The Ethical Question in Design
by Lorenzo Imbesi
Already in 1969, Victor Papanek observed and recognised that there were social and moral responsibilities for the world of design to take on in the “real world”, made up of real people who live, work, travel, play, go to school, get old and get sick. So from the historic experience of the avant-garde of design at a human scale, what emerges is the ethical consideration that projects of design are not to be a luxury for a close-net technological elite; they must instead interface with the urgencies of a humanity in excess, barely surviving, crowding the slums and ghettos of our metropolises, filling the refugee camps of old and new wars, inhabiting temporary housing shelters of emigration, and fleeing natural disasters. This awareness regards the needs and desires of the multitudes of men and women that populate the planet, who are finally receiving attention from the world of design’s official circuits, and giving the project designer an ethical responsibility that exceeds any common professional work ethic.
So, while the environmental variable has long constituted one of the main pivots for projects of ‘sustainability’ and ‘eco-design’ established their instrumental principles, more recently, there have been ethical reconsiderations, going beyond economic gains, which started to open up a new range of more social themes. This naturally tends to make the aforementioned projects more complex, along with their instruments and opportunities.
The awareness of living in an ever smaller world, the diffusivity and permeability of new information technologies and knowledge, the elaboration of new life styles, as well as a problematic awareness of new roles of consumption, all move in the direction of a critical reconsideration of certain categories connected to ‘sustainability’ on which a large part of ecological theory has long been based; moreover there must also be a correction of certain colonialist misreadings, such as the relationship between the north and south of the world, the issues of technology, the culture of constraint and the cultural value of aesthetics.
How many Souths are there in the World?
The colonialist-style geopolitical mapping, which long constituted the North-South paradigm, cutting the globe in half like an apple, has concurrently defined the binary archetypes in which emblems of centrality and marginality (or development and under-development) are manifested. This seemingly static geography is the model on which many analyses have long been based, especially in reference to differences and inequality. The contrasts between black and white, civilised and uncivilized, developed and underdeveloped, western and non-western are systems of exclusion, which have in time brought forth, if not legitimised, certain practices of segregation and colonial subordination.
No analysis, however, should set aside the historic passage that was experienced with Fordist economics: factory industries, connected to the territory, organising work in a hierarchy of structural pyramids, an economy that has constructed the modern metropolis according to concentric diagrams, polarising decision processes and subordinating any marginal component. Movements towards models of post-industrial development can instead allow for new economic and productive geographies to emerge in a world where the old industries of assembly lines give way to new forms of more flexible work organisation. This can in turn allow for production to free itself from the territory and decentralise itself, as the old north-south and centre-periphery paradigms will no longer apply, and because the old maps of colonialism can no longer convey the complexities of the contemporary world.
A new economic geography will transversally cut the boundaries of the world and the old lines that separated North and South, while also signalling a new trans-national phenomena of extreme inequality and marginality.
Immigration is one of the foundational processes of this mobile geography of differences that mainly affects large cities, as it generates physical production, social reproduction, financial power and poverty all in the same place. As a matter of fact, the globalisation of the work market coincides with processes of circulation of capital outside national boundaries, just as migration flow and global finance are converging to rewrite and update a colonial project through these newly emerging forms of inequality. These movements in fact go beyond the archetypical systems of colonial differences to create networks of more interconnected and decentralised nodes, tied to the mobility flows of men and women, treated as if they were capital.
Beyond the consolidated cities of Tokyo, New York and London, another critical phenomenon within the global metropolis that is crossed by the flux of trans-national markets that concentrate technology and finance, including strategic decisions and choices for development, is the emergence of other previously considered colonial cities like Hong Kong, San Paolo, Mexico City, New Delhi, and Cape Town. These cities emerge with incredible extensions in which infrastructure and technology is accumulated along with an extraordinary quantity of humanity that defines the new geographies of centrality and marginality, accentuating differences and inequalities, and often igniting conflict (Sassen, 1998). If a major part of the world’s population is destined (as trends indicate) to live in these global metropolises, these cities will soon present scenarios of emergency, which will have to be seriously taken into consideration by all processes and projects of production.
Ultimately, if “global” is truly becoming the way of being “local”, and this seems to be an irreversible process, one might ask the following questions: what distinctions can still be made between the world’s North and South? or, Can we find as many Souths in the North as there are Norths in the various Souths of the world? and, What about the many peripheries in the centre or the numerous centres in the periphery?
Critical Technologies
In these scenarios, the theme of new forms of centrality and marginality encounters another critical category in regard to sustainability, and that regards accessibility and technological development. The problem, in this case, is no longer only the transfer of technologies to developing countries, there is also the risk in building a form of “peripheral Fordism” caused by decentralisation in countries of new industrialisation, especially in those that produce high levels of pollution. Therefore, the goal is to succeed in creating new models of development that can join technological innovation with know-how and experience in process management, thus involving an immaterial capital of scientific and technical knowledge that, in today’s society of knowledge, have become a competitive factor of great importance. Proof of this can be found in highlighting the progressions in technological innovation regarding information flux management, obtained through investing in human resources, which often translated into prospects of development for many emerging countries, such as the case of software industry in India.
If the paradigm shift that we are living leads us towards a so-called society of knowledge, then there will be an increasing number of access capabilities, that is more power of access, and inclusion into technologies of communications will be the measures of societies’ capacity to develop autonomously. Therefore, creating competitive value will increasingly depend on intelligence and the capability of managing processes, rather than fixed capital; so the new discriminating factor will be the inclusion into that immaterial capital consisting in scientific and technical knowledge (Rifkin, 2001).
Poverty, therefore, will no longer be measured according to primary needs, but also on the power of access to all educational, cultural, informative, and economic opportunities that the network can offer at minimum costs. New disparities and differences will also be measured by magnifying the economic and social disproportion in the world.
On this theme, the ecological movement has a historic responsibility towards technological innovation in less developed countries, by simply blaming it for being the main cause of today’s environmental disasters. The “final solution” often proposed by the movement is a romantic return to the natural state of a recovered “eco-sphere”. In regard to this, even Papanek, who long ago wrote “Design for the real world”, is often accountable for rather idealized ideological judgements.
The same dynamic of intermediate technologies, which matured and developed during the 1960’s and 70’s for developing countries, is currently proposing a weaker, more backward version of technology originating in countries of advanced capitalism. This not only condemns the so-called third world to a form of subordination and to perennial underdevelopment, it also avoids the planning of real models of alternative development. For much time, the lack of resources and distance from industrialised countries were dealt with by proposing transitional phases that would mediate indigenous traditions and the impacts of more advanced processes towards an adaptation to prospectives for growth. In the analysis of the correctness of solutions regarding industry and technology, what becomes evident is a process of downgrading mixed in with a rediscovery of local resources and know-how in order to limit excessive environmental impact and energy consumption.
The advancement of new technologies tied to information and knowledge in a contemporary post-industrial economy of services, proposes new conditions, for its inherent capabilities to create opportunities for a more socially sustainable development through the management of information fluxes, thus concurrently reconciling immaterial production with intelligence.
In this sense, one should note the projects of innovative technological and digital inclusion, like the employment of free wireless networks in areas where even electricity or the use of computers is lacking. Equally important is the wide-spread diffusion of freely distributed technologies, such as operating systems and open-source software, that could break the logic of multi-national monopolies tied to the digital world, while effectively proposing alternative development models even for more developed societies. In summary, if, in the near future, millions of men and women in developing parts of the world start to use these technologies and effectively use its languages to create a “critical mass”, the previously established assimilation or adaptation processes will no longer be necessary for them to work, communicate and be actively present in the world.
Political Desires
The third critical category directly involves the aesthetic issue, which connects above all with the concept of desire. One of the main ideas that have long marked ecological thinking is the concept of limit, which Hans Jonas developed through an ethics of responsibility towards future generations, thus also providing an extraordinarily effective metaphor (Jonas, 1984) particularly in terms of project designs. In short: the definitive disappearance of natural life can be avoided only through the acceptance of something more than ethics, i.e. a true principle of sacrifice that could provide an aesthetic answer with an almost Calvinist style programmed minimalism, which often establishes a policy of “not doing” or the decision to eliminate any and all project interventions when projectual caution is lacking. It is not by chance that many recently developed lines of research are tied to environmental code and regulations, which have often created a rift with the culture of project planning.
In this context, the response has often been a wide-spread “aesthetics of the ruin” as Ava Appiano called it, taking directly from the arte povera and minimalism in Italian conceptual art movements, privileging a form and expression in between the dilapidated and pauperism that, in its demise, has left the strong mark of a moral and aesthetic cleansing. In this, desire is often treated as a threat to be exorcised because, beyond the mere conservation of life, it is the cause of unproductive waste.
Along the same line, Georges Bataille called this waste “la part maudit” the cursed part, connecting it to the concept of dépense, thus interpreting the unproductive waste discharge obtained through consumption as an act of sacrifice and therefore of loss, while at the same time recognising that it plays a social function in tribal rituals, (Bataille, 1967). In exchange for salvation and redemption, sacrificial/sacred rights impose a loss, which often involves bloodshed, having a significant collective symbolic value. It seems that the ‘religion of the useful’ posits itself as the only possible challenge to a civilization centred on abundance and luxury, which will only end up generating waste and destruction.
At the same time, some important factors that the culture of project planning must confront regards the centrality of the phenomena of consumption in contemporary societies and the new critical significance that they adopt as an indication that they are gradually overcoming utilitarian theories of need. Consumption ceases to be a secondary activity in relation to production and the market, as it lets the more cognitive and productive aspects of meaning emerge. In this sense, we are speaking of productive consumption and the critical awareness of social, relational, cognitive, and communicative values of merchandise in the convergence of production and consumption and with the prospect of new forms of participation, life-styles, responsibilities, and self-production. Therefore, aesthetics enters a political realm in order to affirm a “right to aesthetics” that also includes ethical values and solidarity, and does not condemn all of the men and women who live in situations of exclusion and poverty to forms of structural underdevelopment.
In this sense, the “culture of the limit” and the “aesthetics of sacrifice” should be reconsidered in light of the effects of globalisation and media’s penetration around the world, which have in turn produced a diffusion of life-styles as well as a form of awareness and aesthetic education even into the most remote places and social strata. Even in the most hidden favelas, satellite dishes are appearing that, through distant connections of persons and places, often have the role of informing and educating, as well as promoting a new status of consumers along with their aspirations for Western standards. (Seduced, to later be abandoned!)
It is ultimately aesthetics, understood as a cognitive interpretation of sensitivity and shared culture, on which the challenge for the ethical project will be centred. Such projects can provide scenarios of day-to-day life and formal images of new models of development that even include aspects of seduction. Creating an aesthetic of ethics in this sense can make “good” choices into “beautiful” ones, which are both acceptable and recognisable. In summary, the question remains: what form should ethics take on?
The right to aesthetics is thus connected to a concept of desire that is different from Lacan’s theory of a lacking, which stems from the gap between need and demand. To re-read desire as an energy which is freed from the idea of a lacking based on privations and need, also liberates practices of consumerism from the market’s prevailing domain. Consumerism can therefore start to become a creative act that is capable of actively re-elaborating form and meaning, thus overcoming the established logic of a passive acceptance of induced needs.
Desire is thus connected to the idea of project design; it is a creative act that is capable of producing concreteness and happiness through its realisation: it is a will to power, an irreducible drive filling the gap between thought and reality and allowing one to dream while freed from necessity. If “desire caused by want and need is sadness”, quite on the contrary, “any power filled with desire is virtue and wisdom” (Deleuze and Guattari,1975). Aesthetics thus plays a significant role in entering the political realm.