Is design not becoming a mere tool to maintain the existing social system? This critique has led to a reflection on the profession of designer itself, which has functioned as a “pawn of industry” since the industrialization of the 19th century. This became the background for a series of design movements that attempted to reconsider the social meaning of design itself. Typical examples of such trends include a series of “critical design” movements led by Ingo Maurer and “des-in,” the Italian “radical design” movement that opposed the “elegant” aesthetics glorified by consumer society, and the “anti-design” movement represented by Sturm and others. The tradition of these critical design movements can be said to approach the boundary of contemporary art in that they question existing lifestyles and the values of society as a whole through the creation of concrete objects.

However, against the backdrop of the anti–Vietnamese war movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, commune movements – which not only criticized the dominant values but also proposed concrete alternatives to them – flourished, especially in the United States. What the counterculture movement saw as a problem was the situation of “institutionalization,” in which people were reduced to simply purchasing products supplied by industry and lost the power to construct their own sphere of life, and became powerless in the midst of a highly industrialized society. To counter this, the “Do-it-Yourself” (DIY) movement emerged, in which citizens reclaimed the power of construction and organization for themselves.

Stuart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” was launched in 1968 with the aim of introducing various tools for building alternative lifestyles for oneself. However, the magazine was also intended to be a kind of feedback device that would allow readers to fully respond and compose their own pages and create a unique community through the medium of publishing. In 1971, Victor Papanek published Design the Real World: Human Ecology and Social World (Translated into Japanese by Masayoshi Abe, Shobunsha, 1974), in which he argued that industrial design, which supports mass production and mass disposal, is a “genocide” against humanity. Papanek argued that design should address issues related to the survival of humanity, such as environmental problems and the elimination of disabilities, from a global perspective.

This sense of alternative values in design merged with the traditions of pragmatism, minimalism, and libertarianism that had taken root in the United States and found a frontier in the latest computer technology of the time. This was the technological movement of the “personal computer” that recaptures the computer (mainframe), traditionally the monopoly of industry and the state, to the side of the individual. In the state and big industry, the organizing principle is that of a tree, and instructions are given by superiors. Therefore, the large computers that were their tools also took the centralized form of batch processing. In contrast, the PC serves the creativity of the individual by responding immediately to the real-time will of the individual. Each PC forms a network (web) instead of a giant pyramid, and its instructions are characterized by feedback based on cybernetics rather than superiority. Thus, it is argued that information technology supports global democracy as an open set of tools to realize an equitable social principle based on mutual feedback loops.

Based on these alternative ideas, Microsoft, which was born in response to the mainframe computer, and various ventures centered on the West Coast of the United States, such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, were born. The activities of these companies and users have formed the so-called Californian ideology of a global Internet world in which all people are equal and free to exercise their creativity and connect with each other, from the 1990s to the present.

However, in the 1990s, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby advocated Speculative Design at the Royal College of Art, London (RCA). According to Dunn and Raby, the speculative is defined as a free and critical conception of a possible or plausible future that goes beyond perspectives from the existing real world. Such critical or speculative design continues to expand the field of design as various critical and creative activities that do not necessarily produce an object while eroding the boundaries of contemporary art.

(KOGA Toru)

References

• Anthony Dunne＆Fiona Raby（2013）, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, The MIT Press.
• Thomas Hauffe（1995）, Design Schnellkurs, Dumont.
• 池田純一（2011）『ウェブ×ソーシャル×アメリカ 〈全球時代〉の構想力』講談社現代新書
• 『スペクテイター パソコンとヒッピー』vol.48（2021）、幻冬舎