Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: following yesterday’s column on how disruptive technology for emerging markets will affect the high-end tech giants, Justin McGuirk asks why contemporary design critics are obsessed with analysing technology.

That is where this story should probably end, but I feel compelled to say a word about why I wrote it in the first place. As this is being published in web space rather than in meat space, with its finite pages and word quotas, there’s no reason why it can’t go on.

Here’s the question: why are design critics today writing about technology? Why am I, an art historian by training, writing about the Indian tablet computer market? Why are former editors of design magazines jetting off to attend summer school at the Google campus? Why are critics who would once have been satisfied writing about buildings, chairs, Anglepoise lamps, typewriters and other shapely, worldly objects now writing about black-glass oblongs with the same rounded corners and the same greasy finger smears?

Why are we writing about operating systems, user interfaces and “disruptive innovation”? Why, for that matter, is the V&A museum – with its medieval silverware and plaster casts of the Laocoön Group – hosting a talk by the founder of a technology company producing cheap tablet computers?

There are at least three reasons that I can think of:

1. Design is not furniture

Furniture was interesting in the early twentieth century when it was imbued with ideology and notions of progress. It was still interesting in the mid-century when it gave vent to a burgeoning middle class’ sense of taste. Now that those same manufacturers have abandoned the middle class to become a luxury industry, Ikea is left to cater to the majority and there is nothing in between. This makes furniture a microcosm of the economy at large, where the rich get richer and the rest get by. That ought to be interesting, except that good taste prevailed where it counts: at the bottom of the market.

Meanwhile, “consumer products” is a dirty word. In the 1950s and 1960s, washing machines and blenders were socially liberating – they saved us time and drudgery in the kitchen that we could spend in leisure. That has long-since stopped being the case, to the point where even consumers are painfully aware of their own disposable culture, built-in obsolescence and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. One cannot endorse such products without either being a stooge or a whore, and so one is left to marvel ironically at their functional overkill.

We make an exception for a certain kind of technology product because we recognise its massive potential for social transformation – for good or ill – and we succumb to (or are terrified by) that promise. We are addicted to one form of social media or another, and so is everyone we know, and thus we suddenly get that image in The Matrix where humanity is collectively plugged into the machine while supine in the goo. Still, the Arab Spring et cetera.

The truth is that technology feels more alive to us than it did in the days when we dreamed of flying cars because we’re witnessing mind-boggling advances on an annual basis now, in our very hands and not in the pages of some pulp comic. The pace of change dazzles us and so critics court geekdom for insights into the new commodity fetishism because, frankly, commodity fetishism allows us to put you on the couch while we play Dr Freud. So we scan the horizon for signs that technology will liberate us even as it enslaves us.

2. The real innovation is happening at the level of code

We don’t understand code and we have no desire to, we just know it’s happening there, somewhere behind our blackened reflections. Technology, in other words, is where it’s at. Critics are desperate to be where it’s at. The tangible things are dematerialising. The clocks, calculators and calendars, the maps, books and cameras have been swallowed up by the black mirror. As the artist Michael Craig-Martin said to me recently, “I spent 50 years painting everyday objects, now I just paint the iPhone – and it’s not a very interesting object.”

He’s right. It’s a cipher, the black monolith that film director Stanley Kubrick foresaw. It is a design critic’s nightmare – the object that is forever evolving and growing more intelligent, more powerful, without appearing to change at all. It is disempowering to those trained in aesthetics and connoisseurship, yet it is empowering in opening up new worlds of human experience beyond what can be appreciated “in the round”.

Our interaction with the device and our experience of new forms of communication are there for the analysis, even though that’s not really what appeals to us. The attraction is the sightline they offer to a higher stratum of power, which leads me to my next point.

3. Tech is where the money is

The financial clout of the tech giants like Apple and Samsung makes Olivetti – let alone Cassina, Knoll, Braun, Vitra and the other industrial leaders of design’s mid-century heyday – seem like minnows. That means technology is too important to leave to the technology journalists.

Reading the tech press is like watching rabbits caught in the headlights. They may have bought into Silicon Valley’s technological determinism, but that doesn’t mean we have to. In fact, the Californian Ideology – whereby network technologies drive libertarianism, roll back the power of government and allow a handful of entrepreneurs to amass untold fortunes – is hardly a suitable replacement for the crumbling welfare state.

The design critic’s traditional role is to reveal how objects express the spirit of the age. This depends on understanding technological change, naturally, but it cannot be done without recourse to the question of taste and that slippery customer, beauty. The reason tech journalists fail to present the whole picture is because they invoke Apple’s success in relation to innovation, market share and profit, when really the answer is beauty.

The problem here is that beauty is what tech journalists call “design”, whereas design critics are constantly trying to redeem the discipline from such skin-deep designations. Design, we keep insisting, is not style, it is not the shell, it is the totality, the performance, the very thing itself. Beauty is too easily undermined from within, and thus an Apple computer’s beauty must be both internal and external.

So Apple’s success is in “design”, not just in taste. If Apple’s success lies anywhere, it might be in overcoming taste altogether. It has imposed such a universal aesthetic that you would have to be a prude, a radical or a programmer to reject it. Real programmers, you see, don’t buy Apple because they know the guts are indistinguishable from other computers’ and because anyway they prefer a more open software “architecture”. Only true initiates, it seems, can exercise their own taste.

Read part one »

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.

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for certain technology products” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in his first Opinion column for Dezeen, Dan Hill reflects on the recent sale of Finland’s two most iconic design brands – Artek and Nokia – and suggests what the country’s design industry should do next.

“John le Carré said the only way to write about a place was after visiting it for a day, or after a long life once you’d moved there… Time between those two lengths didn’t lend more certainty, just detail,” wrote Rosecrans Baldwin in Paris I Love You But You’re Getting Me Down.

On that basis, I am not well placed to write about Finnish design culture. Having lived in Helsinki for two years recently, I can only really guess at the deeper resonance of Vitra buying legendary Finnish furniture brand Artek, following hot on the heels of Microsoft buying legendary Finnish cellphone brand Nokia. But guess I will.

Within a single week, not long after football’s transfer deadline day, Nokia’s “devices and services” division, which contributed hugely to Finland’s economic and cultural growth over the last two decades, moved to Microsoft for a Gareth Bale-esque $7.71 billion. This deal was swiftly followed by Artek, formerly owned by the Swedish investment company Proventus, joining furniture’s Champions League, via Vitra.

Although this small country of five million people has also produced Iitala, Marimekko, Kone, Fiskars and others, these two firms bookend a first era of Finnish design, with Artek founded by the Aaltos and co. in 1935 and Nokia’s dominance of the global mobile phone sector six decades later. Where do these “exits” leave Finnish design?

Under Marko Ahtisaari, a coherent and bold design culture had recently emerged at Nokia, with their Lumia phones drawing on a distinctly European heritage to produce an object, at least, that moved beyond Apple and Samsung. However, the wider culture around Nokia over the last decade had already – and fatally – betrayed a lack of understanding of the value of design. The software suffered badly and although intriguing handsets occasionally emerged, one felt that design was generally no more than an indulged child amidst what was really a masterful engineering and logistics machine, wrapped in the PowerPoint Palace’s bureaucratic managerialism.

Once Apple, and then Google, had deployed a richer, strategic approach to design in order to seamlessly orchestrate people, apps, media, devices and the interfaces between them, Nokia had no answer. Neither did Microsoft, for that matter. Hence these massive brands were left looking like the two kids picked last in the school playground, staring awkwardly at their boots, red-faced and uncomfortable in last year’s kit. With no other option than each other, Microsoft bought Nokia’s design function – minus Ahtisaari, who is moving on – simply to stay in the game.

Meanwhile, Artek had been looking forward, with Ville Kokkonen’s seasonal affective disorder-defying lamps building on imaginative research. As with Nokia and Ahtisaari, Artek benefits from thoughtful designer leadership in Kokkonen; both draw from wide-ranging perspectives well outside of traditional design practice. Yet Artek’s essential problem is that the entire furniture business is struggling for cultural relevance. Furniture is important for putting things on, yet unlike in the mid-twentieth century, it says less and less about our age. We know that, as architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis puts it, “technology is our modernity” now; inner space, not interiors.

So the questions posed by these acquisitions are more fundamental than those of the balance sheet, where both moves make sense commercially. The question is cultural: Artek was born with an avant-garde mission, whilst Nokia was the first to capitalise upon the most influential cultural object of the last three decades. So this week of deals actually poses the question: what does Finnish product design do now?

There are two obvious trajectories to ascribe, twin arcs towards a twenty-first century industrial design.

The first is in a new form of interactive object, as active partners of people, socially and culturally, via Internet of Things technologies, absorbing the essence of Varnelis’s “new modernity”. Here objects can be augmented with emotional expressiveness and responsiveness, with variable character and identity, via interactions across diverse social relations and contexts. In other words, what’s Finnish for Little Printer or Fuelband? Nest or Glass? Or better, whatever’s next?

Might this be a big ask for a culture whose national stereotype is the taciturn man likely to embark on a devastatingly lengthy Finnish silence at any moment? Like all stereotypes, this is both true and not true, and fortunately there are enough (North) polar opposites to refute it. Yet their late urbanisation means Finns rarely possesses a naturally social culture. It is a culture rooted in the tangible, the material, the output of designer Tapio Wirkkala‘s and Kaj Franck‘s peerless craft. After all, Nokia lost it when Apple veered towards people over things.

The Finnish language is at its most beautiful in the ancient series of soft, weathered words denoting the physical reality of landscapes and bodies; “chipped sounds, words eaten away by ice and silence”, as novelist Diego Marani has it. Yet there is effectively no word for “please”.

But despite this granite-hard pragmatism, there is evidence elsewhere of a supreme facility with the social (and no, Rovio, makers of Angry Birds, I’m not looking at you.)

There is the gloriously levelling ritual of cheek-to-cheek encounters in the sauna, a unique social space recently revived by NOW in Helsinki. Equally, the päiväkoti day-care system for pre-school children is one of the finest learning environments you can imagine, setting up the nation’s world-class results. It is human-centred, with an emphasis on both material and environmental exploration – most time is spent outdoors – as well as carefully tended social, cultural and emotional growth.

Then we must note the Nordic region’s unlikely but deserved emergence as a culinary leader, well-represented in Helsinki. This provides more evidence, with its emphasis on the nuanced, often intangible differentiators of quality, service, provenance, ritual and theatre.

Could Finnish design culture augment its innate facility with the inert via this empathetic understanding of people, ritual and service?

If that is a move outwards from the object, there is another trajectory in the opposite direction, towards a different kind of performative fabric, via architecture at the atomic scale.

The 50,000 Nokia employees not bought by Microsoft – still under the Nokia brand, focused on networks, mapping and advanced technologies – recently received a €1 billion EU grant for research into graphene, the “indistinguishable-from-magic” one-atom-thick material that is the thinnest and lightest yet produced, 300 times stronger than steel, transparent, bendable and highly conductive.

Similarly, Finland has Aalto University’s world-renowned Nanotalo lab, with its focus on biomimetic nanocomposites, particularly derived from Finnish timber. Artek’s Kokkonen is a regular visitor. Yet its facility is separated from the design faculties, lost in the university’s misguided attempt at an urban plan without the urban. Connect the power of this research to Finland’s design culture and its potential becomes tangible, just as with 1930s modernism that fused science and engineering with design in order to produce Artek.

Finland could take its design culture forward once again, now all that is solid – stone, fabric, ceramic, glass – has melted into an air of vertically-integrated software, services and media. Perhaps the next evolution is in digital/physical hybrid objects possessing familiar and treasured materials woven with two-dimensional nanocomposites, and allied with responsiveness, awareness, and character by virtue of having the internet embedded within. Finland might be perfectly placed to pick up that gauntlet. But will they?

Despite a culture borne of survival, Finland has an incredibly high standard of living. You might occasionally need to summon a bit of “sisu” on a pitch black, minus 20 degrees January morning, but it’s nothing a Woolrich parka can’t fix. In deep summer or deep winter Helsinki – don’t ask about November – it is difficult to imagine anywhere better.

Yet in places, that success bred complacency, and by “places” I mean the pre-iPhone era Nokia and some of its other heritage brands. These last weeks suggest that Finnish design can no longer afford to be complacent. Nokia single-handedly contributed a third of Finland’s entire corporate research and development as recently as last year; that is unlikely to happen again. Similarly, Artek has to try hard to prevent the sheer weight of its gilded past from holding it back. People might say, “those E60 stools won’t sell themselves!” Actually, they probably will. What they sell next is the question.

So building on and respecting these rich legacies is important, but moving on is more important. Again, Finland has every chance to do so.

Soon the Finns will witness “ruska” spread across the nation, from Aalto’s moonbase-style buildings in Rovaniemi near the Arctic Circle, down to the rapidly greying Baltic off the capital. Ruska occurs when birch, larch and rowan trees explode into russet tones of richly saturated purples, reds, yellows and oranges, before shivering off their leaves for winter. It’s an extraordinary vivid and life-affirming cycle.

Finnish design needs a similarly florid and dramatic replenishment. While the trajectories sketched above are mere suggestions, the recent seismic activity at its two most iconic brands, Artek and Nokia – one a tremor, the other a quake – provides the perfect opportunity for re-imagining Finnish design in the twenty-first century.

Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.

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afford to be complacent” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: after returning from a two-week break, Sam Jacob reflects on the phenomenon of the modern beach holiday and argues that it is just as artificial as everyday working life in the city. 

The summer is almost out of reach, the sun setting over vacation idylls and planes pulling their wheels up over the bleached industrial outskirts of a Mediterranean city. They accelerate into the sky, contrails arcing northwards, to deliver their payload of over-ripened northern Europeans back to their slate-grey natural habitats. They emerge from the airport still incongruously clad in espadrilles, shorts and straw hats.

Ah, holidays. The ten-ish days off from the normal pattern of life where we can kick back, get back to nature, soak up the sun and otherwise encounter the world in a different way to our usual nine-to-five. But although we often describe them as a “break”, holidays are actually a product of organised labour, products of the industrial revolution as much as the production line.

These bubbles of paradise, where the wind blows through your hair and you feel the prickle of the sun’s heat on your bare skin, are as artificial as the suspended-ceilinged, contract-carpeted and air-conditioned environments you spend the rest of the year holed up in.

Nowhere is this strange version of artificial nature more apparent than the beach. A beach might be a product of coast line geology, of sea levels and tides, of the forces exerted by the sea on the perimeter of the land, of rocks and shells worn down into grains of sand. But really the place we go isn’t this; it’s rather a highly-wrought cultural phenomenon that just happens to look (sometimes) completely natural.

The idea of the holiday is derived from holy days, still ghostly present in the word itself. Secularised and industrialised, the holiday remains a symbolic event, an act full of ritual. The beach is the ground on which we conduct this performance, aided by outfits and props. All those things we identify with beachiness – from the traditional British seaside fare of kiss-me-quick hats, donkey rides and Punch and Judy shows to the exotic cocktail-in-a-pineapple from a thatched beach bar, even the virgin, unspoiled sands of ultimate luxury beachiness – all of these are props and scenarios that allow us to commune with an idea. Walking down the promenade, in other words, or pulling on your Speedos, blowing up a deranged-looking inflatable sea monster… whatever you might find yourself doing is a way of participating in collective ideas about nature and society.

Think of all those highly specific items we drag down there: the special towels, buckets in the shape of miniature candy-coloured castles, lilos, umbrellas, tiny cricket bats, balls that catch the wind as though they thought they belonged to the sky. Think of the clothes we wear, think even of that June magazine favourite, the beach body (and how to get one). All of these point to the beach as a place that holds a very special meaning.

The very idea of a beach holiday is relatively recent. It is essentially an eighteenth-century invention, a combination of science (the beach as sanitarium) and changing attitudes to the landscape after urbanisation (which might fall under the catch-all term of romanticism). These ideas of health and romance still run through our contemporary notions of the beach like the words through a stick of rock. These combine with modern notions of leisure, with money, with images of family and/or relationships. All baking under an ozone-depleted sky, doused in gallons of SPF.

“Ha,” you might say. “Put down your cultural studies notepad, throw off your tweeds and join us frolicking in the shallows. You’re taking this far too seriously; it’s all just a little fun!” But that’s the point: the beach’s syntheticity is so absolutely absorbed into its landscape that it’s almost impossible to distinguish it from nature, even when it really is manufactured.

Beyond the vast infrastructures that holidays command – the engineering, logistics, complex finance and construction that enable travel, highways, hotels – to name but a few items necessary to enable us to go somewhere – beaches are themselves unstable places that shift with wind and tide. These erosions are often held at bay by civil engineering such as groins and breaks. Sand is rearranged in acts of “beach nourishment”: sometimes as simple as scooping it up from one end of a bay and putting it back at the other; other times as extreme as replenishing a beach with sand from somewhere else entirely. These acts of great geological shuffling mean that beaches stay in the same place against their natural inclination.

The slogan “Sous les paves, la plage” rang out in Paris in 1968. It imagined that beneath the concrete veneer of the city was something as apparently liberated as the beach. But far from being something opposite, the beach is part of the very same landscape as the city.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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Opinion: Slovakian designer Tomáš Libertíny, who wrote to Dezeen last month accusing a major advertising agency of exploiting his work, reflects on the nature of copying in design and argues that imitating the work of others should be an integral part of any designer’s education. 

Recently, a post on Dezeen showed a great deal of similarity between Dewar’s advertising campaign and my work. The agency’s stunt reminded me of the likes of Adibas, Adidos, Naik and countless other “brands”.

Inspired, and having thought about the subject of ethics, originality, progress and education in design, I decided to write a short reflection in the spirit of essays by French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne.

Copy to learn… to be copied to learn

I once heard someone say that the single cause of all the world’s evil are the words: “This is mine!” Picasso said that good artists copy; great artists steal. This is well-known and recently over-quoted thanks to the success of Steve Jobs with Apple. It is also tragically misinterpreted. It is a tongue-in-cheek phrase that insinuates that great artists build on the work of others without anyone spotting it.

Actually, it is more that we forgive them due to the personal spin they give to the bounty. In the light of the recent Tour de France doping scandals, one could say that good cyclists cheat; great cyclists don’t get caught. I am forced to ask myself the same question as Mugatu in the 2001 comedy movie Zoolander: “Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” Ironically, he claims he invented the piano-key necktie.

American art critic Arthur Danto pondered over the success of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. This work would not have been possible without the Brillo box design by James Harvey. I imagine it should have been Harvey and not Valerie Solanas who shot at Warhol. The success of pop art is largely thanks to the appropriation of work of often anonymous designers created for the purpose of a vicious battle for consumers.

Nonetheless, it certainly brought Warhol fame and eventually stardom. His version of the Brillo box also became an icon and a dead end. However, its real relevance is the ecstasy of the mind that hangs in confusion. We love to hope; we love the game. The mystery of David Lynch’s movies has the same mind-tickling effect. It is not surprising, since we celebrate entertainers over caretakers.

It seems to me a sign of foresight that we should recognise the path that people walked and pawed before us. That foresight looks back to secure the future. It was Neil Armstrong who took the first step on the moon but that step was the sum of all the steps taken before him by all humankind (not only those of NASA). Similarly, designers are nothing as individuals.

I want to argue that in our education we should learn from the past and not be afraid to learn by copying others. This type of learning is taking a step further in a purposeful direction, acknowledging the source and paying tribute to the ongoing building of knowledge that defines culture.

Our knowledge of Greek sculptures is through the Roman copies. The actual number of surviving ancient Greek originals is pathetic. By copying, the Romans have not only preserved but also learned and improved. Even the famous statue of Laocoön, admired by Michelangelo, is a copy.

The age-old idea of ownership and possession is a consensus upon which the majority of societies agreed to act to bring order into the growing complexity of relationships. We protect the whole by limiting the individual. Copying is not an act of stealing, but it can give the same advantage.

One can copy someone or something in order to:

» learn about the subject and understand it
» pay homage to it
» acquire the same privileges as the subject and exploit it for personal gain.

The nature of the world is such that all of these are part of life and always will be.

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his essay titled The Flower of Coleridge that for the classic mind, literature is the essential thing, not individuals. You could say the same of design.

My training was classical. When I was about 14 years old I got an assignment for an art class I was privately attending to copy a painting. I chose Portrait of a Sculptor, believed to be the self-portrait by Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Del Sarto. There was a limitation: I had to do it in tempera on paper. It was difficult since tempera acts differently to oil, obviously, but the lesson was priceless. My confidence in the medium had risen. Immediately following the copy of a painting was an assignment to copy nature en plein air. I sat by a tree and looked at the structure, texture and weight of its intertwined branches.

In the same way, I observed my own hands. I started to see more the longer I looked at them. It was a great exercise in discipline, focus and of course draftsmanship. I felt that I was starting to understand the relationship between skin, flesh and bones. Later, when I was in the first year of my formal design education, we visited a medical school where they fished human body parts from the pool of formaldehyde for us to draw. A human torso was delivered to us on a trolley and there I was, seeing an expired human engine and tracing it on a piece of paper.

In general, this exercise eventually teaches the mind of any student to look at things. It doesn’t substitute natural talent but nonetheless establishes neural connections that will be prone to recognise relationships, patterns and hierarchies in the world observed. These neural connections may be permanent or flexible, have style or no style (one may argue though that everybody has a style but the difference is quite clear when a rigid and fresh mind approaches a problem).

To learn is to love. Our initial response attaches us to the subject. However, it is the continued study of the subject “as it is” that evolves into love. Bruce Lee in one of his televised interviews says: “If you put water into a cup it becomes the cup. Water can flow or water can crash – be water, my friend”.

Spiritual writer Anthony de Mello puts it differently. He says when you cut water, the water doesn’t get hurt; when you cut something solid, it breaks. You’ve got solid attitudes inside you; you’ve got solid illusions inside you. This is what scientists strive for: an unobstructed view. When you truly love something or someone you must first see it.

A common practice of artists of the past was learning through apprenticeship from an older master. Michelangelo did his time as an apprentice too. He preferred copying paintings from churches rather than learning at school. But which of the world’s renowned design academies today have their students copy, for example, Charles Eames chairs? Or a software code in reverse engineering? How about an assignment to write a story like William Shakespeare? Wouldn’t that be a great way to really understand the inner workings of his writing style and language?

In the case of Eames, when I say copy, I mean literally copy and make an exact replica with the resources one has at his or her disposal. Looking at pictures doesn’t teach anyone much more than information about the weather. It is just information. Following design blogs and current trends does not make one a better designer; it makes one a better-informed designer. Despite the fact that information and skill are both pillars of knowledge, there is fundamental difference between them.

Copying is wrong when it is pretending to be original; then copying becomes faking. A fake is the cardinal sin of design, a non-progressive parasite. On the other hand, copying to learn and improve is the most characteristic trait of human behaviour. Unlike non-human primates, which don’t have the cognitive capacity to improve upon something learned, we do. We copy our parents and friends as children in order to become our unique better selves. That is exactly what designers should do.

Unfortunately, our era pushes individuals to perform at early stages as original creators not understanding that the history of design is the history of re-design. Heading towards the new for the sake of the new is counterproductive. Look, for example, at the three volumes of Phaidon Design Classics. An icon is a stage in the process of re-design that reaches its peak; it cannot be a better version of itself. Originality is a myth. Discovery of the not-yet-seen is not. Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson said that there are no foreign lands, it is only the traveler who is foreign.

It was Giorgio Vasari with his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects who introduced the myth of an artist. It was Michelangelo, who witnessed his Pietà attributed to Gobbo from Milan, who decided, in the quiet of the night, to carve his name upon it. Vasari distinguished between “disegno” and “invenzione”, understanding them as mother and father of the work of art. He saw “invenzione” not as new, but better. He recognised, however, that not everybody was able to reveal the better and it took a genius to fish it out from the pond of knowledge. Hence not everybody is Michelangelo – but we are all fishermen.

Students of design, copy to learn and remember that you are part of the history of design. We are trying to land on Mars.

Libertiny’s  Honeycomb Vase was copied by Berlin students at last year’s DMY Berlin – read our earlier story »

Tomáš Libertíny is a Slovakian designer working in Rotterdam. He founded Studio Libertíny after completing his masters degree at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2006. His works have been acquired by a number of museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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Opinion: in this week’s column Sam Jacob argues against what he calls PRotest, proposing that new forms of outcry through marketing and the media are confusing and “only make us more alienated”.

An episode of television show Father Ted called The Passion of Saint Tibulus sees priests Ted and Dougal protesting outside a cinema holding placards that read “Down With This Sort Of Thing” and “Careful Now”. They’re there, reluctantly, protesting at the showing of a film banned by the Vatican but through some loophole shown in their parish on Craggy Island.

It’s funny partly because of its satirical jibe and partly because of the perplexed and hangdog expressions of the priestly pair. But I think its real comedy, the thing that makes that synaptic spark pleasurably jump across the tracks of your neural network, is how it plays with protest as a form. It’s the gap between the form (protest) and the content (vague, unspecific colloquialisms) that generates the joke. The form of the placard against the un-slogans they contain, the rhetorical high of “Down With” finished by the pathetic “This Sort Of Thing”.

Traditionally, the form and content of protest were one and the same thing. You could march on Aldermaston to ban the bomb, you could camp outside Greenham Common in protest of American nuclear missiles being based on UK soil. You could sit down in the path of a bulldozer about to demolish whatever it was you didn’t want it to demolish. You could stop trucks transporting whatever it was you didn’t want transported. You could march against a war, a policy or an ideological position. You could protest about a thing you disagreed with. You could say what was wrong with it. Sometimes you might even say what you would rather happen. The message was communicated by the action. The action was dictated by message. And of course, these forms of protest still happen.

But staring at an image on the Daily Mail website, it struck me that contemporary forms of protest have developed an altogether different relationship between form and content. It was an image of a child’s passport picture with the word “Help” etched in blue biro stuck onto Constable’s The Hay Wain. The image of the child had been pixillated by the Mail and the background of Willy Lott’s cottage was a blurred blow-up of a jpeg, which only made the whole thing weirder. The story reported a statement from Fathers 4 Justice saying that the act was a protest, a “final act of desperation” after a man lost a final appeal in the High Court over custody rights to his son.

Here the action and the cause are entirely divergent. It is essentially a garbled succession of signs and symbols. The Hay Wain is the apparent site of the protest but the protest is nothing to do with the art, nothing to do with the painting’s role as an icon of Englishness, nothing to do with what Constable’s picture shows, nothing to do with the landscape of Dedham Vale that it depicts. Its only role in this protest is the celebrity status of the painting, perhaps its insurance value too.

The child’s image isn’t placed into the picture as part of the picture plane if as by a collagist (like, say, a moustache on the face of the Mona Lisa – despite the potential for a bobbing child in unexpected depths of the River Stour). It’s stuck onto the surface of the picture as though Constable’s canvas were as undifferentiated as a pinboard. There is absolutely no reason why the head of a real-life, modern child is set adrift in a nineteenth-century pastoral landscape.

There are a myriad of potential political meanings inherent in the act of defacing a national treasure. Which one? How? One might consider the way the “which” and the “how” connect to the matter in hand, but here this is all ignored for the simple fact that the act would be mediated, that it would feature on the Mail (and many other places). Its site wasn’t really The Hay Wain or the National Gallery, but the media. Some might describe this as savvy. I think it’s something else: a meaningless semiotic jumble of symbols with all their meaning sucked out of them, an unintelligible babble of references that are as unreadable as they are recognisable. In other words, its a form of postmodern protest: floating signifiers with a cause.

Talking of protest and floating signifiers, take the case of Trenton Oldfield. Half of the duo behind This Is Not A Gateway (who create “platforms for critical projects and ideas related to cities”), Trenton infamously swam into the midst of last year’s Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The act was clear. A perfect disruption of a media event guaranteed to get coverage. But his motivation was a murky as the river itself.

Was it about the boat race itself? Was it about elitism in sport? The elitism of universities as centres of excellence? The education system as a whole? The use of the river for a corporately sponsored sporting event?

At times it seems to have been about all of these things. The rambling, unfocused justification posted on the internet seems to have vanished. Now, post-incarceration and with an application for a visa turned down, it seems the act has multiplied its potential meanings, both for Trenton and for those who keep one listless eye on Twitter for things to get momentarily excited about. The act of jumping in the river now holds fleeting meanings about the establishment in general, judiciary, prison, the state of television or colonisation, depending on which interview you read. The original act gathers meanings like a snowball, only for them to melt as fast.

I’d argue that the fact that there seems to be no single point is the point. The act and the subject of these protests have become delaminated. It’s as though any subject can be attributed to any act, and the interchangeable relationship between the sign and signified makes it a postmodern form of protest. Doubly so, because the shifting arrangements of form and content take place within the media – in the representation of the act, not the act in and of itself. It’s protest by way of marketing, PRotest, to coin a phrase. The worry is that by operating as a form of marketing, this kind of protest only serves to reinforce the mechanisms of contemporary society, only makes us more alienated, further from a position where we might be able to achieve anything.

Perhaps this kind of non-specific protest is a function of our own era. Maybe it’s just harder to pinpoint what exactly is wrong because, quite frankly, everything is kind of wrong and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Think of the Occupy movement, whose lack of demands and proposals were coupled with a raggle-taggle, multifarious collection of disassociated issues. Its real statement was just in being there, occupying space and column inches, and not really doing anything.

We live in an age where political engagement is increasingly reduced to likes and re-tweets. Meanwhile, mainstream culture continues to appropriate the form and aesthetic of protest for its own ends (what else is Banksy, for example, than the ultimate fulfilment of the Clash’s lyric “turning rebellion into money”). This de-politicised addiction to form and sensation – rather than content – gives us the protests we deserve. As Dougal says, “Careful Now”.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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prevents us achieving anything” appeared first on Dezeen.