The space between commerce and culture: design as social agency

South African Journal of Art History Volume 30 Number 3 2015 Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness Situatedness The South African Journal of Art History is a peer reviewed journal publishing articles and review articles on the following subjects: Art and architectural history Art and architectural theory Aesthetics and philosophy of art Visual culture Art and the environment Film and photography History of craft Design ISSN 0258-3542 Available on Sabinet Website: www.sajah.co.za Archive: UP Online i SAJAH South African Journal of Art History Volume 30 Number 3 2015 Editor Estelle Alma Maré Guest Editors Wanda Verster and Kobus du Preez Editorial Board Arthur Barker, University of Pretoria (Regionalism and South African architecture) Kobus du Preez, University of the Free State (indigenous architecture, conservation) Johannes Heidema, University of South Africa (aesthetics and philosophy of art) Adrian Konik, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (philosophy, film theory and cultural studies) Estelle Liebenberg-Barkhuizen, University of KwaZulu-Natal (women artists, works on paper) Mauritz Naudé, Tshwane University of Technology (South African architecture) Jonathan Noble, University of the Witwatersrand (architectural history, theory and criticism) Bert Olivier, University of the Free State (aesthetics and philosophy of art) Johann Opperman, University of South Africa (South African art) John Steele, Walter Sisulu University (prehistoric southern African ceramics) Aletta Steenkamp, University of Cape Town (architecture) Ingrid Stevens, Tshwane University of Technology (art theory, contemporary art, craft) Gerald Steyn, Tshwane University of Technology (African and South African architecture) Rita Swanepoel, North-West University (philosophy of art) C.J. van Vuuren, University of South Africa (indigenous architecture, anthropology) International Advisory Board Tsion Avital, Emeritus professor, Department of Design and Art, Holon Academic Institute of Technology, Israel Concha Diez-Pastor e Iribas, Director and chief researcher, Architectonics, Madrid Maria Fernada Derntl, Faculdade de Arquitetuia e Urbanismo da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil Aleš Erjavec, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia Antoni S. Folkers, researcher, African Architecture Matters, Amsterdam, The Netherlands John Hendrix, Department of Architecture, Lincoln University, UK Pascal Dubourg-Glatigny, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France John A.H. Lewis, architect, independent medievalist, Auckland, New Zealand Constantinos V. Proimos, Hellenic Open University and the Technical University of Crete, Greece Raymond Quek, Department of Architecture, De Montford University, Leicester, UK Tijen Roshko, Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Canada Leoni Schmidt, School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand Nikolaos-Ion Terzoglou, Department of Architecture, Technical University, Athens, Greece Gert van Tonder, Reki-An Pavilion, Kamigamo Minami Ojicho 5 Banchi, Kitaku, Kyoto City Alexander Tzonis, Emeritus professor, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands The SAJAH is published by the Art Historical Work Group of South Africa Chairperson: Gerald Steyn Treasurer and Publication Secretary: E.A. Maré Cover design: Johann Opperman Layout: Silverrocket Creative Printed by: Procopyprint ii Editorial The theme put forward for this edition – situated experience – points to an anchored standpoint in time and space from which utterances are made and interactions may take place. Situatedness instills our experiences with emplaced meanings and is captured eloquently in the linguistic term deixis, which implies a viewpoint at a specific time and place. If reduced to the banal extreme, it would amount to everything that is provincial, self-obsessed and closed. However, situatedness can also imply centredness, to be in a position to understand and influence a context to some extent. The subject is approached from a variety of perspectives and different disciplines in this collection of articles. It engendered responses that illustrate the experience of domesticity in housing schemes and the township (Steyn and Bosman), the agency of design and nostalgia in current cultural production (Hawley and Cadle as well as Economou) and the difficulty of gauging users’ perceptions of community facilities (Stoffberg). Du Bruyn and Moodley investigate the meaning that can be derived from performed situations in Pretoria and rituals central to Hindu South Africans. Olivier offers thoughts on the threat that “the space of flows” holds for the ordinary, embodied human life-world and Auret questions the primacy of “lived experience” in our understanding of architectural phenomenology. Without even listing all contributions to the issue, it might be apparent that the research is wide-ranging within the core theme. The guest editors are inspired by the effort and time spent by the selected authors. Kobus du Preez and Wanda Verster iii South African Journal of Art History Volume 30, number 3, 2015 Contents Research articles Bert Olivier Situated experience, “the space of flows”, and rhizomatic thinking 1 Gerald Steyn Domestic ritual versus domestic architecture: a review of three Indian projects 15 Ami Jessica Hawley and Bruce Cadle The space between commerce and culture: design as social agency 34 Inge Economou ‘Remembering’ and imagining: Women’s nostalgic engagement with vintage fashion 56 Gerhard Bosman Situated neighbourhood safety and fence decoration 74 Nalini Moodley Exploring the Goddess: Religion and inclusivity within the Hindu community in South Africa 87 Madelein Stoffberg Situating through representation: two community centres investigated through Lefebvre’s Spatial Production 99 Hendrik Auret Architectural phenomenology and the tyranny of lived experience 112 Pfunzo Sidogi Domesticity in select artworks representing the township experience 123 Estelle Alma Maré In the period prior to and after the First World War German painters expressed a passion for their art 135 Yolanda van der Vyver Situating Geography and the powers of Law, State and Church in the dynamic of Change that lead to the establishment of Pretoria 151 Willem P. Venter The in-group/out-group dynamics of Nerdrum’s positioning of Kitsch as a reflection of situatedness within contemporary art 172 iv The space between commerce and culture: design as social agency Ami Jessica Hawley Graphic Design Master’s student E-mail: [email protected] Bruce Cadle Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University E-mail: [email protected] Design occupies a position of ambivalence bestriding the concerns of culture and capital, yet it accounts for a great deal of personal and economic meaning. In The Culture of Design, Guy Julier introduces design culture as a ubiquitous signifier of modernity: defining it as the study of the shifting interrelationships between producers, designers and consumers. When exploring how these agents interrelate both a material and symbolic understanding of the world of consumption becomes apparent. Design begins to account for more than economic markets, including the more intangible production of values and ideas. According to Bourdieu, producing, designing and consuming, pivots on competition. Bourdieu’s sociological field model when applied to this study suggests that design culture can be allocated to two symbolic fields of competitive struggle located in cultural and commercial hierarchies. Design is problematised by the criticisms of Theodor Adorno and Hal Foster, who believe that the social agency of practices, on the critical edge of these prevalent cultural and commercial fields can better explore value creation. Designers seeking to assign new meaning to what they produce have a capacity to reimagine the economic and cultural worlds that design inhabits. This article intends to demonstrate how design as social agency can reimagine current socio-cultural conditions of production, intervening in fields of culture and commerce. Design proposals are presented as evidence of shifts towards this challenge of design’s symbolic production inhabiting a space between dominant fields, superseding concepts of commercial-interest and cultural marginalisation. Key words: design culture, culture industry, cultural production, design as social agency, symbolic production Die ruimte tussen handel en kultuur: ontwerp as sosiale agentskap Ontwerp beklee ’n teenstrydige posisie wat kultuur- en kapitaalaangeleenthede beskry en tog verleen dit baie betekenis aan persoonlike en ekonomiese belange. In The Culture of Design lei Guy Julier “ontwerpkultuur” in as ’n alomteenwoordige aanduier van nuwerwetsheid deur dit as ’n studie van veranderlike verbande wat onderling tussen vervaardigers, ontwerpers en verbruikers bestaan, bekend te stel. Wanneer die onderlinge verbande tussen hierdie agente ontdek word, word die materiële en simboliese interpretasie van die verbuikerswêreld duidelik. Ontwerp begin om aan meer as ekonomiese markte, insluitende die meer ontasbare vervaardiging van waardes en idees, rekenskap te gee. Bourdieu meen dat vervaardiging, ontwerp en verbruik om kompetisie draai. Bourdieu se sosiologiese veldmodel, toegepas op hierdie studie, stel voor dat die ontwerpkultuur aan twee simboliese velde van ‘n mededingende stryd wat in kulturele en kommersiële hierargieë geleë is, toegewys kan word. Ontwerp word deur Theodor Adorno en Hal Foster problematies gekritiseer, wie glo dat die sosiale praktykagentskappe op die kritiese rand van hierdie ontwakende kulturele en kommersiële velde die waardeskepping beter kan ontgin. Ontwerpers wat ‘n nuwe betekenis soek in wat hulle vervaardig, het die vermoë om die ekonomiese en kulturele wêreld van ontwerp weer voor te stel. Hierdie referaat beoog om te demonstreer hoe ontwerp as ‘n sosiale agentskap huidige sosiokulturele produksievoorwaardes kan voorstel deur in die kulturele en kommersiële velde in te gryp. Verskeie ontwerpvoorstelle word as bewys van die verskuiwing na hierdie uitdaging voorgelê waarin ontwerp se simboliese produksie ’n ruimte tussen oorheersende velde beslaan en wat konsepte van kommersiële belang en kulturele marginalisasie vervang. Sleutelwoorde: ontwerpkultuur, kultuurindustrie, kulturele produksie, ontwerp as sosiale agentskap, simboliese produksie SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 30, number 3, 2015: 34-55 D esign is responsible for constructing and situating day-to-day experiences. From a ubiquitous branded paradigm (branded leisure, systems, nations, people, ideas), increasing choice in consumer goods, to rising on-screen interactivity, design is tacit to most experiences we encounter. In The Culture of Design, Guy Julier (2014: 4) believes that design is beyond a profession but is rather a culture signifying modernity. He studies this culture as symbolising value creation, or symbolic production in society, through the objects, spaces and images it creates. Design culture’s symbolic production sits between the demands of economics and culture, shaping economic values and cultural values, such as taste and monetary worth. Reflecting on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural intermediates, Julier (2014: 151) explains that “as befits this [creative] sector, [designers] are [...] liminal: they cross between cultural experience and commercial entrepreneurialism”. Through conforming to and structuring ideas of economic values and symbolic value, design has contributed to both an economic system and a cultural system. The cultural sector or creative economy (Howkins 2013), promoting the rise of the creative industries, expresses the increasing obligation design has to making artistic ideals economic. 350 million citizens in Central and Eastern Europe alone were drawn into liberal democracy and market capitalism from the 1980s to the early 1990s (Julier 2014: 4). Under the growing political order of capitalism, the ideology propagated by design is primarily one of a consumerist nature. Design is central to desire, dissatisfaction and obsolescence (Dunne and Raby 2001: 59), in the interest of a capitalist growth model, a system aiding competitive growth over other forms of growth i.e. moral or socio-political growth. The Space between Commerce and Culture explores design’s symbolic production, situating the social conditions of the field of design, and examining where different practices of design are expressing agency between its fields and structures. Departing from Bourdieu’s field model of cultural production (1993), primarily applied to the fields of art and literature, the aim is to explore design’s field of production and the agents challenging it. Symbolic production is explained and then design’s symbolic production is problematised, as it exists between commercial and cultural poles. Examples of design practices are then offered that address symbolic production, revealing how design, through acts of social agency, can create new cultural and commercial values. Introducing design culture’s symbolic production The symbolic production of design addresses the intention and practices of the designer, an issue directly concerning the gap between a preferred future and the means to aspire to it. Mangez (2007: 55), underpinned by the sociology of Bourdieu, explains symbolic production as a way of providing “a meaning for reality”, articulating “how the world functions or should be functioning”. The social field in which design and other forms of symbolic production are practiced and consumed can provide an understanding of the relationship between objects, how they create values and how they might create new values. All designed objects, images and systems initially originated from perceptions, thoughts and ideas. These thoughts are measurable symbolically and are implicit of the interplay between social structures and agency determining all forms of design practices. Social structures are produced “[when] the construction of a representation of reality also hides other possible ways of understanding and making sense of the world” (Mangez 2007: 57). This can be applied to how the commercial and cultural symbolic worlds that design 35 inhabits and constructs are conceived of. Edification regarding the meanings behind commerce and culture build towards this understanding. Julier’s definition of design culture is the point of departure for this study’s inspection of design: the study of the interrelationships between design (in all its forms) and consumption. He considers design in its fullest sense, not only restricted to domestic objects, attempting to explain the complexity of “networks and interactions that configure the production and consumption of the artificial world” (Julier 2014: XIII). With no fixed interpretation, the varying agency of designers, producers, and consumers, three irregular and relational domains of design, production and consumption, shape its circumstantial meaning. These domains are the reason for a collection of spaces, objects and images, designed, produced and consumed literally and symbolically (i.e. by way of social constructs, institutionalized relations, noneconomic powers), with a deep consequence for collective values. The charting of design’s cultural and economic changes is ultimately underpinned by design’s value creation that “hinges on articulating the cultural reconstruction of the meaning of what is consumed” (Fine and Leopold 1993: 4). Whether Julier is discussing design’s global and political reorganisation, or design’s recent advances in discourse (for instance ideas about ‘good design’)1, or even general consumer goods; it signifies a symbolic production of cultural and economic meaning, a changing and interrelated response to all three domains of design culture (i.e. designer, producer and consumer engaged in practices of designing, producing and consuming). Understanding the assigned meanings of objects, spaces and images (materiality) produced by design’s social relations, becomes possible when design’s relationship to materiality is ‘seen’ as something constructed symbolically. “Symbolic goods […] convey values over and above their value in exchange [and are] vital to the moral as well as the material economy” (Hewison 1997: 31). Julier (2014: 135) supports this idea by explaining that, “consumer goods exist both as objects and as signs”. Bourdieu, in a detailed study of consumption, popularised the idea of symbolic goods in the 1970s and 1980s, when classifying the symbolic production of cultural goods, such as music and art. Similarly, he understood all goods as “both a commodity and a symbolic object” (Bourdieu 1993: 113). From this perspective he could explain how symbolic goods were involved in enterprises of both a cultural and economic nature, “established between symbolic profit and economic profit”, where “the recognition implied by the act of consuming” defines where the object and its producer are positioned within the field (Bourdieu 1993: 48). He proved how cultural goods are embedded in social hierarchies as well as economic systems, providing sociology with key phrases to understand social life within capitalism. The term “cultural intermediates” (Bourdieu 1984: 359), from his book Distinction, is often used in media studies to indicate a new class of cultural producers who blur the conventional gap between what symbolises cultural goods and commercial goods. He describes a fundamental symbolic understanding of design, showing that, designers mediate the gap between production, in its crude form as the system for the organisation and creation of goods and services, and consumption, as the user’s engagement with them (Julier 2014: 74). Bourdieu (1993: 114) also introduced the concept of “the market of symbolic goods” with its forms of noneconomic capital, in The Field of Cultural Production, presenting a way to allocate different forms of production. For Bourdieu the theory of a field is developed as a social construct, with its own inner-logic or ethos that points to a competitive worldview of symbolic distinctions. Here economic and noneconomic capital becomes “the principle through which individuals [and goods] occupy a certain social space” (Bourdieu 1997: 50, in Fowler), or field. Bourdieu’s theories assist in contextualizing value creation, not only in the more traditionally 36 encultured and intellectual fields of music, art and literature but for all kinds of production that involves needs and beliefs. A social world predominately centred on two kinds of distinctions, economic performance (economic capital) and noneconomic performance (symbolic, social and cultural capital), is defined by Bourdieu, and applied to design in this study. His ideas, when extended into the social fields of design, account for design’s polarised extremes of hard-selling commercialism and consecrated designer culture. These are two broadly defined fields that, in their extremes, describe practices that sell to a mass audience on the principle of economic reward, or by contrast, principally compete for symbolic profits or credibility, at times for no economic reward at all (this might include work entered into prestigious designer competitions or exhibited design in museums). Bourdieu’s model (1993: 49) is based on what he describes as two prime subfields or poles of production: the unrestricted “field of large-scale cultural production (FLP)” (or “commercial production” for clarity), and the “field of restricted cultural production (FRP)” (1993: 151). His model is useful when extended to the contemporary grouping of design’s symbolic goods, a professional field Bourdieu had grouped largely with the inartistic culture of mass-market retailing or unrestricted production and the cultural intermediates described in Distinctions. In light of Bourdieu’s social model, when this article addresses commercial or cultural as divided fields of production or practices within design, it refers to two distinctive classifications of design: “Commercial design” refers to specifically organised [design] with a view to the production of cultural goods destined for non-producers of cultural goods, “the public at large”[…], [submitting] to the laws of competition for the conquest of the largest possible market (Bourdieu 1993: 115). By contrast “cultural design”2 refers to practice that “tend[s] to develop its own criteria for the evaluation of its products, thus achieving the truly cultural recognition accorded by the peer group whose members are both privileged clients and competitors” (Bourdieu 1993: 115). This simple model illustrates the struggles facing symbolic production. For instance there is a struggle between the autonomy of practice (also implying agency outside of the market) and the heteronomy of the market; between the older generation’s “orthodoxy of established traditions and the [younger generation’s] heretical challenge of new models of practice” (Johnson in Bourdieu 1993: 16); between ideologies of craftsmanship and fashion for fashion’s sake; struggles between dominant and dominated practices; and struggles between a niche-consecrated reception and wider popularity. According to Bourdieu this has become a map for the dynamics of power in society, a game of dominance and independence, upon which the two cultural fields of production are based. There are other ways of studying design and how its fields of production and symbolic values are grouped, however, integrating Julier’s (2014) and Bourdieu’s (1993) ideas on design and social relations supports this article’s questioning. This article proposes that widespread differentiation within design culture can be allocated generally to either commercial or cultural ‘poles’ of symbolic production. It shows how certain practices of design favour exploration for cultural legitimacy, often found in the self-published work of designers and design displays by institutions, associated with high-end markets, design competitions and the creation of ‘taste’ by fringe cultures and counter-cultures. Other forms of design can be described more readily as practices that compete for economic capital, underwritten by the private interests of clients and media, found in the design, production and consumption of generally mass-produced domestic goods. This commercial field is easily typified by brands like Verimark. As a typical form of 37 commercialism, it produces cultural and economic value through commercials mannered by domestic clichés, and products legitimized by novelty and peer-consumer validation. Forceful, hackneyed, hard-sell salesmanship and repetitive visual advertising and merchandising determine Verimark’s brand equity. Products are mass-produced and globally distributed for broader economic and cultural colonisation. The choices made in these juxtaposing fields of design socially mediate a great deal of economic and personal value. Design is increasingly turning culture into a commodity, contending for economic capital and cultural legitimation. In Good Looking, Stafford (1996: 5), writes about the increasing visualization of contemporary culture, expressing that “freeing graphic expression from an unnuanced dominant discourse of consumerism […] is a challenge” and that all the humanitarian sciences need to focus their attention on it. Likewise Dunne and Raby (2001: 59), on the topic of “designers as agents of capitalism” refer often to the idea of freeing design from “a narrow commercial vision”. Julier (2014: 252), in a similar respect, explains that both cultural and commercial design are laden with “the dominance of the growth-model [be it in cultural or economic capital] to justify what design is for [,] limit[ing] the discussion and miss[ing] [design’s] significance”. This highlights the problems that restrict design’s symbolic production to the competitive interests of commercial and cultural fields. Problematizing design’s symbolic production It is not uncommon for designers to separate their portfolios into commercial and noncommercial sections as a means of showing agency. This is representative of the challenges faced by symbolic production – that which is the dominant form of design (the marketable and structured service of commerce) and the dominated, where social exploration and personal expression reflect self-worth. Design as neither a solely cultural or commercial endeavour holds two disparate symbolic meanings. Forty (1986: 242) explains that the economic and cultural “invariably co-exist, however uncomfortably in the work of design”. He refers to design’s symbolic production as facing a “paradox […], in that designers are both in command of what they do and at the same time are the agents of ideology, subcontractees to a bigger system” (Forty 1986: 242). Jan van Toorn (2006: 319), the influential Dutch graphic designer known for his conceptual abstraction and provocative social commentary, views the problem as a constant striving to neutralise the “inherent conflicts of interest” of serving a collective, whilst working for a professional and private model of industry. When reflecting on the ambit of design, it is evident that the commercial ideologies that it has propagated, limits socially orientated explorations and autonomy of practice. Van Toorn (2006: 51) believes that there is no immediate response to this incoherence in working, explaining that designers need “to grasp what it means to work in a society that is dominated by the relations of production and cultural exchange of a radical capitalist economy”. Design culture’s “tension between individual autonomy and consumption’s wider-role in promoting […] competition” (Julier 2014: 71) demonstrates a struggle between two fields dominating design’s configuration. Commercial production exists to service market, industry, and the private interests of client and media. This is “sometimes referred to as ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture [as experienced through] privately owned television, most cinematic productions, radio, [and] mass-produced literature” (Johnson in Bourdieu 1993: 16), but also extends to many other forms of design. It is a means of cultural producing that sits in the field of commerce, criticized for its predictable sense 38 of “internal sameness [and] de-humanized…methods of operations and content” (Adorno 1991: 87). It has been accused of instilling homogenized ideals of production and value concerned “not by [a commodity’s] specific content and harmonious formation” but its “principle of realisation as value” (Adorno 1991: 86), with design moving from being a means to an end (craft) to being an end in itself (industry). In various studies commercialism is associated with social alienation, spectacle and signs detached from meaning (concepts developed by Debord (1967) in The Society of the Spectacle). Bourdieu addresses a broad field of mass production, “sustained by a large and complex culture industry. Its dominant principle of hierarchisation involves economic capital or the ‘bottom line’ (Johnson in Bourdieu 1993:16), implying but not limited to: popular fashion, gimmicks and fads, and a certain form of professional know how involved with the tireless repetition and affirmation of particular cultural and economic worldviews. Dunne and Raby (2001: 58), two academics advancing the critical design movement in the United Kingdom, have defined this form of design as “affirmative design” because of how it has normalized certain values and modes of production and exchange by affirming the status quo and sustaining the dominant worldview of market capitalism. The cultural worldview that accepts electrical home appliances, such as a fridge, stove and kettle, as symbolic of ‘normal’ requirements of contemporary living, is a pointed example of one of these affirmations. These inanimate objects were popularized in the early century in the American baby-boomer economy, influenced by the “postwar-‘malling’ of suburban and urban spaces” (Foster 2002: 55-57). Branded by the ideals of independence, productivity and wellbeing, the product’s symbolic production is synonymous with the social idea of “The American Dream”, but in the most general sense symbolizes the essentials of a global domestic space. Tacit to this form of symbolic production is an equally significant commercial worldview that symbolises these products commercial viability, such as assembly-line production and built-in obsolescence. Steven McCarthy (2013: 12), in Designer as Author, problematises the prevalent uncritical way in which design is practiced as “anonymous design production, devoid of credit and blame”: In capitalism the products of labour are separated out from the relations of labour. After all, under capitalism, objects are placed in the marketplace where the consumer is unknown, just as the consumer is unlikely to know the producer or much about the systems of their production (Julier 2014: 75). For the commercial production of design, this has meant that often designers remain anonymous to their market and individuals engaging with the design remain anonymous to who designed the object, space or image. Because of the sheer scale of production popularised by a global economy, commercial design, has very few chances to engage with the idea of autonomy, authorship and independence. Rather it is focused on mechanising masses of goods into masses of homes. In so doing it limits explorative, nuanced communication to populations of diversified cultural groups, in favour of communicating to the widest group possible. Design, from this perspective, alienates its audience by means of generic and socially problematic ideas of ‘lifestyle’ and ‘fashion’. And so to “culture”. The word is used to address a less explicitly economic, and tangible way of working or making than its commercial counterpart that is found in the field of restricted production (FRP). Bourdieu (1993: 54) views it as the romanticized field of ‘taste-making’, often referring to a dominant class faction and a leading form of cultural intermediating that can create its own fields of reception. This sub-field of design owes much of its symbolic power to the legitimacy that museums, galleries, and libraries afforded to literary and artistic historicalawareness. To understand this field of production is to interrogate a form of intangible distinction that constitutes a particular brand, object, or space of higher cultural value in consideration to 39 another. This form of production is characterized by experimentation and exploration, because it is not required to communicate with as wide an audience. It most often signifies humanitarian disciplines3 and high-end markets. It is frequently criticized for the way its “success in terms of the ‘dialectic of distinction’ constantly removes the painter or writer from the mass base he or she aims at”. In this sense it becomes “production for producers” (Johnson in Bourdieu 1993: 15); for example, high-designers making ‘high design’ for other high-designers. This form of symbolic production of design is becoming what Julier (2014: 87) states is “the most forceful in its influence on public perceptions of design and designers”, signifying the popularity of designart (see Coles 2007. Design and Art), designer goods or high design and “design classics” (Julier 2014: 91). Julier (2014: 92, 103) comments on design’s encultured production as being increasingly revered as cultural capital since the 1980s, the designed object holding something of intellectual and historical merit, blurring these virtues with corporate culture. With the global art market’s growth in the early 2000s the movement of design art, with its self-published and individual led approaches has made strides into intellectual discussion and high-end markets, questioning whether design is only further commercialising the idea of art or whether we might use design and art to bring more cross disciplinary approaches to industry and cultural production. The designers have mixed feelings about the professional titles artist and designer, some do not identify with any title, and other creatives view their work as a direct contribution to the definition of art. The movement is characteristic of “highly expressive furniture or lighting that often [makes] reference to well-known historical or everyday objects or included visual twists” (Julier 2014: 103). When hero designers, push, or seemingly push, design to new limits of ‘cultural vanguardism’, he argues that useless and impractical designer objects, end up facilitating a market of “cultural sightseeing”: spectacle perpetuating conspicuous consumption, much the way high fashion or high-design does. Bourdieu (1984: 365) explains that increasingly there is a case for designers belonging to a class engaged in the symbolic production of needs. The designers working in this field “mediate ‘cutting edge’ cultural forms to a wider audience” (Julier 2014: 54). In many ways, the profession of design is associated with lifestyle and subculture, a field with its own ethos, self-marginalised from other forms of cultural and commercial production. Design has seen a shift toward personal studio and portfolio-based ‘art school’ structures integrating into design’s educational systems. It has shifted towards self-reflexivity; emphasis placed on the individual documenting and exhibiting of academic, professional and stylistic approaches that compete for legitimacy within its own field. Something Frith and Horne (1987: 28) discuss as a profession that is also a lifestyle within popular culture. Design, when seen as a more cultural activity, becomes highly reflexive and self-conscious, produced with a certain self-gratifying and self-idealising symbolism, reinforcing Bourdieu’s ideas of an FRP. Chaney states it thus: ‘Designers’ use of style to ironically evoke or play with other contexts of use makes style a reflexive medium: a way of talking about itself and a way of talking about modernity. The logic of a process in which the self-consciousness or reflexivity of design grows more important is that the goods of economic exchange begin to lose any foundation in intrinsic value or function…it seems that an inevitable consequence of a reflexivity of production is that style comes to supersede substance (1996: 150). Although this form of “substance-less style”, or emphasis on appearances, is central to general commercial goods, in these instances rather than originating something of its own style, it usually mimics style that has been qualified as sophisticated or interesting in more marginal fields of design. What Chaney is describing is a form of self-aware, cultural symbolic production 40 that accounts for its lack of orientation around social matters of substance, superseded by an orientation around stylistic form. Style is a word describing the particularities of a thing, or manners of doing something, rather than the thing itself. In many ways design can become its own attraction because it does not need to express understanding of the complex consumer value system. Rather it can become a form of value creation for its own ends, through reflexive practise. This begins to explain why the distinction between the social intentions of commercial and cultural production becomes increasingly indistinct. The space between commerce and culture: a blurring between cultural and commercial ideas. As illustrated in the opening definition of design according to Julier and Bourdieu, design is fundamentally liminal or intermediating by nature, it negotiates between economic and cultural values, and communicates these values from client or producers to consumer, as befits the context. The space between, identified in the title of this article, can be defined by its intervention (a living space of a liminal nature, actioned by two opposing objectives) but more customarily, within design culture, by the way it occupies a position on both sides of a boundary or threshold, presenting what might be described as a ‘vague space’. Soar (2002:102) states that the space between often describes something more ambiguous than intervention, for all its ‘distinction making’ in taste and economy, design’s lack of orientation describes a space of indistinction, a “decontextualized [and] depoliticized” space. He refers to this as a “cultural smorgasbord regularly feasted upon by those members of the bourgeoisie associated with cultural production; that is, the new petite bourgeoisie, aka the new cultural intermediaries” (Soar 2002: 102)). As Soar points out, the difference between commercialism’s devices and the methods of cultural practices are not always easy to distinguish; many of the practices lie on the fringe of both fields of production. Ironically they produce forms of culturally subversive material that possesses great design appeal for the new cultural elite. Designers negotiate between economic strategy and cultural legitimation on a daily basis, with the power struggles of money and status guiding the trajectory for design culture. Commercial design, perceived to be of less creative freedom or cultural capital, is continually borrowing from high-end fashions and the high-end industries as it seeks ways to refresh its messages for marketability (Johnson in Bourdieu 1993: 16). There is also evidence of pursuing new material that is rapidly shifting from the mainstream and ‘low culture’ towards ‘high culture’ (see Bell 1976: 20). Leland (2004: 305), in Hip: The History, considers this occurrence as “corporate-co-option”, where counterculture and high-end fashion present illusions of freedom from mediocrity through a figurative turf-war of styles. He describes this freedom as illusory because the relationship between the two fields is binary; the two underlying intentions behind the practices are inexhaustibly chained to each other, like a dog chasing its own tail. Both forms of symbolic production are engaged in bringing design culture into a space of social stalemate, where design is its “own reward” (Leland 2004: 1), thus neglecting the profession’s capacity for social outreach and change. An example of this phenomenon is visible in a recent collection by Jeremy Scott’s worldrenowned fashion house Moschino. Its Spring-Summer 2015 Fashion Show was inspired by the legacy of Barbie4 (Manning 2014: 1). Although the designer remains the very opposite of anonymous and the commodities are primarily retailed at mass to a globalized market of cultural elites, priced far above the general consumer’s means, it has merchandised a lifestyle around its brand that will permeate into the broader aesthetic and logic of culture and commerce. In a 41 tireless fashion cycle, Moschino’s rarefied and playfully ironic aesthetic (connoting the artistic appropriation of ‘low culture’) will be diluted to the point of incomprehension by its increased popularity. In full knowledge of its cultural and commercial fragility Moschino will begin again, finding a new aesthetic to merchandise its brand, continually shifting to remain a leading force in cultural and economic capital. Although Moschino may be contributing to a fascinating material culture of things, it does not address the symbolism behind its cultural and economic ideology; rather it indulges political and social ambivalence, in the name of fashion. Here the blurring of the border between culture and commerce presents design’s value-creation as orientated towards competitive self-gratification. Foster (2002: 22, 25) concurs with this and presents the example of American designer, Bruce Mau as someone who is involved with ‘encultured’ brand exercises, is acknowledged as a creative ‘artist’ but enjoys the status of a businessman. Mau’s symbolic struggle is where he places himself between these two roles, successfully building brand equity for clients by “wrap[ping] intelligence and culture around the project […] the apparent product, the object attached to the transaction, is not the actual product at all…the real product has become culture and intelligence” (Foster 2002: 22, 25). His profession depends on his capacity to perform in a competitive system. To do this he confesses to decontextualizing goods to associate them with something culturally appealing. Design should outperform or liberate social life from commercial systems. This form of incoherence of ideology accounts for how quickly the branding of empty ethos is labelled as creative innovation and cultural vanguardism. In Foster’s (2002: 18) view, Mau is not a victim of commerce, but is experiencing how ‘nothing’, very often the substanceless and repetitive ideas of commerce, can become ‘something’, demanding equity, attention and capital, at the expense of design’s authenticity and genuine social ideas. Instead symbolic value is conceived within production, rather than perceived, and begins to exist with no clear purpose, or rather existing for its own sake, an extremely common characteristic of both fields of design. Foster (ibid.), examines Mau’s business-orientated design approach as a symptom of the conflation of design within current day capitalism as a form of “commercial curdling” (2002: 18), where even within design’s most ‘cultural’ or ‘elegant’ instances, the stalemate induced by profit-interest spirals the value of design into a “consumerist loop”, Foster urges designers to find “cultural running-room” (ibid.). Foster’s (2002: 81) commentary on commercialism in Design and Crime, addresses how design and commerce have ‘consumed’ each other in a post-Fordist economy, where after the 1990-1993 recessions, the economy diversified, resulting in smaller operations with faster and cheaper outputs (Julier 2014: 37-39). Foster resonates with Adorno, explaining how culture and marketing have become more integrated. The ‘culture of marketing’ and ‘the marketing of culture’ promoting an indifference to commercialism’s devices and “political ambivalence” (Foster 2002: 61). In much the same way Adorno spoke of commercialism and how the Bauhaus contested the old art world, and its inaccessible hierarchies by democratizing the individuality of art into the world of design. Underpinned by his readings of Jean Baudrillard (1981: 86), regarding “the practical extension of the system of exchange value to the whole domain of signs, forms and objects”; and explored in more detail in Economies of Signs and Space (Lash and Urry 1994), Foster explains that as the Bauhaus “transgressed the old orders of art…it also promoted the new sovereignty of capitalist design, [and] the new political economy of the commoditized sign”. Foster (2002: 82) believes commercialism and cultural ethos, its primary symbolic value, is “in the service of brand equity and cultural capital”. With design touching so many aspects of everyday life, the symbolism of ‘surface quality differentiation’, seen in both cultural and commercial instances of design, is in fact beginning to standardize contemporary experience. 42 “Life-styles”, the culture industry’s recycling of style and art, represent the transformation of an aesthetic category…into a quality of commodity consumption. The expansion of the role of competing life-styles, the permeation of these styles into the home, […] the way in which products have become a direct extension of their advertising image, all these phenomena token a closing of the gap between the culture industry and everyday life itself, and a consequent aestheticisation of social reality (Adorno 1991: 86). Adorno (1991: 86) made a distinction between authentic culture and a culture industry. Similarly to Foster, he highlights the ‘closing gap’ that design’s symbolic production is facing. Adorno stresses that design within this culture industry is recognised “by the principle of [its] realisation as value, and not by [its] own specific content and harmonious formation” (Adorno 1991: 86). Especially through the devices of lifestyle aestheticisation the design culture industry “transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms” (ibid.). Prior to this moment design was an artisanship, a practice that “sought after profit only indirectly, over and above [its] autonomous essence” (ibid.). The word “autonomy” here, refers to design’s symbolic production, and its blurring of the boundaries between cultural forms and commercial forms. Moschino, Verimark, and Mau, contest for consumer demand within their fields or industry and have virtually no autonomy from the principles of the economic market. Primarily these sectors’ internal competitions are rooted in the visual; how quickly consumers can identify the brand and what it represents. This is a design service industry. Visual communications, created by designers, is not so much a service to the capital in question, but increasingly a form of capital itself connoting a market entirely made-up of brand equity. This turns a competitive market, whether cultural and restricted or commercial and broad, into a symbolic ‘game’ where an object’s symbolic production is determined increasingly on brand positioning or visual representation, rather than the object’s uncompromising use-value, social nature or conceptual and moral underpinning. Redefining design culture As in many other social fields that Bourdieu’s study might be applied to, it is apparent that the dynamics of competition separate people. Much like the dynamics of a living ecosystem, competitive advantage engenders and sustains the order. Within design culture people are separated through what they buy, produce and design, this separation fuels distinctions for cultural and commercial systems. Design has received criticism for misinterpreting and misplacing value, because it makes no distinction between design strategy and market strategy, fixated on competitive advantage as an end in itself. Both Foster and Adorno call for a shift in practice to one that is more independent of industry, critically discerning and explorative of more humanistic alternatives. This idea might be illustrated as two cogs within a piece of machinery. One cog signifies design for cultural competiveness, and the other signifies design for economic competitiveness. The interaction between these cogs signifies the antagonistic dynamic between status-making and moneymaking ideals, high and low culture, the artistic and non-artistic, mainstream and subculture. keeping both systems in motion. The cogs might be productive at their roles, but this does not imply that the greater construct they serve is also productive. As previously discussed design’s competitive approaches are commonplace, and have lead to a form of value creation that accepts design as an end in itself, regardless of its social significance. Before presenting examples of how social agency can assist in creating alternative ideas for design today, Table 1 is an attempt at distinguishing between the different values represented 43 by commerce and culture and ultimately what that might mean to contemporary design. Design has blurred the interpretation of culture; a word understood by this study as an insight into the behaviour and patterns of society so as to find new potential and opportunity for social relations. This table aligns culture with this self-reflexive definition. It represents a symbolic gap between the definitions of commerce and culture, the juxtaposition of the descriptions illustrating the struggle between a particular hegemony in symbolic production prevalent in both typically cultural and commercial expressions of design, and a symbolic production of social agency that could welcome a more authentic and meaningful design culture. The comparative table was inspired by Dunne and Raby’s list describing the dominant design in circulation in comparison to the design they see as speculative design (Dunne and Raby 2013: vii). They juxtaposed values like “making us buy” with “making us think”, “affirmative design” and “critical design”, “problem solving” and “problem finding” and several other dichotomies, to illustrate this conceptual separation. In a similar way Table 1 illustrates how design’s current symbolic production separates design from a culture of socially responsible agency. The table’s comparisons are used to inspire the questioning necessary to get design from the space of the ‘cultural real’ into the space of the ‘cultural ideal’. In this way the juxtaposition accuses “salesmanship” of being at the expense of “kinship”, getting design away from structured “normalcy” so as to foster design that resonates and generates “curiosity”. The table looks towards these kinds of shifts in design culture so as to get away from reducing value into something of a solely competitive nature, when vastly inclusive, discerning, complex, interdisciplinary approaches are available to all designers. By comparing these two accounts of design’s approaches to value creation, the table forms a starting point to encourage a bridging of the gap between the world design has fostered, and a more discerning culture of value creation. When design is seen in context to its symbolic production one understands more directly the social challenges it faces. Design culture is constrained by traditional structures and notions of symbolic value established during the modernist era. This series of paired ‘opposites’ – selfreflexive authorship vs. style, togetherness vs. alienation, capitalist agency vs. social agency – express a disjunction of symbolic values seen in design today. The table reallocates the meaning of truly cultural design to something bigger than seemingly elegant, clever or creative design (as it is usually allocated), but design that is re-scripting the ideas of culture and commerce to say something discerning of value creation for collective growth. Although so far the space between describes a blurring of culture and commerce, it can also represent the ideological ‘battleground’ of contemporary design. It is here where design culture can also be emergent and evolving. Design, rather than assigning meanings and values by context, has fixated on value as an end in itself within self-contained systems, stagnating the evolution of meaning. It has aligned values with cultural-taste and economic strategy, reducing the ambit of design into competitions in status and money. Competitive advantage and exchanges are inevitable to cultural evolution. How these ideas of consumerist growth and competitive advantage are symbolically positioned, determines whether design creates healthy systems for the greater good. What sort of design can exist that bestrides commercial hegemony and cultural competitions, design that has social agency and yet is not only experimental and visionary, but serves a value function that acknowledges the importance of commerce? To begin to understand the space between in design culture is to anticipate new cultural production, new markets and new ways of seeing the world design inhabits. Exploring practices as social agency outside of the subfields of symbolic production can draw attention to how design might define value in alternative ways. Rather than blurring existing notions of commerce and culture, it brings something perceptive and purposeful to these ideas. 44 Commerce Commercial Style Alienation Consumption Exchange value, value within a market Marketing Culture Industry In Private interest Promotional Capitalist Agency Mechanical Mimicked Reductive Culturally scripted Affirmative Social ideas Normalcy Salesmanship Competitive Institutional Production Value Exchange value Profit interest Linear Symptomatic Alienating Unsustainable Homogenisation Obtuse Mechanical Form Culture Non-commercial Self-reflexive Authorship Togetherness Exchange Use value, actual value outside a market Making Authentic Culture In Collective interest Honest Social Agency Human Authored Complex Cultural stewardship Critical Social dreaming Curiosity Kinship Inclusive Interdisciplinary Human Value Use value Aspirational social interests Circular Relational and systemic Resonating Sustainable Heterogenisation Discerning Human Content Table 1 Distinguishing Commerce from Culture in Design’s Symbolic Production (source: Hawley, 2015). Design as social agency: challenging design’s symbolic production If design is neither overtly for taste-making or systemised production what might it say or look like? How does design become disassociated with everyday models of market, industry and institution to enable it to explore new forms of symbolic production? Various ideas presented here below are social agency in action and are encouragement for design to expand the field into a more socially relevant realm. Essential to this is the question of “how?”; how does design culture evolve and expand to better speak to its own contradictions? 45 In contrast to how design’s symbolic production has been systematized by competitive notions of material and symbolic capital, design can also signify something of social agency and liberty, where “the creators of symbolic goods…[might] scribble all over [the marque], to break in from the margins of an ersatz, marketised identity and reveal just what our collective sense of ourselves could be” (Hewison 1997: 31). Bourdieu (1993: 44) explains that social agents are able to “use the power conferred on them, especially in periods of crisis, by their capacity to put forward a critical definition of the social world, to mobilize the potential strength of the dominated classes and subvert order prevailing in the field of power”. Berman (2009: 149), in Do Good Design, believes designers to be agents of social change and encourages designers to ground their work in a professional ethic, expressing that designers must “recognize the interdependence, power, and influence of [their] role as a professional”. The emphasis on design’s social agency and power, can be confused as an idealisation of the social role of the designer. Designers have varying degrees of independence and power to influence structure, and no designer can work entirely outside of structure. For this reason the concept of negoitating the space between structure and agency is a central theme to this paper’s conception of social agency. Working with exisitng structures, adapting and seeing design as something evolving with structures is an important step in encouraging the kind of social agency that makes a real impact on human value systems. One of the protagonists of that challenge is freelance, conceptual designer Marti Guixé (2010) who calls his portfolio “concepts and ideas for commercial purposes”, expressing that most of his “projects are not commercial, but are a way of defining a new perception of this kind of product.” In a similar more academic spirit Jan van Toorn (2013) looks at his own graphic design practice as a form of “visual journalism”, with a highly researched, politicised and documented social underpinning. Dunne and Raby (2013: 159) describe the mechanism behind their practice as a “poetic […] subversion of spectacle for public good and progressive politics”. Situated within the economic sector, Superflux (2015), a collaborative Anglo-Indian design practice, explain their work as being “at the intersection of emerging technologies and everyday life to design for a world in flux”. They self-initiate what they call “lab work”, focused on their “own products and designs, public engagement, and broader questions about process and practice”, and are particularly interested in “humanising technologies” and “redefining progress”. They are not alternative for the sake of artistic subversion, as many cultural practices position themselves, but express that they see the necessity to “work within the social structure [as this method will] improve [their] chances of being socially and economically relevant” (Superflux 1998). These few examples represent a transition where contemporary designers and private practices, competing within both commercial and cultural fields, might position design’s symbolic production differently, without being titled artists or jobless idealists. Their stances can be explained by tracking design’s social agency and responsibility to collective values in recent history. The Arts and Craft movement, pioneered by John Ruskin in the mid-1800s and ideologically influenced by Marxist philosophy, became one of the earliest examples of a labour-led revolution within design culture, where the movement took highly individualistic approaches to design’s production in rebuke of an industry alienating and dehumanizing social life (Livingstone and Linda 2005). Despite the growing number of institutions, markets, publications and books that promote and reward design in the interests of industry and commercial value, in 1964, 22 designers signed 46 a manifesto titled First Things First (Garland 1964). The manifesto spoke directly to the hope that designers and consumers would tire of gimmick and salesmanship. In 1999 Émigré magazine published a revised version of the manifesto; First Things First Manifesto 2000 (Poynor 1999), that proposed “a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication – a mind shift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning.” In a more recent attempt to call for professional action Garland’s work has been adapted to speak to a wider industry of creatives, including those involved in web development, and technologists. The manifesto has been reopened for signatories by Cole Peters (2014), reading: “We have become a part of a professional climate that recognises prizes venture capital, profit, and scale over usefulness and resonance.” The suggestion: “A mind shift away from profit-over-people business models and the placing of corporations before individuals, toward the exploration and production of humble, meaningful work, and beneficial cultural impact.” Giving some evidence to the social agency implicit to the ideology of the manifesto is James Ballard, a British fictional author who embarked on a design project of an exploratory nature, unseen in the commercial world of conceptual advertising being published at the time. From 1967-1970, he self-financed a series of five ambiguous and poetic adverts. His Advertiser’s Announcements, as he called them, were linked to the imaginative logic of his speculative fictions found in the novels that comprise The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). He does not speak to this link, in fact the images served no industry or brand, and without much context to Ballard’s fiction, the ambiguous imagery and accompanying bizarre texts presented narratives that prod uneasily for answers and context, leaving the viewer with the job of interpreter. He explores here the concept of sex and women as ‘packaging’, commercialism’s quantification of the outer world, and even sexual experience as it is condensed to capital. Rather than qualifying or assigning any clear meanings to the appropriated imagery through the text for a particular customer, as would be expected of advertising, he demonstrates ambivalence to the traditionally competitive and materialistic ideology of design, showing nothing to sell and no one to sell for. By acting as both the client, the producer and to a degree the customer, Ballard challenged this format’s limitations by his artistic personalisation of the scape. In his later annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard (in McGrath 2009) explains that there is similarity in a personal relationship: “people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.” Although today this form of explicit appropriated imagery is more prevalent in advertising, these works, in symbolic production, anticipated the poetic gestures of speculative and fictional design through their self-published ambivalence and self-devised symbolism and narratives. The implications of hijacking the medium of advertising to say something beyond market strategy serves as a challenge to advertising’s assumptions. Without directly parodying advertising for its superficiality, he turns the perceived hierarchies that produce design’s definitions and transactions (such as the publisher-advertiser relationship), into an optional rather than compulsory choice. Self-published, conceptual design just ‘outside’ of industry shows how design can construct ideas of value and consumption that are independent of the dominant forms of production. When “antiquated models of practice” and client-oriented, “business model mindsets” are discarded (Sueda 2014: 10) design culture advances in meaning, design growing in agency and abet. Challenging established values could show how design as social agency might supersede the dogmas of mass production and restricted cultural production. Models of practice seeking agency between these ideologies, independent of dominant economic and cultural interests, are examined in the discussion that follows. Providing new perspectives on what design might 47 mean to consumerism. This article proposes that between the dominant fields of commercial and cultural exchange, situated within mass and exclusive markets, design might intervene with more socially meaningful contributions that better convey the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life. Although consumerism is a complex structure of value-creation, as Ballard shows, structure can be given meaning. This view is further elaborated on in Economies of Signs and Space: The sort of economies of signs and space that became pervasive in the wake of organised capitalism do not just lead to increasing meaninglessness, homogenisation, abstraction, anomie and the destruction of the subject. Another set of radically divergent processes is simultaneously taking place. These processes may open up possibilities for the recasting of meaning in work and leisure, for the reconstitution of community and the particular, for the reconstruction of a transmogrified subjectivity, and for a heterogenization and complexity of space and everyday life (Lash and Urry 1994: 3). Design agencies, with their professional know how, operating in high and middlebrow markets form structures that often limit design’s ambit. They instil the norms that govern how designers should think and practice. These pressures can evoke intervention and internal struggles where pioneering practices express autonomy in relation to a “universe of possibilities” (Bourdieu 1993: 11). Bourdieu’s (Fowler 1997: 43, 50) “sustained analysis of artistic and non-artistic culture”, commercial and cultural fields of production, allows one to see how designers might “preserve the autonomous laws of the artistic field from the laws of the (current) market” (Bourdieu in Fowler 1997: 43, 50), in a sense forming a genre in design that is not of the dominant genres. This act is a means of distinguishing design’s evolving significance to society by “recasting” commercial and cultural structures to ones more meaningful. When exploring design’s social agency as an act for autonomy and “a language to critique the status-quo of the marketplace” through “proposals of new functions that question the dominant market systems” (Julier 2014: 102-106), design is revealed that is neither explicitly competing for economic gain nor distinctions in taste. There are increasing anti-aesthetics (see Heller 1994, The Cult of the Ugly) in the name of individuality, devising youth cultures and ideas of taste, much like Moschino’s apparel. Although conceptually it is loaded with the artistic ideals of anti-traditionalism and freedom of expression, Moschino remains a market-leading aesthetic or niche of ‘individuality’. According to Hamilton (2014), challenging markets in any “genuine[ly] transgression today means opting out of the structures of the market, especially the psychological ones [because all] individuality expressed in market activity is a product of subtle coercion”. By presenting what lies ‘between’ design’s ideological struggle, pushing beyond dominant economic and cultural production, novel and innovative practices engaged in making fresh economic and cultural connections reveal themselves. Dunne and Raby, in Speculative Everything (2013), document many examples of design proposals of a self-initiated futuristic nature. Their work is infused with the thinking behind speculative fiction, contemporary art, and film set design, presenting design as experiments in social dreaming that reposition domestic goods and social life, applying paradigm shifts to explore how consumerism might be envisaged. Their fictional constructs are intended to initiate what they call a “speculative material culture” (Dunne and Raby 2013: 140) made up of speculative fictions and proposals for social change. Although they can be criticised for producing ‘design for design’s sake’, a form of restricted self-reflexive production isolated by its own elitism, they believe that this subfield of symbolic production will guide design into a discursive space, ending design’s formalist approach and bringing a much-needed autonomy of practice to the discipline. 48 In 2013 a series of plastic shopping bags, “my shopper” cards, cartons of milk and oat boxes (see Figures 1 and 2) were presented on industrial shelving and exhibited at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s annual graduate exhibition by co-author, Ami Hawley. As a fictional design proposal, inspired by Dunne and Raby’s critical design thinking, the work represented a general shopping experience that might be, to take the South African supermarket chain’s slogan literally: “Inspired by you”. The Pick ‘n Pay: Inspired by You Project, whether read as a literal proposal or as ironic critique, represented a challenge to the banality of commercial design and the discord between the narrow vision of the shopping experience and the vastly rich visual culture available to society. Inspired by the current evolution of online personas, crowd sourcing and digital curatorship through social media and blogs, like Pinterest, the work questions the validity of commercialism’s ‘white space’ remaining “white” and ‘relevant’ to the product being sold. Figure 1 Ami Hawley, Pick ‘n Pay Supermarket Installation: Inspired by You, Full Cream Milk Cartons, 2013, cardboard, 20x9x6 cm, Port Elizabeth, NMMU 2013 Graduate Exhibition (photograph: Ami Hawley). The work also questioned whether everyday things might be positioned to present something less sterile and stagnant about collective beliefs. The designer’s personal ‘rendition’ of Pick ‘n Pay’s branded goods, represented a collection of self-originated and curated images that Hawley, had collected over the course of her research. The shopping apps and online followings would devise the evolving aesthetic of the stacked shopping aisles, possibly creating a very interesting dynamic in brand tribalism (i.e. one devised by customer’s taste and collective public 49 concerns). There are immediate inconsistencies in this paradigm for the shopping popularly accepted, however the design engages people in rethinking the commercial shopping-scape, the value of an image and the passive consumer dynamic. The Pick ‘n Pay project illustrates the way a business and designers might engage in social dreaming, not just problem-solving, but devising new problems to solve. Figure 2 Ami Hawley, Pick ‘n Pay Supermarket Installation: Inspired by You, Oat Bran Boxes, 2013, cardboard, 23x17x6 cm, Port Elizabeth, NMMU 2013 Graduate Exhibition (photograph: Ami Hawley). In another more recent, wry and romantic turn on commercialism, the world-renowned fashion house Miu Miu, and filmaker Miranda July (Oyster 2014) debuted a new film as part of their acclaimed “Women’s Tales” series, called Somebody5 The film showcases their own ‘speculative’ application (app), available for download: “…bringing people together [it]… passes on messages to your friends via complete strangers that are in close proximity to said friends”. The app is currently connecting unlikely strangers using the service with those who we need to reach someone ‘in person’. Although it can also be read as a form of parody on the interfaces that have put between individuals in an increasingly technologically connected society, the application challenges whether technology might also be something inspiring personal contact between strangers, addressing ways in which delivering a message to someone might be felt as an altruistic gesture. The application shows how economic competition, might diversify into practices that foster intimacy and kinship rather than salesmanship despite its 50 success at promoting Miu Miu’s business of selling clothing: but what of the actual business and economic structures themselves? Importantly the design brought to these business operations, although socially valuable (de-alienating the communication of established symbolic production) does not attempt to rescript the core economic structures that situate its commercial values of exchange. In this regard examples are far harder to situate. One might locate this fundamental challenge of design’s symbolic production to contemporary design institutions and the symbolic production of design activism (also associated with art-activism and eco-design). The Central Saint Martin’s (2014) college in London began dissecting the idea of value through the initiation of one of the “world’s first social media fuelled price-drop pop-up shop[s]”. Titled “Worth”, it is a “is a 4 day long pop-up shop”, that sold limited edition designs originally priced at 1 million pounds each, but becoming significantly lower in price as the shop gathered online social recognition (likes, shares and tweets). This example was interesting for the way it applied current-day commerce differently, it signified the importance of online culture and collective buying power in the future of commerce, and the way to design for it. In a similar but more abstract and cross-disciplinary vein Critical Practice and the Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Graduate School’s Public Programmes (Webb 2015) presented a cross-disciplinary “reimagining of commerce” through their annual interactive conference called #TransActing: A Market of Values. With stalls and stallholders from a crossrange of disciplines, from the humanitarian arts, researches, to economists, the market focuses on a peer-lead approach to cultural production, turning the market space into an idea space. Essential to engaging in this market is the understanding that the money system, however socially subsuming its structures, is only one symbolic means to take account and make exchanges. The market is unique in how it engages in designing the particularity and function, inherent to money (taking-stock, budgeting, markets, industry), whilst pursuing new cultural systems of values that are not always so easily reduced to a monetary value or measured (for instance measuring worth and satisfaction). The issue of scarcity and collective belief, key to any value system, is not an easy matter to unravel. What determines scarcity and how collective belief might be realigned with values that promote happiness, abundance and generosity? These are social questions that might realign the culture and commerce we know with a symbolism or assigned value of humanistic care, rather than competitive strategy. Agency when employed to express abstract ideas of social value, like those illustrated above, can find more incidence in material reality as well. Spanish architect, Santiago Cirugeda (Markussen in Marskin 2013) shows how design activism can result in grassroot spatial changes, promoting new collective values within shared spaces. The spaces Cirugeda is interested in concern social value and the independence of the citizen in urban spaces, subverting his training in design to serve outside of industry and government. His work might be seen as exercises in social initiation and subversion. Cirugeda, is often denied permission by the municipality to access the urban spaces he hopes to reclaim for the citizens, and so he uses interesting ways to work on the edge of what he knows about industry and professionalism, to bring unexpected potential to the social scape, through collective community projects. He often subverts institutionalised boundaries and builds upon what exists, in one example he decided to erect a first floor extension to his flat, which projected over the sidewalk. Permission was denied. To overcome the narrow vision of governmental policy he graffitied the street-side wall of his home, and then waited for his application to erect scaffolding to remove the graffiti to be approved. Once approved, this 51 structure was used as the supporting structure for the desired extension designed onto the first floor. In one of his many socially orientated design projects, Cirugeda exploited the laws around rubbish skips. He recognised that individuals were not permitted to design urban spaces, but a skip could be placed anywhere. He therefore began to involve the community in converting skips for a number of social purposes, including a playground. By turning them into play objects he questions and challenges ideas of public space and the street through their actual use (Markussen in Julier 2013: 228). On the edge of the law, he engages in a design practice that is quick, collectively built, economical and in service of the vision of the people, rather than those who are rewarded by existing restrictive social structures (see Spatial Agency 2014). Design in the ambit of activism, like Cirugeda’s, can have its own bias, romanticizing anarchy or in some more manipulative instances, using subversive design to find political and commercial popularity within particular social circles. Cirugeda, like the examples provided above, show how design might act in the present to intervene in new social worlds, outside of industry and market capitalism. The thinking behind these approaches, when cross-pollinated and employed at larger social scales have a capacity to hybridise and replace existing economic and cultural structures in pursuit of better ones. Conclusion “The space between” articulates the concept of intermediation between design’s economic and cultural interests, presenting design as a strategy to increase cultural and commercial competitive value. This indicates how “the space between” might be seen increasingly as a commercialloop, spreading a form of ‘commercialised-cultural value’, The examples of Moschino and Mau, articulate taste-making and market-strategy are one and the same idea. These kinds of examples, prevalent in design culture today, indicate how commercial and cultural value need to be defined in relation to society such that it transcends fixed notions of symbolic production, and the preoccupation with competitive advantage in cultural legitimation and economic-reward. This obstacle hides the potential for other ways to perceive and make sense of the world design inhabits. The authors believe that design can take what is rewarding about either field of production to mediate new meaning between its dominant practices. In the examples above taste-making and market-strategy are challenged and the mechanisms and tools of design are used to explore social issues like gender, political landscapes and new economies of value. These designers indicate a self-reflexive autonomy of practice where value is positioned to symbolise social curiosity rather than social normativity. Practicing design as social agency, aware of design’s symbolic meaning, allows interesting opportunities to arise when the model of design and culture that exists, synergises with the ‘poetry’ and exploration of a preferred economic and cultural system. Design can encompass many more interpretations of the words culture and commerce. When design becomes cultural for culture’s sake, commercial for the sake of commerce, or radical for radicalism’s sake, it conflates its own agendas, and often looses its potential to take what is socially rewarding from both spaces it sits between. 52 Notes 1 2 Tomes and Armstrong (2010: 38, 39) express enlightening views on the ‘good design’ phenomenon, revealing how the roles of manifestos, self-expression and “standards of good taste” in the establishing of a framework, contribute also to creating an “oscillation in which a particular idea of ‘good design’ which crystallises the priorities of school or era itself creates the discontents which eventually undermine it”. on the definition Bourdieu provides for it in his theory of production, implying a certain consecrated restricted practice. “Culture” is a very broad idea that can have no fixed definition. As a word speaking to any product of human activity, symbolic or material, the practices of commerce are as much “culture” as any traditional artistic or ‘honourable’ ideas of “culture”. For the purposes of immediacy, the word “culture”, used in the context of this study, is concentrated 3 High-art, high-design, and certain ‘serious’ forms of music, literature, poetry and cinema are referred to here. 4 The collection appropriates Barbie’s artificially curled, overly blonde hair, painted face, bright pink garments and hypersexualised body shape into the haute couture consumer space – an embodiment of the Las Vegas aesthetic and parody of the Hollywood starlet ideal. 5 This witty, gentle and poignantly troubling film can be viewed at http://www.oystermag.com/ miranda-july-invents-a-messaging-app-for-miumiu Works cited Adorno, J. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge. Debord, G. 1967. The Society of the Spectacle. 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Good Looking: Essays on The Virtues of Images. United States of America: Graphic Composition. Webb, C. 2015. #TransActing: The market of values- an interview with Marsha Bradfield, retrieved from http:// furtherfield.org/features/interviews/ transacting-market-values-interviewmarsha-bradfield on 10 February 2015. Sueda, J. 2014. On speculation, retrieved from http://allpossiblefutures.net/onspeculation-3-2/ on 8 June 2015. Superflux. 2015, retrieved from http://www. superflux.in on 12 May 2015. Ami Hawley is a Master’s Graphic Design student at NMMU. Her research draws attention to social alternatives for the design profession and the values it projects. Hawley explores these alternatives to design’s dominant practice in her personal capacity as an entrepreneur and social agent, beginning Pippin: The clothing curatorship in 2010 as an initiative in sustainable, authentic and visceral alternatives for the marketplace. Bruce Cadle is a professional teacher, agent provocateur and research programme head in Applied Design at NMMU. His interest in developing keen and critical minds leads his teaching and research practice, as a senior academic, towards discourse on design critique in visual communication and fashion, and curriculum design and development. 55