Designers, Visionaries, and Other Stories: Chapter 4 summary

Chapter 4 of Designers, Visionaries, and Other Stories is called "Design Redux". The book is a little dated so some of the information is a little bit off but for the most part is fairly accurate. It is all about ways to utilize old products in new and interesting designs and cut down the waste that is generated in the country from a consumer society. Design is changing but on a very personal level, or a contemporary level. The change is happening because of environmental and moral reasons. However, the changes are not affecting mainstream industrial design. Industrial design lends itself more towards conservative methods and structure. Outside of that field, the more contemporary designs are more enabling, approachable, expressive and engaging. It answers the question "How can we live decently?" It has an emphasis on intuitive, hands-on, physical and reciprocal methods. These methods are a reaction to the world and play off of the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle. The chapter then goes into different ways to approach design with the contemporary ideas in mind.

Appreciation

The section starts off with the author talking about an email he got from his friend who had just gotten back from India. The friend says how he never knows what to say when someone asks how a trip was because you never come back the same. He then leads into a discussion about appreciation. Appreciate what we already have, this is a prominent part of the new style of design. This new style of design is evident projects such as the Sear's Style Project, the Salvation series, and the Banquette and Alligator chairs by the Campana brothers. These projects go against the flow of mass production methods that are typically environmentally and socially harmful and also wasteful and damaging. Dissatisfaction in the rich countries is what gives consumerism and mass production design fuel and in turn, that contributes the environmental destruction. Some contemporary designers are trying to fight the consumerism and trying to "reconcile" ethical and environmental concerns. This will help to reduce the negative consequences of the problem. This all leads back to the saying appreciate what we already have!

Design Redux

Redux is a 17th century word that means to bring back or restore. In 2001 Francis Coppola used to word to describe when he remade is film Apocalypse Now. The new version of the movie gave the public the opportunity to re-appreciate what they already had. Through re-presenting old products, we will be able to restore them as contributions to the human culture and show appreciation and respect to the things they were. We give the products a new life and a chance for them to contribute to economic interests while also cutting down on waste and use of materials. Jurgen Bey is a designer that took this aspect and put it to use. He did this through his glass and polyester infused chairs and his chandelier made from cylinders of two-way mirror foil. Also the Bootleg series by Wolf, Bader, and Oschtz was another way of doing this. They took old music equipment and redesigned it to play MP3 files. This method of design is a way for people appreciate still functioning but out-of-date products.

Distributed and Shared Creativity

This part of the chapter starts off with a great quote, "Everyone is smarter than anyone." Big things can happen when people put their heads together and collaborate. Great examples of this idea being put to use are Wikipedia, Linux, and Mashup. Granted they have some flaws but they are all successful websites though. Story telling also demonstrates this idea. The method of passing stories through generations gives everyone a chance to put their ideas and twist on it. They evolve with the people as it goes from person to person. These ideas are alive and well in contemporary design but not in mainstream design. If it was used in mainstream design, things would change based off of the location and the type of people involved. This would help overcome the idea of a passive consumer and can bridge the gap between traditional and industrial design.

Design Approach

This section of the chapter talks about how Canada throws out about 272,000 electronics every year and they talk about challenges of creating a design approach to help shrink that number. Theres problems with the variety of electronics thrown out and the time and money it would take to break down the stuff. That would create waste in itself. These things follow Thackara's seven design frameworks.

1. sense and respond
2. deep context
3. seeding edge effects
4. smart recombination
5. social fiction
6. designing with us
7. design as service

When it comes to music, remixing is a great design approach. It gives a new twist on an older song and makes people re-appreciate it. Cirque du Soleil did this for one of their shows. They mashed up and remixed a bunch of Beatles songs called it The Beatles Love Cirque du Soleil. 

Harvesting the Discarded

This section starts of talking about how re-using discarded products in a way that could be adapted to fit any culture. This means making as little changes to the product as possible to leave the opportunities open. They then go on to talk about ways to assemble and display the piece. You could use take old wine bottles and place a light and lamp shade in the top of them and end up with an interesting new lamp. You could also use old radios or cassette players and alter them so they can play MP3 files. These things could then be mounted on a square board and presented in interesting ways. The square frame gives the objects a whole new life.

Re-valuing Objects

There are different types of "value" to things and Walker and Chaplin made a list of these:

1. Artist value - aesthetic quality and significant content
2. Uses value - the functionality and purpose of the object 
3. Sentimental value - emotional life of an object to an individual 
4. Exchange value - the actual monetary value 

These four things listed above are very much dependent upon each other. When one of the values gets affected, then most likely the others will be too. Say the object loses it functional quality, then the use value of it decreases. When the use value goes down, the exchange values also goes down because no one will want something thats broken. A way to combat this is to give the object a new function and way to used. Doing that will make the values stay relatively the same and therefore RESTORING the values of the object