“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, April 8, 2011

New School Symposium Liveblog 1

With Karen Pinkus, Alan Stoekl, Daemian White, Cameron Tonkinwise, Clive Dilnot. I'm going to liveblog the symposium here.

Cameron: It's very difficult to get people to think design. Yet we interact with designed things every day. Decisions about our lives are scripted and surround us but they are strangely absent. Perhaps philosophers relate to coffee cups and tables. Banging on table to “refute it thus sir.”

We're lucky to be spending a day thinking about design in the context of sustainability. And in particular around “gift” and “sacrifice.”

The last chapter of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain is one of the best philosophies of making around. Scarry:
“(T)he object is never just 'for itself' It is ... 'only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes its makers.”

What is it to think about design as a gift? Making the world into something responsive to human being. It can be persuasive or coercive.

Cameron has some issue with OOO. Thinking about design but skipping over the human? If you read Tool-Being as a designer you think, “fantastic.” But for Cameron he is missing the human participation in creation of the human world? Hmm...

Cameron likes to talk about smaller scale than architecture. Design of everyday scale things. Sustainability is attitudes towards artifice.

Sustainable design has no ontology of design, so it's only tinkering at the corners. We need a considered understanding of what things are.

Urgency of ecological awareness demands that we halt critique...sophisticated versions of it. Dave Roberts. How do you get people to change their behavior? Without them knowing it? The
Enlightenment project fails when it comes to sustainability. So script people into behaviors then the values follow after.

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