Slow Design is a new approach to design and theorized spotted by a British academic, Alastair Fuad-Luke, 2004. It brings together under this name, all practices from different fields creation, breaking with the logic of consumerism and keeping the center of their concerns, the balance of man and his environment. Given the climate emergency and the decay of our mass societies, it offers nothing less than a civilizational shift and how to get there. This exceeds the views technicist and limitations of eco-design, to an anthropological dimension. The consistency of his theoretical apparatus actually probably the most ambitious collective adventure in the field of design in this new century. Slow design means in effect, through its manifesto to support simultaneously all aspects of human existence and thus places both in form and in content, some affiliation with the avant-garde artists of the 20th century.
Andrea Branzi in U do ecology artificial universe, however, had diagnosed their death. If they played between the second and the third industrial revolution, the role of "recovery room", allowing the culture to absorb technological innovations, it no longer necessary in the digital society because, we said it, the computer adjusts to man, not vice versa, and does not recquiert new anthropology.
Branzi is it wrong? In fact, the Slow design, perfect to the Futurism of Marinetti celebrating modernity by an aesthetic of speed, not as a vanguard, a rear-guard. This does not imply that it is reactionary, but simply that his anthropology based on observations of traditional ways of life, prior to or outside the consumer society, because they are the custodians of anthropological markers required (eg the rituals), that contemporary societies have lost.
This is not the 20th century, marked by modernism, the Slow design also draws its source, but more likely from the 19th century, struck by the first two industrial revolutions. His critique of mass production, his fight for and appreciation of the craft, are indeed reminiscent of the socialism of William Morris, now recognized as one of the fathers of applied art.
Slow Design, as its name suggests, intends to oppose the speed that marks our highly industrialized societies. Our environment artificialised to the extreme, registered in renewal cycles becoming shorter, disrupt our metabolism, set to the rhythm of nature. This phase shift between the biological and technological, will double from inattention to the future and the past, we are entertained by this fast. Hence the need to slow the human resource use and economics.
The record that made Alastair Fuad-Luke in the state of the world is not new. It has been theorized in other fields and proposed remediation such as sustainable development (Report Brundtland) and decay (Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen) will owe him nothing. Then brings the Slow design?
Its principal merit is to address this talk to designers, who have so long been the natural allies of the industry and society of convenience (See: Ugliness does not sell Raymond Loewy). Alastair Fuad-Luke points to the prominent role played by the sight still in the design (shape, color, style) and recalls that most often leads to a strategy of planned obsolescence ... called aesthetic fashion.
Instead, the design fits Slow in view of the long term and emphasizes sustainability, quality, satisfaction of real need, the contemplative attitude.
If the current design is therefore involved in the excitement of the capitalist machine and serves as a foil to the best of bond, it is further away from decision-making structures, and therefore has , a small leeway. . The modern movement and even post-modern one nothing done, he said, to oppose the evils of capitalism and were easily assimilated by the industry body, sometimes of their own will, like Alessi Now dedicated to the gadget industry.
The picture is clear: the designer, if he wants to be in capacity to reform the world must get out of what Peter Hall calls "infrastructure", ie the consumer society. The use of crafts, poly-sensory objects produced, work with local communities in a closed circuit, self-production, are all ways of replacing the current structure of work around capitalism globalized. The design should at least allow themselves to imagine a future beyond the objects of the system economic, technological and political context out of the crisis of meaning through which it passes (since the end of the movement of the modern movement!). It should even imagine beyond its own perpetuation, because everyone should be able to shape itself to his desires and needs and not necessarily by the mediation of an object. In an article slow lab, Peter Hall describes the mass-customization, developed by designers as the ultimate avatar of a consumer society, seeking to give us the illusion that it fills our desires for individuation .
Alastair Fuad-Luke's force the designer to leave his role as an expert technician and artist-led him to occupy a political position decisively. He also cites Thomas H, historian, for whom the history of design is the embodiment of all forms of life and therefore dominates all other aspects of the development of civilization whether technical, economic, aesthetic, sociological, psychological or ecological
If Marx said that the good is the reification of social relations, Alastair Fuad-Luke supports him, that social relations can be modified by design. We see, the responsibility is Slow design weigh on the designer is overwhelming.
Slow Design is not utopia yet. He did not propose an alternative future, but a necessary counterweight to the speed that characterizes our society. The slowness only meaningful in relation to speed and vice versa, the "slow life" can not entirely replace pace of progress. Slow Design simply asks apparently coexist with the current life forms as we need "of islands in a sea of slow speed" in the words of Ezio Manzini.
sources:
http://www.slowlab.net/
http://www.slowdesign.org/
http://blog.bientotdemain.com/index .php/2006/11/14/57-le-slow-design
http://theslowhome.com/blog/index/
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