Bruno Latour gave the first Keynote for the Design History Conference ‘Network of Design’ on Wednesday (03.09.2008). It was a full house…expectedly, might I say. The title of his talk was unclear (he apparently changed his topic) but you can find it here
(http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL.pdf.
Although I was not used to speaker reading from lecture notes without any visual aids, Bruno kept my attention for an hour. It was very enjoyable to listen to his thoughts.
The main point of his talk, (I hope I got it right), was that Design is everything but ‘Modern’. Modern is concerned with ‘matter of fact’ and Design is about judging ‘good or bad’, it has therefore to do with ‘matter of concern’. The more Design, the less Modern.
According to Latour, Design has some modesty (we after all attend to daily object), Design attends to details and has skills. Design is always redesign. In these senses, Design is reactionary and not revolutionary, unlike the Modern. Also, Design is a sign to be interpreted. It is therefore not a ‘matter of fact’, unlike the modernist baby (my words).
Like other contemporary design theorists, Latour also sees Design as normative, having both the material and moral dimensions. (I think) he suggests expanding design to politics. Or so Design expands itself (we design nature: climate for example). Latour cited the German philosopher Sloterdijk often in the talk. After the lecture, he told us (people who were talking to him) that Sloterdijk is a famous philosopher of design and I felt uneasy that I did not know him.
Anyway, at the end of the talk, Bruno ‘challenged’ the audience to ‘visualize matter of concern’ for the public. He asked why Design has not produced the equivalence of the Modernist Isotype. He suggested that we need to ‘represent, assemble, drawing together’ ‘matter of concern’ and to map controversy.
Bruno is right
Bruno is right, design has never been modern and should not attempt at becoming modern. Maybe someone is interested in my early attempt to adopt Bruno´s thinking for design theory. See No. 53 at http://www.conspect.de/jonas/pubsandactions.html
Jonas
Latour reading recommendation
The beautiful thing about Latour's theory is that it fitted so well both with my experiences as a design practicioner and everything I learned so far about the discussion into design and research and could not agree with. So I recommend his latest book to everyone who is interested in a surprisingly design-friendly perspective on the relationship of things and people: Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social..
I haven't finished it yet myself. The whole theory is not really easy to grasp (partially because we are so familiar with the modernist perspective), but it is one of the most intriguing books I ever read, and really well-written (he has a very nice style).
- and I just saw that there is a translated version of this book edited at Suhrkamp as well.
I'll come back to this when I read your article, Jonas.
Katharina.
Sloterdijk
I just read Latour's lecture again and could not help but wonder why Latour thinks Sloterdijk is the our philosopher of design. I know now Sloterdijk is the moderator of the TV show 'philosophical quartett' and the Dean of a design school. Is anyone familiar with Sloterdijk works on design?
Sloterdijk and design
Dear Rosan,
Sloterdijk is known to a broader public through his controversial essay "Regeln für den Menschenpark", where he talks about the end of the humanist project and the beginning of a new era of ... "anthropo-technologies".
I used him as a reference in my text "De-materialization through body orientation - an experiment in thinking" for Design Philosophy Papers in 2006.
Here is a passage from this text:
...
Finally I refer to Peter Sloterdijk. In his controversial essay "Regeln für den Menschenpark. Ein Antwortschreiben zum Brief über den Humanismus" (1999) he explicitly refers to Heideggers text "Über den Humanismus" (1949). In 1946 Heidegger had characterized Christianity, Marxism and Existentialism as three varieties of humanism that all avoid the final radicalism of the question concerning the nature of man. He gives his answer in his existential ontology: not man is essential but existence itself; man is the pastor / shepherd of existence.
Even if Sloterdijk does not follow Heidegger in his conclusions he acknowledges his contribution of articulating the epochal question: what still tames man, when humanism as the school of taming men is failing? What tames man, after previous efforts of self-taming have - for the main part - resulted in a seizure of power over everything existing? At least since the end of WW2 we find ourselves in a trans-humanistic or post-humanistic space of thinking. The classical humanism does not provide sufficient means any more in the battle for man, which is taking place as a fierce struggle between the bestialising and the taming tendencies. Therefore, in the face of his biological openness and moral ambivalence, the question of man's destiny has to be raised again.
Sloterdijk (1999: 10) is sharpening this argument by calling men the creatures, which have failed in their being and remaining animals. Or: by calling them the animals of which the one group is literate and the other is not (the humanistic distinction). Or: by calling men the animals of which the one group is breeding the other. Here he is playing with the German etymological equivalence of züchtigen / zähmen (= beating / taming) and züchten (= breeding). Previous monopolies of taming (breeding) in this "project of domestication", as Sloterdijk calls it, lay in the hands of priests and scholars.
The explicit shift from taming to breeding men breaks up the humanist horizon. Nietzsche introduced the notion of men becoming domestic animals and he senses a space where unavoidable struggles about directions and policies of breeding will begin. Sloterdijk interprets Zarathustra's (Nietzsche's) critique of humanism as rejection of "the false harmlessness, with which modern good man surrounds himself". And his widely (often deliberately) misunderstood conclusion is: we have to keep an eye on the emerging field of anthropo-technologies, if we do not want to keep on devoting ourselves to playing down things (Verharmlosung). The trace of this discourse is obvious, at least since Plato. Today the selective potentials are at hand (Sloterdijk 1999: 14):
"But as soon as powers of knowledge are positively developed in a field, men will cut a sorry figure if - like in times of former powerlessness - they want to let a higher power, be it God or be it chance or be it others, act in their place. As mere refusals or resignations tend to run aground on their sterility, what matters for the future seems to be to actively take up the play and to formulate a codex of anthropo-technologies."
And here we are re-approaching designing. What are possible anthropo-design technologies / approaches and how to assess them in various social, political, economic, cultural, ethical contexts? In this sense the text deals with new roles for design.
...
- Heidegger, Martin (1949, 1981) Über den Humanismus
- Jonas, Wolfgang (2004) Mind the gap! On knowing and not-knowing in design Bremen: Hauschild-Verlag
- Sloterdijk, Peter (1999) Regeln für den Menschenpark, Frankfurt / M.: Suhrkamp Verlag (see also: http://menschenpark.tripod.com/)
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Well, I would say Sloterdijk is not THE design philosopher, but some of his arguments are quite thought-provoking and thus useful for the design discourse.
Jonas
Sloterdijk: Design Philosopher?
Hello Jonas, thanks for your reply. it is useful. But why do you think Sloterdijk is NOT the philosopoher of design? And for that matter, is there a philosopher of design? R.
Who is your favourite design philosopher?
Hi Rosan,
I did not mean that Sloterdijk is NOT the / a philosopher of design but that he is not THE (one and only, outstanding, ...) philosopher of design.
Is there a philosopher of design? Well, I know some philosophers who think and work about design, for example my friend and former colleague Matthias Götz, who is a professor for design theory in Halle.
I would like to open this question for the public debate: Who is your favourite design philosopher?
Jonas
Design philosopher? What is that?
Hello everybody,
the last comment from Jonas made me think if I knew any design philosopher at all. I'd rather say no, because they are all philosphers of something else, in my understanding. When I found articles from science and technology scholars, it came closest to what I considered a philosophy of design. Of course, it depends on what aspect of "design" you are interested in. In my case, it was a philosophy of making, about which technology studies have something to say. In Latour's writing, I constantly have the feeling he is talking about design.
So for now, I can just recommend some of the protagonists in science and technology studies (but just because I haven't discovered any other). Besides the critque on modernism, they have many other useful concepts for designers. In terms of analysis, actor-network-theory is all the rage. It seems that especially in design situations where the involvement of different kinds of actors (institutions, individuals, processes, laws, artefacts) are involved, the notion of actor-network is attractive. SST is interested in the labour and the resources it takes to bring some piece of technology into reality - and that is later inaccessible when the artefact is produced. My reading of Latour was thus that the production of technology is a political process (I might be wrong, though).
But I'd be curious about other philosophers.
(Speaking of philosophers: Someone put Heidegger's "Being and Time" on the web (in German). For anyone who is interested in the reaally strong stuff. We just had this conversation of the large-scale theories crashing down on you when doing your PhD literature review. Try this one!)
Katharina.
what about Thomas Maldonado?
Hello everybody,
I have followed this interesting discussion, and I asked Jonas’ question to my colleagues and students, exactly as it was "Who is your favourite design philosopher?"
Until now, I had got only an answer that was another question: what about Thomas Maldonado?
I couldn't really give an answer so I'm turning this suggestion to the DRN public...
gaia