20th century AD

Design is inseparable from its age. But its role may also be to break away from the spirit of the age and herald a new era.

Two hundred years ago, the seemingly static pre-industrial world began to stir. Slowly at first, and then with growing speed, it embarked on an unstoppable quest for novelty. Right from the start, industrial design was one of the main driving forces behind this process of acceleration, for reasons that were both ethical (the new versus the old in the name of progress) and mercantile (the new replacing the old in the name of commerce). Design was both a product and a component of its time. How do things stand today?

It is often said that acceleration and transience are the defining features of our age. But today we wonder where all this speed is taking us. Perhaps design should swim against the tide and contribute to this questioning. Perhaps it should promote profundity and duration in what seems to be an increasingly superficial and constantly changing world. In other words, perhaps design should emphasize the "solid side" of a changing world.

Language pollution

Freed from its inertia, matter lends itself to unlimited transformation. The physical world no longer seems to be a solid vehicle for permanent meanings, but a constantly changing fluid. At the same time, progress in information technology and communications opens up a new dimension of human experience that is liberated not only from matter, but from the constraints of space and time. Even the certainties of memory are called into question by the greater possibilities of "fiction", of juggling with information and images to create a potentially infinite variety of "virtually real" pasts, presents and futures.

These developments are both fascinating and disturbing. We cannot yet fully gauge their human and social implications. The only thing we can really be sure of is that the changes under way are of far-reaching importance. New cultural instruments must be created to confront a phenomenon whose consequences will be mainly negative unless it is kept under control: We can already see this today. What ought to be communication, and therefore exchange, has led to a new form of isolation, and what ought to be information has become no more than background noise. We discover that words and images are products that are "consumed" and produce rubbish that eventually pollutes our language.

But matter that seemed to have dissolved in the ever-changing flow of information reappears elsewhere in our experience. The rubbish accumulated by our societies is matter that has again become dense and inert, trapped in its own heaviness and duration. It is used matter, stripped of its original meaning, that invades our space and our time as tangible evidence of the irreducible physicality of our environment. We discover that the fluid world of information and "fiction" needs powerful stage machinery in order to function, that all this machinery consumes and is consumed, and that it all forms a huge entropic system which uses resources and creates waste.

Nobody today would deny this obvious fact. We talk anxiously about "the environment problem", and ask ourselves questions about how to promote "sustainability", in other words about how to put an end to the war that the human race has more or less unwittingly declared on its environment. We cast around for solutions. Some turn to an idealized past that will never return; others look just as naively to an increasingly technological and dematerialized future. As we have just seen, in the current economic and cultural context, dematerialization is more than offset by the increase in consumer goods. The solution to the problem - the creation of a more harmonious relationship between humans and their environment - is not and cannot be purely technical.

And so we move between two contrasting worlds: a virtual world without substance or history, and an environment in which cumbersome and durable rubbish is accumulating.

Living matter

Of course it is very tempting to turn away from the problems of the environment and take refuge in the virtual world. But to do so is to forget that between the immaterial world of information and the world of "dead matter", or rubbish, there is a world of bodies, things and images which change in ways and at a pace determined by our innermost nature as human beings - biological beings who live in an ecosystem, and cultural beings who constantly try to make sense of things. And this world of matter which is "living" in both a biological and a semiotic sense is a world which needs permanence as well as change, repetition as well as novelty, and solidity as well as fluidity.

The world of living matter consists of change and permanence. It could be thought of as a fluid with a solid component. Today we should fix our attention on the solid component. It is being eroded by change, but it remains the basis of our search for meaning and by its very nature it curbs consumption and reduces waste (both physical and semiotic). It is here that we shall find the answer to the basic questions concerning our cultural future (the construction of meaning) and our existential future (the preservation of living conditions).

Permanence in change

In the past, the idea of solidity was based on the permanence of things, on a duration of forms and relationships which seemed intrinsic to them (the inertia of matter and social conventions). Today that solid world, which was the basis of our models for interpreting reality, has ceased to exist.

It has been superseded by a fluid world, in which the permanence we so much need can no longer be taken for granted but must be acquired by a deliberate act of the will. "Solidity", when it exists, is the result of a project.

Some may feel that there is not much point in seeking solidity in a world fascinated by promises of immateriality. For myself I prefer to think that the best way to make sense of things is to rediscover and revalue their core of solidity. In doing this we should reject nostalgia and naivety, and remember that the solid world of the past can now be no more than a memory. The kind of solidity (of products, relationships, ideas) that we can seek today is that of forms stabilized in a context of perpetual change.

Since this solidity is no longer an intrinsic quality of things, it must be the result of a deliberate endeavour to define what must endure so that everything else can change without losing meaning and without destroying the planet. If it takes that course, design will belong to its time, and the meaning it acquires will help to shape the future.

COPYRIGHT 1996 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group