Professor Erkki HuhtamoUCLA, Dept. of Design | Media ArtsDesma 10Design Culture - an IntroductionLecture Notebook 1This 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 lecture! Illustrationswill not be included – they are only shown in class!******Meeting 1, Sep.29, 2006What is Design ?What is Design Culture ?******Viktor Papanek:Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.******All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to allhuman activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable endconstitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design to make it a thing by itself,works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life."(Victor Papanek: Design for the Real World, 1971)******These designs are home altars created by some Mexican people can be characterized as‘bricolages’: compositions made out of pre-existing elements, so that they express theirmaker’s meanings, either consciously or unconsciously.Social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw bricolage as a ‘logic of the concrete’: asignifying practice different from abstract philosophical or mathematical thought.******Papanek’s definition comes close to equating design with culture: we create culture bymeans of design; we design by means of culture.But what is culture ?“Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”.(Raymond Williams: Keywords, 1976)Etymology: Latin cultura: cultivation, tending******‘Culture’ - three main categories of usage according to Raymond Williams:1. A general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development2. A particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general3. The works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity******‘Culture’ - relationship between ‘material’ and ‘symbolic’ production- refers to material production (in archaeology, cultural anthropology; compare withagriculture)- refers to signifying or symbolic systems (in history, cultural studies; compare with‘cultivation of the mind’)These should be related rather than constrasted! Both are part of all cultural processes.******What is Culture?In the widest sense, culture is the sum total of all human efforts: to survive, to create, toperceive, to signify, to communicate. It covers both material things and the ‘things of themind’. Culture is about learning and passing the acquired knowledge to others.Humans create culture, but culture also creates humans.(E.Huhtamo)******What is Design Culture?“[Design culture] includes not only the production of useful objects (and here weshould add processes, services, and techniques as well), but also their distribution andconsumption.”(Maurizio Vitta)******Expanded Definition of Design CultureDesign culture does not only comprise concrete designed things; it also containsdreams, utopias, fears, disappointments, struggles and ‘dead-ends’. The “discursivedimension” of design culture should not be forgotten!It has been suggested that design is what separates human activity from nature...******Definition of Design by Heskett“Design, stripped to its essence, can be defined as the human capacity to shape andmake our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs andgive meaning to our lives.”John Heskett: Toothpicks and Logos, 2002******But is design really only the privilege of human beings?The ‘Great(est) Designer’?“God is the great designer of the Universe” (a freemasonic trope)Oxford English Dictionary, 1649Compare the notion of “Grand Design”with the idea (ideology?)of “Intelligent Design”******In the middle ages nature was often considered as a miraculous book ‘written’ by God.When read with a proper method (refering to the right ‘code’ = the Bible) it could bemade to reveal information about the Christian mythology.‘I am like pelican of the wilderness.’ (Psalms, 102:6). The Pelican is a bird for Egypt, from whichit gets it name, for Egypt is known as Canopos. It is devoted to its young. When it gives birth,and the young begin to grow, they strike their parents in the face. But their parents, strikingback, kill them. On the third day, however, the mother-bird, with a blow to her flank, opens upher side and lies on her young and lets her blood pour over the bodies of the dead, and soraises them from the dead.In a mystic sense, the Pelican signifies Christ; Egypt the world. (Anon.: Physiologus, 2nd-4thcenturies)******Galileo Galilei about the book of nature:“Philosophy is written in this grand book— I mean the universe— which standscontinually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns tocomprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language ofmathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures,without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these,one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.” (1623)******Nature turns into culture through human actions (both material and symbolic). Tofunction, we have to make sense of our environment, which we perceive and signify assigns. To be able to form and read these signs we need codes.Semiotics is the science that analyzes culture as encoding and decoding of signs. It is auseful ‘instrument’ for both designers and design scholars.******Nature as Designer?Does nature design?Is there ‘design’ in nature?******”Komar & Melamid’s Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project is at once a seriousnon-profit organization that cooperates closely with the World Wildlife Fund and acontinuation of themes familiar from the artists’ previous work. Having lost the jobsbecause of strict antilogging laws in the late 1980s, Thailand’s 3,000 domesticatedelephants have been forced to move into the crowded cities where they perform circustricks, barely earning enough for their handlers (mahouts) to feed them. By establishingthree Elephant Art Academies Komar & Melamid have empowered these poverty-stricken pachyderms to make ends meet by picking up brushes and taking the artworldby storm.”www.elephantart.com/catalog/splash.phpxt*******“Design against nature”“Being a human being is a design against