BCNDesign

The Design History Foundation is a private institution that was established last year in Barcelona. It seeks to promote, support and disseminate the work of design historians in Spain and Latin America. Its aim is to help in the establishment and development of the History of Design through  research, postgraduate and training workshops, conferences and symposia, exhibitions and publications. One of the key aims of the Foundation is to enhance the visibility of the History of Design as an area of historical studies.

The DHF has worked closely with the recently launched Barcelona Disseny Hub, curating the poster exhibition Col.lecció del Gabinet de les Arts Gràfiques, and putting together a new study collection of over 1000 Spanish posters.

I believe Barcelona’s DHF will be a great platform to promote a better understanding of design and to showcase what design historical approaches can contribute to thinking through visual and material culture. Through the Board of Trustees, we’re establishing a range of institutional links with national museums, and the Graphic Arts exhibition currently on show at the Palau del Marquès de Llió (Montcada 12, Barcelona) is its first major public outcome.

Launched just under two weeks ago, the Designer’s Review of Books promises to be a nice place to hang around and browse the online shelves. The DRB was founded, is edited and written (mostly) by Andy Polaine, an interaction designer, journalist and lecturer, but it features guest reviewers as well for more specialist pieces. Here’s what Andy says about his project:

Although there are several good design websites that occasionally have book reviews, there didn’t seem to be a single place online where you could get constant updates and reviews of new (and sometimes old) design books.

The reviews are grouped under 2D, 3D, Interactive and Motion, and so far the 3D aspect is under-represented, although that will probably be addressed as more articles are posted.

There are still only a handful of reviews on the site, but they are for the most part quite detailed, giving a good overview of the books’ contents and with some welcome pics of interior spreads. While more descriptive than critical in tone, they provide a helpful indication of what the books are about and of their approach. So it’s not quite yet the design equivalent of the LRB, but a great initiative nonetheless. Keep reading.

Second Life architecture

I’ve just come across a fascinating article by Tyler Pace on the Design Philosophy Politics website: ‘Digital life identity crisis: tales of security and sustainability’.

While the issue of sustainability is a pressing one and is now solidly embedded in contemporary design thinking, it is still rare to find an article such as this one, which carries over the issues into what we are still calling the ‘virtual world’. Pace’s comments make it clear that we are using an incorrect, and misleading, terminology. There’s no such thing as a virtual world, there’s just the world. Here’s some food for thought:

Linden Labs, producers of the popular social virtual world Second Life, expressed their consumption problems in 2006.

“We’re running out of power for the square feet of rack space that we’ve got machines in. We can’t for example use [blade] servers right now because they would simply require more electricity than you could get for the floor space they occupy.”

Identity information in Second Life is more complex than a traditional web application as “residents” of Second Life own clothing, chairs, cars and pretty much anything else you can imagine. All of this accessory information becomes part of the identity maintained by the Second Life servers, thereby requiring vast amounts of electricity. Popular technology blogger Nicholar Carr calculated that Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as the average Brazilian citizen.

On a parallel tack, I’ve received a very interesting call for papers sent out by the online journal Design Philosophy Papers, on the need for design history to address sustainability as a historical and historiographical issue. Full details below.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Design History Futures – Sustaining What?

to be edited by Karin Jaschke, Paul Denison and Tara Andrews
in association with Anne-Marie Willis

SUMMARY:
Modern lifestyles and material cultures made possible by design are now being seen as so deeply implicated in unsustainability that a re-writing of design history seems inevitable.

Conversely, a revitalised, critical design history could play a major role in providing an intellectual framework for new, redirective design practices.

How does awareness of sustainability and unsustainability affect design history?
What does this mean for specific areas of research: histories of product design, architecture, fashion, graphics, material and visual cultures, etc.?
What part has design history itself played in the development of unsustainability?

Submit 200 word abstracts by 12 Dec 2008 to:
Anne-Marie Willis, Editor, Design Philosophy Papers  amwillis@teamdes.com.au

FULL TEXT:
Design history has evolved over recent decades through engagement with matters of concern like class, gender and the postcolonial. In turn, critical design histories have contributed to new ways of understanding the world around us. Today, the matter of concern is sustainability: an issue that is almost too large in its implications to be grasped outright. It presents a challenge that is new in scope and kind. Design history cannot remain unaffected by this.

Design historians are well aware of the role design has played in making the modern world. Yet the modern lifestyles and material cultures made possible by design are now being seen as so deeply implicated in unsustainability that on these grounds alone a re-writing of design history seems inevitable. Modes of practice and thought, social and economic contexts, and the ideological premises of past design practice need to be addressed anew.

At the same time, this raises the question of design history’s own disciplinary past, present, and future. Design histories have used and perpetuated ways of thinking that have fed directly into current, unsustainable design practice, including notions of progress, newness, and obsolescence, ‘iconic design’, and the star-designer or ‘starchitect’. Historians of design thus need to consider the implications of their value-systems.

Climate change, resource depletion, and pollution will lead to major changes in modern lifestyles in the near future. Design has a major ethical and professional stake in this transition and the direction it will take.

We propose that a revitalised, critical design history could play a major role in providing an intellectual framework for new, redirective design practices. Thus we ask the following questions, and invite papers that address them:

•       How does awareness of sustainability and unsustainability affect design history?

•       What insights could be gained by re-reading design’s past through perspectives of sustainability and unsustainability?

•       Could design history contribute to a more developed understanding of sustainability and unsustainability?

•       Are there past writers who have already done this? Is their work relevant to today?

•       Have we overlooked historical subjects that are of importance to the sustainability debate?

•       What part has design history itself played in the development of unsustainability?

•       Do we need radically new ways of thinking to understand the role that design has played in bringing about the present unsustainable state of the world?

•       What does this mean for specific areas of research: histories of product design, architecture, fashion, graphics, material and visual cultures, etc.?

•       Is there an ethical imperative for historians to reconsider their disciplinary approach with view to sustainability? Does this imperative undercut notions of impartiality?

•       Where are the blind-spots in design historiography that may hinder a real rethinking of design history?

•       What methods and approaches from other disciplines or traditions of thinking could offer ways of understanding our unsustainable past that might be relevant to the historical study of design?

SCHEDULE
Abstracts (200 words) due by: 12 Dec 2008
Select and invite full papers by: 19 Dec
First drafts of papers due by: 13 March  2009
Papers refereed by: 3 April
Final drafts due by: 24 April
Publication online by: 22 May

SUBMIT ABSTRACTS TO:
Anne-Marie Willis
Editor, Design Philosophy Papers
amwillis@teamdes.com.au
www.desphilosophy.com <http://www.desphilosophy.com>

The Barcelona City Council has recently announced that it will request the establishment of the .bcn domain for the city. Earlier this year,  the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)  voted to approve lifting restrictions on the classification of domain names, allowing for new customized Web addresses.

In 2006, ICANN approved the .cat domain, which was subsequently launched by the Catalan Regional Government (Generalitat de Catalunya) as a new domain for websites in the Catalan language. This domain therefore was not intended to represent a specific politically defined region or nation, but a cultural and linguistic group, and had therefore from the outset a strong ideological and national-linguistic component. As explained in the .cat domain charter:

The .cat TLD is intended to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet (the “Community”).

The Community consists of those who use the Catalan language for their online communications, and/or promote the different aspects of Catalan culture online, and/or want to specifically address their online communications to that Community.

The success of the .cat domain has encouraged numerous applications for other top level domains centered on creating an independent internet identity for linguistic and cultural communities.

Given the weight of local identity politics contained in the .cat domain, it is no surprise that the Generalitat has reacted angrily and is firmly opposed to Barcelona’s application to have its own domain. The Regional Government’s position is that .bcn will weaken the .cat domain, and will strengthen Barcelona’s approach to presenting itself as a ‘city-state’ with the rest of Catalunya as ‘part of the Barcelona metropolitan area’, rather than as being the capital of the Catalan nation.

In the words of Jordi Bosch, the Generalitat’s Secretary of Telecommunications and Information Society:

Barcelona perdrà l’oportunitat d’exercir com a capital del país i optarà de nou pel paper de ciutat estat que no beneficia el conjunt de Catalunya [...] i es donarà un concepte erroni de la resta de Catalunya com a àrea metropolitana de Barcelona.

The Generalitat has further accused the City Council of trying to carry out a branding and marketing operation at the expense of Catalan national identity.

And so it goes.

Instances of the word 'diseño' in La Vanguardia, 1881-2008

Barcelona’s major broadsheet newspaper, La Vanguardia, has opened up its archives (Hemeroteca) and now offers free online access. The full content ranges from 1881 onwards, can be searched by keyword, topic or date and downloaded as .pdf files.

As an interesting feature to note, the results interface offers a detailed interactive visual timeline of the number of occurences of the search word throughout La Vanguardia’s archives. A search for ‘diseño’ (design), for instance, reveals a striking development in the use of the word.

Its first noticeable appearances coincide with the 1920s / 1930s and the rise of Spanish modernism, and diseappear by 1936, at the start of the Civil War. The 1950s see a very slow, small but steady return of the word, whit its use growing noticeably from the mid 1960s. Between 1976, the start of the Spanish political transition, and 1989, the surge in the appearance of ‘design’ in the newspaper is extraordinary, from 1,194 instances in 1976, to 4,670 in 1989. After a short trough, usage peaks by the late 1990s, with 5,597 appearances in 1999.  Perhaps most surprisingly, there is a very sharp drop from 2000, and current levels of usage in 2008 are only equivalent to those of 1986, the height of the Barcelona design boom.

As I’ve suggested in La Barcelona del diseño, design and the city had a special relationship between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, which seems to have now lost some of its historical relevance.

And here is some eye candy from the archives:

Advertisement for clothes and underwear manufactured with synthetic fibers. May 1952.

Advertisement for Muebles Malda, one of Barcelona's furniture retailers. June 1966.

'We can't all use the same furniture'. Advertisement for Muebles La Favorita, one of Barcelona's furniture retailers. October 1973.

The FAD Industrial Design Delta Prizes of 1976. Images of designs by Miguel Mila, Jose Bonet and Studio Per.

January 1977. Barcelona Design Centre (BCD) moves to larger premises.

Colour supplement, July 1992: ‘The Games of the imagination. The Olympic project becomes the inspiration for the design of hundreds of objects’. In the main picture, Andre Ricard, designer of the olympic torch.

Piers Fawkes of PSFK, a global trends and innovation company with a strong online presence, interviewed me recently about Spanish design and my book La Barcelona del diseño. You can read it here.

…or, after watching the video above, one might be tempted to swap famous titles and go for ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Barcelona’.

The video is part of an online campaign for the promotion of the book Odio Barcelona (‘I Hate Barcelona’), published by Editorial Melusina. It’s a compilation of pieces by twelve Barcelona-based authors, whose essays address aspects of the city that they dislike, in most cases related to the housing boom speculation and the negative effect of commercial interests on the fabric and spirit of the city, as well as to the growing pressure of Catalan nationalism on everyday life and urban politics.

Authors include Javier Calvo, Agustín Fernández Mallo, Philipp Engel, Robert-Juan Cantavella, Hernán Migoya, Llúcia Ramis, Matías Néspolo, Carol Paris, Oscar Gual, Lucía Lijtmaer, Javier Blánquez and Efrén Álvarez.

There can be no doubt that the extended honeymoon of the Barcelonese with their city is long over, a disenchantment that was probably sealed in the collective urban mind by José Luis Guerín’s 2001 film En Construcción, the understated but moving documentary of the construction of a new building in the inner-city neighbourhood of El Raval.

Another recent addition to the chorus of critical voices is Manuel Delgado’s book La ciudad mentirosa. Fraude y miseria del modelo Barcelona (‘The Liar City. Fraud and Misery of the Barcelona Model’), published by Catarata in 2007. This is an impassioned rant, described by the author as the cry from the heart of a disabused lover. Although the author is an academic at Barcelona University, the work is journalistic in tone (but with useful bibliography in the footnotes). It offers a fairly generic serving of urban studies and public space theories as background to a virulent critique of the evolution and implementation of the Barcelona model of urban regeneration, particularly the wholesale commercialisation of the city both as a ‘brand’ and as a building site.

EXIT, Quarterly Magazine on Image and Culture, published its latest issue with the monographic topic ‘Machines’.

#31 MACHINES
(August, September, October – 2008)
Bilingual edition: texts in English and Spanish

Rosa Olivares, director and editor of EXIT, reflects in her editorial Sensitive Machines, on the cinematographic iconography of the robot and on how the machine not only symbolises man’s fears, but also his desire for perfection. Francisco Javier San Martín, lecturer of History and Theory of Art at the Universidad del País Vasco, traces the history of the way in which the avant-garde appropriated the machine as a metaphor for modernity in his article The Machine and its Shadow. Miles Orvell, Professor of English Literature at Temple University and expert on the history of photography, examines the present day photographic representation of machines. This issue concludes with an essay by Elio Grazioli, Professor of History and Theory of Photography at the Università di Bergamo, which takes Andy Warhol’s famous statement “I want to be a machine” as a starting point from which to investigate the relationship contemporary photographers have with the photographic machine and the concept of automation which can be associated with it.

This issue also includes an extensive interview by Louise Neri, current director of Gagosian Gallery and previously editor of Parkett, with Hiroshi Sugimoto on his Conceptual Forms series, dedicated to teaching models of mathematical formulae and models which recreate complex mechanisms, a series which Thomas Kellein, director of the Bielefeld Kunsthalle, also writes about. Portfolio sections are dedicated to the work of Peter Fraser and Stéphane Couturier and include texts written by the artists themselves.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since the heady days of Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Lately, the general trend in cutting-edge consumer culture business thinking has been that the new generations of consumers are a savvy bunch, tricky to reach and brainwash, highly articulate in the art of navigating safely the stormy seas of corporate branding without getting their gear wet.

Rob Walker begs to differ. He has been writing the ‘Consumed’ column for the New York Times magazine for the last few years, a clever and perceptive take on 21st century consumer culture. His work has been described as a mixture of cultural anthropology and business journalism. His latest book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy And Who We Are, explores the industry’s response to try and reach the post-No Logo crowd, a subtler, more insidious technique that Walker calls ‘Murketing’: murky marketing. So if you’d like to get updated on what’s been going on since viral marketing was the latest thing (1997!), this is probably worth reading. In any case, Walker’s book is set to become the latest pop-psychology business bestseller – we’re so beyond The Tipping Point.

You can read the Introduction here, courtesy of Random House.

Having lived and worked in London for almost a decade and a half, I’m now moving my operational base to my hometown of Barcelona, from which I will shuttle regularly to Berlin and London to take care of business and stuff.  I’m excited and looking forward to re-discovering my city, re-engaging with it both personally and professionally. I must also confess to a certain degree of trepidation – one can never really ‘come back’. The Barcelona I left behind is gone for good. I’ve kept track of things and people while I’ve been living in the UK, and writing a book on design in Barcelona has certainly helped, but I’m sure there are many surprises waiting for me here. At least, I hope there are.

There seems to be a link between ways of thinking and geographical locations, something curiously unrelated to cultural backgrounds or professional communities or even national territories. Over the years, I’ve noticed a slight shift in my thought processes whenever I travelled back and forth between London and Barcelona. A re-accomodation of sorts, to my immediate human environment of course, but also to the different weather patterns, light changes, sounds and urban landscapes. This blog is meant to be a content provider, but it’s also a personal experiment – a log-book of sorts, charting my passage back ‘home’.

BCND then, is a blog vaguely related to my book La Barcelona del diseño, recently published by Santa & Cole to great critical acclaim (please excuse the self-publicity, but if not here, where? If not now, when?).

It’s an open forum for discussion, debates and any other contribution around the city of Barcelona and its links to design, both now and in the relatively recent past.

Beyond Barcelona itself, this blog is open to thoughts, news and conversations about design in general, urban culture, architecture, images and things.

A generous agenda, as you can see.