Making Sense and Meaning¶

Reflection¶

Week 01¶

In the first week, we talked about using a multiscalar approach to look at the world.

It is interesting as most of the design principles started from a european centric culture. From a UX standpoint, I couldn’t agree more with this idea. Having the experience to work for both ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ projects, the notion of “less is more” can hardly be applied on UX project in China.

In China, you will notice that most of the app is compact and full of information.

It is almost like Chinese application follows “more is more” concept. For this, I think it is important to understand it from the structure of the chinese character and english alphabets. Since chinese character are compact and able to communicate more meaning using a significantly less space, it allows the interface to accomodate more things. Moreover in chinese culture, we celebrate vastness and inclusion of everything, thus when an interface design is so called “crowded” from the western standpoint, it works perfectly for the users of chinese region since they are used to the concept.

I think it is important to look at the design case studies based on the context while being concious of the whatever design principles that we are practicing. In the end of the day, it is crucial to consider who are the users, the real people who are using the product rather then following the so called “universal design principle” which is mostly created from the western society.

Week 02¶

During the second week, we had the opportunity to receive a guest lecturer from Peru, Beno Juarez.

One sentence that stayed in my mind is how the value of the object is not in the object itself, but in the user’s capacity. Using a pencil as an example, it depends on the user’s imagination and perconceived notion to decide the function of itself. This is a very philosophical statement, but at the same time it unleashes one’s potential. You are more capable than you think you are, most of the time, humans are limited by their own perception.

The test of your favourite and least favourite animal is also an interesting exercise, I think it is like a psychological test in some way. Although I am not sure how mine would fit in the context, since my favourite animal is an owl and the reason I like it is because it is very wise, have good vision and able to turn its head 270 degree.

Beno also shared that technology is not the bad thing when introducing it to indegenous culture, but how we are using it. I could not agree more.

I have been exposed to many talks that celebrate the notion of either-or, nature or tech. It is the time to recognize that we are entering an era to co-exist with both nature and tech. I think it is important for the indegenious culture to atleast have some access of technology, and this would be a starting point, or an alternative tool for them to bring their knowledge to us. How can we bring nature back into the cities? What can we learn from the indegenious cultures, learning how to reconnect with nature?

In the course’s reading: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, there is an excerpt on Early Colonialism and Nature: To live is to alter one’s environment…While humans are an environmental-making-species, our organizations are fragile…civilizations have emerged and expanded with more than a little help from the rest of the nature, and when that help is withdrawn, they can crumble.

This emphasize that we are very much depending on nature but we forgot how powerless we were, colonizers has drastically changed the way human could realte with nature by attaching values such as resources, gold, spices on a particular naturae land that they aim to conquer. Like the preface of the Steps to an Ecology of Mind mentioned: “The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if somethign is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for the evidence for them.”

With the capitalism society that is newly born in the last century, we forget that without respecting and restoring the connection with nature, it is the matter of time we will be facing the consequences.

Nature has been shaped into something ‘cheap’, like an object. Lands are owned by land owners, and they further transform how others could relate to nature. It might be a very painful but uncomfortable experience, yet we have to be concious that these issues exsits: the exploitation of indegenious land and culture, the history, the disconnection of our people with nature before we can decide how to alleviate the harm that has been done.

Week 03¶

During the 3^rd week, we had a sharing session by Felencia Hutabarat.

I personally find it inspiring as through engaging with local communities we are able to learn the organic and traditional way of sharing skills and knowledge. Her recommendation is to have access to an innovation lab, knowledge center, materials instrument and production investment.

When it was Sudebi time for sharing, she mentioned that she refused to belong to a particular box. This reminds me of the story from Divergent, in the Divergent universe people are separated into factions with a specific ability. The emergence of the divergent community means that it is a sign of cognitive diversity, and it means that the community is slowly healing.

Also, one thing that I remember that she shared is the idea to not be colonized by your own imagination.

Again, it is important to have clarity and realization to be able to see further than what it seems to be. It is important to think about what are your specialities that make you stand out rather than thinking what people expect you to be and be that expectation, as you would be fitting yourself into a certain box.

Overall listening to our classmates sharing, I feel that it is very empowering experience and I hope that in the future I will be able to apply the skills to the community that is relevant to my research.

Assignment¶

Instructions¶

To write a blog entry of between 1500-2500 words at the end of the course on your website and design a vignette to illustrate the (some) following questions (feel free to replace them by more meaningful ones to you):

1. How design can reconfigure systems of extraction?
2. Which worlds can we design with the power of today’s tools?
3. How can we design the transition towards these worlds?

Submission¶

In today’s world of modern capitalism, it is easy to fall into the fallacy that we are living in a utopian or almost heaven-like world where resources, food and shelter are accessible to most people.

However, it is important to realize that there are marginalized communities and alternative realities where millions of people are still suffering due to warfare, poverty and famine while we sat comfortably on our couches watching Netflix with a bowl of popcorn. As someone who had the privilege to have access to all the modernities and convenience that modern capitalism bought us, we have to remember that we are still living in a system that is harming our planetary well-being. The alternative reality might happen to our descendants one day if positive change is absent.

To start with, we need to understand why the current system of capitalism that we are living in is harmful to planetary well-being.

To give a brief introduction, a capitalist society emphasizes convenience, efficiency, and also a priority on money. Although capitalism is often associated with the coal and oil-fueled revolution, transformation in the food system came first. Without a food surplus, there is no work outside of agriculture (Moore,100). When there is a food surplus, there are other jobs available for the people to accumulate more wealth, and this would create a market for luxury industries so that there is a place for people to spend their wealth. Automation and bulk manufacturing also make products cheaper and more affordable. When everything is easily accessible, affordable and convenient, it makes the value for ownership of each object cheap and disposable. It is too easy to acquire food, clothes, plastic utensils, etc, thus when the object no longer serves its purpose, one can just dispose of it as easily as how it was acquired.

I always believe in the notion that one has every right to purchase something, but one has no right to eliminate something that is in good condition directly to the landfill.

The moment something is purchased, one should be responsible for its life cycle and should properly dispose of it. The problem that we face nowadays is that people can be easily manipulated through online ads, trends and influencers; companies rely on sales to gain capital, thus they are putting a lot of science, technology, design and talent into encouraging people to spend more. We are in this situation because the system that we are in encourages designers and engineers to put their talent in the companies to create and manipulate more ‘wants’, as this is how the modern capitalist society works. From my point of view, it is important to access this topic from three spectrums: government, system, and technology. Please refer to the diagram below to understand this concept better.

Diagram

In my opinion. only when these three factors work together in the best condition, that is when the change would be optimized and impactful.

First, I will be talking about the role of government in design. Politics is a sensitive and complicated topic, however, as long as you are born into this world in a country, it is impossible to avoid it. Democracy is always celebrated as the ideal way of governance, as at first glance it is fair and even and considers the rights and the voice of most people. But remember this: just because this is what most people prefer and think it is true and best for the nation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the decision is right or best. For example, just because everyone or the majority of people smoke, it doesn’t mean smoking is good for the body. It is interesting to think that we will not ‘vote’ for what we should do to a patient in the hospital, as we would entrust the job to the doctors to diagnose them as they are the ones that are experienced and specialized in this sector, but for politics, anyone can be a politician. Someone in a position of power holds the responsibility to make the right decision.

Thus, it has to be someone that is wise and non-bias. We have to accept that as humans, the majority of the people on this earth might not have the wisdom to make such decisions that will change the fate of the nation.

That being said, the first thing that would need to change is the quality of the people in power that forms the government. The policy has to be made by somebody that is specialized, has a non-biased view, is selfless, and has the best interest of the nation and the planetary well-being. The way of governance, whether it is a democracy, feudalism, or communism is not the main concern, as in timeless history, we have already seen many successful and unsuccessful examples, of the fall and rise of a nation under different leadership.

Having said that, we will move to the next topic: systems. In my case, I would see systems as an opportunity for designers to contribute their talents. Design plays a huge role in reconfiguring systems of extraction. Personally, I think redesigning the way people interact with their objects, will force humans to behave in a certain way, and if it is practiced throughout a period of time, it will form a habit. When it becomes a habit, there will be hope for changing the current system of extraction. For example, instead of asking why people are not recycling and forcing everyone to recycle, try to understand what is stopping them from practicing recycling.

Some useful potential of applying this includes studying what are the pain points why some people choose not to recycle, and by understanding that, designing the system to support all the pain points that were listed.

Another option would be designing the act of recycling to be subtle and hidden so that it can be something part of the subconscious behavior. Also, if using recycled materials is more convenient and affordable than using a brand-new material that was shipped from somewhere across the globe, automatically, the user will opt for the option that brings more value to them.

From this, we can see that an effective system can play a huge role in improving our planetary well-being. It might not make a difference on a small scale, but if we can apply a good system to every part of the world, the impact would be huge.

In order for the system to thrive, it requires proper planning and designing so that everyone can follow it without confusion. To explain this, I am going to use the recycling system in Japan as an example. They have their own mechanism for sorting trash. They even micro-sorted bottles and bottle caps for plastic recycling and they started this practice from the kindergarteners. Even though I have only been to Japan once and have not been separating bottles and bottle caps for recycling, but when I am in a system where everybody is doing that, even though this might be entirely new to me, eventually, I was able to follow.

The same concept goes for vice versa. Imagine somebody that sort trashes accordingly. However, this individual is trapped in a place where there is no place for collecting plastic waste because this kind of system does not exist. That being said, we are putting way too much pressure on the individual to carry out actions, putting them responsible for the earth that is slowly deteriorating due to the greed and ignorance of capitalist society. While doing this might make a certain part of the population feel better since somebody can be accountable for all the disastrous catastrophes that humans will eventually face, it is crucial to shift back our focus on what we can really do as designers, to contribute to creating a system that thrives for planetary well being.

For the third part, technology, and I will be exploring the way we can use existing tools to bridge the alternative present in approaching our desired future.

We need to understand that it can be deceitful if one decides to work on a ‘goal’ in this context as the emergent future is something that keeps on evolving. Having a clear goal for the future might not be as helpful compared to seeing clarity in today’s world relationship with technology. With today’s tools and technology, what kind of alternative presents can we build that would lead to the desired future?

In order to start this process, we have to accept that technology is everywhere.

I am stressing this point as there are still some individuals that believe that technology is the source of all evil and we should go back to nature. I do partially agree with it, however, to see clearly what is going on in today’s world, we have to fully comprehend that technological advancement is not something that can be undone. Instead of focusing on the negative impact technology brings to nature and mankind, how can we use it as a tool for us to mitigate the effects of tech disasters? What are the ways to make technology and nature coexist, and thrive together as a symbiotic system? While there is no one answer that will solve all questions, to start with, it will be helpful if we focus on the green industry.

For example, solar energy, electric vehicles etc would slowly become more important when resources become scarce. When more talent and focus are being made on the industry that is relevant to the modern world’s problem, this can solve a lot of the issues while at the same time promising job opportunities in this sector. Furthermore, I think technology should be applied more to system design and with a practical intention, for example using AI to calculate food consumption so that no food is wasted, or using technology to solve recycling problems such as creating an app that will bring people to the recycling point, to name a few. There is so much more to explore, by creating the desirable now, we are, in turn shaping our future.

Having mentioned all the three important factors: government, system and technology, I think only when the three of them are in their optimum condition, that is when positive change can happen at a desirable rate.

These three factors are important in creating effective change because they all contribute in working together and supporting the scale of the change. While it is understandable that this optimized condition could be difficult to achieve and there might be obstacles in some countries, it is crucial to not lose hope and continue to work on these topics so that one day, we can leave behind our legacy to our descendants in a positive manner.

Citation¶

Patel, Raj. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Verso Books, 2020.

Reading Notes¶

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things¶

These are some interesting quotes from: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore.

Although capitalism is often associated with coal and oil fueled revolution, transformation in the food system came first. Without food surplus, there is no work outside agriculture (100,Moore).
Cheap food enables that expensive systems to yield riches, workers could be paid less, more calories with less labor, so more exploitation (102,Moore).
Empire provided europe’s industrial workers with cheap food though at huge cost to people in other parts of the planet. They guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well—as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest (103,Moore).
Two ways to keep that cost down were to pay immigrant workers very little and to settle them in company towns, which compelled them to hand back wages for housing and services such as schools, cut-price English lessons, and recreational facilities.
Cheap oil is so important because today’s capitalists don’t wish to support the kinds of massive investment that would make a solar transition possible.
Capitalism may have claimed the New World with guns, germs, and steel, but the New World’s order was kept through race, police, and profits. These technologies of hegemony and order are the subject of our final chapter.
The argument of this chapter is that capitalism’s ecology has shaped the modern nation-state and vice versa, through the colonial frontier, through the interactions between early capitalists and “savages,” and through the technologies of communication that capitalism fostered at its inception. The ordering and reordering of Society through cheap things has always preceded by both force and suasion, coercion and consent.
The limits of production, consumption, and reproduction are fixed only by the system in which we find ourselves. Such limits are neither outside nor inside but both, knitted together by capitalism’s ecology of power, production, and nature. The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by “lifestyle choices”3 rather than socially enforced logics. If you have been gentrified out of your old neighborhood and need to commute an hour to your job, your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve. Worse yet, footprint thinking teaches us to consider the drivers of planetary crisis as grounded in the aggregations of “people” and “consumption” rather than in systemic dynamics of capitalism and empire.
In defense of the footprint calculator, we might ask: does it not acknowledge the reality of our times, of planetary crisis, epochal climate shifts, mass extinction? Yes, but these modes of thought explain our present, disastrous state of affairs by consistently and significantly underestimating how the present is the product of a long past, of a bloody history of power, capital, and class, entwined in the web of life. At stake is how we understand population, nature, and limits.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind¶

These are some interesting quotes from: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a book by Gregory Bateson.

In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored. He carries no Baedeker in his pocket, no guidebook which will tell him which churches he should visit or at which hotels he should stay. He has only the ambiguous folklore of others who have passed that way. No doubt deeper levels of the mind guide the scientist or the artist toward experiences and thoughts which are relevant to those problems which are somehow his, and this guidance seems to operate long before the scientist has any conscious knowledge of his goals.
In fact, the phenomenon of context and the closely related phenomenon of “meaning” defined a division between the “hard” sciences and the sort of science which I was trying to build. Gradually I discovered that what made it difficult to tell the class what the course was about was the fact that my way of thinking was different from theirs.
I stressed the fact that “data” are not events or objects but always records or descriptions or memories of events or objects. Always there is a transformation or recoding of the raw event which intervenes between the scientist and his object. The weight of an object is measured against the weight of some other object or registered on a meter. The human voice is transformed into variable magnetizations of tape. Moreover, always and inevitably, there is a selection of data because the total universe, past and present, is not subject to observation from any given observer ‘ s position. In a strict sense, therefore, no data are truly “raw,” and every record has been somehow subjected to editing and transformation either by man or by his instruments.
If you are surveying a piece of land, or mapping the stars, you have two bodies of knowledge, neither of which can be ignored. There are your own empirical measurements on the one hand and there is Euclidean geometry on the other. If these two cannot be made to fit together, then either the data are wrong or you have argued wrongly from them or you have made a major discovery leading to a revision of the whole of geometry.
The conservative laws for energy and matter concern substance rather than form. But mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance. Within the body of fundamentals, that half which deals with form has been dramatically enriched in the last thirty years by the discoveries of cybernetics and systems theory. This book is concerned with building a bridge between the facts of life and behavior and what we know today of the nature of pattern and order.
D: Well, people spend a lot of time tidying things, but they never seem to spend time muddling them. Things just seem to get in a muddle by themselves. And then people have to tidy them up again. F: But do your things get in a muddle if you don’t touch them? D: No—not if nobody touches them. But if you touch them—or if anybody touches them—they get in a muddle and it’s a worse muddle if it isn’t me. F: Yes—that’s why I try to keep you from touching the things on my desk. Because my things get in a worse muddle if they are touched by somebody who isn’t me

Resources¶

Course Notion Site

Design as a Participation Reading

Last update: June 9, 2023