Philip Brophy’s Body Malleable interactive animation has been exhibiting across Australia since 2004, with its opening at ACMI as part of the Australian Culture Now exhibition.

Now headed for Japan’s National Museum Of Art, Osaka as part of an exhibition opening in October called Skin of/ in Contemporary Art, some tweaks and modifications were sought. My initial involvement in the Body Malleable piece was in the redesigning and construction of the mechanism for user interaction, affectionately known as the “pod” (for more on that work scroll down almost to the bottom of this link).

This time around and as part of its maintenance and refurbishment I redesigned and rebuilt the tactile elements of the pod, namely the external doughnut shaped opening and the internal tactile cylindrical channel.

After some experimentation the internal tactile cylinder is now made up of 60 silicone gel-fingers. Fastening the silicone gel was like trying to squeeze a bar of soap, so a floating outer concentric cylinder was used to bind the fingers in place over a holster.

CAD modeling created a two-part gravity-pour ‘Objet’ master mould. Anyway, scroll through the pictures above to get a better idea. Below is where the piece is going now.

Sustainability (or the philosophy of) emanates ideas with implications that strike at the contemporary foundations of our daily existence. In time, sustainability theory (or some derivation, as today it comes conjoined to almost anything no matter how “unsustainable”) will transform the way we live. However, it will not do this in its own right. Rather, transformation will occur through the means and constructs that already exist and that are imbued with powerful agency for change, such as industrial design.

Local and global issues of unsustainability such as ‘climate change’ have become common knowledge, regardless of ongoing polemics to the degree of their human root cause. While their severity compounds, so the prospect of a prosperous future and conditions of life steadily alter. Humanity’s troubles may result in our inability to exist in continuum, to sustain the legacy of life. We find ourselves paradoxically grappling in a challenging and complex position of trying to save ourselves from ourselves through a magnitude of multi-layered political, economic, and social agendas, ever while limits are met by boundaries being further stretched.

There is no unified understanding let alone an undisputed written theory of sustainability. Simply put, sustainability is the ‘ability to sustain’, but this too does not tell us why, how or what we need to sustain. Therefore, sustainability is an idea that constantly bares elaboration, which in turn necessitates that we make judgements based on ethical values. It is complex philosophically to deal with how and why we should now manage our ecology because of our ‘current situation’ into ways that both determine and maintain us through a quality of existence worth sustaining and of reciprocating sustenance. The truth is life as we know it (or knew it) is no longer sustainable. It takes a long-term view of humanity over time to begin to comprehend unsustainability and to understand how necessarily implicated we, and our lifestyles, have become.

An unquantifiable portion of industrial design outcomes, though they may sustain or positively add to some aspect of our lives, simultaneously contribute to our unsustainability in some (other) way. Many of the design icons of the last century (e.g. from the fields of domestic appliances, personal transportation and connectivity, to office and business techno-eccentricities) simultaneously constitute energy and resource depletion, multiple forms of pollution, and end up as ‘post consumer waste’. The designed objects, processes, services, and systems within industry, business, transport, and the ever-sprawling domestic domain, design our behaviours, attitudes and values. Today the emerging link between industrial design and our unsustainability has established that we acknowledge that the two play determining roles in each other. They have deep links; unsustainability is designed. It may not be believable nor helpful to suggest that during the emergence of the industrial design profession, the practice itself could have been designed to ‘design for sustainability’. Historically, design outcomes that improved our lives via simple offerings of convenience, saved time and labour, without any awareness of broader relations over time designed us into contradiction.

As mentioned, industrial design and sustainability are deeply interrelated, but the question is in what way should they be now and in the future? Sustainability is currently creating gaps in industrial design practice. Industrial design and versions of sustainability are pushed together in many different ways and forms. However, the success of such outcomes in terms of true sustainability can falter due to assumptions made about the concept. So, how should this type of thinking alter design practice? Contemporary designers are grappling to exact practical ways of addressing unsustainability, dealing with the dichotomy that our dependent existence is made both better and worse by design outcomes. The design of industrial design is changing.

Kurt Vonnegut died this year. Below are a few quotes lifted from Slaughterhouse-5. The first couple strike me as great comments on relationality and time:

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. - p. 53

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. -p. 19

Finally, a prayer for the administering of change:

… GRANT ME
THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,
COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,
AND WISDOM ALWAYS
TO TELL THE
DIFFERENCE

- p. 44

RIP KV. So it goes.

(thank you Sarah for the great gift)

… when we do so small a thing as turning on a 150 W light bulb, we are manipulating a quantity of energy substantially greater than a human being could produce in sustained effort. The energy consumed by an oven, or hot water heater is an order of magnitude beyond our capacity. The energy consumed by an automobile can easily be three orders of magnitude greater. If all the people in the United States worked continuously like galley slaves, they could barely equal the power output of even a single city power plant…

- from page 4 of the Introduction to A Heat Transfer Textbook, by John H. Leinhard IV and John H. Leinhard V, 2001.

Appliances have made a massive and direct impression on western domestic life and our attitudes to energy input and human effort verses notions of convenience and the designed desire for it. As appliance industry competition erodes profit margins with ever greater economies of scale to appease stock holders share prices, the unrelenting drive for niches within ever smaller appliances intensifies. Electric toothbrushes, electric can-openers, hand-held blenders and food processors, coffee machines and grinders, automatic bread makers, popcorn poppers and even vacuum packaging systems.
[In fact, just last night, the toilets in the restaurant we ate at had ‘electric’ paper towel dispensers: a motion detector senses your hand and then unrolls a suitable length of paper towel!?]

Hand-grinding coffee beans with an old grinder has for me extended the daily ritual of coffee drinking further back into the making process. I enjoy feeling the resistive jolts through the handle from my effort as the beans crack and smash, without the nerve shattering pitch of a high revving electric motor. My mother originally bought the pictured Zassenhaus manual mill some time in the 1960s (it still has the McEwens price tag on the side), which I have indefinitely “borrowed” . No motorised grinder could function for 40 odd years! (let alone, require no electricity). Machine verses human power is intensity verses ‘extensity’. Whilst I can’t hand-grind beans as quickly as an electric grinder, as it takes me about one minute to grind what would take 10 seconds for a machine, do I really need those other 50 seconds? Is it those 50 seconds of time that the labour-saving device offers that are important, or the connected experience that enriches the making process?

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1/2007 contents:

Anne-Marie Willis, Editorial: Transition
Tony Fry, ‘Redirective practice: an elaboration’
Cameron Tonkinwise, ‘Philosophy gets real about design’ ( Albert Borgmann’s latest book reviewed)
Eli Blevis ‘Living room totem of the unsustainable’
Design Philosophy Politics – new ezine preview
Review shorts: books received & noted
New themes announced – with a call for papers

Found this on The Age online newspaper accompanying an article last month referring to Howard playing down the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. It is futile to wait for government (particularly the current Australian government) to legislate necessary change, which is something Buckminster Fuller used to argue when rallying for a ‘design revolution’ half a century ago (’doing more with less’). That conclusion is a great pity, however, in light of the visionary and inspirational leadership, for example, from governments of Curitiba to Sweden. Governing for the riches of the individual verses the community as a whole has lead many Australian’s over the last decade to think ‘what can my country do for me, rather than what can I do for my country’. Australia’s next federal election is November 2007 and for the first time in too long, the opposition exists.

After reading a Core77 article entitled D.I.Y. ID: Indie Designers on the Rise, it struck me that there is obviously a strong ethic associated with true independence that goes beyond DIY-ing. Whilst self-governance, autonomy, and creative freedoms have all been founding principles of independent music, theatre and film for instance, should they not be fundamentals of ‘independent design’?*

From my own observations of independent music over the last couple of decades, the disdain for artists who “sold out” by signing to a major record label has thoroughly diluted. For many independent artists the ethic was of independence at all costs, rather than any (false) notion that one could have both freedom and a fat company pay cheque. Therefore, the only true and respectful mark of independent success was not financial; instead it was the gathering of a cult following and peer recognition. It was all very ‘death before dishonour’. However, this normalised during the nineties and is summed up fairly well within the liner notes of an album I own from 1996, which states (regarding the band transitioning to a major label), “we still have creative control… not that it’s really a big deal because bands don’t really catch that much sh*t for selling out anymore. Do they?” In fact, being uncovered/ discovered and then crossing over for a potential mainstream success is now more often aspired to (after all, how else are you going to pay the rent?) Furthermore, the term, “indie”, has become a descriptor for an aesthetic sound or fashion, rather than an ethic of process or purpose, let alone existence. Today, ‘indie’ is a style, it’s a haircut.

There are plenty of unorthodox or independently practicing designers, with accessible resources, know-how, communities, engagement and dialogues about “challenging the definition of design and design practice”. However, far less evident are designers and design outcomes that challenge our everyday lives. “Indie Designers” and aspiring designer-superstars give us alternative aesthetics/ styles for what already exists in evermore cool, chic, ironic, or quirky ways. So, where are the independent design outcomes that challenge our unsustainability, for example, by designing us to consume/ waste less and divert us from mainstream commercialism to a way of being happy with less materialism? The question is will independent designers change anything if they are only an ‘alternative’ version to what pervades in the mainstream?

With independence comes freedom and with freedom comes responsibility. What an independent design ethic offers that matters most is to design what is right. Independence is a freedom to impose constraints that matter, rather than have mainstream/ corporate/ financial constraints imposed onto something that doesn’t.

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*Remembering that ‘design’ is not art, or an art?