Professor Erkki HuhtamoUCLA, Dept. of Design | Media ArtsDesma 10Design Culture - an IntroductionLecture Notebook 8This notebook does not contain complete slides from the lecture! It is only meant as anaid to your memory. To get the complete idea, you must attend the lectures!Illustrations will not be included – they are only shown in class!*******Meeting 9 (Dec.8,2006)Design in the Postmodern Era*******Sayings about Design in the Postmodern Era “Function is Out, Form is In”Time Magazine, March 2000"Design has taken on its own life, and this raises a problem often encountered in consumerculture. The energy is pure delight. But can we turn it off?”Herbert Muschamp (2000)****Postmodernism- Concept that has dominated cultural debate and theory from the 1970s;postmodernism followed the collapse of ‘heroic modernism’ (modernism: break withthe past, ‘arrogance of the New’, belief in human capabilities of modernizing society andsolving global problems with science - and design!).-Postmodernism expresses scepticism and sometimes nihilism towards ‘progress’, seenas typical of modernism; endless recycling of material from cultural ‘archives’ replacesunique innovation. Celebration and enjoyment of the surface, reckless hedonism...-Postmodernism as a cultural current is seen as penetrating all (or almost all?) forms ofcultural production and signification*******Timing Postmodernism-When did the move to ‘postmodernism’ happen? Dating a matter of debate: claimed tohave happened since the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s...depending on critic, point-of-view,country and the field in question; “Was it the nuclear bomb that started it all?”-Andreas Huyssen (Across the Great Divide): claimed that postmodernism does not followmodernism; it is a historical current alternating with modernism(s), found periodicallysince the late 19th century (Art Nouveau was ‘postmodern’, then overshadowed by‘high modernism’; again discovered in the 1960s with Pop, Psychedelia, etc.)*******Postmodernism - Origins-Origins open to debate; usually seen beginning in the 1960s-Word appears in Charles Jencks: The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977)-Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) argued that modernarchitecture was meaningless because it lacked the complexity and irony of historicalbuildings-Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour: Learning from Las Vegas (1972): praisingthe cultural honesty of built commercialism in Las Vegas - earlier despised bymodernists as decadent and messy.“We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to goupward.” (typical quote from Learning from Las Vegas)*****Some features of Postmodernism-simulation replaces representation (representation told us something about reality, wewere confident that there was a link with the reality ‘out there’; simulation creates anartificial realm that only pretends to refer to the ‘real’; we no longer know theontological status what seems to be ‘represented’)-scepticism about reaching any single truth ”beyond the surface”; avoidance, veiling,masks; questioning of the truth of the ”master narratives” of culture (religion,philosophy, scientific worldviews ...). Reality is in flux; impossibility of grasping it beforeit turns into something else...-emphasis on external style, surface, visuality, ‘skin’; culture as an endless play of”signifiers”; humor and irony replace (modernist) seriousness*******More features of Postmodernism-Plundering of “cultural archives”: anything that has ever existed is potential material forcreativity. Anything can be connected with (almost) anything else, without respect fortheir historical relationships or truthfulness-Eclecticism (”Anything Goes”), self-reflexivity, irony, intertextuality, deliberateambiquity-The obscuring of boundaries between ”high” and ”low” culture, but also between fieldslike art and design (already evident in the case of of pop!)- Anxiety and pessimism hidden behind the carefree surface?*****Robert Venturi on Postmodernism (1966)”Elements which are hybrid rather than ’pure’, compromising rather than ’clear’, distortedrather than ’straightforward’, ambiguous rather than ’articulated’, perverse as well as’impersonal’, conventional rather than ’designed’, accomodating rather than ’excluding’,redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal ratherthan direct and clear.”****Jean Baudrillard on Postmodernism”The visual crisis of culture creates postmodernity""Contemporary images are the sites of disappearance of meaning and representation” -Simulation dominates; simulation precedes the real; it turns reality into its own image(e.g the ”disneyfication of reality”)*******SimulationAccording to critic Gene Youngblood, the word "simulation" has two main meanings: 1) 'fake copy’ (e.g. digital photographs that only pretend to represent something ’real’)2) 'model of the possible’ (e.g. using computer-simulated models for cars or airplanes totest their qualities before the prototype has been built) .******Bricolage- Mode of adaptation where things are put to uses for which they were not intendedand in ways that dislocate them from their normal or expected context. Advertisersoften use ’counter-bricolage’.- Originally used by social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950-60s about the”logic of the concrete” of non-Western indigeneous cultures (opposite to Westernabstract reasoning)*******Appropriation, PasticheAppropriation: The act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others' meanings to one'sown ends.Pastiche: mixing things with no reference to their real history or the sense of rules aboutwhat is "right"******Intertextuality-The interplay and mixing of different cultural ”texts”-Cultural production that constantly refers to other earlier cultural products-leads to endless recycling of cultural meanings that lose their specific referents;however, they can also be used for critical ends*******Features of Postmodern Design Culture- Recycling ideas taken from “cultural archives”; frequent references to earlier designmovements in new design products-Design identified with glamour: "designer as a media star", ‘high design’- At the same time the idea of affordable design objects for everyone (chains of storeslike IKEA, Muji, Target): design as a way of