Archive

In this issue, Ana Henriques delves into the various uses of détournement, a cultural technique developed by Guy Debord and the Situationists to hijack the meaning of images produced under capitalism. A versatile instrument, détournement has been employed in many different contexts, such as the punk movement and the fight against AIDS. Nowadays, the legacy of détournement lives in images that criticise the cosy, pacific illustration style of Big Tech: Alegria. 

Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was not simply a descriptive work; it was also a manifesto. Debord sought to encourage us to not just recognize the spectacle, and how society had, ostensibly, fallen under its spell, but also to attempt to subvert it. He was, in fact, part of a group of social revolutionaries called the Situationist International (henceforth referred to as SI), whose aim was to offer a more modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.¹

The spectacle was a central aspect of situationist theory. The idea of the spectacle was that the history of social life may be understood as a reduction of being into having, and then of having into merely appearing; at which point commodities complete their colonization of social life. Indeed, in the founding manifesto of the SI, Debord describes the established culture as a sort of rigged game, in which conservative powers halt subversive thinking from accessing public discourse. He explains that such thinking is first trivialized, and thus rendered sterile, so that it may safely be incorporated back into mainstream society, where it can be exploited. Though first mentioned by the SI, this process came to be referred to in political theory as recuperation. Its counter-technique, however, is what the SI and Debord described as détournement.²

In this issue, Swedish-Australian media theorist Nathaniel Tkacz discusses the essential characteristics of a dashboard and explains how this ubiquitous but overlooked ‘symbolic form’ for monitoring and understanding came to dominate the daily life of individuals, organizations, and firms, infiltrating both the sphere of work and that of leisure. The following text is an excerpt of Tkacz’s book Being with Data: The Dashboarding of Everyday Life, published by Polity Press in 2022. 

Dashboards are generic digital artefacts that facilitate a specific relation to data. Dashboards and dashboard-like interfaces are everywhere, used all the time, by scientists, civil servants, economists, managers, factory workers; and by pretty much anyone who has a phone, tablet or personal computer. They are used for business, leisure and the murky in-betweens. Despite efforts by industry to sell them as part of broader visions of our data-driven future, it’s hard to get too excited by dashboards, comprised as they are of charts, graphs, tables, gauges and ‘key performance indicators’.

Cover of Being with Data.

You may already know what a dashboard is. If you hail from the overdeveloped regions or are otherwise connected to the digital world, you’ve almost certainly seen one and there’s a very good chance you’ve used one. Perhaps, like me, you have a line manager who uses them to oversee the performance of you and your co-workers, figuring you and them as lines on a graph or pieces of a pie chart. That is, perhaps dashboards know you even if you’re not properly acquainted with them. If you’re lucky, like me, your seniors will tell you about your dashboarded existence and you can look at it together; reflecting on how dashboards quantify the complexities of work; how they arrange and value your activities and outputs. Perhaps you’ve laughed at the shortcomings of dashboards or felt dismayed about a bad comparison or a low indicator.

In this issue, researchers Isabelle A. Zaugg, Anushah Hossain and Brendan Molloy explain why a large amount of spoken and written languages are digitally-disadvantaged. To do so, they shed light on the limits of the available digital tools and support, as well as the risks related to surveillance faced by the speakers. This entry was first published in the Glossary of Decentralised Technosocial Systems, a special section of Internet Policy Review. The original version, available here, includes a larger set of footnotes and the full list of references.

Yitna Firdiwek’s 1988-1989 ChiWriter Ethiopic font (DOS-based word processor).

Definition

In this issue, Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, reflects on the “annoyingly prolific” production of Bruno Latour and its significance for designers. With his unique cleverness, Latour drew attention to the narrative – even promotional – abilities needed to advance a scientific idea, he reflected on the morality we delegate to things, and thus invited us to take those things seriously.

Bruno Latour reenacting 1864 Pasteur’s lecture on spontaneous generation in 1999. Still from video.

Very Clever Latour

In this issue of Other Worlds, designer and design historian Michele Galluzzo speaks with Brockett Horne and Briar Levit, co-founders of the People's Graphic Design Archive, about messy history, bottom-up participation, institutional support and the awe that archival material can spark.

Local sign painting in Dominican Republic, Mural, PGDA – Added by Louise Sandhaus. https://peoplesgdarchive.org/item/5399/local-sign-painting-in-dominican-republic.

In 1994, Martha Scotford introduced the adjective 'messy' to define a novel approach to the historical narrative of graphic design. With her seminal essay Messy History vs. Neat History, published in the U.S. journal "Visible Language", the American historian proposed to shed light on the contribution of women to the evolution of visual communication. In order to have a more inclusive, anti-heroic and anti-canonical history – Scotford argued – it was necessary to adopt a 'messy' perspective on historical events, one capable of embracing a 'bottom-up' gaze, through the lens of social history or, in other words, people’s history.

In this issue of Other Worlds, Netherlands-based Portuguese designer and researcher Afonso de Matos looks back at his educational journey which led him from having no idea about design to believing that everything is design and design is everything. This journey urged de Matos to come to terms with a series of contradictions about the role of a critical attitude in design, its effects on the world and its relation to uneven professional opportunities.

Among a small but significant number of design institutions (mostly located in Europe, the US and the UK), a certain outlook upon the field has been taking shape. It has been given many names, but here we’ll call it “Critical Design.” This outlook perceives design as more than a market service: it aims to show that designers can be agents of powerful social and political change, beyond the boundaries of the commercial client-commission setting. From this perspective, designers are no longer meant to solve problems, but rather frame them. We are asked to shoulder the responsibility of raising awareness about the world’s issues. We are encouraged to become provocateurs.

These apparently productive developments beg, however, some further investigation. Who can afford to do this type of critical work? What standard does it set for the remaining 99% of designers who must work for clients in order to pay their bills, many times bound to unregulated working conditions? Or is that even those who do critical work are sometimes equally precarious? And that’s not all. Beyond asking what the criticality discourse does to us, designers, we must also ask: what can it really do to the world? Are our critical projects changing anything or are they, ironically, doing the opposite and keeping the status quo? What are the limits of awareness-raising? Whose awareness is actually raised? By which visual and material means, and within which spaces?

In her book The Circuit (available here), graphic design writer, researcher and educator Hannah Ellis investigates the actual meaning of design when it reaches the scale of fairs, festivals and biennials, as well as the effects of these events on people and places. Here, we publish, with permission of the author, a short excerpt about the political and economic genealogy of these manifestations. The Circuit is the the first title in the ‘Design Capital’ series, edited by Francisco Laranjo, Luiza Prado and Silvio Lorusso.

Common sense suggests that ‘design events’ are obviously and exclusively about design. But a more complex conclusion of what they do or are or how they exist in the world is slightly harder to pin down. They are slippery things, tricky to articulate precisely because of the fundamentals we take for granted, and subject to unofficial precursors — like ‘promotional’ — that change their meaning entirely.

‘Events’ is too big a category to file under, a cluttering of festivals and weeks and biennials, piling together the exhibitions that take over a city for days, weeks, sometimes months. Flags are planted overnight and lay claim to a place that has been conquered by design. From the outside, beyond the length of time that they stretch out and over a city for, they behave largely in the same way, or at least appear to. Differentiation requires a bit of etymological digging: take, for example, the meaning of ‘festival’ – a day or period of celebration, usually religious. For the most part, design festivals are annual, celebrating the subject with Gregorian predictability, much like the dedicated Weeks that block out one fifty-second of the industry calendar. Language puts ‘design’ next to deities and, traced back far enough, ‘festival’ can be followed through iterations of Old French and Latin – festivalis, festivus – to the root of festa, for feast. A day of dedication or a celebratory meal; in this case, what is gorged upon is not good food and wine, but an overabundance of design with the capital D. (They should not, I realise later on, be confused as moments for close examination or interrogation; further backwards still, festa is one step removed from festus – joyous.)

In this issue of Other Worlds, Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente, founders of the F/LOSS-oriented design studio Manufactura Independente, rigorously dissect Stayaway, the contact tracing app launched in Portugal during the Covid pandemic. By analysing both the technical limitations of the app and its misleading visual metaphors, they prove that a grounded criticism of public health monitoring systems is possible. Reconsidering the app after its demise, they warn us against a novelty bias in the public discourse, which is too focused on promotion and expectations rather than consequences and effects.

The persistence of the pandemic has motivated many proposals for digital solutions to fight Covid. Contact tracing apps are one of such endeavours: by measuring how close smartphones are and how long they stay so, their purpose is to warn people of potentially dangerous contacts with infected people. As part of our work in Portugal’s digital rights association D3, we’ve dedicated a good amount of time to the analysis of the evolution and failure of Portugal’s contact tracing app, Stayaway Covid. As a result, we published a lengthy public report highlighting the shortcomings of this experiment. In this brief text, we offer a design perspective into the app’s interface and communication strategy, in order to outline the less evident pitfalls in rapidly deploying untested technologies as public health measures.

Failure

In this issue of Other Worlds, Pernilla Manjula Philip reflects on the various practices of care revolving around her illness. A complex scenario emerges: the safety procedures regulated by the official healthcare system limit the well-being allowed by do-it-yourself technologies developed by independent communities of makers. The approach of these makers is, in turn, often too technical and masculine to include most users. With her artistic work, Pernilla mobilizes empathy to counterbalance this state of affairs.

Care

I did not care that much about the medical-industrial complex before I found myself in a hospital trying to wrap my head around the fact that I will never leave again. I would eventually go home, but I would bring my diagnosis with me. And with that, bring the hospital along. My brand-new illness has attached me to a world of care that I will always depend on. A lifetime of needing care.

In this contribution, Silvio Lorusso examines various ways in which designers have conceptualized, expressed and exerted their power. Furthermore, he looks at how such power overlaps with notions of authority, hierarchy, prestige, responsibility and ethics. The goal is to provide a specific set of categories to map the power relationships in which the field of design operates beyond both subjectivism and determinism. On the 27th of September, Lorusso presented this work at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology of Lisbon and discussed it with design critic Francisco Laranjo, director of the Center for Other Worlds.

An interview between Silvio Lorusso and @wdka.teachermemes

During the last year or two, an informal network of Instagram accounts linked to specific institutions began to populate the infosphere of Dutch art and design education. By means of memes, inside jokes, informative posts and critical declarations, these spaces, generally run by anonymous students or teachers, have maintained—if not produced—a sense of belonging in a time when the schools' sense of community was jeopardized by the pandemic. Thanks to a frank and straightforward language, they counterbalanced the "soft managerialist" style of much official communication, often detached or condescending. These accounts did the work of "reading of the room". They also manifested the daily reality of institutional life, which involves Kafkaesque tasks and unpaid work. Needless to say, this activity caused friction: the call-out of unwanted behavior generated tensions and certain people felt personally attacked.

These meme pages do not only interact on a regional scale, but also on an international one. By doing so, they connect the struggles happening in different hubs of art & design higher education. For instance, some of these accounts stood in solidarity with London students who refused to pay high tuition fees when their education was transferred online.

French designer Anaëlle Beignon recently graduated from the Interaction Design department of Malmö University. In this excerpt from her master thesis, Beignon shows how obsolescence is not just an internal quality of a device, but a dimension that emerges from the relation between such device and the broader sociotechnical ecosystem.

"My computer is too old, I'll have to change it soon."

This sentence may make sense, but how did "old" become a synonym for unusable? "Old" in this context could refer to a degradation of the performances of the device (speed, battery, etc), but it can also refer to difficulties that occur from living with a device that does not fit anymore its environment (compatibility, features, etc). Why is it so hard for "old" and "new" technologies to co-exist?

This short article focuses on the process by which a technological device becomes old, obsolete. My main argumentis that obsolescence does not only refer to objects that break earlier than expected. In a lot of cases, obsolescence is triggered by external changes in a world in which things are connected: when one evolves the others have to evolve as well. I propose to reconsider the concept of obsolescence from the perspective of the tech industry's agency on the ageing of well-working products. Being myself a designer, I reflect on my responsibility in the making of obsolete products and present alternative approaches of envisioning technological development.

In his new book CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape From It (available at Valiz Publishers, Dutch designer and writer Ruben Pater uses accessible language and striking visual material to dissect the complex relationships between graphic design and capitalism. Here, we publish, with permission of the author, a shortened version of the chapter 'The Designer as Brander'.

"Iron instruments fashioned into rather simple printed type became tools of torture." — Simone Browne, author and educator

From the Nike swoosh to the Christian cross, abstract symbols play an important role in human society. Elementary shapes such as the circle, square, triangle, the line, the arrow, and the cross have been found in 35,000-year-old cave drawings on different continents.¹ Historian Yuval Noah Harari mentions sociological research that suggests groups of up to about 150 individuals can exist without symbolic representation. Once a group becomes larger, stories and myths are necessary to establish a social order. Harari cites religions, politics, professions, nation states, social classes, and corporations as examples of such narratives.²