TECHNO-HETEROTOPIAS. CRITICAL DESIGN AS MICRO-HUMANISM Emanuele Quinz * published in Design for Change, L. Gauthier (ed.), BlackJack Editions, 2011, pp. 42-58. 1. The first robot is shaped like a red ring. It is very autonomous, very concentrated. But it has an idiosyncrasy: it prefers to avoid electro-magnetic waves. As soon as a radio, television, or cell phone is switched on, the robot moves, looking for a place that is out of reach. The second robot is shaped like a funnel. As with the first, its function is still enigmatic, but its behavioural patterns are obvious: as soon as someone gets close to it, it stares at them, then starts moving about, becoming nervous and more and more hysterical. The third robot is like a sentry: to make the data archive it is safeguarding accessible, it uses a retinal scanning technology. But to be sure of not making a mistake, it asks the user to train his/her eye at the camera for an interminable period of time. The fourth robot is highly intelligent, but very fragile. As the prisoner of a rudimentary, underdeveloped body, it is totally dependent. As a result it inspires in users a gratifying feeling of control… With the four robots that make up the series Technological Dreams, the English designer twosome Dunne & Raby let us into a vision of the future. A near future, where machines are everywhere. But Dunne & Raby’s robots are not efficient, high-performance tools—intelligent computers at the service of human beings. On the contrary, they are imperfect, opaque machines, which replace functionality by neurosis. Similarly, the interactive clothes produced by the Canadian designer Ying Gao remain enigmatic. 1 While using the same technologies (intelligent textiles) as Wearable Computers , they stand apart from them. Their interaction is not instrumental and functional but, on the contrary, constructed upon an opaque, unstable exchange: they seem to breathe when they hear us breathing, they vibrate and become undone when we approach. Their language remains elusive and mysterious. If Wearable Computers are posited as intermediary devices for the user, Gao’s clothes become actual interlocutors. By refusing any functional transition, they are no longer prostheses. They are neither skin, nor body, they are neither objects nor merely machines. They become subjects. Like Dunne & Raby’s robots, the relationship they set up has to do with dialogue. But a dialogue borrowed from mystery, a state of suspension and anxiety. These visionary projects introduce a critical dimension into design. Instead of coming up with technologies which perform better and better, design proposes useless, dysfunctional, precarious and unstable machines. Instead of pursuing functionality and innovation, design focuses on faults and shortcomings, disorders (in people and machines), accidents, deficiencies, ambiguities and paradoxes. By adopting this focal approach, aimed at everyday objects and behavioural patterns, design questions the impact of technologies in our imagination, in our behaviour, and in our habits. To define this attitude, Dunne & Raby have come up with the term Critical Design: “…Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position 2 rather than a method” . In retrieving the heritage of Anti-Design, which developed in Italy in the 1960s, in opposition to the cult of objects and the state of alienation introduced by wholesale industrialization, this critical stance of design today takes the form of a whole host of propositions, ranging from the “London school”, founded by Dunne & Raby at the Royal College of Art in London, to the conceptual 3 methods of Superflex, Marti Guixé, and Jurgen Bey from Droog Design . All these propositions stem from a common front, which reverses the methods and aims of design. Instead of setting changes and improvements in the living and working conditions of the masses in motion through the design of tools and interfaces, these propositions are aimed at a more subtle, more underground change to things individual and private. 2. 4 The horizon that this critical stance is aimed at is that of “informational capitalism” , of contemporary 5 society transformed by the impact of technologies. When information technology becomes ubiquitous , invisible but omnipresent, and distributed here, there and everywhere, a logic of dematerialization and globalized interconnection is imposed, and the economy shifts from markets to networks. The cultural, social and political infrastructure is mainly made up of data circulation and the ebb-and-flow of information. Thanks to developments in micro-computing and networks, and the spread of portable and integrated equipment, processors are becoming more and more requisite in each and every function—they are working their way into each and every object in our daily lives. Technologies are becoming essential components of the environment which surrounds us; they are becoming our environment. The impact of the exponential development of digital technologies is far-reaching in a quite novel way. In no time at all, the stakes and challenges became clear: changing technologies meant not only altering our living environment, but also imposing changes in our perceptions of the world, in our behavioural patterns, and in our relations with others. Changing technologies meant changing people, and moving humankind along into a new phase. This change has been enacted through a strategic convergence involving engineering, science and design, and has concentrated a huge amount of power in the hands of a small avant-garde of developers. Charged with a brief that went beyond the horizon of technics and technology, they very swiftly turned into gurus, enlightened by a fierce positivism, and fired by utopian visions. It is in this context that critical design is emerging, like an uncompromising and visionary reaction. On the one hand, this stance attempts to delimit zones of resistance of the human in the face of the relentless advance of technologies, in relation to the globalized world of ubiquitous computer technology. On the other hand, it relativizes design’s “mission” as a vehicle of change. 3. In the 1960s, the development of technologies restored a topical element to the idea of humanism. On this front, two radical visions came up against one another: on the one hand, technological progress is seen as a lever for the project of a revitalized human society, on the other it is tolling the knell for human beings, in the face of the triumph of machines. Humanism is becoming the terrain of a dramatic clash between utopia and dystopia. On the one hand, people boast about the possibilities offered by Virtual Reality of “improvising reality”: 6 in each one of its attributes, the virtual world is discrete, parametered and manipulable depending on our desires and our projects, by freeing people from a tragically “mandatory” reality. On the other hand, people riposte with the tragic prophecy of the “disappearance of reality”: “the 7 media bring about the disappearance of the event, the object, the referential” . This is the “perfect crime”, the “murder of reality”: on the one hand, the objects which make up the world are gradually replaced by their images and their “simulacra”; on the other, the depth of matter, through procedures of capture and digitization, is absorbed by the immaterial flatness of the pixel on the surfaces of screens. Just when there is no longer any knowledge or experience possible outside of the media horizon, it is no longer reality that is obligatory (henceforth out of reach and unverifiable), but the ghostlike persistence of simulacra. In the same way, two positions square off against each other around the idea of intelligence. 8 On the one hand, people advocate the project of a “collective intelligence” , encouraged by the infrastructure of contemporary communication techniques and the networked interconnection of computers. This “fast synergy of intelligences” would be capable of underpinning a community-based sharing of knowledge and know-how, as well as decisions, and would give a new democratic uplift to society. On the other hand, people are announcing the advent of “Singularity”, the fatal overtaking of human 9 intelligence by the intelligence of machines . In the face of the uncertain prospect of the exponential growth of technologies, people are, on the one hand, calling for the comeback of humanism and, on the other, the end of the human. Over the years, these prophetic visions have faded and blurred. In these visions, be they paradisiac or apocalyptic, the individual disappears, dissolved in an anonymous mass or replaced by a machine. To these shining visions, critical design responds with “fictions”, all swathed in subtleties, which present the psychological and social impact of technologies, on the scale of the individual and of everyday life. Versus the extremism of utopia and dystopia, critical design is proposed as a heterotopia, a “counter10 place” , a zone of rupture and resistance. 11 The aim is to introduce “doubt or complexity in the techno-utopian visions” . It is through questioning and doubt that critical design is asserting its goal: giving rise to a gap or discrepancy, creating a reprieve of consciousness, a change that is not situated at the level of social macro-structures, but at the level of the individual. 4. When the 1990s came to an end, metaphysical spectres, paradisiac peaks and apocalyptic nadirs were met by a more soothing, “human-centred” vision of technology, an established and stable order. Ubiquitous Computer Technology reverses the prospect espoused by Virtual Reality in the 1990s: instead of “constructing a new word inside the computer”, it tends to “spread invisibly across the world 12 which already exists” , and create a merger with (and thus the disappearance of) the technical apparatus in the environment about us. Design is once again the protagonist in this reversal, this refocusing around the human. A new form of humanism emerges which, once the shrill tones of utopia and dystopia are abandoned, replaces the 13 machines at the service of man and his requirements, and which proposes a “calm technology” . Little by little, the gap between the world of the daily round and its functions and the simulated and interfaced world of computer technology is filled: the computer becomes invisible; interfaces merge with the surfaces of objects; interactions by way of interfaces based on a system of commands, on the arborescences of a menu or on graphic representations, are replaced by more “natural” paradigms of interaction, which are based on the actions of and ways of using everyday objects, which call for less attention, less effort and concentration, and are less stressful. Intelligence is no longer detoured towards an elusive entity; rather, it is dissolved, incarnated in the environment that surrounds us, at once perceptible and interactive. Within the enlightened cohorts of engineering and design, the 14 watchword is Ambient Intelligence : the environment captures and directly responds to the needs of the user. For example, a system interconnects light and other ambient controls (heating, humidity levels, etc.) with a biometric device incorporated in an item of clothing, in such a way that the environmental conditions can be modulated in relation to body temperature changes and a person’s movements... Computer technology is everywhere, but it is not frightening any more. This seemingly calm situation nevertheless hides insidious paradoxes, which critical design strives to pinpoint. The ubiquity of information forms a cultural, social and political landscape dominated by information flows, by networks and thus by those who manage this information and these networks. To borrow the words of Jaron Lanier, an early pioneer and, these days, a renegade in relation to the digital revolution, the power gathered in the hands of a technocratic oligarchy, made up of engineers, scientists and guru-designers, who have all been behind the rapid development of computer 15 technology, imposes an oppressive system, which he calls “cybernetic totalism” . By way of clever seduction, values, desires and patterns of behaviour are all subject to a massive standardization. Objects disappear, lose their materiality and thus their capacity to create an affection, duly becoming invisible—mere functions. Gradually the individual is replaced by the abstraction and anonymity of social networks, undermined by a philosophy, which reduces the complexity of experience to information transfers, which promotes “discrete” intelligence to the detriment of sensation and emotion. People are pushed towards self-abdication, towards a fatal subordination; they are reduced to being “users” of imposed technologies... In this context, design becomes purely “affirmative”, limited to the confirmation of the status quo imposed by “Corporate Futurologists”. Objects produced by design are inert emblems which repeat established official values; “their slick surface distracts us from the dystopian vision of life they wih for 16 us...” . Critical design, on the other hand, sees itself as subversive. With its host of useless machines, disconcerting objects and strange uses, it opens up heterotopic spaces, areas of resistance. As Dunne says, the aim is to “raise awareness, stimulate discussion, and provoke debate, all of which can help achieve technological futures that reflect the complex, troubled people we are, rather than 17 the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be” ... To this end, the critical methodology of design is based on the twofold system of the manufacture of strange, dysfunctional objects, and the design of “fictions”. Instead of presenting “fictional functions” (like those imposed by industry and the market, critical 18 design proposes “functional fictions” , which illustrate unusual uses of electronic and computerized systems. These realistic narratives (often imbued with a dark and scathing wit) speak out against the paradoxes of our mythologies and the conformities of our behavioural patterns. By summoning to the side of design the means represented by literature, photography and, above all, film, they announce alternative scenarios, of the present but more especially of the future: a sort of “design fiction” is traced out which, like “science fiction”, becomes a “captivating medium with which to explore social changes, 19 the impact of the future and alternative societies” . In contrast with the compulsive dictatorship of innovation, many recent productions are re-introducing “analogical” looks and uses to advanced digital systems, with a nostalgia that is at once corrosive and poetic: from Hulger’s “vintage” prostheses, which make it possible to connect 1960s’ telephone earpieces to the iPhone or to a skype-linked computer, to Daniel Rozan’s Mechanical Mirrors, which simulate the dynamics of the pixels which form an image with motorized metal mini-plaques... design becomes an arena of individual freedom—where expression is given to forms of stubborn resistance to the colonization of everyday life by digital technologies. Where fashion is concerned, Ying Gao’s interactive clothes result from the same polemical approach. The dresses which make up the Playtime series (2010) bristle with sensors that are sensitive to flash bulbs: when a person tries to capture the image with a video camera or an ordinary camera, the piece of clothing undergoes a metamorphosis, it breaks up its moving forms, by becoming blurred and out of focus. By being evasive, the clothing introduces a shadowy zone, and hence an area of freedom for 20 the individual, challenging the hegemony of spectacle and image, and of a “generalized fashion” . In 2008, Dunne & Raby’s questioning, along with that of their colleagues and students in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art in London, extended from sensitive and intelligent electronic objects to the area of bio- and nano-technologies, technologies which will have an influence on our lives in the near future. In a paradoxical extension of the ubiquitous prospect, computer technology is not only finding its way into everyday objects, but it is also reaching living matter; it is becoming an “invisible component of 21 life’s fabric” . Manipulation of the genetic code permits a control over biological matter, something which was previously inconceivable. By converging with computer technology, biology is gradually changing from a descriptive science into a discipline of intervention and reformulation in relation to the living world, and increasingly becoming a terrain for design. In this way, Dunne & Raby, Nathalie Jeremijenko and the Material Beliefs collective (which includes, among others, Elio Caccavale, James Auger, Tobie Kerridge and Jimmy Loizeau) are taking note of the paradoxes and dangers of this extension. The objects and the absurd scenarios which they present, at times comic, at others scary, do not simply incarnate “future forms and functions”, but they 22 also reveal “above all their social, ethical and psychological consequences” . 5. The vis polemica of critical design does not spare the “human-centred” approach. This approach, which was widespread in interactive design in the late 1990s, and underwritten by scientists who in no time became gurus, like Don Norman, bases the conception of design on an analysis of users’ desires and needs. Values such as simplicity, comfort when using interfaces, and the ‘usability’ of electronic devices, all become central: design is freeing itself from standards dictated by technological innovation and scientific progress to focus more on the perceptive, cognitive and psychological processes of the user interacting with the object. For Dunne, this approach remains “affirmative”, consensual, and dependent upon the demands of marketing and the restrictions of industry and the market, and it also tends to reduce the complexity of the individual to his role as user. Dunne’s critique targets three of the pillars of this approach: the ‘User-Friendly’ notion, the concept of pleasure, and the conception of the “flow” or “optimal experience”. Dunne contrasts the ‘User-Friendly’ label with “(ab)user-friendly” and “user-unfriendly”: instead of being efficient, simple and comfortable to use (and thus reassuring, and comforting), the objects proposed by critical design are complex and enigmatic; they disorient, and at times they fairly and squarely put people off. This “strangeness” of the object summons unusual uses, appropriations and hijacks, and abuses, in a process of systematic subversion, of functional estrangement which Dunne 23 calls “para-funcionality” . In contrast to the transparentness and transitiveness of the ‘User-Friendly’, there is a promotion of the opaqueness of objects and uses, like a lever for awakening a “sceptical sensibility”, and facilitating questioning about the packaging imposed by technology. Likewise, the notion of “pleasure”, which has become a basic front in the qualitative investigation of 24 ‘User-Centred’ design, represents a target of Dunne’s criticism. For Patrick Jordan , the success of a product depends on its capacity to give rise to pleasure in the user—at once physical (the object must be pleasing for the senses), social (it must facilitate social interaction, and represent the real and desired image of the user in the public context), ideological (it must tally with certain stylistic ideals, and certain philosophical, religious, ethical and other values), and psychological (it must give rise to an emotional attachment). Pleasure thus becomes a means not only for improving the interaction and ‘usability’ of a product or technology, but above all a strategy for establishing its commercial success, for producing desire. Dunne contrasts this overly consensual, not to say demagogic notion of pleasure 25 with what he calls “complicated pleasures” : the misuse of technologies and the hijacking of functions and forms generate the “shudder of transgression”, giving rise to complex psychological experiences. In this sense, the object of critical design is also defined as “post-optimal”. Dunne here makes reference to the notion of “flow” or “optimal experience”, put forward by the psychologist Mihaly 26 Csikszentmihalyi as a fundamental value of ‘human-centred’ design. This notion defines a state of total focus of the subject’s consciousness on the activity under way, where all external distraction and all effort are done away with, to make way for a sort of intense “merger” with the environment. On the other hand, the opaqueness of the critical object, its functional alienation, and its subversive and dysfunctional character, are posited as obstacles and call for a cognitive effort and reflection. The user stands back and observes himself, questions his behaviour and his relations with the technological environment. With this systematic Verfremdung, applied to design, “a form of social 27 research integrate aesthetic experience with everyday life through conceptual products” . With an eye on the creation of a gap or discrepancy, Dunne talks of Design Noir (like the film genre), which he introduces as a conceptual tactic capable of “generating existential moments”, and, by way of disturbing narratives “dramatizing” everyday acts and interactions with machines, so as to render 28 visible the dark side of their psychological impact . An example of this tactic of appropriation is represented by the Placebo collection, produced by Dunne & Raby in 2001, made up of eight objects which use electro-magnetic fields. The project presented both objects and images which depict the reactions and behaviour of users. If, to all appearances, these furnishing objects seem familiar and everyday, their function is altogether unexpected. From the Nipple Chair (an armchair with two nipples on the back which vibrate in response to magnetic fields) to the Compass Table (a table on which a compass moves when a portable computer or a cell phone are placed on it), these objects are not aimed at any functional efficiency; on the contrary, they are totally useless from a practical point of view, they function like fetishes, like placebos, and shift the theme of design from the instrumental function—invariably standardized—towards a mission of catharsis with regard to individual drives and tensions. As Dunne explains, “As designers, we cannot always change reality, but we can change the perception that we have of it, providing users with psychological 29 peace” . Similarly, the machines produced and presented by Noam Toran in Desire Management (2006) are “private” and enigmatic tools, which describe strange patterns of behaviour which go hand in hand with disorders, deviations of desire and pleasure. Behind the flat and comforting horizon of technological consumerism hide complex individualities, made fragile by disorders, and territories made uneven by aberration and obsession spread out— becoming special areas of exploration for critical design. 6. In the shift from the mechanical age to the information age and the period of ubiquitous computer technology, the area in which design intervenes moves from functions and interactions to values. The definition of “good design” takes on an explicitly social and political connotation. In the Industrial Design of the 1980s, the imperative was ergonomics—how to best adapt objects and environments to the user’s physical body; in the Interaction Design of the 1990s it was humancentred—how to best adapt objects and environments to the user’s cognitive processes; lastly, in the 2000s, the challenges of design shifted to the arena of ethics—how the human factor manifests itself 30 and how human beings can live with each other, and with objects and environments . Because of the impact of technologies, design is gradually moving away from its disciplinary framework, from its traditional area of action, and is being endowed with a mission of “global architecture”. It ranges from the production of communication interfaces to the design of systems of exchange, “instead of looking at product design, it looks to economies of movement; instead of 31 isolating graphic design, it considers the economies of information” ... 32 It becomes a vehicle of “massive change” as is proposed by the manifesto/exhibition of Bruce Mau . For Mau, “new design” is configured like an activity, which is “distributed, plural and collaborative”. Its scale is no longer that of the individual’s uses and needs, but that of the “common good”: design “guides everyday actions, configures our consciousness and our spaces, and alters our lives”, in a nutshell it “gives shape to the networks of invisible actions and flows which, in their turn, will give shape to our future”. For the author of Science-Fiction (and of Design Fiction), Bruce Sterling, the society of ubiquitous 33 computer technology is defined as “synchronic” : at the moment when each computerized and connected object is amplified by information layers that can be manipulated in real time, the system of objects becomes a “synchronized” system of data, traces and trajectories. And it is the synchronization of this system, “the management of relations between people and time” which, for Sterling, becomes the raw material of new design. In these visions, which are not intended as utopian but, on the contrary, realistic, design takes on a pivotal role, as a vehicle of social change in its macro-structures. Its responsibility is to inform a better, more human and more sustainable future. Humanism becomes an ethical imperative. In the face of the utopias and dystopias of the 1990s, and in the same way as it confronts this new humanist incarnation, critical design retains a sceptical stance in relation to design’s areas of intervention. It contrasts an “all-encompassing” brief and macro-changes with small-scale actions, which are addressed to individuals. Dysfunction has preference over functionalism, neuroses over positivism, regression over innovation, the glorification of alienation and othernesses over the concept of standards, and questions hold sway over answers. It basis its action on doubt and questioning, and it 34 favours the “modest forms of micro-politics” . So, Interrogative Design by the artist Krysztof Wodiczko is constructed like something akin to a 35 “transgression of borders and orders” . By identifying in excluded categories—foreigners, immigrants, “strangers”—valuable forms of otherness and basic heterotopic resources, he tries to make cracks in the monolithic and overwhelming horizon of a society designed in every aspect— geopolitical, psycho-social and ethical alike—by directives of economic power. By producing “transitional objects”, “psycho-social artifices”, capable, once more, of constructing “narratives”, Wodiczko highlights the alienation of these figures (of the vanquished), and their unacceptable suffering in the struggle for survival, and design here is keen to give rise to a “revelation, and interrogative passage”. So, Critical Vehicles (1988) for the homeless, and Alien Stuff (1993), rods fitted with mini screens carried by immigrants in the urban space, work like methods of communication, propose “fictitious narratives” which are provocative and light-hearted, in order to stir up thinking, but above all an “emotional understanding”, “a legalization of the strangers’ illegitimate experience, their illegible past and their illegal present”. In the same basically political spirit are also posited the actions of “guerrilla design” of the English collective Troika, the activism of Marie Sester, on the borderline between architecture and urbanism, and the “collective interactive systems” of Usman Hacque: these interventions come across like “tactics”, opposed to strategies of power, like 36 incursions or, as de Certeau would put it, “poaching” operations , which use critical appropriation to open up a breach in inertia, found a “temporary community”, and drive the “momentary rebirth of a 37 democratic public place” . Critical design prefers a modest and subtle humanism to the utopian humanism of the techno-gurus, and the grandiloquent variant of Massive Change. A humanism which is not guided by certainties, but which is, on the contrary, undermined by doubts. A humanism, which is not based on the successes of science and technology, and human knowledge, but which, on the contrary, presents deficient, useless, disconcerting technologies, as well as fragile, anxious and pathological individualities. A humanism, which deals with humour (often dark), enigma and suspense. A humanism, which refuses the notion of humanity as an abstract entity, and, on the contrary, focuses on individuals in their singularity. Which does not want to fuel a radical change of society but, on the contrary, provoke a simple shudder of doubt, a reprieve of consciousness. A micro-humanism. 7. The objects proposed by Critical Design are in most cases one-off pieces. At times they do not go beyond the status of prototypes and they are not marketed. The fictions which accompany them, which borrow the languages of film, photography, performance, and installation, are mainly presented in the white box of a gallery or a museum, in the protected and sacred venues of contemporary art. Likewise, their methods of conception and design, the conceptual approach above all, put them very close to processes of art. On the one hand, questioning of the impact of technologies draws critical design closer to artistic practices which use new media. In fact, and increasingly, critical design is filling the place left empty by the parable of these practices, by the shipwreck of so-called “digital art”, which became too quickly stuck in an illustrative logic, in a poetics of the demo, ultimate gadget and plug-in. Just when digital art is becoming “affirmative”, or simply decorative, and losing the force of awareness-raising which had driven its emergence, design is replacing it as the new outpost of critical resistance. On the other hand, the heterotopic stance, micro-humanism, rather compares critical design with the “post-utopian” perspective conveyed by contemporary “relational” practices. These practices, which became widespread in the 1990s, conceive of the work of art as a “social interstice”, as “a space of human relations which while fitting more or less harmoniously and overtly into the global system, 38 suggest possibilities of exchanges other than those which are in effect in this system” . Like Critical Design, relational art proceeds by way of the creation of “micro-situations, showing barely any discrepancy with those of ordinary life”, and aims at “creating or re-creating links between 39 individuals, and giving rise to new forms of confrontation and participation” . But, as Jacques Rancière explains as he summarizes this movement, in the face of the ethical imperative, art scales down its ambitions “in relation to its capacity to transform the world, but also with regard to the assertion of the singularity of its objects. This art is not the introduction of the common world through the absolute singularity of form, but the re-arrangement of the objects and images which form the already given common world, and the creation of situations capable of modifying the way we 40 look at things and our attitudes with regard to this collective environment” . According to Rancière, relational art swiftly abandons the critical register in favour of the playful register and plunges into blasé melancholy “with regard to the common world which art carried within it, if it had not been betrayed by its political enrolments and its commercial compromises”; it founders in a disillusionment which derives from a “consciousness of its limits, the tendency to play on the limitation of its powers 41 and the very uncertainty of its effects” . By placing itself at a deeper level within the system, critical design lays claim, on the contrary, to an inexhaustible positivity. As Dunne & Raby explain, if “fine art often refer to popular culture, industrial 42 design is popular culture” , it invariably focuses on products, regarded as a category of objects capable of infiltrating people’s daily lives. This proximity with the individual and the context of his life, this capacity to infiltrate the daily round and speak a language which anybody can understand, allots design a special position, which keeps alive any confidence in its potential for action. It is the prospect of an impact, of a possible change— limited to doubt, questioning, and the reprieve of consciousness—which gives depth to the scenarios of critical design, which, despite the irony and corrosive sarcasm of these propositions, stops them toppling into the abyss of cynicism. And, by being situated between the disproportionate ambitions of the design of Massive Change and the disenchanted melancholy of relational art, critical design assumes a central role in the contemporary cultural landscape. Critical design, which is sceptical about technological utopias and dystopias, and uncompromising with regard to affirmative design, through the immoderate use of paradox and dysfunction, constructs a powerful realism, a poetics—which is also a politics—of discrepancy. Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods Notes 1 Wearable Computers nowadays represent a burgeoning sector of technological research. Developed back in the 1980s with the prospect of computer technology being distributed here, there and everywhere, they explore the ergonomic potential of on-board computer equipment. Cf. S.SEYMOUR, Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology, Wien New York Springer, 2008. 2 A.DUNNE, F.RABY, Critical Design FAQ, on line at http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0 3 Cf. the exhibition Designing Critical Design (curated by Jan Boolen), produced in 2007 by the Z33 Centre at Hasselt in Belgium. 4 The critical perspective on the shifts of ubiquitous computer technology was ushered in by the sociologist and urbanist Manuel Castells, who, as early as in 1996 (M. CASTELLS, The Rise of Network Society, Wiley 1996,) stigmatised this phenomenon as a manifestation of a new society, based on a “informational capitalism”. Likewise the American economist J.RIFKIN (The Age of Access. The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, New York, J.P.Tacher/G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 2000) talks about a “new culture of capitalism” based on ubiquitous computer technology. 5 This term was first used in 1988 by the American engineer Mark Weiser, head of the Xerox company in PARC M. WEISER, The Computer for the 21st Century (1988); an updated version of this text is available on-line at: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html 6 The notion of Absolut Physics was put forward by Jaron Lanier, indefatigable inventor of concepts and technologies, just when he was making the first steps in Virtual Reality. If, in order to act in the world around us, we need to use the limited resources of our bodies, or intermediary objects--as extensions of the corps -, in Virtual Reality we can make direct modifications, with no go-between. Each and every detail of the world of simulation is discrete, parametered, manipulable digital matter: environment, arrangement, form and movement of objects and avatars. Within virtual space, which is not only transitional but also transitive, reality is no longer tragically “obligatory”, but becomes the result of “improvisation”. Cf. J.Lanier, The Virtual Visionary, Interview with Jaron Lanier, in The Guardian, 29 December 2001. 7 J.BAUDRILLARD, Les stratégies fatales, Paris Grasset, 1983, p. 95. 8 P.LEVY, L'intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace, Paris La découverte 1994, English translation Collective Intelligence, Basic Books, 1997. Other theorisations – from Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere to the Connective Intelligence of Derrick De Kerckhove, to the Ecology of the Mind of Gregory Bateson, to the Hive Mind of Kevin Kelly – give off common sense. The model of a “community-based democracy of networks” has been explored by H.RHEINGOLD in The Virtual Community, Reading MA, Addison-Wesley 1993, Cf. on this subject the critical summary of T.MALDONADO, Critica della ragione informatica, Milan Feltrinelli, 1997, p.11-92. 9 R. KURZWEIL, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Penguin 1999; The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Viking Adult 2005. This prediction is based on an extreme generalization of Moore’s Law (whereby the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years), which points to the progress of technological development, in particular the increase in the speed of calculations and the greater complexity of algorithms. This exponential technical evolution marks the sway of machines over people, who are limited by their “biological condition”. 10 M. FOUCAULT, Des espaces autres (lecture given at the Cercle d'Etudes Architecturales, 14 March 1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, October 1984, pp. 46-49. 11 A.DUNNE, F.RABY, Design Noir: the Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Basel August/Birkhäuser 2001, p.6. 12 WEISER, The Computer for the 21st Century (1988), an updated version of this text is available on-line http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html 13 M.WEISER, J.SEELY BROWN, The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Xerox Parc 1996, available on-line: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm 14 E.AARTS, S.MARZANO, The New Everyday. Views On Ambient Intelligence, Rotterdam 010 Publishers 2003. 15 J.LANIER, You Are Not a Gadget. A Manifesto, New York Alfred A.Knopf, 2010. 16 DUNNE, RABY Op.cit. 2001, p.6. 17 DUNNE, RABY, Design for Debate, in Neoplasmatic Design, Architectural Design, Marcos Cruz and Steve Pike (eds), Vol 78 No6. http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/36/0 18 TROIKA, Fictional Functions and Functional Fictions, Interview with Anthony Dunne, in Digital by Design, edited by TROIKA, London, Thames & Hudson, 2009. 19 DUNNE quoted in A.MIDAL, Design Fiction: the Parallel Destiny of Design, interview avec Anthony Dunne, in Tomorrow Now. When Design Meets Science Fiction, exhibition catalogue, edited by A.Midal, Luxembourg MUDAM, 2007, p.143. 20 Cf. G.LIPOVESKY, Les temps hypermodernes, with Sébastien Charles, Paris Grasset, Nouveau Collège de Philosophie, 2004. 21 R.A.L.JONES, Soft Machines. Nanotechnology and Life, Oxford University Press, 2007. 22 DUNNE, RABY, Critical Design FAQ, cit. 23 DUNNE, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, Cambridge MA, MIT Press 2005, p.42. 24 P. W.JORDAN, Designing Pleasurable Products: An Introduction to the New Human Factors, CRC Press 2002. 25 DUNNE, op.cit.2005, p. 63. 26 M.CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, Flow, New York Harper, 1990. 27 DUNNE, Op.cit. 2005, p.20. 28 DUNNE, RABY Op.cit. 2001, p.46. 29 About Placebo see DUNNE, RABY, Op.cit. 2001, p.75 ss. 30 A.DUNNE, Interpretation, Collaboration, And Critique, Interview with Raoul Rickenberg, on-line at http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/465. 31 Massive Change, edited by B.MAU, in association with the Toronto-based Institute Without Boundaries, London, Phaidon 2004, p.16. 32 MAU, Idem: “What we see over the last hundred and fifty years, and in a dramatically accelerated pace over the last fifty, is that design is changing its place in order of things. Design is evolving from its position of relative insignificance within business (and the larger envelope of nature), to become the biggest project of all. Even life itself has fallen (or is falling) to the power and possibility of design. Empowered as such, we have a responsibility to address the new set of questions that go along with that power. At the same time, we acknowledge the hybris and inherent paradox of the new position we find ourselves in: We designing nature and we are subject to her laws and powers”. 33 B.STERLING, Shaping Things, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2005, p.45. 34 J.RANCIERE, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Paris Galilée 2004, p.34. 35 K. WODICZKO, Designing the City of Strangers, in Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews, Cambridge MA, MIT Press 1999, p.4-15. 36 M. de CERTEAU, L’invention du quotidien, Paris 10/18, 1980, p.82-89. 37 K.WODICZKO, Idem. 38 N.BOURRIAUD, Esthétique relationnelle, Dijon Les Presses du Réel 1998, p.16; English translation Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Réel, 1998 39 RANCIERE, Op.cit., p. 33-34. 40 Ibid., p.54. 41 Ibid, p.83. 42 DUNNE, Op.cit. 2005, p.146.