Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: in this week’s column, Sam Jacob explains why YouTube movies of consumers ritualistically unpacking their purchases “bring a sharp eye to the designed world”.

“Hi my lovelies!” would be a strange opening for a philosophical treatise on human relations with inanimate objects. Perhaps that’s philosophy’s loss. It is, on the other hand, exactly how an unboxing video might begin. Unboxing videos have been around a while. Over on YouTube, you’ll find thousands of them: self-made videos of people unwrapping things they’ve just bought.

Here’s the typical format for an unboxing: first we see our protagonist and presenter with a large cardboard box. This will usually have been delivered to their doorstep, though sometimes they have actually been to a shop and lugged the thing home by themselves (imagine!). Then they tell us what it is, why they bought it and sometimes their own personal consumer history with the brand or model in question. Then, slowly, they perform a packaging striptease. Out of the brown shipping carton they reveal the real product-packaging itself. Now it gets serious. In the rigour of the unboxing ceremony, every little thing counts. So this outer skin is scoured for detail: texture, graphics and text are read with intense focus as though carrying out a form of inanimate, cuboid brand-phrenology where every part, every lump, every word and every colour is read for greater significance.

We are then taken deeper, through layer upon layer of wrapping and boxes like unwrapping an onion. Each encounter on this journey to the centre of the box is relayed as though the product in question was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Instructions, manuals, notes and care instructions are read with portentous relish. Strangely, the product itself often only has a cameo appearance at the end of all this foreplay.

The unboxing video is strange modern phenomenon. It’s a product of available technologies: of cheap digital video cameras, free editing software and the amateur broadcasting enabled by the internet. But it’s more than the sum of its technological parts. It is (isn’t everything?) an expression of the contemporary culture out of which it emerges.

It’s certainly something to do with the way we shop. Changes in the physical act of buying alter our experience and role as consumers. Shopping is increasingly less physical. It’s a click on a jpg rather than a journey to the high street where we can touch, try, press and otherwise examine things. Shops are places where we encounter new possibilities. They are (or were, or just about still are) the portals through which things come into the world. New things, shiny things, desirable things … all the things!

But internet retail means the point of contact with things has been displaced from the shop counter to the doorstep. The moment of a physical encounter with a product once took place in a public area of the store, amongst other customers and assistants – other humans in other words. Shopping – consuming stuff and buying things – despite its shallow reputation, is a way of participating in the world. The acquisition of things is a deep physiological sensation that makes us feel we are participating in the world. Now that moment takes place in the privacy of your own home, all alone, and it’s this new space between purchase and possession that the unboxing video fills. It’s a great return of the encounter with objects, displaced into the strange public/private world of the internet overshare. If we can’t share this moment with someone, we’ll share it with everyone instead.

Unboxing tells us that objects are not singular things in the world, but they are part of much wider networks inhabiting larger spaces of cultural imagination than their own cubic volume. The subjects of unboxing videos are the objects of our most deep desire: technology and fashion. Our fascination with them is deep and unreasonable, verging on the fetishistic. Shiny gadgets and new outfits are the sites onto which we project our fullest consumer psyche, the things that we imagine can extend us, transform us and improve us. Depressingly, unboxing is gendered along very traditional lines: men obsessing over technology, women obsessing over fashion.

As much as they are about consuming, unboxing videos also represent a form of design criticism. Well, criticism might be the wrong term. What I mean is, like design criticism, unboxing provides a commentary on our encounter with things. Of course, unlike traditional design criticism, unboxing happens in realtime. It records the immediate reaction and response to the object rather than a opinion mulled over time and shaped into an argument. It is first-person and super-subjective to the point of obsessive tedium, rather than generalised, objective and phrased for an audience (though of course, with movies sometimes gaining in the region of 20 million views, unboxing has an audience that towers over design criticism). The language of unboxing means you can say “Woo!” and “Yeah!” in ways that even Reyner Banham would have baulked at. Still, for all its amateurism, for all its fannish enthusiasms, unboxing brings a sharp eye to the designed world. It looks closer at fragments of the world on our behalf. However naïve, it witnesses our relationship to objects in its full, unexpurgated banality.

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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a form of design criticism” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs explains why we’re responding to our critics and introducing paid editorial internships: “Interns will get a contract and be paid above the minimum wage”.

Let’s talk about interns. We’ve run an unpaid internship programme since I launched Dezeen as a one-man bedroom start-up in 2006. People started offering to help me out in order to get some experience of online publishing and to have something to put on their CVs. Win-win.

Over the years we’ve honed the programme into what we felt was a responsible, benign package for people who want to break into journalism. Naturally, it helps us too.

It went largely unremarked until this month, when Twitter users pounced on an unpaid editorial internship advert we placed on our own recruitment site, Dezeen Jobs. Comments included “Exploitation!” “Show some leadership!” and “#unfuckinglievable” [sic].  “It’s not an internship,” wrote another, “it’s a ‘wealth creation programme‘.”

I don’t agree with a lot of this rhetoric, which, incidentally, seems to mostly come from UK architecture students, professionals and journalists who were already angry about the number of unpaid architecture internships advertised on Dezeen Jobs. But the point of this column is primarily to address criticisms of our own internship programme.

In the past I’ve defended ours as being one of the better editorial programmes out there: over four (recently increased to six) weeks, we devote a lot of time to training and explaining how online journalism works. It’s a pretty standard route into the media, as a quick trawl around websites of other publications in our sector reveals. I ran a similar scheme at icon magazine, where I was editor from 2003 to 2006.

Everyone now employed on the Dezeen editorial team has done at least one unpaid internship, some of them with us but others elsewhere. When I was trying to get into journalism in the nineties I did “work experience”, which was much the same thing.

So working for nothing to learn the ropes is nothing new and a glance at Dezeen Jobs and other similar sites suggests that if anything, such positions are increasing in many creative sectors.

However I always felt slightly uneasy about the unpaid aspect of our internships and we have discussed this regularly in the office. Whatever the moral arguments, you can’t argue with the logic that, for the intern, getting paid is better than not getting paid.

But the flood of applicants, the overwhelming positive feedback we got from past interns and the fact that other publishing companies were doing the same made it seem okay. We never saw it as “exploitation” or free labour but rather a mutually beneficial hybrid of work and training.

Most importantly, it was legal: our internships have been conducted in accordance with the Department of Work and Pensions’ guidance on volunteers. (The term “intern” has no legal status in the UK and seems to have drifted over from the USA over the last 15 years, replacing the dowdy “work experience” tag, which now only legally applies to people under the age of 16).

But as a company and an employer we don’t want ours to be “one of the better programmes”. We want it to be really good; as good as we can make it; the best, if possible. We want to constantly improve everything we do. We’re no longer a shoestring operation struggling to make ends meet. We recognise that because of our profile and audience, people look to us to set an example.

Since the tweets began to appear last week we’ve discussed this endlessly in the office and researched the alternatives. We’ve asked all our interns from the past year for feedback on how we could improve the experience. Interestingly, getting paid was only their third most-cited suggestion. The thing they wanted most of all was to get more bylines on stories (not having to answer the phone was the second most requested change).

There is also a general consensus among our past interns that a month is about the limit for an unpaid stint. But in order to train people to the point where they can write stories, we need them to stay longer.

So we’re scrapping unpaid internships and we’re introducing a new, paid, three-month editorial internship programme. Interns will get a contract and be paid above the minimum wage. By the end of the period they should have a bunch of published stories to show future employers as well as a rounded knowledge of all aspects of online journalism.

It’s important to note that while this change has been triggered by criticisms on Twitter, we are making them for business reasons rather than ethical ones. We believe that the new programme will lead to better-motivated people doing higher-quality work. That’s good for everyone.

One thing we are not going to do however is act as police officer for the global architecture and design professions. Circumstances vary according to discipline and country and we don’t think we should be telling companies how to run their businesses. There are plenty of other individuals and organisations better placed to do that.

This is a tough time to be running any company and with a chronic over-supply of architecture and design graduates willing to take unpaid internships, I can understand the appeal to both parties. There are clearly some companies that take advantage of interns but I don’t think we are the right people to point the finger. We would prefer to lead by example.

So we have no plans to ban internship adverts from Dezeen Jobs, as some people are demanding, so long as the posts advertised are legal and meet the requirements of any relevant professional bodies. We have added a new paragraph to our terms and conditions to ensure advertisers are aware of this. We will take action to remove a job ad if there’s a clear breach but this will be based on legal, rather than moral, arguments.

If people suspect firms of breaking the law or a professional code they should report them to the relevant authorities. And if anyone wants to do a paid internship with us, get in touch.

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Opinion: in this week’s column, Sam Jacob argues that instead of liberating us, 3D printing will merely “bind us even more closely to fewer and fewer corporations”.

If this is the year of anything, it’s the year of 3D-printing boosterism (even more than last year was). The overarching narrative surrounding 3D printing presents it as a liberating technology. It argues that the technology will free us from organised, centralised production of the industrial era. And it suggests that this radical break will in turn transform the political, economic and social structures that industrialisation precipitated.

There is a latent dream somewhere in this rhetoric, something like an electrified version of William Morris’ strange rural-futurist novel News From Nowhere. Morris’ protagonist goes to bed in the industrial 1890’s but mysteriously wakes into a post-revolutionary, proto-socialist nu-medievalist London.

It’s a London whose citizens craft themselves beautiful things in fulfilling equality. We imagine now, perhaps, our own sci-fi version of this utopia. A future where digital production technologies set us free. Where we are surrounded by sequentially layered self expression and customisation. Where we return, thanks to electronics and robotics, to an idealised folk-art state.

Yet of course, we’ve been on the cusp of techno-liberation before. Remember those wild, free years when the internet was young? Limitless fields of freedoms seemed to open up through the window of a squawking dialup modem. The information enclosures of Facebook, Google, Apple et al have long put paid to that sensation.

Let’s face it: 3D printing might give us a million new ways to make objects, but it is unlikely to undo our late capitalist relationship with objects. If the history of the internet is a lesson, then technology only accelerates us further towards the horizon of consumerism, deeper into the depths of digital modernity.

Think, for example, of the labour politics of 3D printing. There is something undeniably appealing (to designers) in the removal of the production process between the designer and their artifact, a shortening of the distance between their imagination and its physical product. But part of this appeal is that it shifts the value of the object toward the designer rather than the labour of production. It’s the total realisation of Ruskin’s critique of industrial capital’s division of labour, where ‘thought’ and ‘work’ are entirely estranged, where personality and invention are ringfenced by design rather than shared with production.

Inevitably it won’t be a democratic, distributed version of the technology that takes hold. It’ll be an iTuned, DRMified ecology that will bind us even more closely to fewer and fewer corporations. If we’re lucky enough to escape that fate, it will only be into the arms of a Pirate Bay of objects where we’ll find the 3D equivalents of screener films, dodgy 3D scans and partially ripped bootlegs.

Here’s another scenario, another possible version of a 3D-printed world. This one is a world that physically resembles the contents of your hard drive (if you are anything like me, that is). A world of half-completed files, a thousand drafts, weird duplicates, super high-res and hyper-compressed versions of the same file and lost aliases. A world made in the image of the detritus around the outlet of a photocopier. A world of copies with no originals. A world of undifferentiated, undetailed substance, endless landscapes of half-finished Sketchup models as though Google’s 3D warehouse had dumped itself back into the physical world. In other words, a super-proliferated Junkspace that would make even Junkspace blush.

Technology itself will not rescue us from our circumstance. We can’t draft a new world and print it out. In fact, the focus that digital design places on the object itself as an autonomous object, floating in its electronic amniotic sac, is itself a mirage of technology; a non-verbal argument about the nature of objects and society as much as a Fordist production line ever was.

If there is any hope of resurrecting Morris-esque resistance or Ruskinian ideology in a digital age, it is to recognise, as they did, that objects are not simply form but intrinsically politicised artifacts. And so are the technologies we use to produce them.

But 3D printing propels the idea of design-as-form to an extreme conclusion. It makes a persuasive argument for design as the production of autonomous techno-formalist objects. 3D printing might change how we make the world, but it won’t change the world itself.

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Opinion: in the first of his bi-weekly columns for our new Opinion section, Sam Jacob describes the way that sites like Dezeen have unleashed a “design tsunami” and discusses how “the endless spewing of design imagery” is affecting design culture.

Contemporary design suffers from a severe case of consumption. Not that wan condition that affects inhabitants of Victorian novels but that thoroughly modern version of consumption brought about by binging on toxic levels of images and information. Its most pressing symptoms present themselves as chronic vomiting and constipation to the point of obstipation. In other words, it can’t hold it down but neither can it pass a movement.

Design’s high-gloss diet is incredibly rich yet gruel-thin and it’s produced a weird physiology: flabby corpulence and stick-thin emaciation as though it were anorexic and obese simultaneously. Contemporary design culture consumes as though it were at a Roman vomitorium where nothing is digested, where everything is swallowed for the fleeting pleasure of consumption itself only to be thrown up to make room for the next course.

The medium, as we well know, is the message. So to try to glimpse the nebulous nature of contemporary design culture we should look to design’s own forms of media. The frames through which we look at design are not transparent; they are mechanisms that construct design culture around the mass of manufactured objects we produce. Perhaps then it’s not contemporary design itself that is the source of its condition but the media that communicates it that is the source of its condition.

There was a time when design could be catalogued. Its objects could be counted and accounted for, arranged in sequences to construct particular narratives. Think of the way in which institutions such as the V&A or MoMA constructed narratives and ideologies of design through the things they collected and exhibited, through their patronage. The museum, like the magazine, functioned as a particular kind of design media. Between the late 19th century and 20th centuries museums and magazines wrote narratives and impulses from Arts and Crafts to Modernism, Brutalism and Postmodernism. They wrote designs narrative so indelibly that we still trace their intent today.

These once-strong curatorial frames are now just sieves in a design tsunami. It’s not that the museums got small, it’s that design became monstrously voluminous: uncountable and uncuratable. The sheer volume and scale of design has outgrown any of its previous states, bursting the seams of the definitions that we used to clothe it with, apparently impossible to frame in the gallery or on the page.

Design culture now flows through a new form of media as an endless glut of glossy imagery gushing through super-lubricated digital downpipes. This very site is perhaps the poster child of the new media through which we consume design culture. And so, I would argue, as the new popular form of design media, it is a site within which contemporary design culture is now manufactured. But what, exactly, is this new form of design culture? How can anything like culture exist in this stream of Photoshopped incontinence?

Dezeen is a design media born digital. It’s not an internet shadow of a preceding physical institution but a thing in and of itself. It emerged out of the kind of communication that used to happen backstage of journalism. Its simple trick was to divert the flow of designers mass-mailed press releases addressed to journalists into a publicly accessible form as fast as possible. Free from the formats and obligations of traditional media, Dezeen’s structures and logics emerged out of the protocols of electronic communication themselves: ordered by date, tagged, collated by a content management system.

Scrolling through we quickly become nauseous at the sensation of unrelenting glossy immediacy. We become dumb to the invention and imagination that designers exert. But as we gasp for air, drowning in its infinite shallowness, we should recognise that it is also a product of our collective desire. It is the will of the epoch expressed in an insanely huge slick of stuff. In this slick we find a perfect storm where design’s sense of individuality meets the flattened hierarchy of the digital, multiplied by the superfast churn of content.

Sick as it might make us, the endless spewing of design imagery and ideas down our screens has other effects on design culture. It liberates us from the traditional custodians of curator and editor so that the designer is freer (if they make it through Dezeen’s selection procedure) to talk unhindered directly to the world (for better or worse). Dezeen’s format, speed and volume also, simply through the ravenous nature of the beast, serve to break down traditional disciplinary boundaries – at least within its own terms. Students and graduates rub shoulders with the old and famous with far more regularity than in museums or magazines.

But at the same time we see criticism reduced to metrics of hits, likes and retweets. We see barely legible comments obsessing with old-fashioned, pre-digital (pre-Modern even) ideas of authenticity and originality when they aren’t just plain paranoid-aggressive. Just as it expands our vision of design, it simultaneously shrinks our own ability to understand. Our own conception of design mirrors the media through which we see it.

Dezeen and its digital cousins represent a new form of digital design culture, entities with total and unrelenting equivalence, a narrative with no top, no bottom, no start or end. It is post-curatorial and post-editorial. In other words, it’s a place where everything can happen but nothing ever will.

While it shares some of the native digital qualities of other networked cultures (Wikileaks to Fan/Fic to name but two) Dezeen, its imitators and its users have yet to develop an equivalently sophisticated version of digital design culture. Instead, within their space we see designers caricaturing the role of design, designing things that are familiarly design, talking like we imagine designers talking. We see objects and buildings that seem like characters of objects and buildings we have seen many times over, the kinds of things that fit the narratives of old media. We remain haunted by spectres of design past, unable to give up these rusting professional armatures.

Worse, even, as we have also jettisoned the powers of old media to give shape and meaning to the worlds that design produces. Having abandoned their abilities to develop narratives and direction for design culture we are left with the same image of design, the same boring heroisms, the same banal beauty, the same stale imagination spinning around and around. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a vision of design’s future, imagine a screen regurgitating images on a human face – forever.

Sam Jacob is a director of internationally acclaimed architecture practice FAT where he has been responsible for award winning projects in the UK and abroad that include cultural, retail, housing and commercial projects for clients including Selfridges, BBC and Igloo.

His work has been exhibited at major institutions such as the Venice Biennale, MAK and the V&A. He is design critic for Art Review, contributing editor for Icon, and contributes to many other publications including co-editing a recent issue of AD, a launch title for the Strelka Press alongside editing strangeharvest.com. Sam is Professor of Architecture at UIC and Director of the forthcoming Night School at the AA.

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of Photoshopped incontinence?” appeared first on Dezeen.