Seminar Description

The focus of this seminar will be on ethics and design. "Design" is not a new word (it has its roots in the Latin word designare, to designate). However, the contemporary conception of the praxis of design is interwoven with new technologies, means of production and distribution, and divisions and coalitions of (inter)national and local social organizations. The process of design is implicated in the conceptualization and often (material) articulation of artifacts and systems for communities. Thus, one could see design as a 'glue' which binds particular social groupings (e.g., cities) together with a set of technologies (e.g., automobiles) via the planning and implementation of an artifact or system (e.g., the kind of street and highway systems planned by urban designers). Designs can influence communities (e.g., as the highway designers have extended the sub-urban sprawl of Los Angeles). Communities can influence designs (e.g., as the sub-urban commuters have demanded the means to travel into and out of Los Angeles resulting in eight-lane freeways as well as rail transport). Technology can influence design solutions (e.g., the ubiquity of cars make them seem like the "obvious" means to travel in LA county). Communities can influence technology and designs (e.g., as when the LA public street car system was bought up and then dismantled by the makers of oil and tires in the 1950s thus encouraging the development of highways and the demand for automobiles). In other words, design, technology and communities are all mutually influential of each other. Any good understanding of design demands an understanding of community and technology. Any sophisticated notion of an ethics of design requires even more: one must have an understanding of technology, community, and a worked out idea of how design decisions can work for or against a community. With an ethics of design one can begin to address questions like this one: Is the LA freeway system and concomitant automobile traffic a good design for the needs of the LA community?

Within the art world, explicitly including a theory of community into a theory of design is a legacy of the avant-garde and its refusal of the boundaries of 'art' as distinguished from 'science,' 'engineering' and the production of the artifacts and situations of everyday life. Artists, such as the Constructivists, Productivists, the Bauhaus, Dadaists, Surrealists, Situationists, as well as many contemporary 'conceptual' and 'activist' artists, have often refused to label their work 'art' and have preferred, instead, to show how their work functions as design and labor for and/or against specific communities.

Within and without the art world, theorizing design as various processes mediating communities and technologies has been predominantly performed by radicals and those of the political left. Contemporary work, especially in digital design, shows that this theorization of design is no longer exclusively the domain of the left. 'Bottom-up' management and 'ubiquitous' computing, for example, have become design strategies for reactionary and right-leaning corporations, public officials and individuals as well. The appropriation, by the right, of the left's design tactics may be partially influenced by the political migration, from left-to-right, of various high-profile individuals. For example, Stewart Brand began his publishing career producing the left-wing Whole Earth Catalog that was organized around the slogan 'access to tools.' The Whole Earth Catalog (co)evolved into the Whole Earth Review which Brand passed off to editors such as Howard Reingold (later, briefly, editor of the on-line Web magazine HotWired) and Kevin Kelley (currently executive editor of Wired magazine). Brand wrote a book in 1986 about the MIT Media Lab and now recently (see the New York Times, August 23, 1995, page A17, 'Cyberspace Prophets Discuss Their Revolution' Face to Face') met with Republican House leader, Newt Gingrich's adviser, Jeffrey Eisenach, to help plan the future of the national information infrastructure. Thus, Brand is in the position, if he so desires, to explain to political reactionaries radical (design) tactics.

To our knowledge many of the design tactics and concepts that we will discuss in this seminar have their roots in left politics even if they have, now, moved into the repertoire of the right. We have chosen several early, left-inflected texts for inclusion in the syllabus, not out of a nostalgia for sixties (and earlier) left-wing politics, but rather, because we found the earliest articulations of these tactics the simplest. Consequently, these texts should be clear and so pedagogically useful for anyone trying to master the material outlined in the syllabus. These earlier texts, although containing many of the main components of a theory and practice of design ethics, have gapping holes in them, painfully obvious to the contemporary reader (e.g., the sexist and patronizing tones of many of the early authors). By interleaving a discussion of the earlier texts with one focused on more recent writings, we plan to fill in most of the gaps of the earlier writings.

Two of the concept-clusters about design that we will repeatedly return to are cyborg/prosthesis/extension and epistemology/education. We anticipate that, as the term progresses, the relevance of these two concept-clusters to design and design ethics, in particular, will become clear. Nevertheless, a brief synopsis of their relevance can be stated here. An artifact of design, e.g., a technology, can be conceived of as an extension or prosthesis for an individual or a community. For example, clothing extends one's abilities to survive severe weather conditions. Various theorists and technologists have termed the aggregate of an individual and a technology a 'cyborg.' When a technology becomes integrated into the everyday life of a community the community becomes a new beast (e.g., consider societies before and after clothing or, perhaps, the United States before and after the advent of the automobile). Design often involves deciding how to shape a technology and therefore how to extend an individual or community.

The epistemology/education concept-cluster is closely linked to the cyborg/prosthesis/extension cluster. Who should be allowed to decide whether and/or what kind of an extension is to be made to an individual or a community? Epistemology, as a special area of philosophy, covers such questions as Who can be subjects, agents, of socially legitimate knowledge? What kinds of tests must beliefs pass in order to be legitimated as knowledge? What kinds of things can be known? In other words, epistemologists often, if implicitly, ask Who can know what under which circumstances? In the special case of design this question boils down to asking whether the designer knows what sort of extension or change will be best for an individual or community. Many posit that the designer can only know best if the designer knows the affected individual or community well; such a knowledge entails an education for the designer and, perhaps, for the community or individual as well to learn about the proposed designs and their reception. One might assume that the epistemological and educational questions are easiest when the designer is the individual or a part of the community affected by the design. However, since, an implemented design will necessarily provoke the formation of a new cyborg, the questions are not necessarily simpler since, in such a case, the designer will be a different entity after the implementation. Thus, identifying this 'who' who knows best is not simply a matter of identifying a static agent.

Seminar Requirements

Students will be expected to do weekly readings and activities, attend and participate in discussions and conduct design and artistic research which will culminate in an end-of-term, final, digital presentation that will be discussed, disseminated and transformed on the World-Wide Web (WWW). Each meeting of the seminar will consist of a discussion of the week's readings and a review of preliminary design proposals and work-in-progress.

Schedule (Tentative)

Wednesday, August 30 CAVS (N52-157)	Group Meeting
Wednesday, September 6	No class
Wednesday, September 13 Media Lab (E15-468)	Introduction to the Seminar Design Project: MIT Ethical Manual for Contemporary Designers and Artists and Introduction to the Media Laboratory * Brand, Stewart, Whole Earth Catalog * MIT Media Laboratory, Project List
Wednesday, September 20	Homeless Vehicle Project, Poliscar and Alien Staff * Lurie, David and Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 'Homeless Vehicle Project', October 47. * Daniel, Krzysztof, Oscar and Victor, 'Conversations about a Project for a Homeless Vehicle', October 47. * Bos, Saskia, "Krzysztof Wodiczko", Amsterdam: De Appel Gallery.
Wednesday, September 27	Design for the Real World * Papanek, Victor, Chapters 4 ('Do-it-yourself Murder: Social and Moral Responsibilities of Design'), * 6 ('Snake Oil and Thalidomide: Mass Leisure and Phony Fads') and * 9 ('Design Responsibility: Five Myths and Six Directions') of Design for the Real World, second edition, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, Inc., 1984
Wednesday, October 4	The Futurists and the Constructivists * Sparke, Penny, 'Avant garde design in Russia,' in Design in Context. London: Bloomsbury, 1987. * Gabo, Naum and Antoine Pevsner, 'The Realistic Manifesto,' * Brik, Osip. 'Program of the Productivist Group,' * Gan, Alexei. excerpts from Constructivism, * Toporkov, 'Technological and Artistic Form,' * Tatlin, Vladimir. 'Art Out into Technology,' in The Tradition of Constructivism, S. Bann (ed.), New YorK Da Capo Press, 1974. * Marinetti, Filippo. "The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" * Boccioni, Umberto. "Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto" in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds.) Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.
Wednesday, October 11	The Bauhaus and ULM * Frampton, Peter, 'The Bauhaus: the evolution of an idea 1919-32', in Modern Architecture: A Critical History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. * Gropius, Walter, 'Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar,' and * Schlemmer, Oskar, 'Manifesto for the first Bauhaus exhibition' in Programs and manifestos on 20th-century architecture, U. Conrads (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964.
Wednesday, October 18	The Situationist International * Jorn, Asger, 'Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhaus' * Internationale Situationniste, 'Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action' * Debord, Guy, 'Theory of the Drive' * Debord, Guy, 'Detournement as Negation and Prelude' in Situationist International Anthology, K. Knabb (ed. and translator), Berkely, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989.
Wednesday, October 25	Cybernetics * Wiener, Norbert, 'A Scientist Rebels' * Wiener, Norbert, 'A Rebellious Scientist after Two Years' * Wiener, Norbert, 'Sound Communication with the Deaf' * Wiesner, J., N. Wiener, and L. , 'Some Problems in Sensory Prosynthesis' * Wiener, Norbert, 'Prostheses with Sensory Elements' in the Collected Works of Norbert Wiener, Vol. IV. * McLuhan, Marshall, Cybernation and Culture from The Social Impact of Cybernetics, Charles Dechert (ed.)
Wednesday, November 1	Cyborgs and Feminist Epistemology * Haraway, Donna, 'A Cyborg Manifesto' in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991. * Harding, Sandra, 'Feminist Epistemology' in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Wednesday, November 8	Critical Media Art * Interactive media projects by artists; digital art by critical artists; review of V2 organization and Unstable Media projects realized in Rotterdam.
Wednesday, November 15	Activist and Media Art * Lippard, Lucy, 'Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power', in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis (ed.). New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. or * De Landa, Manuel, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Wednesday, November 22	Ethics of Postindustrial Technology and New Technoculture * Bhabha, Homi 'Race, time and the revision of modernity', in The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Wednesday, November 29	Student Presentations
Wednesday, December 6	Student Presentations
Wednesday, December 13	Student Presentations