This is also the case with “Chindogu”. Their individual
elements are recognizable, but the reason for combining them is at first bewildering.
The meaning behind the object is derived from “sense-fiction”: the objects
make functional sense, but are still useless.
Forbidden Emotions: Para-functionality and Design
In a field where “product design is thoroughly integrated in capitalist production, [and] bereft of an independent critical tradition on which to base an alternative,” only a few
designers use the function of products as criticism.
在產品設計完全整合在資本主義產製的領域，失去了獨立批判的傳統，只有一些設計師使用產品功能作為批判。
...what Baudrillard has called the “crisis of functionalism.”
Baudrillard (1981) argues that the acceptance of functionalism as an arbitrary
but dominant rationality gave rise to an irrational counter-discourse that
moves between the two poles of kitsch (庸俗作品) and surrealism:
The surrealist object emerges at the same epoch as the functional object, as its derision (嘲笑)
and transgression. Although they are overtly dys- or para-functional, these phantasmic (幻想的)
objects nevertheless presuppose—albeit in a contradictory sense—the advent of functionality
as the universal moral law of the object, and the advent of this object itself, separated,
autonomous and dedicated to the transparency of its function. When one ponders
it, there is something unreal and almost surreal in the fact of reducing an object to its
function: and it suffices to push this principle of functionality to the limit to make its
absurdity emerge. This is evident in the case of the toaster, iron or “undiscoverable objects”
Heterotopian Gadgets: Para-functionality and Art Objects
異托邦工具
The heterotopia
described by Michel Foucault (1970) illustrates what a literary gadget
might be like:
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic,
untroubled region in which they are able to unfold;... Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax which causes words and things (next to and also one another) to “hold together.”
"This enslavement is not, strictly speaking, to machines, nor to the people who build and own them, but to the conceptual models, values, and systems of thought the machines embody." p.21
"By poeticizing the distance between people and electronic objects, sensitive skepticism might be encourage, rather than unthinking assimilation of the values and conceptual models embedded in electronic objects." p. 22
"This chapter looks at "poeticizing" the distance between people and electronic objects through "estrangement" and alienation," locating interactivity between transparency and opaqueness, the pet and the alien, prose and poetry." p. 22
Robinson 認為 Norman 的取徑產生了沒有混淆、不會令人失望的產品 (這很明顯是不夠的)。...... 吊詭的是，以使用者為中心，不只是要釐清人們如何描繪事物，而是絕對需要認清: 人們所互動的設計物，對我們如何思考，有巨大的影響。"
"Robinson argues that Norman's approach results in products that will not confuse or disappoint (which is clearly not enough). ... Paradoxically, user-centredness is not just figuring out how people map things, it absolutely requires recognising that the artefacts people interact with have enormous impact on how we think." p. 23
"In the human factors world, objects, it seems, must be understood rather than interpreted. ... The reduction of the relationship between people and technology to a level of cognitive clarity by the human factors community..." p. 23
"Everyday language is usually informative and instrumental;...since if a piece of information has been successfully passed or some action successfully instigated, the words by which this has been managed can count as "transparent." With the poetic function comes a certain opacity, for the writer is no longer passing information nor seeking to instigate action. There may also come an intentional ambiguity." p. 35
"The poetic function of language has as its effect that when we read literature we become
more aware of language than we are when we are confronted by language in its other
functions. To introduce another term dear to the formalists, in literature language is
“foregrounded. ... In the everyday use of language it will seldom be practical and may even be found impolite to “foreground” language.”" (Sturrock 1986, 109–110)
(p. 35)
functional metaphor vs. poetic metaphor
根據 Viktor Shlkovsky，詩意藝術的功能，是對抗感知的慣例模式所支持的熟悉化。
"According to Viktor Shklovsky,..., the function of poetic art is to counter-act the familiarization encouraged by routine modes of perception." p. 35
fan heater by Winfried Scheuer
"Semiotics and semantics were used by 1980s designers as a framework for analyzing the way industrial designers could use form to express implicit meanings: for instance, the flow of air in this fan heater (1981) by Winfried Scheuer." (reference)
"To provide conditions where users can be provoked to reflect on their everyday experience of electronic objects, it is necessary to go beyond forms of estrangement grounded in the visual and instead explore the aesthetics of use grounded in functionality..." p. 42
"The fit between ideas and things, particularly where an abstract idea dominates practicality, allows design to be a form of discourse, resulting in poetic inventions that, by challenging lows (physical, social, or political) rather than affirming them, take on a critical function." p. 42
"Instead, the distance between ourselves and the environment of electronic objects might be "poeticized" to encourage skeptical sensitivity to values and ideas this environment embodies." p. 42
"Whereas architecture and furniture design have successfully operated in the realm of cultural speculation for some time, product design's strong ties to the marketplace have left little room for speculation on the cultural function of electronic products." p. xv
"In order to achieve this, research is needed into an expanded notion of design aesthetics that includes more poetic and metaphysical relationships with the artificial environment of technological artifact." p. xvi
"Even the cultural and aesthetic experiments of design groups like Memphis, or more recently Droog Design, rarely touch on electronics." p. xvi
Mies Chair and Ottoman by Andrea Barnzi et al.
Andrea Barnzi 和其他 1960 年代與 1970 年代的實驗設計師，處理詩意居住模式中的設計物的角色，在建築學觀點的帶領下，發展出挑釁的研究取徑和立場，聚焦於新素材與表面的表達和語言學上的可能性。
"Andrea Branzi and other experimental designers of the 1960s and 1970s addressed the role played by design in poetic modes of inhabitation and, guided by an architectural perspective, developed provocative research approaches and positions focusing on the expressive and linguistic possibilities of new materials and surfaces." p. xvii
"More recently, Ezio Manzini outlined a role for the designer that offers a fresh perspective that builds on earlier Italian design thinking. He suggests that the days of the design visionary are over, and a weariness with utopian vision has set in. Instead, he advises the designer to use his or her skills to visualize alternative future scenarios in ways that can be presented to the public,..." p. xvii
"These "material tales" are not utopian visions or blueprints - clear-cut modeling of the future is too didactic. Instead, they mix criticism with optimism to provide the "complicated pleasure" found in other imaginative media such as film and literature, particularly those that explore boundaries between the real and the unreal." p. xvii
"The electronic object accordingly occupies a strange place in the world of material culture, closer to washing powder and cough mixture than to furniture and architecture, and is subject to the same linguistic discipline as all package design, that of the sign. It is lost somewhere between image and object, and its cultural identity is defined in relation to technological functionalism and semiotics." p. 1
psychology of everyday things by Norman
人因社群非常值得被批判，他們發展出一套電子物件的觀點，主要從電腦科學與認知心理學領域，在電腦工業中極端的有影響力；舉例來說，Don Norman 的設計心理學。
"This is useful to critique the human factors "community," who have developed a view of the electronic object, derived from computer science and cognitive psychology, that is extremely influential in the computer industry; for example, Don Norman's (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things." p. 2
人因取徑的一個嚴重的問題，是它毫無批判的接受 Bernard Waites 所稱的美國意識形態，或技術在意識上的合法性: 所有問題不管是自然的、人類本能的、或文化的，皆可以視為技術問題，可以透過客觀知識的累積，理性的解決。......如此，技術在美國意識形態中，成為工具理性的化身，技術官僚統治者的工具。
"A serious problem with the human factors approach though, in relation to this project, is its uncritical acceptance of what has been called by Bernard Waites (1989) the "American Ideology," or the ideological legitimation of technology: All problems whether of nature, human nature, or culture, are seen as "technical" problems capable of rational solution through the accumulation of objective knowledge, ..., so that technology, in the American Ideology, becomes "instrumental rationality" incarnate, the tools of technocracy." p. 2
"However, the most fruitful reflection on material culture is to be found, not in anthropology or sociology, but in literature concerned with the poetry of everyday objects. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelar (1969) offers an analysis, influenced by psychoanalysis, that emphasises the poetic dimension of humble furniture such as wardrobes and chests of drawers; Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's (1991) InPraise of Shadows considers the Japanese object in relation to shadow and darkness, and the effects of electricity on their appreciation;..." p. 5
"But once these prototype elements have been subjected to the extreme rationalization required by mass production, they become reduced to abstract ultra-miniaturized electronic components. Their modernist poetry, based on truth to materials, is lost." p. 7
"But generally, designers have not exploited the aesthetic dimension of new materials with the same energy that engineers have exploited their functional possibilities. Most work in the area does not encourage poetic and cultural possibilities to converge with practical and technical ones. The outcome is a stream of unimaginative proposals." p. 9
"The work of Durrell Bishop offers a vision of what this might mean: existing objects are used as physical icons, material representations of data that refer to both the pragmatic and poetic dimensions of the data being manipulated.... Although applied very practically, Bishop's thinking engages with the cultural context in which the technology is used. An "aesthetics of use" emerges." p. 17
"The most difficult challenges for designers of electronic objects now lie not in technical and semiotic functionality, where optimal levels of performance are already attainable, but in the realms of metaphysics, poetry, and aesthetics, where little research has been carried out." p. 20
"The position of this book is that design research should explore a new role for the electronic object, one that facilitates more poetic modes of habitation: a form of social research to integrate aesthetic experience with everyday life through "conceptual products." In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new experience of everyday life, new poetic dimensions." p. 20
Questions:
1. What is "Participatory Design" in your impression?
2. What is Participatory Paradigm? (reading and discuss next week)
3. Participatory 派典與其他派典最大的不同為何?
4. What is Critical Design?
1. In short, as a result of what might be termed 'methodological intimidation' (方法論上的恐嚇), research work carried out in colleges of art and design stands a very real risk of losing those qualities of originality, iconoclasm (破除偶像), energy, style and wit which have characterised the best of art school culture since the 1950s.
p. 3
2. Rejecting the electronic product designer's traditional role as semiotician, he attempts to map a new conceptual territory on which to explore the electronic as 'post-optimal object', turning his attention away the familiar attempt to achieve 'optimum performance levels' and towards more fundamental philosophical issues.
3...., Dunne's research focuses on the relationship between electronic objects and the realms of poetry and aesthetics.
4. Design is seen as a form of socio-aesthetic research towards the integration of aesthetic experience and everyday life through the development of conceptual products rather than working prototypes of models which attempt to simulate a final product designed for mass production.
5. As a PhD by project, Dunne's work uses research through the design process to explore the development of an approach that allows the development of critical responses and a sceptical sensibility towards the ideological nature of design with the purpose of stimulating original aesthetic possibilities for new kinds of electronic object.
7. The ultimate aim of the research project is the development of electronic products which by'making strange' (陌異化) or 'poeticising the distance' (詩意化距離) between ourselves and our artefactual environment, facilitate sociological awareness, reflective and critical involvement with the electronic object rather than its passive consumption and unthinking acceptance.
8. Rather than aiming for transparency, as would a conventional applied researcher/product designer, his (Dunne's) attempt to enhance the critical distance between the electronic object and the human subject through the introduction of 'poetic' techniques of aesthetic 'estrangement' is reminiscent of the writing of Frankfurt School theorists such as Walter Benjamin or the methods of avant-garde theorist/performers such as John Cage,...
p. 4
9.... his idea of using the process of invention as a mode of discourse (以發明過程為論述), a poetic invention(詩意的發明) that, by stretching established conventions, whether physical, social or political, rather than simply affirming them, takes on a radical critical function, a material critical theory of what Dunne terms a 'parafunctionality.'
10. To this extent Dunne's work offers a positive and radical model of the action researcher in design as a critical interpreter of design processes and their relationship to culture and society rather than a skilled applied technician preoccupied by the minutiae (細節) of industrial production or a slick but intellectually shallow semiotician.
11. In Dunne's case the electronic object produced as the studio section of the doctorate is still 'design' but in the sense of a 'material thesis' (實體論文) in which the object itself becomes a physical critique (實體批判).
Exercise:
Select 1 work by Dunne & Rabby, and 1 everyday electronic product Write a short essay (200 words) on this work according to the above concerns.
Discursive Design book project (see book questions, audience and users, discursive design genus and species Chap 7. p.100)
week 7. case study presentation (9 aspects, each student shares a part to complete) (individual) 20%
week 8. mid-term project demo (individual) 30%
week 16. final project demo (individual or team) 50%
Timo Arnall et al.'s paper quotes:
p.100
1. We have engaged in a reflective design research process that uses graphical,
audiovisual, and time-based media as a tool, a material and a communicative artefact that
enables us to approach complex, obscure and often invisible emerging technologies.
2.
We
conclude by elaborating on discursive design approaches to research that use film as a
reflective and communicative medium that allows for design research to operate within a
social and cultural frame. 3. As an
interdisciplinary field, drawing upon many domains such as Human Computer Interaction
(HCI), product and graphic design, informatics, art, engineering and critical practice, it has
grown the potential to situate itself in a critical position between emerging technologies and
culture.
4. In this article we discuss our design research activities that use film as a material for
exploring, conceptualising and communicating with emerging technology. ... The central research question we address is how does audiovisual media enable new
kinds of practice-based design research with emerging technology?
5. The article develops two main aspects: film as a material in communicating and con-
ceptualising new technology and the role of film as a tool in the design research process. ... (1) First, we investigate the bound-
aries between the field of design research and the critical conceptualisation of technology.
(2) Secondly, in our design practice we use film to probe the depth and materiality of emerging
and often invisible technologies. (3) Third, depth of field is one of the cinematic qualities of film
that is used here to both communicate about technology, and to help understand the role of
audio-visual mediation in the design and development of technological products.
6. By using film, we imply a mode of production and display that involves
cinematic qualities such as genre, narrative and cinematography, not simply video as a tool for documentation or analysis, but film as a purposeful, constructed, designed and directed
experience.
p. 101
7. They are embedded in the article where they form
topics and construct a path through the research as is argued for example in the field of visual
rhetoric and through the genre of the visual essay or ‘pictorial texts’ (e.g. Mitchell, 1994).
p. 102
8. there is a need to understand the critical processes of
translation between emerging technology and the popular cultural imagination.
9.The commercial film for the
Polaroid SX-70 camera, directed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1972 (Eames Office, 2000), is
a fine example from design practice of new technology explained to the masses through a
product commercial, conveying technology and experience combined into one form.
p. 103 10. Kirby demonstrates how
film establishes achievability of scientific and technical discourses, and ‘cinematic depictions
of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability
and benevolence’ (Kirby, 2010: 41).
11.
Important
here for design research that involves digital materials, processes and communication is the
concept of mediation (Vygotsky, 1978). 12.
Wartofsky sorts artefacts at three levels: primary artefacts are
tools used directly in human activities (Wartofsky, 1979). Secondary artefacts are ‘symbolic
externalizations’ or ‘objectifications’ of primary artefacts. Tertiary artefacts are abstracted
from the function of secondary artefacts. At this third level, mediating artefacts are abstract
and conceptual: they are no longer concerned with plain representationality but move into the
realm of imagination. Here artefacts become powerful forces for transformation, embodying
vision and potential. In the context of our research, we can discuss our design practices and
research perspectives through artefacts like prototypes and products, and through
representational artefacts like films that are both able to articulate concepts, potentials and
visions for emerging technologies. 13. These filmic artefacts are conceptualised and
communicated at the level of artefact as tool and sign, but they are also artefacts of mediation.
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