Really enjoying thinking about the implications of planning a means of manufacture in citizens’ hands. It’s been a while since I did any serious work in this area and technology has caught up sufficiently to make this a fruitful area of design research again. The FISCAR10 conference I just attended was a great, jumping off point.

One thing that struck me are the parallels between the recent history of graphic design (dtp (an acronym from history), web and web 2.0, bedroom web design agencies) and the current emergence of rapid manufacture capability, the lowering of technical barriers to entry and diffusion of technology.

If the parallels hold true we can expect a ‘gold-rush’ scenario and a rush of pseudo-professionals looking to make a fast buck, a reappraisal of the industrial design profession and, after a few painful years, new forms of both design process and new types of products and processes will emerge.

Last time (graphic) design was on the back foot with technology and technologists dominating the debate and while this debate was going on, there was a groundswell of activity. Design needs to be more proactive, visionary and dynamic this time.

The recent FISCAR 10 conference in Helsinki had many highlights, a productive collaboration, a widening of my theoretical horizons, amongst others. I will be documenting these as time and energy permit, but one thing moved me to write NOW!

The conference had many instances of activity theory scholars moving into design in a slightly naive way. This is amusing (sometimes), and understandable. What is not forgivable is for someone from the design profession to make fundamental mistakes about the field they are supposed to be expert in.

We are not talking trivia or contested knowledge here, but rather the fundamental structure of a discipline universally agreed.

The graphic designer in question (educated where?), stated and then defended his assertion that the post-modern movement started in the 1880s and that post-modernism sat between Modern Art (taking place before the 1880s) and movements like Fauvism, Cubism and so on that started after post-modernism.

I thought this was either a typo or he was being tricksy. In ‘The Post-Modern Condition’, Jean Francois Lyotard argues that before something is modern it must first be post-modern. This paradoxical statement is an interesting and active area of debate and engages with notions of authorship, originality and the shifting nature of meaning.
Unfortunately ‘Graphic Design Boy’, actually someone my age (old!), was not thinking at this (or any?), level.
The repudiation of argument for Postmodern Graphic Design in the 18880s is either very simple – read just one book or even Wikipedia on the history of GD – or more complicated.

Put simply, there were no ‘Graphic Designers’, before the 1940s. The title was created to make a pay grade above ‘commercial artist’ in the US advertising industry.

As far as Art is concerned, read Clement Greenberg, Robert Hughes or any other art historian’s works.

The conference paper was about how life is more difficult for graphic designers now compared to the past, perhaps the time would have been better spent getting a little bit of basic knowledge first.