Inter-disciplinarity trans-disciplinarity, multiplicity & pluralism
Key Books:
- Adversarial design [carl disalvo] 2014
interested in design activism, a form of public resistance. Agonist pluralism - we live in cultures where there is different types of people but we come together under one name. However, he sees that this friendly body is infact a disagreement underneath with conflicting positions. Trying to live together but the idea of democracy is based on the idea that there are disagreements under it all.
Trying to introduce the idea of a noisy pluralism driven by disagreement but somehow we get to the perception of a stable order. Million dollar block project - trying to understand the workings of a culture in terms of force and noise. What drives people to a political space. He showed it as a heat map which is important to show the movement. He's not trying to say people from these blocks are bad but more drawing attention to the social act of problems that are coming from this area. What he thinks disguises this is the service of politics, idea that design works for the government. Signage, leaflets, flyer; dress up the information, to tell them what to do and participate in politics. We live in a representative democracy as we have people from different parties with all different policies and we elect an individual; his idea is that when this happens you lose your identity to an individual voice that represents a whole. There the noise is being dampened by investing in one voice. He likes the idea of a heat map as it tames noise but also reveal information about a culture.
Core concepts:
Multiplicity - this is a principle
- Something happens in the first 1900's that people start to see situations in different ways.
- Borus - the idea has being that theres self evident truths to things, they are straight forward concepts that gives us an order and ground things.
- started to contest the ideas that there could be secure straight forward concepts.
- materiality and the idea that you can find this noise everywhere.
- tick that comes out of early writing - henry burkson , interested in it in the individual phycology
- he recommended an exercise - hold hand out and put strain on one finger, but not all energy has moved to your finger but what you're actually feeling is the distribution of all the muscles in your body.
- physically you are a multiplicity, we feel one thing intensely but when you break it down its a web of combined force, a disguised form of distributed from.
- don't think of it as one thing but 100's of things
- maybe things that seemed simple were actually complex.
- Henry Adams invented multiplicity - vertiginous unmooring of existence.
- he was worried that change and an accelerated experience might dissipate the energy of the nation and the people. This disturbance could affect the way they experience and face a challenge. This was just before the war so he was concerned that the question on social structure would undermine the war effort.
- the war highlights the noise you see the individual experience and the chaos.
Pluralism - this is a perspective
Both concerned with the relationship between the one and many
This is what democracy looks like - design film, social
- focusing on the antagonism what is supposed to be an agreed culture.
Think about design as a public display. Think about the attempt to create graphic displays in movements such as the suffragette movement.
- Designers politics [ Tony Fry]
When doing digital visualisation you are taking raw data and then reducing it in to a simple form so you lose some of the richness of the data. Artists may try to keep the data in its raw form whereas designers will try to make the data be quantitive so that the information is quick and easy to interpret.
