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Missing Masses by french philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour explains that as humans we are governed by things or pushed along by ‘rules’. Using the example of the alarm that goes off every time he drives his car and doesn’t wear his seat belt. I thought maybe it was a bit of an exaggeration and that surely you could sit there with the seatbelt alarm going off, I have seen postmen do it all the time but then I realised that is not the point. I went home over the weekend and found myself placed on the right side of the escalator annoyed people were standing on the left. Not that this is particularly breaking the law but it is he affect on me as a person and what I consider to be right or wrong, merely because this ‘thing’ the escalator now has this social structure attached to it. Design culture isn’t put on a pedestal perhaps how fine art might be (YES there are some designs that are sought after) and on the whole design is usually ignored. Maybe that might be the sign of a good design? I don’t spend hours staring at a spoon, thinking about its connotations and craftsmanship but I do use it everyday and it makes eating my cereal a whole lot easier in the morning than using a fork.

We delegate responsibilities and moralities to things.. so the design of the door. They organise the people that come through the door. For example and sign on a women’s toilet reduces the type of person that comes through that door. The door is a simple design of a hinge pin allowing us to leave the four walled room without knocking a hole through the wall. The door closer regulates the behaviour of the door which replaces a doorman, the reliable ‘thing’ has took away a job that we would have to do. Not only has this ‘nonhuman’ taken the job of a human it has also begun to have agency over the human that designed it. Thinking about all the doors in the world.. I can’t get into the main office at my work. This automatically separates us and them into a hierarchy, this door has agency over me because it doesn’t allow me into a certain space and it also places me in a certain social group. I can’t have a cup of tea with the bosses but I can with the people at my level, so already my social interactions have changed, all because of a door.

I never really thought but the design of those tall bar stools are hard for children to climb and sit at so it makes it virtually impossible for a family to be in these areas. Certain styles and designs place different users in different situations, our social spaces are governed by our interaction with design.
What is neglected is how we function alongside ‘things’ looking into design it’s relationship to social issues could benefit both human and non humans. The social aspect of design and that interventions of change, we talk about changing the world but the design of ‘things’ can make more progression than just talking about change. A designer should think past aesthetics and more about the place in society that design will be. Not just it’s success within it’s target audience but what consequences does this ‘thing’ have on the people that interact with it.

Before this session I thought the term critical design just meant to be critical or create a critique of design, through review or maybe an essay. However looking at critical design as more of a practise or performative action sounds a lot more interesting. Particularly in terms of design for art direction as it highlights how in our practise we can use the design to provoke emotional response and potentially problem solve.

Putting this into practise through a workshop set in a future… Donald Trump is still in power in the year 2022 and he’s built his stupid wall and there no regulations on looking after our planet which means packaging has gone wild and free because maybe Trump thinks climate change doesn’t exist or something?
So anyway.. we were tasked with designing packaging for a fruit of our choice. I went for the classic orange.

Title: Orange vs Apple

Design rationale
To re brand the orange to be easier and quicker to eat than the public fave the apple.

Goals
easy to travel with, quick to eat, minimal effort, minimal mess, stylish af, as useless as it is useful, ridiculousness.

My final design of the
Orange Dispenser Iphone
case supports the Apple
product and so you can
read, message, scroll
without the daily stress
of having to hold your
arm/ hand in front of
you. With the Orange
Dispenser Iphone case
it will dispense each
segment individually, you just spin the side and it flicks the next orange segment out. Minimal effort with all that peeling, minimal effort with holding a phone in your hand. As Apple upgrades their phones and renders the latest Orange Dispenser Iphonecase useless the Orange Dispenser will have the latest upgrade doing virtually the exact same thing but maybe the next design will be touch screen? The phone company Orange slogan used to be ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Orange’ but the slow demise of the company, falling short to it’s competitors left the brand way back in the past to be replaced by a cheaper version of itself. However the Orange Dispenser Iphonecase has a future that is bright, Orange vs Apple. Orange wins.

The ridiculousness of a design can seem like it’s taking the piss out a situation or a need for a certain product or design but it kind of brings light to that ridiculousness that is evident in the everyday. For example Julijonas Urbonas’s Euthanasia Roller Coaster (2010)
Designed to send it’s passengers into a euphoric state, with the pressure on the brain lasting a minute for each loop it ends up killing the passenger. Slightly mental and slightly ridiculous as a design but at the same time is it making a comment on our future? What if this was actually made, would people use it? There are people that go to other countries seeking euthanasia, essentially this is solving a problem.. no doctors are wasting time on people that want to die.. you just send them all to this rollercoaster park. I read somewhere Google have put billions of dollars into research on the problem of immortality so why can’t we design something for death? Why a rollercoaster? It’s kind of a playful place rather than something you would associate with going to die, life literally is a rollercoaster sometimes and now apparently death can be to. The design itself is pretty provocative but then so is whether you’re in favour of euthanasia. Should death be a choice?

Starting off the session we are asked to draw both a line and a circle.. After a few failed attempts I realise maybe I don’t have the ‘Gwalt’ that Albrecht Dürer has, my drawing skills is something probably I’ll have to practise and learn. I’m trying to think about what stood out in this lecture because I didn’t realise a topic a vague as ‘Lines’ could be so broad, but I suppose the world is really made up of a collection of lines. The objects around us and the words I am typing now are just a series of connected lines. How the line is perceived is a completely different thing.. you could begin with a single line but where that next line goes will determine how someones eye and brain will receive that information to then understand those lines as.. a chair… a house… a door… a face… a word etc etc etc.

Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs is a interesting example of the how the lines are read. All understood as a ‘chair’ but all made of lines in different ways. The first an image, the second a object in life and the third a definition in words of a chair of a piece of paper. The image or the chair is actually not a chair, it is a representation of a chair. Confusing but weirdly makes some sort of sense. The chair exists but when the chair eventually breaks or gets destroyed the image of the chair still lives on. The image somehow becomes more transcendental than the actual object that exists because although it is only a representation, it succeeds beyond it. The importance of images and therefore lines is pushed further by artist Francis Alÿs The Green Line 2004 which is performed in Jerusalem that traces the municipality of Jerusalem. Talking about the original line, it is just a man walking along dripping paint but it’s communicating a line we have created already. We as humans organise and order information and spaces through lines and representation of things or our world. A shipping Forecast organises land into sections which serves as a function for people at sea to associate their whereabouts in relation to more information. I guess there are good and bad reasons for organising space through lines as it can inform society instantly of their whereabouts or how to navigate like the tube map of the underground. Lines in design can aid us for practicality but also creates borders or territory. I had heard of Francis Alÿs through a friend who was using him as a reference for a sculpture she had made of ice. I was annoyed she’d spent so long creating these blocks of ice and after she took the images she just left them. The image is there to replace her work, she doesn’t need the physical work anymore.. “it’s done Becky, it’s done.” her point was made, and all that is left is a trace. Alÿs’s Paradox of Praxis is a recording of him pushing an ice block creating a water line behind him and describes it as “sometimes making something leads to nothing.” I guess both of his works can illustrate the pointlessness of creating this line trace but also the prominence of it’s importance. Sometimes something like drawing a line with ice leads to nothing and sometimes a line of territory or a border is created and it leads to separating people or society into a certain group in relation to there surroundings.. all dependant on this particular line that has been drawn.

We organise the information and space with lines as we organise society and people with ‘things’ such as a the door from my previous ‘Things’ blog post. We like to order our surroundings but to what end? As a designer it makes me question what kind of designer I want to be or at least thing about the prospects of my designs social interactions. As an art director I would want to probe these existing interactions and maybe juxtapose the function of an existing design with it’s opposition. A lecture with art director Carol Montpart gave us the opportunity to create a pitch or idea for a shoot to make the ‘boring’ watering can interesting visually. So taking the function of pouring water to water plant and placing that design under water to water underwater flora has made the design completely reversed and redundant but visually has peaked interest because of it’s location is counter productive to it’s functioning. It is outside it’s usual place and function in society and thus creates a visual language that highlights the actual design of something that is usually forgotten or ignored.

In the 19th century we were subdivided into value regimes such as; the church, the state, science, justice, art, family life etc. Institutions guard the boundaries between these regimes and their individual beliefs and rules. For example… ‘Science’ cannot be undermined by the values, principles and beliefs of ‘Religion’ or the regime of the ‘Artist’ cannot be swayed by the values of the commercialised world. Each institution mediates the other, in Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society explains the differences between convivial institutions and manipulative institutions. Convivial institutions are free to use and will exist whether society chooses to use them or not, whereas manipulative institutions convince the consumer that they cannot live without them.

Institutions are a group of people that establish rules and regulations within their group and they have similar views and opinions and they live by there rules. After this lecture I’m left confused and wondering whether we need institutions at and what are their value. I’d started reading into something called Rhizomes recently by philosopher and psycho analyst Deleuze and Guattari. There this idea of there not being a hierarchal lines passing down in an institution but different levels of entry on different planes of thought. They talk about three lines; the Molar Line, the Molecular Line and the Line of Flight. In regards to political institutions and thought the Molar line is the ‘status quo’ or the surface level of an structure. For example; parent/child, male/female, boss/employee… that divides us into class or territories. The Molecular line is the unconscious bias that begins to form the cracks in the Molar Line and finally, the Line of flight is where the system cracks and a break in inevitable. The importance of structure is illustrated in this example of political thought as the Line of flight is described in such a way that would break the status quo. In society is their a need for these institutions as most of the time we are organised into different territories of status or class division.

who decides what is art and what is not/ Do we need curators at all? Who has authority to choose what is good and what is bad art?

November last year, artist Michelle Hartney started placing her own information plaques next to artists such as Balthus, Gauguin and Picasso. Why? Well, it is a part of her artwork Correct Art History which re evaluates the importance of these artist or the glorification or their work when in fact it’s widely that Balthus sexualised prepubescent girls, Gauguin was a pedophile who had three child brides in Tahiti and Picasso called women machines for suffering. I think this an interesting artwork to look at in regards to art institutions and their value. Although I’m not sure if I’m 100% on board with some random coming into a gallery and sticking up some signs… I get her point. If you think about an art institution in terms of Deleuze and Guatarri’s philosophy, the institution in question the Met and it’s surface level of genius artists of the ages showing us the ‘status quo’ or what has been chosen and considered as ‘good’ art. Now, Michelle Hartney, she is our Molecular Line, the unconscious bias. She doesn’t view this art from the society in which it was made, she views it from her perspective (now) a time of the ‘me too’ movement, and a time of anguish towards sexism in every shape way and form. Finally, the Line of Flight… will it ever come? Institutions of art should crack, institutions like the Met should reevaluate what art is relevant. What art is necessary? What art is worth being hung on the walls of a institution that should be displaying some of the best art in the world. Who cares what someone does in their spare time when they’re just so damn talented. At the end of the day the world of art isn’t the only institution in the creative industry, if Netflix can terminate all streaming of the shows of once worshipped film producer Harvey Weinstein for abusing women and the Metropolitan Opera can fire former conductor James Levine for sexually abusing teenagers…then why do we still hang the paintings of ‘geniuses’ of Gauguin on the walls of the Met?

Behind my design rationale lays my personal desire to experiment with critical design.

In my essay I state three examples of critical design questioning the relationship between complex, unclear desires and objects. For element 2 I am playing with the desires and objects involved around the submission. The desires were minimum 3 blog posts and a visual essay expanding on my essay. The object one would assume to transfer the materiality of this desire is a printed publication. Nowhere in the brief does it state that it must printed but only that it is a ‘manual’ hand in.

Speculation is often made that printed publications are becoming less of a mass produced thing and more of a limited amount of prints. This leaves more room for the material to be explored as the less copies there are the less the price and difficulties of mass production.

I am choosing to use the physical object of desire for this submission, the book/printed publication… to store the information of desire, the blogposts and visual essay. This format has been chosen with the intention to render the submission without rationale or meaning without being placed within the object of desire.

I am interested in our relationship between objects and language, whether that be written words of symbolic. I want the materiality of the publication to fit with the extended ideas from my essay and examine contemporary social value systems. Roland Barthes Mythologies “deciphers the symbols and signs embedded deep in familiar aspects.” Embedding the virtual submission within the symbol of a book stuck in time intended to speculate the future of printed word, the intangible characteristics of language and information.

Desire Management entire connotations can change just because of the title and the many inflictions the words ‘desire’ and ‘management’ can have on the mind. With the visual essay I took this in to account and titled it both The Disobedience of Objects & The Disobedience of Language. Inspired by the publication Tools of Disobedience created by Melanie Veuillet, which illustrates ordinarily familiar and yet peculiar objects because of the way they are structured.