HI Jean, thank you for your comments, I think you raised some relevant questions in the discussion about a "paradigm" of design for social responsibilty.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jean Schneider [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
Some comments regarding Nicola Morelli and Keith Russel posts about design and social responsibility:
[...]
I think that the claim for a "new" paradigm, and making it a separated alternative is relevant. But I guess that if we don't want this to be another "attempt" (the discussion about the social relevance of design, and the urge to start on a new foundation seems as old as design itself), we should clarify a few things.
First of all, if we argue for a more responsable design practice, we have to define who will we report to. What I mean is that responsability invoques accountability. And if we declare that we are responsible towards "society", then we have to declare who will be in the position of judging our acts.
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--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
NM. The question of accountability, as well as the question "who is the client" implicitly included in the question of design for social responsibility is one of the main points to understand in order to define a "paradigm" (or whatever we want to call it to define social design as a specific disciplinary area) In some cases concerning social design the question can be easily answered: When the design action is related to a local context and the consequences of the design actions are limited to such context, the designer is accountable to the local community. IN those cases the design action may be directly developed in cooperation with the local community (as it happen for some scenario-based cases).
Some examples of design projects (developed by students) I have seen so far are:
- Designing communication systems and practical tools to improve poultry raising in a local community in Benin
- Designing a system to generate local design and production initiatives in Chiapas (Mexico), using local resources or byproducts from the transformation of local resources(timber or tequila production)
In other cases (especially when the design process has global targets, such as sustainability or social justice) it is much more difficult to understand who the designer should be accountable to. In such cases it does not make any sense to say that the designer is accountable to society.
--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
Of course, as Nicolla suggests, we could quite literally think of alternative practices, and there are some that indeed exist. But one can't ignore that this implies an in depth questionning of how the production of material goods is structured.
What I mean there is that we would have to reach very quickly issues such as who works/for how much. And, as a personnal comment, I have never been able to adress/get a program to adress the issue of manufacturing from the human perspective. To put it quite bluntly : a chinese worker is still cheaper (and more clever) then any manufacturing robot, so why don't we spend less time talking about tooling, and more time talking about working hours and civil rights?
--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
NM I think your following comments interrogating about the ontology of design are central here. In my previous post I was discussing whether the design process is necessarily linked to a material outcome. In a different ontological perspective, i.e. if we do not put the ontological condition
design =>material object
the question who works/for how much be less significant. For instance: in a circumstance in which a design action is aimed at providing a local social/cultural context with the tools to produce/design their own solutions the question of the Chinese worker does not make sense (that doesn't mean that the question does not exist or that it is not a valid question).
--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
Having a closer connection to your end customer (and assuming that the artifact can be manufactured on a prototype/small scale level) means that, beyond "customization", symbolic economy can replace part of the monetary economy. But do you know any design program that would teach economics in this perspective?
--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
NM No I don't, but I understand that there are projects (also research projects), that use methodologies that could/should be taught in socially-oriented design programs.
--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
Yes, Latour, Bijker etc have developed an interesting frame, but somehow, this remains remote from our discipline At least as long as we will consider that the designer "designs" (what a paradox!), which, from an external perspective, is a debatable metonymy (in most cases, the product that comes out one day is the result of a collective work, in which the designer sketched). Is it technology that mediates, is it the object itself, is it the processİ and if it is all of these (and more), then where do we sit?
--------------- Jean Schneider-----------------------
NM I found that Bijker's work was very helpful in clarifying those questions. In this sense I found it very close to our discipline. I have even used Bijker criteria for defining a technological frame in a design project (I should specify that the project in question was part of a design research, though).
Regards,
Nicola Morelli, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Institute of Architecture and Design
Aalborg University, Denmark
Web: http://www.aod.auc.dk/staff/nmor
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