Ideas as work of Art
Once designers step away from industrial production and the marketplace we enter the realm of the unreal, the fictional, or what we prefer to think of as conceptual design—design about ideas.
It has a short but rich history and it is a place where many interconnected and not very well understood forms of design happen—speculative design,1 critical design,2 design fiction,3 design futures,4 antidesign, radical design, interrogative design,5 design for debate, adversarial design,6 discursive design,7 futurescaping,8 and some design art.
Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found in some variant throughout the leading economic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new global problems present to it, most immediately the credit, financial, and fiscal crises since 2007–8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of deepening. This continuation of the neoliberal project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another round of structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of encouraging new and aggressive incursions by the private sector into what remains of social democratic institutions and services. This is in spite of the immediately negative economic and social effects of such policies, and the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the new global crises.
A deeper tension within neoliberalism is in terms of its self-image as the vehicle of modernity, as literally synonymous with modernisation, whilst promising a future that it is constitutively incapable of providing. Indeed, as neoliberalism has progressed, rather than enabling individual creativity, it has tended towards eliminating cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of scripted interactions, coupled to global supply chains and a neo-Fordist Eastern production zone. A vanishingly small cognitariat of elite intellectual workers shrinks with each passing year — and increasingly so as algorithmic automation winds its way through the spheres of affective and intellectual labour.
For us, this separation from the marketplace creates a parallel design channel free from market pressures and available to explore ideas and issues. These could be new possibilities for design itself; new aesthetic possibilities for technology; social, cultural, and ethical implications for science and technology research; or large-scale social and political issues such as democracy, sustainability, and alternatives to our current model of capitalism. This potential to use the language of design to pose questions, provoke, and inspire is conceptual design’s defining feature.
It is different from social and humanitarian design, and design thinking too, which, although also often rejecting market-driven design, still operate within the limits of reality as it is. This is very important for us. We are not talking about a space for experimenting with how things are now, making them better or different, but about other possibilities altogether.
We are more interested in designing for how things could be. Conceptual design provides a space for doing this. It deals, by definition, with unreality. Conceptual designs are not conceptual because they haven’t yet been realized or are waiting to be realized but out of choice. They celebrate their unreality and take full advantage of being made from ideas. Patrick Stevenson Keating’s The Quantum Parallelograph (2011) is a public engagement prop exploring ideas about quantum physics and multiverses by finding and printing out online information from a user’s “parallel life.” It uses abstraction along with generic technical references to suggest a strange technological device. It is clearly a prop but it sets to work on the imagination very quickly. The aesthetics are fresh, striking, and immediately signal that the object is conceptual without diminishing it in anyway.
Our attempt in here is to can create a blueprint of an futuristic small autonomous common space; A small direct democratic community. A group of people who shhare an identity forming narrative, a narrative of a sustainable future.
As we mentioned before, architecture of our lives are divided, our habits and practices are in constant feedback loops as well as our emotional and sprirutual beings. By using the same elements we are trying to immagine and design a future colony.
That kind of dream needs a very dynamic multidisciplilnary approach.
From social relations to the governance mechanisims.
It is often said that if something is conceptual, it is only an idea, but that is missing the point. It is because it is an idea that it is important. New ideas are exactly what we need today. Conceptual designs are not only ideas but also ideals, and as the moral philosopher Susan Neiman has pointed out, we should measure reality against ideals, not the other way around: “Ideals are not measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. Reason’s task is to deny that the claims of experience are final—and to push us to widen the horizon of our experience by providing ideas that experience ought to obey.”
At the other end of the spectrum conceptual design means a parallel space of speculation that uses hypothetical or, more accurately, fictional products to explore possible technological futures. Industrial and product design usually operate at this end. This is the end we are interested in.
Even though Marcel Duchamp is acknowledged as the first true conceptual artist, it was not until the 1960s that artists such as Sol LeWitt and Adrian Piper clearly articulated what it meant to make art out of ideas. In his “Sentences on Conceptual Art”12 (1969) LeWitt lists what have become for many the core features of a conceptual artwork, for example:
Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind.
All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.
One of the most interesting for us is point 9:
The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
In design, people often struggle to get beyond the concept to appreciate and engage with the ideas. It is at the level of ideas that the craft of conceptual design happens. Ideas are constructed or found, evaluated, combined, edited, tweaked, and embedded.
Conceptual approaches exist in most areas of design, either in a pure state, usually for exhibitions, or fused with more commercial goals and available to buy. graphic design has a long tradition of experimenting with ideas and an established critical context for discussing and debating them. The work of highly conceptual studios such as Åbäke, Metahaven, and Daniel Eatock is regularly discussed, exhibited, and debated in the design press. In Facestate (2011) Metahaven use the kind of strategic thinking usually applied to commercial corporate identity projects to critique the political implications of blurring boundaries between consumerism and citizenship, especially when social software is embraced by governments in the name of improved transparency and interaction.
The technology industry does have its own tradition of conceptual design in the form of Vision of the Future video scenarios setting out future directions or promoting new corporate values but they are often very limited in their scope and vision. They usually feature perfect worlds for perfect people interacting perfectly with perfect technologies.
Whirlpool, and especially Philips Design, are two companies that have consistently gone beyond this and successfully used conceptual projects to explore alternative visions for everyday life, which with Philips’s design probes pushed the medium itself forward. Their Microbial Home (2011) is a proposal for integrating domestic activities such as cooking, energy usage, human waste management, food preparation, and storage, as well as lighting into one sustainable ecosystem in which each function’s output is another’s input. At the heart of the project is a view of the home as a biological machine.
In his “Sentences on Conceptual Art”12 (1969) LeWitt says, “Ideas can be works of art; It feeds the profession’s imagination and it opens up new possibilities, not only for technology, materials, and manufacturing but also for narrative, meaning, and the rethinking of everyday life.”
We recognize it is very difficult to finance and implement this kind of design activity and there are limited opportunities but it is needed.
Rather than waiting for commissions from industry or seeking out market gaps for new products, designers could work with curators and other professionals, independently of industry, in partnership with organizations focused on society in the broadest sense, not just business. Similar to architects, designers could take this on as a profession using some of our time for more civic purposes. This is also a role designers in academies could take on. Universities and art schools could become platforms for experimentation, speculation, and the reimagining of everyday life.
Comments