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dialogue |
participants: Greg Foley, V Magazine and ooco.com Dan Gottlieb, emanate.org Scott Paterson, PDPal Carolyn F. Strauss, slowLab
more dialogues: 09 Dec 03 (Bangalore, India) >
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> dialogue 18 May 2003 ... GF: Time is structure. A lot of problems come when we try to structure things that can’t be. Why do we always try to re-script this human picture? Because we always want a structure to understand. If it were time to re-design a plane and they actually did start from scratch, and they realized, ‘Oh, if the plane were actually a different shape and it were lower, would we actually save on material resources for the architecture that loads them, etc.? But it’s already too late because the structures are already in place: the airports are built, etc. CS: I guess you could just a create a lift… pull the whole plane onto a scissor lift to get it ot the right height… GF: Or introducing a new, trained factory where they all have specific new tasks. Cassis: Humans don’t want to change once they’re … people get afraid and scared and they don’t want to change. GF: This is just the natural course of life. Things get big and bloated and then they die. And then they shrink. SP: I need an example!? GF: City planning: we have these office buildings that are use-less. So we have to change the purpose of them and make them into residences thereby getting life going downtown, converting all these empty office buildings into luxury condos. Hopefully that combined with having people down there living shopping and eating will breathe new life into it. SP: Which part is the ‘bloating’ business? GF: Too many of one thing, you know. You push with, 'This is the place that we need all the office buildings,’ but then business moves, and all those things are empty and use-less. There was a hotel that I was consulting for, and they were saying that although they were the first hotel in the neighborhood and had something like 300 rooms. But suddenly all these little boutique hotels started popping up with only 100 rooms to fill and they are booked all the time, which keeps their exclusivity high. And the 300-something room hotel can’t stay full, so now they’re obsolete in some way. It’s hard for them to meet their needs in some way. So ‘slow’ is smaller, more flexible, alternatives, opposite. ... CS: ...and also designing with longevity in mind as well as re-use. When you think about what you were saying about buildings, in terms of New York commercial real estate, where you’ve got a shop that’s there for 2 years, then you tear it down, renovate, stir up all the asbestos, bring in new materials, throw the other stuff away… it’s a completely wasteful exercise. Then you think about a company like Camper—they get these spaces and just move in and open up boxes of shoes and start selling them, and then they design around the whole commerce process and the way customers 'inhabit' the space.. So it’s a designed shop, but they’ve used the real estate from the moment they had it, and in some sense it’s participatory. GF: There’s a friend of mine, Russell, who ’s doing a project called Vacant, where he’ll go into whatever city and just move into an empty space for one month and then move to another city. CS: Do they squat in the store? GF: No, they do get a one month lease or maybe the person donates it or somebody sponsors it. But it makes use of these dead spaces and brings people there again, at least for a month. CS: I love it. Using the interstitial space. Very slow! SP: what are they doing in the space? GF: They sell custom products or artists products or small-run things. Shoes, books, whatever. It was founded in London and then it was here and then it moved to L.A., but they were having conflicts with the Tokyo timing… ... CS: The edges of slow are not defined. Neither are the edges of slow around design practice clear yet. There’s a movement around what they’re calling ‘slow technology,’ and there’s been some valid exploration on that topic by a group at the PLAY interaction institute in Gothenburg, where they’re exploring different expressions of reading and writing information . The Clock of the Long Now I guess is aiming to be a slow technology. With the interactive TV stuff that I was designing a couple of years ago we clearly recognized difference between interacting with things that are pre-programmed in the technology or interacting with other people across the technology. Does it enable new forms of expression to come forth? Or does it create specific parameters of what you can do within the scope of the use of that thing. Which I think could apply as well to products and architectural space. So flows of people, the body, through physical space, the use of a product. ... (Dick van Hoff’s kitchen machines are touched on) CS: ... I like that the machines are used toward very specific ends, and yet enable something deeper to happen for the user. SP: You know the thing about that which I don’t think is a very productive example? That the scale at which my action manifests itself is limited because it’s mechanical. Compared to the slow technology idea, it seems like the layers at which I can affect my world are limited. CS: But again the thing about this that I like is that you use something like this and then you go into another room in your house and you’re pushing a button and you wonder, ‘I wonder if there’s another way that I could get this thing to run?’ it opens up that kind of awareness around the use of machines that goes beyond the thing that you’re using. SP: It’s like a ‘laying bare of the device’ kind of project. Cassis: What I wonder is what really makes people change their process? What makes them question that button? Because as we said earlier, people are so resistant to change, that process I find really interesting. I just read The Drama of the Gifted Child, where there are these narcissistic cycles of generations that make them more resistant to change. Like, how can you design so that people really get the awareness and really want to change? Often something really drastic has to happen like a catastrophe. DG: It seems like people are really unwilling to change for a long-term outcome, whereas an immediate difference that they can perceive makes change much easier to accept and more natural. Is this a little bit like the hand-powered flashlight or cell phone charger? This project (kitchen machines) seem to really work on the conceptual scale. SP: I guess I’m thinking about how do I understand that thing in terms of some larger system? And if I don’t make that connection—when I push this button I’m actually affecting the water supply in the city because the power comes from a dam, etc. where I’m suddenly connected to this larger system. And I think that this slow design thing you’re trying to flesh out is very much to create an awareness of that. These projects are clever and all, but who was saying the thing about good design being rarified? GF: John, the last time we were here. I don’t know why we were on this discussion of well-noted design which tends to be small. Why is it that expensive, etc. once you try to give it to the masses it’s a whole other thing. ... DG: There’s somebody who seems perfect in the context of slowness, Ivan Illich. I don’t know if you guys have read or know of him. He’s a theorist who wrote in the ‘70’s—‘Energy and Equity’ which takes a look of energy across many nations and many fields through transportation and looks at energy used by flight, by automobile, by bicycle, by walking and analyzes the kind of options available and the amount of energy, and as the energy expenditure increases for any given mode of transportation, the more options there are… so what he does is he very precisely calculates the speed limit at which automobiles should be regulated to 20 miles per hour, because it’s the maximum speed that somebody on a bicycle could carry themselves, and that’s a distributed form of technology. And he does this incredible analysis about limiting technology in order to balance available technology and energy. He says, automobiles are here, they’re here to stay and that’s fine, but they can only go 20 miles per hour. Because the fact that somebody can go 90 miles per hour while the rest of the world can only go 15 or 20 creates this huge disparity. And he makes a really precise and beautiful argument. He also looks at the post office and breaks it down in terms of communication. Like western medicine, he kind of debunks the scientific-ation and westernization of western medicine against tribal medicine. He does the same thing regarding education. He looks at whole systems. CS: there was an article in the New Yorker about the whole traffic pattern thing. It was interesting because it pointed out that the problem of traffic has less to do with the volume of cars on the road than with the behaviours of the drivers. So the article specifically talked about these people that map the behaviours of drivers. It’s kind of what I was thinking about when I was talking about airports and how people move through them: what are the things that you can regulate? One of the things they talked about with the traffic is that there will always be certain personalities of drivers. Some are lane changers, who always think they will go faster if they get in the next lane. But if everybody had to go 20 miles per hour, it seems like there wouldn’t be as much of that, because getting there faster wouldn’t be as much of an issue. SP: I think it would still be an issue. CS: I have this thing with my son where I’m always running late. Anyway, I realized that even if we’re running late, if we just take our time, it only really takes us about 3 minutes longer to get anywhere than if we’re rushing and I’m stressing out and telling him to hurry. So I don’t know if that’s part of Illich’s argument, but I’m interested to read it. SP: That’s a matter of perception, which I think is definitely something that’s involved. You perceive if you’re rushed that you’re going to get there faster. DG: You perceive time more vividly. SP: You feel like you’re going faster, but… Cassis: … you’re disconnected. You’re disconnected more and more. SP: There’s a book that I think Michael Bell wrote called Slow Space. CS: Someone just told me about it. He teaches at Columbia and I was thinking about inviting him to one of these. The thesis of the book is something about how we experience architecture in the city, and that time is a 4th dimension of urban experience. ... (CS brings up the ‘slow doorbell,' one of the projects of the ‘slow technology’ group in Sweden) CS: I’m not really sure that it works. I guess it depends where it is and how frequently you go there. When I think about my doorbell on my apartment, it rarely gets used. By a maintenance guy from the building. Or maybe a neighbor… GF: So it should be his favorite song. CS: it’s like ringtones. GF: I wish it could be—I’d be like ‘I love this part…’ CS: You would experience it in the house, but it wouldn’t work for the person visiting unless it were a persistent activity for him/her, in which case, if you were ringing someone’s doorbell that much, at some point they might give you your own key anyway… SP: Well, I think it’s the case of who is the experience for. I think it’s for the homeowner, not the visitor. GF: It offers a great solution to my personal doorbell problem, which is that it screams in my apartment but the person outside is totally oblivious to what they’re doing to me. Then once they’re inside and they hear it they go, ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry.’ Because people who know me touch it very lightly. If there were some feedback, you’d know what you were doing. SP: You bring up another interesting issue for me around ‘slow’: On the one hand, there seems to be a scale problem. Some examples that I keep hearing here are about the literal-ness of ‘slow,’ things that slowly happen. But the slow you’re after is more of a thing that happens across scale. It’s really a quality of life problem. If someone can tell the scale of the way that doorbell button has an impact on your life, the solution being feedback… Cassis: The feedback would be a little electric shock. GF: No, if they heard it. If there were some sound. Some people’s buzzers you can hear, which makes you aware of what you’re doing, your pressure. If everything had that involvement, that direct feedback, then maybe you wouldn’t become so detached. But that’s where we’re at now. Everything is ‘bombardmentalism’ because we’re so disconnected. Pile it on, because people are not going to get it otherwise. Cassis: Right, and how are you going to get away from it? I try by not watching TV, but that’s difficult too. GF: Yeah, then you’re out of touch with certain conversations... Cassis: I like what it does to me. I write a lot more film music now, and I find that images just have a huge impact on me. I realize that as I don’t watch TV something hasn’t happened with me. CS: Bombardment is interesting.You can be from the fields of Kansas and walk out on the street in New York for the first time and feel totally bombarded. But when you live in a place, there’s a flow, and in fact a symbiosis. It’s kind of like the city is an eco-system. Whereas, I wouldn’t necessarily call media imagesa coherent system, they’re not symbiotic, even when they’re telling a story. I also think they’re trying to do something very different. I think they’re trying to activate fight-or-flight instincts, they’re trying to activate primal instincts that get us excited and bring our attention to what they’re advertising, etc. I find that withdrawing from television has not been difficult at all. People say to me, ‘Oh my god, how do you get your information?’ GF: You listen more carefully to what everybody is talking about. ... SP: The thing that Greg said about feedback is really interesting. DG: Really interesting. I’m trying to think of all the things I do on a daily basis that I don’t have feedback for. There’s a huge list in some ways. Like when you call a person’s cell phone, you hear it ring, but you don’t know whether it’s off, if it’s on vibrate, if it’s loud, and you have no idea what’s happening on the other end. The other thing is taking out the garbage. That’s something that you put input into and get no feedback from. If you put a little or a lot in, the same thing happens: the garbage truck comes and it disappears. But what are all the things you do in a day and get no feedback from, even though your putting input into lots of things. It would be an interesting list. ... DG: I wonder if a huge theme out of tonight might not have been that of ‘legibility.’ I mean, what is legible about our materially-understandable world? How legible is this cup to me in terms of where it came from and where it’s going to go? It’s kind of like the idea of ‘reading’ everything, the objects around us, as part of feedback, as part of understanding. I think that a lot of the world is illegible. And that has a lot to do with what’s going on and the choices we make. SP: Although there are a lot of things about this cup that you can know. Cups in general have a kind of legibility. I know it’s that way (stands it up) rather than that way (upside down), that is if I want it to contain something. There are basic design things that are legible about it—it’s approximately the size of my hand and it’s tapered so that it can sit in that other one. And then there are some iconic things which, if I know that language, then I know that it’s recyclable and there’s a brand. I mean, you’re right. But when I examine this cup I see that there actually are a lot o things about it that are legible. And I wonder what more you could know. That’s probably further down the line in terms of strategies. CS: Traces are an important part of slow design. One of the things I’m hoping to start up in the fall is this 'open-source' design project, where the processes of designing a product will be comprehensively recorded online, with a web log being the primary mode of communication between designers. So that you can look at the seed of the idea, how it evolves and into the deeper prototyping and exploration, and finally into a real product. But another important product will be a kind of traceable multimedia document of design process that will be a resource in and of itself. I think it’s one of the things that’s missing in our experience of design objects and environments, especially as far as designers and students of design are concerned. SP: It would interest those who do that, or those who are fans. But I just use it, I don’t care. Unless the story of it is compellingly told. Then I’m interested, because it adds to my experience of using the thing. Otherwise it just gets in my way. CS: it’s not visibly imbedded in the cup anywhere. SP: It could be. A bar code is imbedded with a lot. I can find out what lawsuits Volvic is involved with by scanning that bar code right there. There’s a project that’s out there that does a search when you scan any bar code. CS: So it’s basically that the designer who created it wrote a query, right?And its not that the bar code contains that information, it’s that the bar code triggers that query. Yes, that could be a nice way of writing more information onto designed objects. ... |