Below is the final section of Part 3 from my recent grad school design paper in which I attempt to imagine a not-so-distant future world for the post-capitalist designer. We began by de-commodifying the basic necessities of life in Part 3a before proceeding to identify some post-capitalist design needs in Part 3b. Now, in Part…
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Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care Part 3b: Imagining the World of The Post-Capitalist Designer – Identifying Post-Capitalist Design Needs
This is Part 3 of my recent grad school design paper in which I attempt to imagine a not-so-distant future world for the post-capitalist designer. We begin by de-commodifying the basic necessities of life (Part 3a) before proceeding to identify some post-capitalist design needs (Part 3b) which will then allow us to consider the roles…
Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 2a: What is Degrowth?
This is the first section in Part 2 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore two contemporary, post-capitalist movements that have much to offer our creative endeavor to imagine a new, ecologically sensitive design story. Degrowth and solarpunk are neither finished experiments nor cautionary tales but living, still-unfolding proposals, argued over…
Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 1c: Design in Cuba: Sufficiency and Resourcefulness in Action
This is the third section in Part 1 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore four laboratories of non-capitalist and postsocialist design. Please find the preceding sections below if you’d like to catch up: Introduction Part 1a: The Designed Object as Comrade in Constructivist Russia Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy…
Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy in Socialist Yugoslavia
This is Part 1b of my recent grad school design paper, the introduction can be read here. and Part 1a can be read here. … From 1918 to 1992 Yugoslavia improvised their very own “third way” type of economy. In 1948 Josip Broz Tito broke with Stalin and pulled Yugoslavia (which today is comprised of…
The Designer as Moral Compass: Minimalism, Animism, and Quaker Plaining
“Rodchenko names a new kind of emotionally affective object: the comradely object of socialist modernity. Unlike the commodities he encounters on his visit to capitalist Paris, which elicit a possessive relation that makes the objects into “slaves,” things made in the socialist East will actively promote egalitarian socialist culture. They will replace the pleasure of…
The Ordinary Texture of Existence: Reflections on ASMR and The Consummatory Satisfaction of Felt Quality
“Whisper whisper whisper.” –Anonymous ASMRtist old pond– frog jumps in. Plop! –Matsuo Bashô “In Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience, the “category of transmutation” (PR 63) describes how the felt qualities of past events are fused into a new event with the consummatory satisfaction of an emergent pervasive aesthetic quality. […] Whitehead’s “satisfaction” is identified…
Each Occasion is Concerned With The Universe: Virtuous Oscilation, Whitehead, and Quaker Concernedness
“Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality “An exemplar can exemplify only some of its properties. It brings those properties to the fore by marginalizing, downplaying, or ignoring other…
The Manliest of All Rituals: Critical and Creative Nonviolent Reflections on Hunting
“The adoption of fixed settlements also created problems with regard to the status of women. When a hunter-gatherer people took up fixed settlement, in actual practice it pursued its livelihood through fishing or simple cultivation and herding, but it preserved the lifestyle that had existed in the hunter-gatherer phase. In sum, a division of labor…
The Theo-Aesthetic World of William Morris
Recently, for a grad school class, we were asked to write an essay on a “design pioneer” of our choice for the first half of the summer session. For the second half, the class was asked to create a visual project based on the designer we had chosen. I chose British designer, writer, thinker, and…