Design by anyone
In Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Andersson’s epic film on porn star Dirk Diggler’s rise and fall, there is a memorable scene that is a tribute to the C-60 cassette. Wearing only his underwear and a silk robe, a cocaine dealer, played by the esteemed Alfred Molina, praises the advantages of a
cassette tape over the vinyl record, which was still dominant at the beginning of the 1980s. The C-60 is what my generation called a mix tape. And it is precisely the possibility to make your own mix that was the focus of that drug-fueled anthem. Mix tapes gave this guy the possibility to decide which of his favourite artists he wanted to hear and above all, the order he thought was optimal. Does this sound familiar? We have grown accustomed to buying a song, putting the player on random, and restlessly pushing next after the first two seconds thanks to services like Spotify and iTunes.
All of this was next to impossible during the reign of the LP record. Did you get up off the sofa, lift up the pick up arm to fast forward to another, better song? No, you didn’t. You listened to them in the order that someone had likely spent a great deal of thought and sleepless nights working on.
Have technological developments made music consumption more democratic? Yeah, maybe. At least if by democratic you mean we now control what we listen to, when we listen to it, and most importantly, the order of the hits that wash over us. I won’t touch upon the extent to which freedom of choice has or hasn’t made us happier, more harmonious individuals, but I think of that movie scene and Molina’s pathos-filled speech on behalf of the mix tape whenever I hear someone utter the phrase “democratic design”.
Up until now, democratic design, apart from being an Ikea slogan, has often been the same as accessible design. Not in the sense that it is easy to acquire, but that it can lead to increased accessibility. Thanks to pioneers like Ergonomidesign and Össur, this is a field in which the
Nordic region has excelled. We have every reason to be proud. Even if accessibility can, and should, be a part of a democracy, isn’t it governance by the people that we mean when we talk about democracy?
On this front, we have a long way to go. But we should naturally be able to see consumer power as a type of governance by the people, and consumer power is starting to increase in the design world.
In this issue of Form, we trace the development of 3D printing technology. And if it goes as far as designers like Alexander Lervik predict, digital files and accessible printers that can produce finished furniture will shift the power over the means of production to the consumers. The challenge
for the entire design industry in such a future scenario will be to avoid the situation the music industry finds itself in – that consumers suddenly become criminals due to illegal file sharing.
When Mario Carpo investigates whether or not we stand before a paradigm shift due to the development of digital technology in architecture in his book The Alphabet and the Algorithm, he takes a giant step backwards. During the Renaissance, Alberti revolutionised the view of the architect as the originator of a building’s design rather than the building itself. The design was in the
drawings and the goal was to make them as identical as possible so as to stay true to the originator’s intentions. In short, according to Carpo, the digital revolution means that we are moving from the production of identical copies to an era of participation and individual adaption. Designers will no longer have total control, and this is a development that might be terrifying for designers and architects. What happens to the profession when technology allows anyone to create objects or buildings? You can either be afraid of the future, or look at it like this: pen and paper have been available for generations, but we still have professional writers. The most important factor isn’t the
technology, but rather how it’s used.