R3C3

In its efforts to be “safe rather than sorry,” precaution becomes myopic. It tends to maximize only one value: safety. Safety trumps innovation. The safest thing to do is to perfect what works and never try anything that could fail, because failure is inherently unsafe. An innovative medical procedure will not be as safe as the proven standard. Innovation is not prudent. Yet because precaution privileges only safety, it not only diminishes other values but also actually reduces safety.

Ubiquitous systems lend themselves easily to—indeed, redefine—surveillance. However discrete they may be at their design and inception, their interface with each other implies a domain of action that extends from the very contours of the human body outward to whatever arbitrarily large civic space can be equipped with the necessary sensors and effectors. In short, there is no current technology with greater potential to support authoritarian and totalitarian social engineering, and the limitation otherwise of choice.

Thomas Maldonado … saw the design process as a system embodying both scientific-based and intuitive-based thinking. He considered that while design is indeed an art, the designer is not solely an artist. Aesthetic considerations were no longer the primary conceptual basis of design. The professional designer would be an “integrator” with responsibility for integrating a large number of specialties in addition to aesthetics, mostly the diverse requirements of materials, manufacturing and context of product use, as well as considerations of usability, identity and marketing.

Based on the discrepancies between Bill’s approach and that of other teachers, including the systems principles of Tomas Maldonado, the school shifted its ideology to a more methodological and structured field of study, but one that also strongly embraced aesthetics as a primary factor. This resulted in an academic program with a common basic course and an introduction to consolidated theoretical disciplines. The new design teaching approach became known as the “Ulm Model” which significantly influenced worldwide design education, especially industrial design, as the HfG reputation spread and many HfG graduates established Ulm-influenced education programs around the globe.

Mathews argues that Chungking Mansions provides a fascinating insight into “low-end” globalization: not the slick operations of multi-national corporations, but traders schlepping goods around the world in suitcases. Most come from sub-Saharan Africa, tempted here by the cheap products made in mainland China and the fact that Hong Kong has a largely open border, admitting asylum seekers and merchants alike without too much fuss. Mobile phones are what traders are mostly looking for. Mathews estimates that at least 20% of the mobile phones now in use in sub-Saharan Africa have passed through Chungking Mansions. Some 19 million phones are sold here each year, including China-made branded and unbranded phones, Chinese knock-offs (with names such as “Sory-Ericssen” or “Nokla”), illegal copy phones and used ones returned from Europe. One trader from Tanzania regularly carries home 700 phones in his luggage, making US$500 profit per trip. These African traders are “the Marco Polos of developing-world globalisation”.

I think the idea of a star developer having his or her name on the box is just subscribing to the same floundering cultural models that the Platform Holders and Publishers have necessarily bought into and staked their futures on. It’s about upholding and participating in the culture of brand, personality and celebrity that is the central driver of the author-centric broadcast culture we’re ultimately in the process of tearing down whether we realize it or not. In some ways, the very idea of the ‘name on the box’, or ‘getting top billing’ is emblematic of what I am calling broadcast culture. An Artist has something to say, He creates a work of Art with a Message, He puts His Name on it and we all consume it. That’s what a painting and a poem and a novel and a play and a film and an album are. But that’s not what a game is.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

The ink was hardly dry on the Citizens United decision when the Chamber of Commerce organized a covertly funded front and rained cash into the 2010 campaigns. According to the Sunlight Foundation, corporate front groups spent
$126 million in the fall of 2010 while hiding the identities of the donors. Another corporate cover group—the American Action Network—spent more than $26 million of undisclosed corporate money in just six Senate races and twenty-six House elections. And Karl Rove’s groups, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, seized on Citizens United to raise and spend at least $38 million, which NBC News said came from “a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls”—all determined to water down financial reforms that might prevent another collapse of the financial system.

In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters—even the fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world—see numerous apocalyptic films -, but not end of capitalism.

Engineers are far more important than managers at Apple — and designers are at the top of the hierarchy. Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware.