Creatively Advancing into Novelty
This is the second 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…
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…
This is the fourth 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…
I’ve decided to post my recent grad school paper in chunks since it is much longer than an average blog post. Below is the introduction. … Introduction Design is many things, but if we reflect on design as a trade or practice or vocation for a short time one might envision the people working as…
“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…
“All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it… The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity.” –Paul Virilio, Pure War. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Semiotext(e), 1983. p. 18 We normally don’t think about Paul Virilio while…
“Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating. Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense…
“Our word “reason” goes back to the Greek verb lego, the verbal noun of which is the famous word logos, which was translated as the Latin ratio. Lego has two principal meanings: “to say” (hence the Word of John’s logos) and “to put together” (related to lechos as the marital couch). (As Whitehead states: “Logic…
“All too many atomized Americans have taken up arms and carried out shocking acts of violence over the past decades, usually without anything more than the desire to harm and kill for their own sake. Mangione might be a sign of something new: a political moderate with no movement behind him, no history of activism,…
“Nobody is spared from the logic of a mode of production built on exploitation. As Lacan put it, capitalism is the discourse or algorithm in which, instead of communicating to another person as a person, we are forced to negotiate through cloudy signifiers. We are workers relating to other workers in an environment mediated by…