Besides being provocative, the almost apocalyptic tone of the Cumulus Bogotá 2019 Conference, The Design After, was also an invitation to connect the practice of contemporary design with other historical moments: particularly those when design was thought of as an agent of change in critical moments of society. An example of this is the diversity of reactions that led to changes in the economic, technological, productive, and social organization that were part of the industrial capitalist model between the 18th and 19th centuries.
For instance, in England, reactions ranged from the implementation of political and developmental policies promoting the arts through taking critical positions because of the many problems in terms of labor and environment that were brought about by the new productive model. William Morris and John Ruskin were aware of the impact the industrial revolution had on the quality of life for both citizens and workers. Subsequently, they foresaw a solution to the crisis in the arts. On the other hand, Henry Cole and Prince Albert, promoted the celebration of industrial modernity through World Fairs and the inclusion of design as part of state political agendas (Raizman 2011, 61).
Something similar happened in Germany, which, through both public and private initiatives, sought design to play a role in the processes of national construction, industrialization, and social reconstruction in the period immediately following the two great wars of the 20th century. Hermann and Anne Muthesius sought to make a contribution to the development of the nation based on an aesthetic quest that would harmonize industry with tradition while positioning Germany on the map of industrial progress (Pevsner 2011; Stratigakos 2003). In the post-war periods, both the Bauhaus and the Ülm school inspired a way of thinking in society based on the combination between a humanistic and material perspective while allowing the damaged social fabric during the conflict to be reconstructed.
In France, over the course of several decades, the bird’s eye view of the city was combined with the detailed view of the domestic as a strategy to deal with the challenges and changes involved in adopting the modern. From 1853 onwards, the parameters for designing the city established the paradigmatic elements of modern cities after the renovation of Haussmann later on at the turn of the 20th century. The tenets of modern domestic life and consumption were also established through Art Nouveau and Art Deco (Raizman 2011, 120–161). Both discourses were echoed and effectively replicated in the United States. The Universal Exhibitions acted as consumption laboratories and were consolidated as scenarios to celebrate the emblematic American modernity, especially after the City Beautiful Movement and the Chicago Exhibition of 1893 (Gordon 2010; Rydell 1993).
Since the first decades of the 20th century, and especially after WWI, many questions were posed after the evident flaws of industrial modernity. The Frankfurt School made many of the system’s fissures evident, which gave rise to a line of critical thinking that looked at the modern with more and more suspicion. During the post-WWII period, the consolidation of the field of cultural studies in England and the United States also had a great impact, which once again called into question the basis of the hegemonic model and raised many questions based on the analysis of its cultural productions and systems of power. The discussion about race, gender, social class, national identities, the popular, and the vernacular opened a path to understanding what Buchanan and other authors have contemporarily called “wicked problems” (Buchanan 1992; Coyne 2005; Farrell & Hooker 2013).
The term acquires special relevance in a globalized world where the theoretical framework of the center-periphery has become a dated way of understanding more complex relationships. Homi Bhabha (2006) identified the origin of many of these difficulties in historical problems that were never resolved, which is an idea that has been especially useful for understanding post-colonial contexts. Many of these problems that are derived from historical inheritance are the ones present-day design has to deal with to try and save the world, once again, from a debacle. Climate change; the sustainability of resources; the protection of biodiversity hotspots after centuries of environmental predation; the recognition of new and complex citizen identities; the value and omnipresence of the image and the design itself as a mediator of social and political processes; the recognition of communities and ancestral knowledge already installed in the territories; and the need to rethink notions that were central to modern thinking such as productivity, efficiency and consumption are just a sample of the complex and profound challenges that contemporary design faces.
Cumulus Bogota, 2019: Five Foci to Think about the Future of Design
In the quest to understand the contemporary role of design and its ability to redefine itself, less as a discipline and more as a philosophy that allows wicked problems to be faced, Cumulus Bogotá 2019 focused on five topics: 1) Sensing the City/Sensing the Rural the urban; 2) Somewhere, nowhere, anyone, everyone; 3) Counterculture; 4) Biodiversity; and 5) Fiction and de-innovation. The articles that are part of this special issue of Dearq, were selected according to these topics to try and provide the reader with an overview of each topic to help them understand the way they relate to conference’s main topic: The Design After.
The first topic, Sensing the City/Sensing the Rural, invites the reader to rethink the often unbalanced relationship, between the city and the rural. Additionally, the term post-digital times is used as a provocation in the topic description to think about the role of technology in connecting both sites as well as a means of raising awareness of the importance of studying and connecting with communities. Both articles illustrating this theme, Insights from a Design-led Inquiry about Rural Communities in Brazil, and Finding a New Commons: Architecture’s Role in Cultural Sustainability for Japan’s Shrinking Regions, present case studies from different geographical contexts that offer options to rethink historical problems related to land distribution and run-down or abandoned architecture in times of demographic decline. The Brazilian case study exemplifies the use of high and low complexity technologies to conduct community driven-research through video, photography, and qualitative analysis software. The results aim for a political strategy to be defined that uses design for the old problem of land distribution in Brazil (Anderson & Hill 1986; Martins 2000; Straubhaar 2015; Veltmeyer 1993; Vergara-Camus 2009). The Japanese case runs parallel to the former in establishing the notions of public infrastructure and land as communal assets as a starting point to propose their resignification and appropriation through a design practice based on qualitative research methodologies.
The second topic, Nowhere, nowhere, anyone, everyone, sets its starting point around the boundaries of capitalism, proposing the combination of forces between social sciences and design as the main strategy in order to identify and generate parallel market opportunities and new ecosystems. This is formulated as an alternative to be able to understand complex realities derived from historical problems but also to produce renewed theoretical frameworks that allow value to be generated in scenarios where political structures and economic systems have historically proved to be useless or inexistent (Hutton & Pikety 2014). The articles Artisans and Designers: Seeking Fairness within Capitalism and the Gig Economy and, Movement and Place-Making in a Monsoon Terrain both represent the craving for historical social justice that is deeply ingrained in the formulation of this topic. The first article, presents contemporary craftsmanship as a global problem and as a practice still governed by pre-modern thinking and practices that frequently contradict the rationales of modern economy. The second one posits the importance of trying and find new ways to establish a more balanced relationship with ecosystems, which is particularly sensitive when talking about the so-called biodiversity hotspots. This article’s case study, the West Ghats, contemplates the options that design can offer to help understand the dynamics involved in living in a territory that, in this case, is always subjected to the unpredictable nature of the Monsoons.
The third topic, Counterculture, inevitably refers to the 1960’s as one of the historical moments when going against the establishment gave visibility to, until-then, overlooked and unknown subcultures. In this paper, the term counterculture was considered more a strategy than a cultural phenomenon. It was used to define a design scenario that would capitalize on the failures of the system, recognize the knowledge already installed in the territory, and produce alternative models of relationship with the environment. The first one of these articles, Research Video: Audiovisual Ethnography and Beyond, combines ethnographic field-work in Bolivia that reflects on the production of scientific knowledge. One of the authors’ main premises is to look for a greater and wider scope and impact of their research through implementing qualitative research methodologies which advocate for the acceptance of what they call video-research as a valid academic production that is also accessible to non-academic audiences. The article Bio-currencies: an Alternative to Payments for Environmental Services, offers a glimpse at one of the many possible new ways for doing design research, once again using social science methods to approach the territory to identify ancestral practices such as bartering. This exercise allows contemporary societies to rethink strategies so as they can face an eventual breakdown of capitalism. The third article, Photo-ethnography and Political Engagement: Studying Performative Subversions of Public Space, reflects upon the urban landscape and the subcultures that are part of it. Through visual culture and discourse analysis methodologies, the authors reveal the importance of the performative dimension to establish a dialogue between the past and the present through photographs of cityscapes. The photographs of the LGBTQA+ community provide a framework to understand the contemporary dialogues that are taking place in Santiago de Chile between the hegemonic and the marginal.
Biodiversity, as one of the main topics, was not just limited to its own boundaries but to a wide array of connected fields. The reference to biology in the field of design is not new, and it is possible to understand its centrality based on works from Da Vinci’s attempts on biomimicry to Theo Jansen’s contemporary walking sculptures. However, the scope of biology in the field of contemporary design goes far beyond form and function. Nowadays, it also deals with sustainability, climate change, and with the decentralization of an overarching user-centered design discourse that has taken place in recent years and been directed towards an ecosystem-driven design. The two articles covering this topic, Prototype of a Self-sufficient Biofabrication Protocol for Remote Territories and BioForm: Learning at the Intersection of Science and Design, are good examples of how to expand the boundaries and create a new way of looking at old problems existing between design, art, and science. The first presents an experience with the development of biomaterials from algae and mollusks in an extreme region of Chile that allowed the research team to reflect not only on the development of new compounds but also on the meaning of materiality itself in the process of connecting territory with community. The second, paper, which was based in Ireland, proposes a curriculum that allows scientists and designers and professors and students to take a stance and try to understand the other discipline while developing mixed skills. Both articles are developed using neologisms that refer to science fiction such as biohacking, biomaterials, bio-mimicry, and bio-fabrication, which account for a historical moment in the history of thought when it is possible to think about a new modernity that does not imply the same devastation caused by the industrial modernity.
The fifth and final theme, Fiction and de-innovation, offers the possibility of understanding design as an act that allows being able to deal with the symbolic world as well as the practical one. This track also challenges the stability of dominant discourses on innovation to propose less trendy but more sustainable alternatives to add value to design processes. Through speculative thinking and ideation, the idea is to redefine the identity of a design practice that seems to have lost its track in the midst of a heyday of self-improvement discourses and senseless mottos. Similarly to 20th century movements such as Futurism, Constructivism, and Archigram, the topic Fiction and innovation situates technology and sci-fi-based utopias at the core of its speculative proposals.
The article Black Panther’s Utopian Project: The Innovative Potential of Fiction and Speculation by Non-architects highlights the urban and architectural opportunities contained in the speculative world of video games and movies. Through the analysis of Black Panther, the film-makers highlight the little or almost zero visibility that marginal communities have had in the formulation of urban and architectural utopias. The paper identifies that the problem of lack of visibility in the landscape for these communities is not only a real historical problem and also that future formulations will most likely not take them into account. On the other hand, it highlights with great acuity the possibilities of equilibrium and social justice that are expressed visually through the point of view of the marginal. In Wakanda, the fictional country where the film takes place, through the possibility of coining terms such as Afro-Aesthetics and Afro-Futurism, the authors find a way to refer to techno-fiction universes created after new and more inclusive paradigms.
Lastly, the article A Pedagogical Experiment on Design of Exception, Absurd, Artifacts, and Imaginary Interfaces, creates a theoretical framework of speculative design derived from Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics –or science of imaginary or even absurd solutions– to propose the term patadesign. Both terms, pataphysics and patadesign, have the underlying sense of the absurd, which is presented equally as a method and as a symbolic solution (Jarry, Edwards, & Melville 2001). In this sense of the absurd, it is inevitable to recall the classic cases of speculative design, Jacques Carelman’s Catalog of objects, the aesthetic universes created by the surrealists, the absurdity of Marcel Duchamp’s artworks, and even the uncanny compositions by John Cage. When reality itself and corporate discourses are proximate to expire, creativity and absurdity can turn into a way-out and a safe space against the folly of normativity.
Final Thoughts
There is no doubt that a significant portion of design history has been built within the boundaries of social utopias and consumer capitalism. Although most of the utopias have simply remained as beacons of design, their importance lies precisely in their ability to act as counterweight to consumerism, which is one of the greatest challenges contemporary design has to face. The utopia implied in the formulation of the Cumulus Conference 2019 once again places a good dose of expectation in technology, but it is still a 2019 utopia, meaning that the approach to technology is no longer overarching but nuanced and counter-balanced by critical theory. The role of designers, in this game of weights and counterweights, is closer to that of a philosopher who thinks about life through sensory experience. The power of this utopian designer no longer lies in his/her ability to alienate themselves under the indifference of thoughtless, lonely professional practice but uses the conscious and cooperative practice of their transformative power of both matter, energy, and life itself.