Culture by Design

This weblog traces graduate students’ discussions preceding Tuesday evening lectures at Parsons, The New School for Design, for the course Global Issues in Design and Visuality in the 21st Century: Culture. As an introduction, Professors Susan Yelavich and Clive Dilnot illustrate the contingent, emerging and traditional meanings ascribed to “culture”, highlighting how they may pertain to design history and theory. In part a result of increased globalization, and following paradigmatic shifts in anthropology and sociology discourses, culture is more often understood today as a plural, multiplying and immaterial moment (as opposed to a singular, static and objective category). While hierarchical notions of culture persist – we might implicitly regard an elaborate table setting as one that is more “cultured” than one that is disposable – since the second world war design scholars have increasingly shifted focus toward more generally pervasive attributes of culture, as they may be accessed through examination of the generative relationships between beings and constructed environments.

As such, cultures of mass consumption are as viable for critique as are the trappings of high culture. Diller and Scofidio’s Tully hall, an anonymous park stage in Minrovia, and Girard’s Opera, each create (and are created by) culture. As Yelavich shows, unpacking the notion of culture leads us to series of contemporary issues that may be significantly addressed through design, including sustainability and ethics. As historians, curators, critics and writers, we will determine (and reflect on) how the stuff of the world may (or may not) bring on cultures that are just, enduring and beautiful.

Literary theorist Terry Eagleton humorously suggests we may now be faced with an Idea of Culture (2000) expanded beyond purpose: cultural studies students today write on anything from the politics of pubic hair, to the dynamics of the paper clip. While we remain grateful for the freedoms provided by our mentors who challenged what were then-narrowly defined gender, class and ethnic boundaries of dominant culture, Eagleton warns that neither should we limit our shared experiences to those of common cash. The crisis in culture, he says, occurs when our only connections are commodified. Where regards design, scholars interrogate perceived needs and existing systems to assess whether the stuff that surrounds us is determined purely by market demands, or if it seeks to include environmental and social justice requirements.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1999) offers three categories helpful to discussions of the concept of culture: the hierarchical, differential and generic. As alluded to above, a hierarchical concept of culture is one that is acquired and value-saturated, so that having “culture” is like having a badge. Alternately, a differential understanding of culture accepts that there are a variety of ways to live. Culture(s) in this paradigm (the plural form here is significant) are co-extant and comparable. Persistent within the differential concept of culture however, is the anticipated conflict between living and artificial realms. So, Bauman suggests, we better theorize a generic understanding of culture — one that appreciates that relationships engaging people and places with plants, animals and larger eco-political systems are both actual and performative.

The capacities of design are thus determined by a range of concerns exceeding market trends. Because our everyday existence is no longer determined by nature, design must be understood broadly, as a living negotiation between the objective and subjective if our ultimately artificial world is to be ethically grounded. For example, a fancy pair of “designer” jeans is not the sum of its parts, but an active, highly politicized agent influencing (and influenced by) vast global networks. Dilnot (2005) writes”…in artifice we have no choice but to focus our intellectual efforts on how things are disposed, configured, in a word designed, to act – and on the consequences and implications of their so acting. And the context for this focus is not technical, not a reference merely to the thing … but the question of being in relation to or better through, artifice. That being is, or better, being today becomes, only in relation to the horizon provided by artifice, means that being today cannot be thought about except in relation to artifice: we are, as we are and as we might be, through our standing to and our relations with the artificial” (49).

Bauman, Zygmunt, Culture as Praxis, London: Sage, 1999.
Dilnot, Clive, “Ethics? Design?” The Archeworks Papers, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2005): 15-53.
Eagleton, Terry, The Idea of Culture, London: Blackwell, 2000.