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DESIGN AND VIOLENCE

Someone says “a good essay is the one where the author disappear”. Well, I don’t think I can agree with the statement, at least when we talk about design and writers talking about design. First of all, what happens in real life, can be experienced also because design, which has been shaping our environments for centuries. Design is a human matter.

Moreover, the reason that triggered the conception of this article is nothing more than a personal experience.

I’ve experienced the wave of violence exploded after the lockdown, on my skin, from people I didn’t even know.

This is the latest big issue for psychologists and doctors all over the world: it is now challenging the opportunity to observe an increase of PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) after the end of the confinement induced by the pandemic of COVID-19 and a lot more people need concrete help.

During the days after the above-mentioned episode, I thought, as a person, what suddenly triggers violence? Then, as a designer, can design help to disarm the trigger of violence? But what if design could implicitly be the social trigger of violence itself?

I never thought of the matter in this way. I’m one of those who firmly believe in design for the better, but what if it doesn’t?

I’ve been studying the theme this month, and I found the most authoritative voice from an everyday inspirer in my work, Paola Antonelli, who took care of the problem a few years ago. I found the issue actual and sadly evergreen.

Design and Violence: the book

What I’ve experienced allowed me to broaden my knowledge beyond a preconceived vision on the role of design and a new way to understand the matter from an unexplored point of view about products, services, and what it can cause.

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, Director of R&D at MoMA, has always conceived design as an all-embracing and philosophical discipline at the service of society.

She firmly states that we can find it in everything and everywhere, from genetics to digitalization, from politics to poetry, from teaching to architecture. The core in her lucid thinking is to consider its role as a catalyst for changing, to the point it should be taught in school like maths, history or literature. 

Designers’ have the ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA, 2008

Those words represent the gateway to seizing a harsh project that Paola Antonelli brought to life years later, together with Jamer Hunt, director of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons.

They co-organized the ongoing online curatorial project Design and Violence launched by The Museum of Modern Art in 2013, which has after become a book.

Design has a history of violence

From the book description

Design and Violence  investigates the dark and controversial sides of design, unfolding its ambiguous relationship precisely with violence “either masking it while at the same time enabling it; animating it in order to condemn it; or instigating it in order to prevent it”. As a discipline, design has the best-known purpose of the betterment of society and the controversial connection to brutality is rarely highlighted. Paola Antonelli e Jamer Hunt wanted to shed a light on this hidden contrast.

Unknown Designer. Plastic Handcuffs (also known as Plasticuffs or Flexicuffs). Initial design first patented by Peter J. Gregory (American, b. 1934) in 1978. Injection molded nylon, 34 2/3 x 3/4 x 1/2″ (87.95 x 1.9 x 1.27 cm). Photograph by Jamer Hunt.

Starting with a wide approach on violence manifestations in the contemporary times, they sum up the concept collecting projects and objects, and pairing them with comments of experts from diverse fields as journalism, politics, music, literature, science and more, to respond individually to the projects, while sparking at the same time a challenging conversation with the reader. The words ambiguous or ambivalent are frequently used throughout the entire project and are not casual: the dialogue generated remains necessarily ambiguous too.

Hacked pump spray filled with milk. Istanbul, Turkey, 2013. Image courtesy of action press/Zuma Press/Pinar Istek.

RIPP (American, est. 1987). The Protection Mask (also known as a bite/spit mask). c. 2000. Polyurethane, 7 2/3 x 6 3/4 x 6″ (19.38 x 17.15 x 15.24 cm). Photograph by Jamer Hunt.

Crowd pen with revolving gates and built with poured in place concrete fence. Large slaughter plant serpentine single file chute. © Temple Grandin (American, b. 1947). Grandin Livestock Handling Systems, Inc. (est. 1980). Serpentine Ram for a Slaughterhouse. First designed in 1974, design modifications ongoing.

Each author is demanded to respond to one object - from plastic handcuffs to an AK-47, from violent video games to the Stiletto Heel or lethal injections - contributing to the debate and to the research of the historical impacts of design on the built environment and on everyday life, remaining a reliable but at the same time individual as a comment, anyway.

Designing this approach to processing the matter, makes us aware of the sophisticated communicative goal of the project: there’s no single explanation to violence, but many. At this very point, there is an important consideration linked to this approach in which the project has found birth.

Crowd pen with revolving gates and built with poured in place concrete fence. Large slaughter plant serpentine single file chute. © Temple Grandin (American, b. 1947). Grandin Livestock Handling Systems, Inc. (est. 1980). Serpentine Ram for a Slaughterhouse. First designed in 1974, design modifications ongoing.

Designing this approach to processing the matter, makes us aware of the sophisticated communicative goal of the project: there’s no single explanation to violence, but many. At this very point, there is an important consideration linked to this approach in which the project has found birth.

It’s about a specific product that unleashed the interest of Paola Antonelli to the point it became the beginning ofDesign and Violence conception.

I’m talking about Cody Wilson’s The Liberator, an open-source-3D downloadable gun, whose simplicity could leave anyone petrified.

It’s composed from single printable parts and it’s completely operational. The strong provocative root from which the project took its parts, generated different reactions by polarizing the public.

“It’s really important to think that sometimes it’s assumed that Design has an inherent kind of moral compass, and that designers must take a Hippocratic Oath and first of all do no harm, but in truth Design has a history of violence" Paola Antonelli said while explaining why she launched Design and Violence.

Roger Vivier (French, 1913) for Christian Dior (France, 1946). Evening Shoe. 1954. Silk satin and tulle. Image courtesy of V&A Museum.

Sputniko! (British/Japanese, b. Japan, 1985). Design Interactions Department (est. 1989). Royal College of Art (UK, est. 1837). Menstruation Machine. 2010. Device: aluminum, electronics, and acrylic, 13 3/8 x 13 13/16 x 13 3/8" (34 x 35 x 34 cm). Video: 3:24 min. Product design assistance: Naoki Kawamoto (Japanese, b. 1980). Innovation Design Engineering Department (est. 1981). Royal College of Art (UK, est. 1837). Photo by Rai Royal. Image and video courtesy of the artist.

Finally, in order to follow the starting thread of the article, violence is a wide, complex, multifaceted, capillary problem that has dark roots in behaviors, habits and needs (the same that design process uses as beginning points).

Violence can change a whole country or overturn settled circumstances, just as Design.

So, following the consideration of the curators, the two always walked together and both of them have the power, in absolute terms, to just transform by improving or worsening the reality.

From one hand violence is innate in animal and human species, but in this last, violence can be also designed, improving a never-ending loop.

Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek  Image source: Cody Thompson.

Materials Courtesy of MoMA:
http://www.moma.org
A complete archive of Design and Violence lives at the original URL:
http://designandviolence.moma.org
Book designed by Shaz Madani Studio:
http://smadani.com/overview/