Design Ex Machina
This is my BA Thesis at PUC-Rio, defended on December 2006. I cannot say this project started just one year before that (which was my cronogram), because some of the main ideas presented were maturing since the first time I read Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition on the beginning of college, three and a half years before I officially started to write it. I remember that in 2002 I was deeply touched by Arendt's thoughts about the nature of political activity, its importance for the understanding of our condition, and its particular role in our way to be in the world. At that time, it was such a shock that it was hard for me to even talk about it. It took me more than three years before I could start articulating how the author’s peculiar concept of action could contribute to the design theory. Then I started my theoretical project on the beginning of 2006.
It was necessary not only to present Arendt's concept of action, but to also to confront it with some of the traditional ideas in design. Considering that the work speculates about the political nature of design – political in a strict way, ie design as arendtian action – I needed not only to critically introduce Arendt's action (because she is not specifically worried about the design or art problem), but also to trace a panorama of some main ideas in design, such as pragmatism, modernism and industrialism.
The title is a reference to a movement in the ancient Greek theatre, in which a god (an statue of it) would appear in scene, suspended by a crane, to change the plot in favor of the protagonism. This miraculous change is responsible for the term deus ex machina, meaning literally 'god from the machine'. For the one who carefully reads the text, the title may sound ambiguous, for the main idea of design activity as political (in a broader sense) would be a massive change in the way we see ourselves as producers (also in broader sense), rearranging some of our discussions about our role in the production world. But also could be that those same producers become the 'machines', in case we fail to perceive another way out of the designer responsibility discussion, which always leaves us in the same subordinated position in relation to the major decisions of the modern industrial world, with the same unanswerable question: “the designer has or has not the responsibility for the consequences of his projects, considering that he not always decides about its relevance and realization?”
This question is not irrelevant, but it remains unanswerable because, first of all, we cannot talk about responsibility (or consequence) before investigating the role of the designed forms' effects in the world, and the importance of these effects for the sense of design as a self-justified activity. The designer's responsability discussion also fails to tell us what is exactly a failure without a preconceived teleological idea about what is worth producing, if we limit ourselves to a pragmatic point of view, which is, by the way, insufficient to answer that other question that lies implicit in the first one, that fundamental question, that with time becomes irresistible: “Why are we doing what we are doing?” This indicates us another way to approach the design problem, taking in account our huge and permanent goal to comprehend that fundamental question.
The text was set in my own recent typeface at that time, Inocência. By the moment I decided to use it, I had only the regular weight, and, knowing the theorical nature of the text, I needed to have at least the italic too. So for the last three or four months I started the rush to finish and revise the text, to refine the regular, to design the Inocência Italic and to design the book. I printed twenty copies, and my friend João Doria binded them.
Abstract
The present study discusses the relevance of usual considerations about project activity under the light of the action theory of the german thinker Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). Since it is not its aim to conclude about motivational aspects on design, this work offers some understanding about the contributions of the arendtian political theory to design criticism and practice. Therefore, the main objective is to perceive the immediate implications, impossibilities, boundaries and conditions of a supposed political aspect of projecting, challenged by the thought of authors like Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Aristotle, Herbert Simon and Walter Gropius among others.
March—December 2006 @ PUC-Rio Graduation
170 × 272mm
80pp in Portuguese
typefaces: Inocência regular & italic
Conqueror Connoisseur Neutral 110g/m²; cover in Supremo Duo Design 300g/m²
OKI laser printer
20 copies
The text set in Inocência
contents