Designs mediate between requirements resulting from human
practical experiences and possibilities (Gibson defined them as
affordances) in nature and society. They embody expectations and
plans for change; and they need to interface between the given
and the desired or the expected. The language of design has an
implicit set of anticipations and a projected endurance.
Aesthetic structuring, culturally rooted and technologically
supported, affects the efficiency of designed items. The
explicit set of expectations is measured against this implicit
set of anticipations. It translates from the many languages of
human practical experiences to the language of design, and from
here to the ways and means of embodying design in a product,
event, message, material, or interaction.
It is interesting to consider the process of designing from as
many perspectives as possible. From the thumbnail sketch to the
many variations of a conceptual scheme, one eliminating the
other, many decisions are arrived at. Design resembles a natural
selection process: one solution eliminates the other, and so on
until a relatively appropriate design emerges. This is the
memetic scheme, successfully translated into design software
programs based on genetic algorithms. In the absence of rules,
such as those guiding literacy, and freed from dualistic
thinking (the clear-cut good vs. bad), the designer explores a
continuum of answers to questions that arise during the design
process. The fact that various solutions compete with each other
confers a certain drama on design. Its open-endedness projects a
sense of change. Its mediating nature explains much of its
engaging aspect. There is an obvious difference between the
design experience within a context of assuming identity between
the body and machines, and the new context of digital cloning of
the human being. Designs in the area of neurobionics, robotic
prosthetics, and even the cyber-body could not have emerged from
any other pragmatic context but the one on which the
civilization of illiteracy is established.
Still, if someone had to choose between the Greek Temple
typewriter of 1890 and today's word processor, thoughtlessly
designed and encased in cheap plastic, the choice would be
difficult. One is an object of distinct beauty, reflecting an
ideal we can no longer support. Its distinction made it
unavailable to many people who needed such an instrument. Behind
or inside the word processor, as behind any digital processing
machine, are standardized components. The entire machine is a
highly modular ensemble. One program is the archetype for all
the word processing that ever existed. The rest is bells and
whistles. Here is indeed the crux of the matter: The ability to
achieve maximum efficiency based on the recognition that raw
materials and energy mean nothing unless the creative mind,
applied to tasks relevant to human experiences of
self-constitution, makes something out of them.
In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seems
demonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain for
the environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced by
new machines. That people eventually become addicted to the
products of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designer
fashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At other
times, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize the
efficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting a
challenging sense of quality against the background of our
obsession with more at the lowest price. But it is not so much
the activity as the people who are the activity that make either
the criticism or glorification of design meaningful. This brings
up the identity of the designer in the civilization of
illiteracy.
Designers master certain parts of the vast realm of the visual.
Some are exquisite in visualizing language: type designers,
graphic artists, bookmakers; others, in realizing 3-dimensional
space either as product designers, architects, or engineers.
Some see design dynamically-clothes live the life of the wearer;
gardens change from season to season, year to year; toys are
played with; and animation is design with its own heart (anima).
The variety of design experiences is only marginally controlled
by design principles. There is integrity to design, consistence
and pertinence, and there are aesthetic qualities. But if anyone
would like to study design in its generality, the first lesson
would be that there is no alphabet or rule for correct design,
and no generally accepted criteria for evaluation. Literacy
operates from top (vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonetics are
given in advance) to bottom. Design operates the opposite way,
from the particular context to new answers, continuously adding
to a body of experience that seems inexhaustible.
People expect their environment to be designed (clothes, shoes,
furniture, jewelry, perfume, home interiors, games, landscape)
in order to harmonize with their own design. There are models,
just as in the design process, mainly celebrities, themselves
designed for public consumption. And there is the attempt to live
life as a continuum of designed events: birth, baptism,
communion, graduations (at different moments in the cycle of
designed education), engagement, marriage, anniversaries,
promotions, retirement, estate planning, funerals, estate
execution, and wars. As a designed practical experience
involving a variety of mediations, life can be very efficient,
but probably not rewarding (in terms of quality) at the same
time. The conclusion applies to the result of all design
activities-products, materials, events. They make possible new
levels of convenience, but they also remove some of the
challenges people face and through which human personality
emerges.
The relation between challenges-of satisfying needs or meeting
higher and higher expectations-and the emergence of personality
is quite intricate. Every practical experience expresses new
aspects of the individual. Personality integrates these aspects
over time and is projected, together with biological and cultural
characteristics, in the never-ending succession of encounters of
new situations, and consequently new people. The civilization of
illiteracy shifts focus from the exceptional to the average,
generating expectations affordable to everyone. The space of
choices thus opened is appropriate to the endless quest for
novelty, but not necessarily for the affirmation of the
extraordinary. In most cases, the designer disappears (including
his or her name) in the designed product, material, or event.
Nobody ever cared to know who designed the Walkman, computers,
earth stations, or new materials, or who designs designer jeans,
dresses, glasses, and sneakers, tour packages, and Olympic games.
No one even cares who designs Web sites, regardless of whether
they attract many interactions or turn out to be only ego trips.
Names are sold and applied on labels for their recognition value
alone. No one cares whether there is a real person behind the
name as long as the name trades well on the market in which the
very same bag, watch, sneakers, or frame for glasses, sells
under different identifiers.
This has to be seen in the broader picture of the general
disconnectedness among people. Very few care to know who their
neighbors or colleagues are, even less who the other people are
who namelessly participate in expected abundance or in
ecological self-destruction. Illiteracy indeed does away with
the opaqueness of literacy- based human relations. All the means
through which new practical experiences take place make each of
us subject to the transparency of illiteracy. The result is even
deeper integration of the individual in the shared databank of
information through which our profile of commercial democracy is
drawn. Design endlessly interprets information. Each time we
step out of the private sphere-to visit a doctor or lawyer, to
buy a pair of shoes, to build a house, to take a trip, to search
for information on the Internet-we become more and more
transparent, more and more part of the public domain. But
transparency, sometimes savage in competitive life (economy,
politics, intelligence), does not bring people closer. As we
celebrate new opportunities, we should not lose sight of what is
lost in the process.