Inter- disciplinarily, trans- disciplinarily, multiplicity and pluralism
Inter- disciplinarily, trans- disciplinarily, multiplicity and pluralism some key books to think about on design activism and social change -Carl Disalvo- adversarial design -Tony Fry- designers politics 1. Carl Disalvo- adversarial design Carl Disalvo is interested in design activism, its a form of public resistance and an attempt to transform positions in society using design strategies. agonist pluralism thinks about how we live in cultures where we all come together operating under the same name seen as a collective and have an identity, however this is friendly and no body argues, he sees it as a noisy voice, based on different positions causing disagreements. a cacophony of voices that functions off the ground of democracy, trying to live together but the idea of democracy is based on the idea that their are disagreements under it all.
the film 'this is what democracy looks like' is a design film on social antagonism and whats supposed to be an agreed culture. think about design as a public display, for example banners in place of protests such as in the suffragette movements and ww1 propaganda, design is it all graphically. trying to introduce the idea of noise and the idea that we have a noisy pluralism is driven by the disagreement and somehow we get to a perception that we have a stable order.
the million dollar blocks project is a data visualisation project about trying to understand the workings of a culture or society in terms of ideas of force and noise and intensity to a degree, it comes away from a way a society is tuned and to the way it flows. its the physicality of society and what drives movements of people in political space. the project was an attempt to figure out what was filling the prisons, they documented where the people in a prison came from, they narrow it down to 17 tower blocks that have a majority in prison. the heat map is the important part as its the idea of heat, noise and force, it gives the idea that any identity is driven by a raw material behind it. carson wasent saying the people out of these tower blocks are bad but drawing attention to the social set of problems that are inherited in this particular zone in the city.
he thinks its typically the service of politics,the idea that design works for government, signage in society leaflets for government for examplethe 'get out and vote campaign'. we live in representative democracy which means when we vote, politicians get together and say what they are about and they represent these ideas from their party, us as the public vote for one to elect. the point is that democracy is representative, it takes the noise of society and minimises it through to one person. design tames noise but can also in an activist context, reveal it again multiplicity multiplicity is concerned with the relationship between the one(you) and the many(others). it started with Daniel Borus wih 20th century multiplicity, the idea that something happened in the first 1900's that people start to see situations in different ways. the idea is that theres self evident truths to things, they are straight forward concepts that give us an order and ground things they started to contest the ideas that there could be secure straight forward concepts. materiality the idea that you can find this noise everywhere.
Henry Burkson was interested in it in the individual phycology, he recommend an exercise, putting your whole hands strain on your finger, the point is that not all your energy has moved to the tip of your finger but what you actually are feeling is the distribution of all of the muscles in your body.hes tryng to show that physically we are a multiplicity, we feel one thing intensely but when you think about it, it's broken down to a web of combined force. he doesn't think of it as 1 thing but 100's of things. maybe the things that seemed simple was actually complex. Henry Adams was worried that all the talk about fragmented and individual challenging social structures would undermine the war effort.
