Ben's thoughts behind/before his blunt questions

1) Who Gets It and Who Wants It?..
The global network and network within cities is great for those who see a newly connected universe, but surely it is a chimera of fairness for others, where the lack of parity in resources becomes blatantly obvious.Who gets What design, and anyway does the Who necessarily want the What? Might there be a wealth of design in poverty & a poverty of design in wealth?

As designers, how do you make sense (and provide for) gross imbalance of resources & stuff across the globe? Or, to put it another way: what happened to ethics?
..And What are People Going to Do All Day?
Edmund Scarry: What Do People Do All Day? If we are not tasked with constantly making things: what are humans going to do? How do we design for that?

We engage in off-site global slavery for an excess of First World consumer stuff that nobody really wants. Treaties are made to cultural prevent upsets: is it time to make a treaty to stop off-loading beyond-thrift-store, baled-up, Junk-for-Jesus, used-clothing around the world? (NYTimes You-Tube: The Kenya Riots, Feb 14th 2008: Why is everyone is wearing cast-off corporate picnic tee shirts?

2) Urban/Rural Dichotomies
The Favela Syndrome: designing outside the system: hacking state organized urbanism & consumer culture: how do the two systems of being coexist? When people speak of 50% of the world’s population living in cities, what about the other 50% ? Why is so much design energy given to world cities and so little on the countryside, further exacerbating the schism between urban & rural states of being. How do we deal with design imperialism in the face of multiple ways of doing things by others?

Starved of happenstance and the incidental (which rural states take for granted) the urban dweller turns to the design & manufacture of the visceral to make up for the loss. Are we suffering from bipolar urbo-rural mood swing disease?

3) The 6th Sense
Buckminster Fuller No More Second Hand God. Page v.
Man is born with an extraordinary inventory of universal phenomena. Most of the inventory is invisible, operating either infra or ultra to our sense apprehending….We are given facilities to permit and induce our progressively greater apprehension and comprehension of the universal phenomena.

Urbanistas have a reputation for being cosmologically insentient. How do we explore, calibrate, expose, and design for qualities that are traditionally invisible, such as body/mind energies leaking from the pineal-eye? What are the perameters of the intangible? How do we design for more than the presence of a product and, what is the white space, that others do not explore, that surrounds ‘Design without Objects’ or ‘A World without Objects’?

What happened to the notion of being reflective? The hyper-cycle of consuming stuff could prompt its rejection, which in turn leads to a resurgent interest in the ineffable: is this the Ghost Dance revisited? How does the ineffable engage with the material, a designed sublime, where constructs of ‘no-thingness’ sit content?

How do we design for the need for the visceral and need for the ethereal/not being tied down at one and the same time? what happens to the moon & month, the moonstral cycles of being?


4) Design Doctrine..
‘Humans were given the mandate to use the world as they see fit’: has this theologically driven pitch run its course? What is being done in design to accept and follow the contribution of other living creatures, acknowledging that animals, plants, geothermal and weather systems all have equal pull? Has the anthro-centric vision of the world, as humanity’s sandbox, become untenable? What did the Biomorphic Design agenda leave out? Put another way: does Mother Nature really care an iota what we do?
..Suburbo-Smalltown-Christocentric Design
Why is there an absolute negation of what mainstream Christocentric suburbia/exurbia/small-town-folks are interested in?: Why has haute-design chosen to side-step red-state evangelical culture. (Christian-radio, Effingham Illinois 2/14/08: Program discrediting democrat presidency: Barak Hussein Obama (“Barak: name given to the donkey that Mohommad rode on the night-flight from Jerusalem to Heaven what he met the former prophets. Obama educated in madrassa as a schoolboy. Despite his conversion from Islam to Christianity, how can we be sure about the Muslim within?”)

5) Positivist Materialism..
What gets left out when engaging positivistic design? Is change the only way that a designer can operate? Where to go from happy-happy joy-joy. What does hyper-mutating design do with the jingle Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without!? Is constantly morphing change really a delaying tactic for what may well be Design on Credit? [How do we engage concepts such as the repetition of a built structure like the Ise Shrine, where change is measured by what happens in the repetition of its creation and what happens to the structure over time as it engages the elements?]

..& Junk-bonding Metaphor
Metaphor: the implication of something without its material presence. The positivism of design has sidestepped the telling of stories, an oral tradition, neither written or built. The great eBay shuffle: redistributing manufactured goods to trigger memories/projections of desire, reminiscence or quiet that they imply. Network intrigue versus cultural richess, the quality of lingering, wondering, wandering.
6) Contradiction
What happens to design at points of contradiction, uncertainty and global tensions? Designing a solution for all aspects feeds contradiction, for it can deny some and embrace others simultaneously. How is the symbiosis between warfare & peacefare (to build and to destroy at the same time) different from nature’s symbiosis?
How is the happy-happy joy-joy carnival of design sensibility reconciled against a backdrop of an excluded underclass, who live out what the Have’s term: ‘Suffering”? How do we deal with the swing between optimism and pessimism, the realm between, is it possible to design for an interstitial state?