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Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 12:48:38 -0400
From: Kass Schmitt
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the internet and everyone by john chris jones
published by ellipsis May 2000 distributed by W.W.Norton 592 pages, hardback ISBN 1-899858-20-2
$30.00
This is not a book about the world wide web or the dot-com revolution. It provides no hints on how to get online, or how to construct an effective homepage. Instead, The Internet and Everyone has a different aim: to start to describe "the architecture of post- mechanical living" which the advent of computer networks is making possible.
In 1995 Ellipsis asked John Chris Jones to write a short book about the internet. Jones, whose earlier writing had foreseen the revolutionary importance of automation, computers ("the first machines to be built without inbuilt purpose" but with "hidden qualities of 'adaptiveness' and 'connectivity'") and networks, accepted the invitation, and this long book is the result.
Written over an extended period in which he became, reluctantly, a net person, the book explores the implications of the technology for society in many aspects -- economic, artistic, industrial, political. On a backbone of 25 letters, texts of various sorts - essays, dramas, meditations -- explore the possibilities of synthesis and progress that the internet allows: the sharing of knowledge and professional expertise: the breakdown of hierarchies and the limitations of dualistic ways of thought: the collapse of geographic space and time.
The form of the book is itself a result of the possibilities opened up by the internet, in which the process of writing itself becomes publishing, "more like speaking than writing".
For anyone who wants to start to understand the implications of internet for everyone, this book will be thought-provoking and stimulating. It might even be life-changing.
John Chris Jones, author of Design Methods and designing designing, was the first professor of design at the Open University. After resigning his chair, he has pursued his interests in the nature of design through writings in many genres, performance, and teaching in Europe and the USA.
for further information please contact Lisa Bennett at ellipsis london t: 020 7739 3157 / f: 020 7739 3175 / lisa@ellipsis.co.uk
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of all so many of us replies to Tom Mitchell's questions on bad design
Tom began by reminding me of a seminar at which I spoke of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and of fail-safe designing, or the lack of it. Much of the discussion had been about the design of shopfronts and other questions of visual style.
1 FAIL-SAFE DESIGNS
I don't remember what I said about Chernobyl but I do remember talking about the vacuum brake, which used to be fitted to steam trains, and about electrical fuses and circuit breakers, as examples of 'fail-safe' designs. The principle which these have in common is that the device ceases to function at all as soon as something goes wrong. For instance, a vacuum is used not to apply the brakes to a train but to hold them off. If the vacuum accidentally leaks, or is deliberately unsealed by the turning of a brake handle, then the pressure of the atmosphere applies the brakes automatically. Similarly, in a fuse or a circuit breaker, the electrical current will pass through the device only if it is below a safe voltage and current. If there is a dangerous surge of electricity, either the very thin fuse wire melts or an electro-magnet, through which the current passes, opens the switch and stops the current itself. I may not have remembered the details exactly but the principle is clear: reverse the normal logic of operation. Instead of designing as if accidents are not going to happen, design on the assumption that they will. Enable the design to self-regulate.
In the case of nuclear power, genetic manipulation, agri-chemicals, new therapies and drugs, any technologies that change by their presence the systemics (the 'natural' or existing checks and balances) of the situation, insist that the new technology is prevented from working unless, and only for as long as, it can be proved to be safe. Thus the onus to prove safety should be placed on the designers and sponsors of the idea: the onus to prove danger should not be placed on the consumers or the potential victims, as is often the case at present. This in itself is a fail-safe practice which can be embodied in the law rather than in the hardware.
What irritates me about industrial design is that, though it grew out of protests against the inhumanity and danger of engineering design and economic management if left to themselves,[1] and though it began by adding considerations of beauty and fitness for purpose to what would otherwise have been bare engineering, it is by now insensitive to many of the human factors that are non-visual, or outside the designer's experience, as the powerful and unpredictable effects of new technologies often are. The available design skills are still inadequate to the scale of difficulties that the new technologies bring with them.[2]
You ask about the distinction between the fail-safe design of life-threatening technologies and the design of shopfronts, and of other manifestations of 'designer lifestyle'. At the meeting you mentioned I was appalled by the contrast. And yet there is something to be said for the view that designing is the addition of fashionableness to otherwise unattractive or dated-looking products. Looked at anthropologically, fashion is not a triviality; it is surely one of the main manifestations of the culture, as it changes, in the only way it can. 'If a new idea cannot be made fashionable it cannot be realised' is perhaps a measure of its importance. The difficulty is that the fashion for serious designing has disappeared for the moment.
But there is more to life than safety first. Look at the unending variety of designs of the Swiss Swatch, which apparently halted the decline of the traditional watch industry and must have saved many people their jobs.[3] The designs of watchfaces are now as various as they are often illegible - but many people like them and feel that life is better for their presence. More alive. Yet the briefest consideration of the apparent purpose of a watch, 'to indicate the time', would condemn many fashionable watchfaces as failures. However, thinking of life as a whole, what is the purpose of a watch? Not only to let you know the time (perhaps more frequently than you need to know it for the good of your mental health or peace of mind) but also to let you enjoy buying it, wearing it, matching it to whatever else you choose to wear today, to 'be the figure that you like to think you are'. Where I quarrel with post-modern design is not in its widening of the idea of purpose to include the non-functional, the presence of the thing 'as object', as part of the 'art of living', to use an old phrase, but when all this is done at the expense of the invisible, the non-visual, and when it diminishes the idea of what it is to be human. Those are my main concerns: I guess that your other questions will enable me to describe these more exactly, the elements of 'intangible design'.
2 BLAMING THE OPERATOR
Throughout my life I have been angered by the policy of blaming the operator for crashes and other disasters of technology which are entirely predictable at the design stage, or earlier. To attribute a technical failure to 'human error' is often to misunderstand the nature of human skill.
For instance, if you attempt the simple task of pressing a button every time a particular light comes on, you will miss seeing the light (or you will press the switch when no light comes on) about once in every 500 attempts, no matter how hard you try not to make mistakes. Furthermore, you will not be conscious that you made the mistake because your nervous system, your 'link with reality', does not operate continuously; it is intermittent, it suffers from 'internal blinks'. What we take to be smooth and continuous knowledge or awareness of our surroundings is rather like our vision of the cine or tv screens, or our reading of a book - it is a mere sampling, through eye movements and memory, of a small part of what is actually before us. The rest is inferred. When you are unskilled you notice this, for example, in learning to drive a car. As a learner you may miss seeing pedestrians, traffic lights, other cars, you may even fail to look at the road ahead at all in your conscious efforts to get your hands and feet to synchronise in operating the gear shift in conjunction with the brake and the accelerator. But when you are skilled you can drive safely for miles without noticing what you are doing while simultaneously carrying on a conversation and keeping your subconscious attention several hundred yards ahead to anticipate the actions of yourself and other road users before they happen. In this way the skilled nervous system operates 'automatically' (i.e. unconsciously). So, on the rare occasions when the skilled nervous system unconsciously fails, it is wrong to blame the driver. If he or she is to be conscious of every action, car driving would have to be slowed down to the pace and hesitancy of the learner. It would be like working to rule in an industrial dispute, only worse. It wouldn't even be safer.
Most of this has been known for fifty years or more: it is the central know-how of ergonomics, although, if you attend only to those static anthropometric manikins, you might never guess it. There has yet to be a serious attempt to reorganise industrial life on the basis of this dynamic knowledge. If this were done then not only would the responsibility for accidents be placed where it belongs (in the decisions of those who decide to introduce a new technology and who benefit from it) but the mechanical tempo of industrial life (so obviously mis-matched to the many rhythms of the body, from breathing and heartbeat to sleeping/waking and gestation) would be transformed so that people come first and technologies come second, or even last. The resulting life-forms could be marvellous. Artifice might resemble nature in its varieties and rhythms and the stress of artificial living might be gone.
3 'PEOPLE-DEPENDENT TECHNOLOGY'
That is a new term for which as yet I can think of no examples - it is my current hope.
What I envisage is that, instead of designing everything (and particularly computer software) on the assumption that 'people are going to behave like machines' - that is, without feeling, love, hatred, anticipation, intuition, imagination, etc. (the very qualities we think of when we ask what it is to be human) - we design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvellously capable, given the chance, each and every one. I'd like to see machines, systems, environments of all kinds, made such that if they are to work well everyone who uses or inhabits them is challenged to act at her or his best and that there are no built-in obstacles to doing that. The main obstacles to this at present are not so much the machines and technical processes but the presence of our other selves, as paid guardians, 'protecting' every one of us from our 'mechanically stupefied selves' and enforcing rules of behaviour and design which assume that 'users know nothing and producers know all'.
If you analyse any profession, from doctoring to policing, from teaching to designing products, I think you will find that professional know-how is in two parts. There is the rational part, which can be embodied in a book or in a piece of software, and the intuitive part, which can only be learnt in practice. In my picture of 'people-dependent technology' most professional jobs are eliminated. The rational know-how of the professions is made available to users directly, through screens, keyboards, and the like, while the intuitive skills are learnt by the users themselves, through trial-and-error and simulation more than through instruction by teachers.
The resultant 'cybernetic utopia' is something I'd like to see attempted immediately through the medium of 'experimental cities', through imaginative instead of threatening movies, and through a complete reversal of education away from 'logical know-how' and towards 'colloquial skills'.[4] If it were to happen, I'd expect to see each person composing the human or colloquial parts of her or his own education, medicare, security, government, food, sport, reading matter, entertainment, etc., with the rational parts being provided by an autonomous automation that has been freed of professional bias and control. The implications of this are, I'm sure, enormous and I hope to spend the next part of my life exploring what they could be. My modesty is a mask he says to himself as he tries to imagine all that.
The change to this kind of thinking, to this 'softecnical' approach, after several centuries of thinking of people as if they are mechanisms, is vast, but it's already beginning. That is why I now work not on design and technology directly but am attempting fictions, plays, and other such forms or genres, in the name of design. I believe that, before we can hope for all this, we have to change our culture. We have to remake ourselves, our mental pictures of what we are. And
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows ... [5]
(I'm thinking here of pastoral or pre-industrial living.) Designing has already left its narrow basis in things, in exclusively physical products, and has begun to spread itself 'to everything', no longer as a way of imposing on the many but as a way of listening to each other, and to ourselves.[6] 'The composer becomes a listener', as John Cage says ... Designers too?
4 TRAFFIC AUTOMATION
This is described more fully than I can do here in my essay, 'The future of breathing',[7] and in the earlier publications listed at the end of that essay. The central point of this proposal was to reject the present mixture of cars, buses, taxis, roads, traffic lights, traffic police, car parks, traffic meters, etc. as a hopeless failure, with its notorious 'insoluble' problems of congestion, parking and traffic accidents, not to mention pollution and the attempts to solve the problem by adding the urban highways and the multi-storey car parks which create 'the concrete jungle'.
I took the first three of these problems of high-density traffic and asked myself if there were other kinds of crowded movement in which such problems do not occur. What came to mind were the movements of swarms of bees, flights of migrating birds, and the complex movements of people walking in all directions across a railway plaza without slowing down, without colliding with each other, and without clogging the space with empty vehicles.
Why, I asked myself, are people in road vehicles so unable to travel smoothly and safely in high density when birds, insects, and people on their feet can do so easily? The answer, I thought, is 'information'. Because the professions then responsible for city traffic (civil engineers, police, law-makers, and vehicle designers - this was in 1959) were each trying to solve the problem piecemeal by the inappropriate methods of pouring concrete, enforcing laws, and making feeble attempts to reduce the size and parkability, but not the number, of cars. The right solution, I felt sure, was to give to each driver and vehicle sufficient information and freedom of action to be able to steer clear of congestion before it became excessive, and to free everyone from parking difficulties by making each vehicle automatic enough to find its own way to the next people wanting to move, once its present occupants had got out. The automatic control of vehicles, through a magnetic tape embedded in the road, would remove the need for traffic lights and would make traffic collisions almost impossible. Car parks could be eliminated and the utilisation of vehicles could rise from, say, five per cent, as at present, to perhaps ninety per cent, as each vehicle would be moving most of the time, thus freeing-up most of the curb space for getting in and out wherever you wish and reducing the need to manufacture so many cars in the first place.
The result of this thinking was a scheme for complete traffic automation which could be introduced in easy stages over the twenty years from 1959 to '79 and would gradually reduce the main features of the traffic problem to nearly nil provided that the users of cars, taxis and buses could be persuaded to abandon their present vehicles for small automatic cars and minibuses which could be called to any phone or (transformed) parking meter from which the traveller indicated his or her position and destination. Each traveller would be given an expected arrival time at destination, depending on the density of traffic, and if this was excessive would have the choice of cancelling the request until a quicker journey became possible. In this way I proposed to provide each of the millions of minds, presently immobilised by information scarcity, the means to use its own intelligence, as in the case of birds, bees, and people walking on a plaza ... This is what I call true decentralisation, or constructive anarchy. I think control from the centre is barbaric. It's useful only in emergencies.
There's more to this scheme but I think I've said enough to show why I reject altogether the 'bad design' of city traffic, and indeed of industrial life as we know it, and why the kinds of solution I seek, though so beautifully fitting in theory, are so very difficult to realise. They cut against the vested interest of each of us in our specialised, paid, or sanctified roles as car owner, investor, car worker, civil engineer, policeman, lawyer, parking attendant, taxi driver, bus driver, etc., and they call for a scale of thinking, and of collective responsibility, that is far beyond what is encouraged in the culture as it is. Yes, it's courage we need, the courage to 'tackle the whole', but without imposing our preconceptions, and to live out the probably amazing consequences of doing so 'decentrally' and 'without control'. 'I made it without an idea', said Marcel Duchamp referring to The large glass, his central work. What I'm describing is I think art, the art of technology, unthreatening and free, the spirit of the time. Why not?
However, all is not hopeless. Since 1959, when the scheme became technically feasible[8] (using the kind of electronics which was then being developed for the space programme), many electronic fragments of the scheme have appeared piecemeal: the linking of traffic lights permitting tidal flow, automatic control of the distance between vehicles, electronic maps in cars to show congestion, parking places, etc. Unfortunately, these bits and pieces are being allied with ideas such as road pricing, and automatic surveillance, and central control, that show none of the equality and trust that are possible if these sub-solutions are linked together in a cybernetic and democratic anti-plan for collective intelligence, such as 'true' traffic automation allows. Again: the need to change our minds. When will it happen? And where is the selfless kind of non-directive leadership that could make it possible? I believe they're to be found in the work of artists like John Cage and Joseph Beuys and in the unspoken thoughts of many.
5 EXAMPLES OF BAD DESIGN
For the moment I can't think of specific products which have irritated me and led me to do what I do. What seems wrong to me is that designers are restricted to designing single objects when what needs changing is the design process itself, and with it the way of life. No amount of change to the physical design of cars is going to solve the traffic problem, no changes in the design of jobs is going to solve the so-called problem of unemployment,[9] no changes to the design of schools and colleges, or even to their curricula, are going to undo the basic error of education - namely the forcing of all of the youngest and liveliest people to do obediently what their elders tell them until the age of about twenty-five - when what they need to be doing is learning to take over the shaping of life as soon as they have the know-how and while they still have the energy and imagination to do it. (How about that as an alternative to drugs and crimes of violence?) And no conceivable changes to broadcasting (apart from getting rid of the professional broadcasters) will release everyone from the passivity of becoming 'couch potatoes' as we now have the nerve to call ourselves in the inactive role we nearly all assume for about twenty hours a week in front of tv screens. ...
So my answer to this question is: forget products, forget industrial design in the form we know it now, and do something about the hopelessness of relying on professionals and specialists and all kinds of police persons to change the culture as a whole. What happens at present is just mismatching, a total mismatching of what we do (the designing, making, distributing and discarding of products, physical and economic, for the narrow motive of economic security alone) to what we are (almost a new species of beings if you include our technologies, our extra-bodily extensions, our collective presence as and in 'the virtual world').
I feel that it is not the bad design of individual products that leads me to this near-total 'condemnation of everything', laughable or even cranky as that may sound, but the dreadful accumulated sensations and experiences of trying to live one's daily life among the disconnected and discordant actions and perceptions that comprise the actual life of everyone - even the so-called leaders - today. To participate in this nonsense is a crime in itself, yet what can we do?
As I write these words I am sitting in a train that is very nearly too bumpy to write in, on a seat that fails to support my aching back, after a sea journey that was delayed for two hours due to a broken fuel line (the reason for our delay was kept from us until the journey was over while some of us must have been wondering anxiously about the ferryboat Estonia that had recently sunk with nearly a thousand passengers), the electro-magnetic interference in the train is so great that it is nearly impossible to listen to radio, there was no connecting boat train so we were put on to a local train that stops everywhere, there was no one to meet us at the station, no one who could tell us how long we'd have to wait - only five tv screens displaying outdated train times ... But I don't want to sound like an unlucky and disgruntled traveller who is forgetting all the times when trains and boats did run to time and when the journey was pleasant ... What I'm trying to say is that the whole of our industrial way of life, every part of it, is pervaded by bad micro-experiences which everyone has grown to accept as inevitable, from imposed noise and polluted air and junk food to poor seating, queues, bad access, repetitive work, unhelpful officials, unsafe and congested transportation, aggressive advertising, commercialised news media, tedious tv, and clumsy and insensitive software, not to mention the far worse conditions in the poorer countries upon which all this misconceived materialism depends ... I could go on and on and on.
Why do we put up with it? Where, oh where, is the modern equivalent of the joys of pure air, of autonomous living in natural surroundings that still attract us to the unattainable idea of 'a life in the wilds' for everyone? When, oh when, is the improvement of the pattern of life as a whole, as each person experiences it day-by-day, minute-by-minute, going to become the subject, the operational unit, the aim and purpose of creative endeavour? The existence of industrial design can be a small help in all this but I fear it has lost the impetus to aim for 'higher things'. What I've been driven to do in my 'work', modest as it is in relation to these aims, is to try nevertheless, here and there, to 'design at the scale of life, the scale of mind itself' while refusing to act at the scale of its hopelessly disconnected fragments. Easy to say, difficult to do. Perhaps impossible at the moment. Is that why I'm driven to the fictional? Partly that, and partly by fascination.
6 defining good and bad design
Well, initially I'd prefer not to define these terms because 'thinking in opposites' could be a way to perpetuate, not to escape, the dualism that pervades industrial culture and is possibly the 'cause' of what is 'wrong'. If I try to define 'good design' what comes to my mind is a new kind of industrial living that is organised decentrally, a multiple culture in which every single person is a unique norm or centre around which everything is organised dynamically, moment by moment. Computers can make this possible if we give them the chance. A technology that is used not only to further the interests of owners and managers, and all-of-us-as-specialists (all of us as instruments of abstract economic goals), not as a forcing of everything to fit the administrative convenience of the over-simplified life as seen by 'central control', but technology reorganised and changed to enable the apparent miracle of multiplicity to happen, person-by-person, event-by-event. According to this view of things, bad design comes of a diminished and crushing image of 'what it is to be a person', the dumb idea that the purpose of living is only 'to produce and to consume and to do as you're told and enjoy the incentives'. Oh no no no no!
But of course I can't leave it at that. The 'purpose of living' is unknowable. All these arguments are specious, in a way. (I'm not sure what specious means exactly. I'm using the words or they are using me in ways that reach beyond whatever it was I thought I'd said or what the you and the you who are reading this may decide that I am saying as you interpret it in your of course unpredictable ways.) The actuality of things is unmistakable but the reasons are not. I don't know that what I'm saying now is exactly true to all the unexpectedness of life as we enjoy it, whatever the state of the art, the art of the impossible you may think but the art of the time has no limit. The sentence nears irrationality or even poetry, perhaps, but that is where we are. What next? The future is not known and cannot be while all of us exist and can change minds and thoughts and things when we see what we are doing.
YOUR OTHER QUESTIONS
A How do I approach projects such as traffic automation, car-seat comfort, trying to teach this view of design, devising a book of design methods, or my recent attempts at 'improving' theatre and novel-writing by attempting to change the conventions of realism?
In that sentence is a selection of my favourite 'designs', intangible as they may appear and lacking physical presence. I could try to say how I approached more tangible designs, such as 'the car of the future' (see letter ten), eating utensils, computer interfaces, etc., but that would be on a smaller scale, less relevant to what I've been saying. Goodness knows if I can find words to say what's common to these attempts at 'intangible design' but now you've asked me I'd like to try.
Pause.
Yes, I think I can do it, and in not too many words, for as I think back to these attempts I notice that they all arose from a single strategy, or method.
My method is simply this: to put myself 'at the receiving end'. For traffic automation I first imagined myself going through all the motions of a person who is travelling in city traffic whether by car, by taxi, by bus or on foot. At each significant point, or 'obstacle'
Well, I don't know if that description is enough to let anyone share or copy the experiences I'm trying to describe, but to me it's very clear: I approach such questions simply by studying what it is like to experience 'things as they are' and then I try to design a new version which is completely free of all that I find irritating or unpleasant, regardless of any resistance to changing the status quo and I hope despite my preconceptions.
B What led me to being involved in this sort of work?
Anger and impatience at the treating of people as if 'they' are things, tools, instruments, as means to the ends of others. These are, of course, the ends of ourselves in the officially and economically sanctified roles (our 'jobs') which we are obliged to accept if we want security, or esteem, or any of the other 'necessities of life'. No wonder I feel caught in a trap, driven to unrealised designs, in the main, though here and there managing to slip a little something into the mainstream. Such as this.
C What do I try to accomplish in this work that is not accounted for in traditional designing?
To put people first and organisations last. That's the only way to go about it, it seems to me, if designing is not to be forever tied to supporting 'what is wrong' and is to become 'the means through which the culture itself can evolve, can self-organise, can change and grow'. This is not a matter of self-expression but of looking outward and of seeing what we produce as itself becoming a part of nature, the sublime creation, or whatever it is. What am I saying?
D What examples of bad designing motivated me to go in the direction I have?
The first I can think of were household utensils like water taps that did not fully fit the hand, electrical sockets that could be reached by children's fingers, cars that are so cramped and uncomfortable in the back seat especially, and such like. But I think my main inspiration was not the badness of what is wrong with the details of 'man-made-life' but the positive visions and writings of people such as Henri Mignet (designer of the pre-war 'Pou de Ciel' or 'Flying Flea'), Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eric Gill, Lewis Mumford and other inspiring modernists. What I see these having in common is their insistence that technology is not only dead matter, it is the spirit of the time. 'Aluminium is not a ductile metal, it is treacherous, it is hardened earth. Long live steel, long live wood!' are words I recall reading as a child when I fell under the influence of Henri Mignet, and of that 1930s' enthusiasm for 'machines of the air' which drew me in the first place towards design.
As I come to the end I ask myself why I've been drawn so often to put words and phrases between quotation marks. 'Machines of the air': why did I write it as a quotation? I don't think I'm quoting anyone. Is it that I'm trying to give a special meaning to the phrase, to signify that it has a spiritual meaning for me now? But 'man-made-life': what does that imply? Surely nothing very spiritual, more the reverse, its dreadful audacity, its omission of women, its awfulness as a phrase, its inadequacy to the new and still strange presence on earth of all so many of us in numbers and forms impossible without machines? Yes, all of these things, and more, are implied by the quotation marks. Perhaps I am not content with the language as it comes to us, bearing the thoughts and even the commands of 'times past'? That's another phrase I can't possibly write without 'quoting' it! Who knows? There's more to all this than I've managed to say. 'All so many of us': was it my intention to write that or was it a mistake of my fingers? It was a mistake when I first wrote it, somewhat accidentally, not looking at the screen, but when I read back I liked the 'all' and decided to leave it. In this so tiny accident of words, consciously accepted, lies, I think, the way forward. The way of trust in our bodies and ourselves, in 'the life outside the forms' if I may call it that, in 'the creative unknown' as others have called it. Viva! This is a long way from centralisation, thank goodness, a long way from 'bad design'. It's a way to be alive. And if we rise to possibility the world is good indeed.
notes An edited version of this attachment appears in C Thomas Mitchell, New thinking in design: Conversations on theory and practice, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1996, pages 150-160.
1 I am thinking here of John Ruskin, William Morris and others whose protests against the brutalities of the coal and iron phase of industrialisation led eventually, through the actions of the German Werkbund and the like, to the appearance of industrial design as a new profession of 'visual humanisers', still not fully accepted or understood and perhaps not always aware of their own significance as changers of the culture.
2 One of the good things about modernism, presently under a cloud, is that it gave designers, and others in a position to innovate, the cultural impetus, or encouragement, to make changes to the culture itself as well as to its accepted parts. To insist on fail-safe designing is to go outside the existing culture if you ask for more than 'the economic constraints allow'. The recent switch to the superficialities of the 'designer lifestyle' or 'design as trivia' may be a sacrifice of this most valuable ability of the culture to redesign itself, to transcend its own defects when these become evident, to extend to the artificial world the quality of spontaneous evolution. Could the refusal of serious designing be a cultural death wish? Whatever happened to the Romans?
3 If you think jobs are good. I don't. It is the business of design as I see it to look beyond such limited ideas as 'job-creation' to the wider idea of 'living-without-work'.
4 By this I mean the spontaneous skill by which a baby learns not only how to speak but how to live in the culture, without conscious knowledge of grammar, or rules, or any teaching by specialists. A useful measure of 'good design' is whether or not the thing can be used 'colloquially', with 'zero learning' as I've called it in the past, using only one's existing skills and know-how. The more profound aspects of existence are those that are learnt and communicated in this way. In an emergency, or under heavy stress, these are what remain. My Welsh accent is more me than is this and it could be the last thing to go.
5 'Leisure', Complete poems of W H Davies, 1963. This simple poem, and his Autobiography of a supertramp, 1908, seem to me so central to everything decentral!
6 I enclose pages from my current book The education of everyone (see letter twenty-three, attachment three) to show how strange and unexpected and unmechanical and unprescriptive is the result of trying to explore in this direction. At least it is to me. To be surprised at the result, that is how John Cage says he composed his music, not knowing how it would sound (John Cage: writer, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Limelight Editions, New York, 1993, p 246). Could the future be designed not knowing what it's going to look like? What doubts and excitements this question provokes. Is this the way to liberate everyone from the pre-existing self, from the culture of death? Oh Sigmund Freud, where is your pessimism now?
7 Pages xx to xxiii of designing designing (previously published by adt/Phaidon Press, London, 1991), forthcoming, ellipsis, London).
8 I thought in those days that if something was technically feasible it was socially feasible as well. But I still believe that we are all capable of changing our minds.
9 I just can't see unemployment as a problem at all: wasn't 'freedom from the bondage of work' the very purpose of using machines in the first place, at least in the minds of their inventors? And isn't 'unemployment' also the distinguishing mark of the child, the freeman, the aristocrat, the politician, the poet, the artist, the lover, the romantic, the saint, all the types of people from whom we can learn the way to liberate ourselves from the false necessities of the utilitarian world that our recent ancestors foisted upon us but which contradicts so many of the better notions of what it is to really live? 'Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin'. ... Surely it's time to aspire again to such considerations as these if we are to rise to the occasion of our inventions, at last, and not remain forever in the self-imposed slavery of mechanised specialisation? Yes indeed, I'm losing my patience!
10 This is what, elsewhere (for example, in the book *Notes and plays*, Spectacular Diseases, 83b London Road, Peterborough, pe2 9bs, 1998) I call 'existentia'. As I turn away from specific products, and towards rethinking the conventions of theatre, fiction, broadcasting, computing, virtual reality, and other such 'forms of modern life', I find this more and more the way to proceed, to 'get outside the imposed culture'. The essential skill is that of 'listening to the chatter of the mind', the tiny thoughts and passing feelings that we normally discount and censor.
11 The change to present tense is deliberate - I am writing thinking as it happens, not conventional prose.
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