Another future for designers in America

Abstract

The rationale behind mass-industrialization, now normalized, is embodied uncritically in the practice of many new designers. What if the industrial past could be explored and experienced as a foreign territory, providing a vantage point from which to critically evaluate contemporary design practices and define new paths? Young American designers are searching for alternate roles, and ways to design and live. Many experiment with models from elsewhere, places where new futures are growing from useful pre-industrial remnants. America, a country synonymous with industrialization, has no such resources upon which to build new practices, and slowing while creating value through quality is pitted against the dominant ideology of democratic capitalism and a national mythology that conflates freedom and prosperity, with ownership and abundance. Students who lack understanding – critical or otherwise – of mass-production, its precedents or antecedents, learn first-hand the values of making one and making one million by producing spheres through whittling, turning, casting, and using software defaults to send the perfect sphere off for automated reproduction, ad infinitum. This exercise develops in the manufacturer (student) a nuanced understanding of worth and consequential value, and creates receptivity, otherwise absent, for identifying and testing new patterns of behaviour.