Think Tank
Bespoke futures: Media design and the vision deficit
Peter Lunenfeld
Table of Contents
Mutants in the Rosebowl
A few terms back, one of my grad students showed me sketches for a film project he’d done about the future:
Figure 1: Mutants in the Rosebowl...
Radiation from nuclear fallout has mutated most of surviving humans, and those few who have proven immune have fortified the Rose Bowl's walls and made the interior…completely self-sustainable.
This was not the first time, nor the last, that a student, tasked with envisioning the future, came back with something bleak. I wondered why this kind of post-apocalyptic landscape is now the default when we ask creative people to speculate about the future.
One reason we have so little faith in the future is that the shape of things to come has never been so inadequately imagined. We tend to see utopia as relentlessly personal, while the apocalypse is one of the few shared universals. In other words, while we can posit a future for ourselves as individuals (and even as members of a family) we have little in the way of positive imagination for the realm of the social, much less the political. This explains why a movie like Children of Men (2006) resonates, but it becomes difficult to imagine a contemporary film in which a better future is portrayed as eloquently as it was a half century before in a film like Destination Moon (1950). As we hurtle into the 21st century, it seems we suffer from a vision deficit.
Figure 2: The mid-century modern futurism of Norman Bel Geddes's model for a Flying Car, 1945.
Knock modernism, if you choose, but at least the art, design, and architecture generated in that heady period put forth a panoply of futures seductive enough to inspire others to bring them into being. From the Radiant Cities of ‘20s architecture to the design Esperanto of Helvetica in the ‘50s, from the space races of the ‘60s through the postmodern technofabulism of goggles ‘n’gloves virtual reality in the ‘80s, and Flash-y exuberance of the dot.com ‘90s, the 20th century offered a surplus of futurities, those qualities we associate in or with the future itself.
In the 21st century, though, it’s not that we’re not thinking about the future, just that the future we’re thinking about is relentlessly grim. And if designers, who are trained to visualize, aren’t being trained to visualize a future they actually want to live in, why not?
Part of the answer to this is the transformation of design education. One hundred years ago, if you were at the Royal College of Art in London, the ultimate point of the curriculum was to produce designers who could better the commerce of the British Empire. There were similar academies all across Europe, established to promote German, Italian, Danish, and other national industries. This model has hardly disappeared, as you can see from even the most casual reading of mission statements for recently founded educational initiatives like Designium in Finland, LSCA in Singapore, and the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong.
But in many other schools, that sense of service to a national enterprise is not just suspect but actually contradictory to the mission. Many elite institutions (and even not-so-elite ones) don't just attract a diverse international student body, they depend upon the tuition of foreign students to support the school. At my own institution, Art Center College of Design, for example, over the past two decades, you could trace the development of other national design economies by the make-up of the international student body, Japanese in the ‘80s, Korean in the ‘90s, the growing influx of Indians and Chinese now. This is not surprising. As capitalism itself globalized, why should design and the education of designers not follow suit?
These students—as well as their American-born classmates—are not being trained for national economies so much as transnational companies. But this mission of producing talent for the Unilevers, Sonys, Chrysler-Benzes, and Royal Dutch Shells of the world is hard to get one's heart around. Call it transnational corporate design education. Of course designers will work for these multi-nationals, but what replaces that sense that one's creative practice feeds more than the client's bottom line, that one’s work contributes to a greater, communal goal? Although serving one’s nation has certainly been problematic what, if anything, replaces the sense of putting other interests above your own?
About the author
A professor in the graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design, Peter Lunenfeld writes about design, art, film, and the broader culture in an era of computational ubiquity, studies that fall under the emerging rubric of Digital Humanities. His books include The Digital Dialectic, Snap to Grid, and USER: InfoTechnoDemo. His forthcoming book is The War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the Computer Became Our Culture Machine. He is the editorial director of the award-winning Mediawork series for the MIT Press.
