'More art, than money' , I once recorded this Spanish' tourist's remark on his first encounter with Dutch money, which is so often used as an example of the Netherlands' fine design tradition. When design can be 'more form than function', this goes to illustrates that symbol exchange and 'processing' comes natural to us, so 'function' comes as much after 'form' as that it precedes it. Users make form function, (by) rendering it meaning: it is their game, their intelligence. Artists should take that intelligence to inform their design and get the gameplay.
Design operates exactly on the never balanced level of human understanding and learning, where form and function interact in mysterious ways. In an 'Age of Interaction' then, the idea of 'function following form' is no recalcitrant theoretical fancy, but a major design challenge and opportunity.
mas arte que dinero
Jouke Kleerebezem
'More art than money', or function follows freaks form; opening talk (in progress editing) of the design Recast symposium, 12-14 April 2002 at the Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht NL. Part one introduces the design department agenda, part two, the actual mas arte que dinero offers some personal thoughts on the fact that we create so much form for so little function.
design Recast's title I best illustrate by the Nokia company recast: they grew in 100 years from a paper company, to rubber (used for cable insulation) to electronics and wireless telecommunications... exploiting the Finnish local assets of vastness, going from turning its wood into pulp to bridging it by mobile communications, via the cabling detour. The Nokia recast is the story of media in a nutshell.
To Recast design, as I would suggest, as a different service altogether, no matter what kind of interface (we) will develop for it, leaving the full possibilities of individual expression, particularly that of an informed and informing user (whom we will hopefully meet often these symposium days, user centered as we are in the design community), function will follow form.
introduction of the Jan van Eyck design department agenda
I'm not going to use your and my own valuable time to at length introduce our department, or the Academie, at this point. You can address me and others of its community throughout the coming days. Nevertheless some of its recent policy recasts I would like to share with you, if only because they gave birth to design Recast, the symposium and main research strands. If I say 'JvE' in the following, I mean its design department, where we are pioneering and 'publishing' that new policy. What are the changes that we have been working at, since January 2001?
no school
First principle: the JvE is no school, no institute of education, but of learning. An important difference, signalling that relationships between researchers, advising researchers, technical staff and (administrative) management, as well as with possible third parties and funding partners, operate on the basis of mutual respect and an exchange of expertise. All parties can equally learn from each other: experience and skills should flow back and forth between parties, in and out of this multi-disciplinary, international community. All learn in the passing, in collaboration.
clear interests
Then, in this learning practice, the JvE is no value free facility: our community has its clear interests. These interests even are its prime source of information, both lens and filter to our activities. Through different media, they will be articulated, published, advertized, used to connect to the professional field, in its individual, institutional and corporate forms of organization. Our focus invites participation. It appeals to those who work in the design field to contact us and propose projects. In good old launch-and-learn fashion this institute stepped out of the yearly race for portfolio booty, to actively flag its interests and see who feels addressed, all year long, in every activity. Publishing our main research interests is not meant to filter 'out' certain practices and interests, but to filter new ones 'in'.
project based
Organizationally this means that, if interests meet, we can accept any design research project proposal, in any stage of development, at any moment in time, for any duration between a couple of days and a couple of years, in any collaborative format. Now that's the basic idea. To bring this into practice we will have to get rid of some old habits. We're working on that too, and the next years will be crucial to test our intuitions. We're learning to recast from a long standing traditional 2 year post-graduate curriculum with 'tutors' and 'students', towards a center of expertise, research and experimental production... connecting those in the design fields with a practical and/or theoretical mission, while maintaining this generous Jan van Eyck mix of three disciplines: design, fine arts and theory.
So 'design Recast' labels our search for and research into contemporary practices that are 'pushing the design envelope' in different ways. We have just composed a team of four researchers from Argentina, Portugal and the Netherlands, which will be concentrated to develop our informed intuition into more solid speculation, however not to lose the very basic experimental value which characterizes any worthwhile research problem. Nevertheless clear projects will emerge, out of more general orientations. Within the context of the main research strands we can already distinguish near-project clear questions, for example into cultural identity (the Dak'Art biennial), into corporate and institutional identity (with cases JvE; Hasselt Art Center), into the overlapping, or mutual enhancement, of informational and material space, and we have a variety of running projects venturing into the interaction of sonic and graphical expression, game development and software design as much as print and publishing related productions.
launch-and-learning
Other enhancements of the Jan van Eyck's mission as an 'institute of launch-and-learning' are the opening of its library and documentation center to the public and its acquisition of the new media and theory collection and the magazines of the late Vormgevingsinstituut's (Netherlands Design Institute) library, as well as the Bonnefanten Museum contemporary arts library. Our own publishing ambitions will soon materialize in a new publications series, to which all three departments will equally contribute, and researchers and advising researchers are invited to take up editorship per issue. Next to this, Jan van Eyck will offer its web server to host individual sites of (former) researchers at no or low cost, also to somehow establish a different idea of the relationship between those who are in and those who are out—unlike out in the ol' school meaning of 'not yet in or not in anymore', which designated a clear hierarchy. We now aim to stretch the collaborative pattern in all directions, including researchers in every stage of their career, with any motivation to contribute a part of their knowledge, skills and intuition and share their questions or problems in this place and through our networks.
open sources
The idea of 'making the JvE an open, public space' runs as a solid thread through our policy decisions. This openness is meant to be an openness to the sources of design research and production, which is 'out there' as much as it is 'in here', and primarily in the interaction between the two. Contemporary design practices are versatile, wild and unruly, encountering the effects and opportunities of unprecedented media attention. This is by all means a great period for (some optimistically say 'age of') design. Which brings me to the title of my 2 cents of speculation for the discipline: 'mas arte que dinero', or function follows form.
Mas arte que dinero
'More art, than money' , I once recorded this Spanish' tourist's remark on his first encounter with Dutch money, which is so often used as an example of the Netherlands' fine design tradition. When design can be 'more form than function', this goes to illustrates that symbol exchange and 'processing' comes natural to us, so 'function' comes as much after 'form' as that it precedes it. Users make form function, (by) rendering it meaning: it is their game, their intelligence. Designers should take that intelligence to inform the work and get the gameplay.
Design operates exactly on the never balanced level of human understanding and learning, where form and function interact in mysterious ways. In an 'Age of Interaction' then, the idea of 'function following form' is no recalcitrant theoretical fancy, but a major design challenge and opportunity.
old media informed
Much of what I have personally come to value, over the past ten years, of extreme importance for the design disciplines operates exactly where private and public interests meet, where they rub and irritate, or enamour, in a completely new atmosphere of medialized information exchange. After an initial massive migration, or genuine brain drain, into the networks, into the Internet and World Wide Web, in its first decade as a consumer technology, roughly from 1992-today, today we see a return of its pioneers into the neighbourhood, connecting to the immediate realities of environments that have changed by the new media invasion, in a 'the end of the world as we know it' kind of way very much, but also to re-articulate stronger and more specific, those typical qualities which can not be met by medialization or computerization, like face-to-face interaction, the materiality of experience, the politics of immediacy. Yet our situated everyday interaction is informed and enhanced by all-over medialization. Old media, print and material arts and architecture, public space, our urban and natural environment—as contexts for much appreciated immediacy—offer a different experience altogether since we enter them informed in a completely new way, developing a different knowledge about and esteem of its material qualities and how they relate to the qualities of 'the media' at large.
I tell you nothing new if I say that our world experience has always been heavily informed by its representations and recommendation, through communication: as much before, during and after its invasion, comforting our intervention. The world has ever been advertized as experiential. Information that came 'before', we know: we have read its maps (handed down by institutional and corporate bodies of politics, religion, education and commerce) before we entered its terrain; 'after', we know: we brought and shared the souvenirs form our visits to the exotic; soon it is exactly in the 'during' where we will see the biggest changes occur: when information space and material space penetrate each other in 'real time'—as soon as we pick up the phone in the back of the bus, so to say, where no phone dared before, this penetration is happening. Quite simply. Quite naturally.
place-to-place to person-to-person shift
All communication always went from place-to-place, as a matter of transport: design, production, distribution, all just a place to place transport of product, signal or service, all the way. Now we move to person-to-person, first in the technological, and immediately with it in a far reaching social-cultural, and political sense. Person-to-person, with disrespect of location or situation, is where our communication goes. The phone rings on the bus, and its not for the bus that it rings, but for you or her or him. Two persons connect, two material situations, no two alike, are connected, two material spaces and one information space merge in the communication connection. Moods merge.
Can we at all call this situation a functional one? I doubt it. I still wonder what for heaven's sake is the functionality of having to 'pick up' , or to accept a connection to, one distant material situation (a located other, calling me), while being in another (me in the back of that bus). At a time when communication meant connecting places: a phone on a wall, those might have been places that I also visited, places I knew personally: the house of a friend, my family, a bar where I frequent. I would 'pick them up' at a place that I called home and knew intimately. Now it is 'where ever' connecting to 'where ever', an enormous territorial gain which I sometimes think has nothing to do with me, and in general makes no sense to the situated individual. Quite different from my email, which at least is on my familiar server, one location where I do feel at home, connecting me when ever I wish from where ever I wish to whom ever I wish. We all have our preferences. On the other hand, my phone not only can tell me who it is that is ringing (ringing?), and soon enough probably where s/he is ringing from, and soon after even show me, picture me on its screen, his or her whereabouts, so that where ever that is and where ever I am, we share those spaces, in communication, put them together for the time being, space becoming space over time, the duration of a connection, or as I have called it in a different context, when I wrote about real estate value: square feet per second.
To me such changes seem to take us very far indeed from 'function', and very much towards 'form'. A form of art and play. A form of ritual, of communication. Everything then in my world turns 'mas arte que dinero': more play than function. It's the Midas Touch of medialization and telecommunication. It maybe isn't much of a new situation after all, we have played before, but this game is radically differently represented and accessed, and we have very different options to interact with/in it. In the Age of medialized Interaction, function follows form, it follows the sprawl of the network, follows the situated other, where ever s/he is, moving around and changing busses. Consequently, for our orientation, we should be reading calendars of events, rather than maps of spaces.
connecting those forms
A large(r) part of what we would call function today, is to connect two forms, to connect two material presences, two busses driving in two different directions, thus stretching form and function over time, making it temporary, soon to collapse: since when we disconnect those two busses, that form and function is no more. It was a form of play, and play isn't forever, we have to connect again to establish another event from another place.
So form isn't solid, it became information, performance, a form of communication. Form isn't that chair that is with you for the rest of your life, or that table which was with your family over the lives of one generation after another. Form is form over time and time is the duration of a connection. If you want sustainability, design sustainable connections, not solid forms. If you want that table to stay in your family over generations, connect it to those generations, inform them about that table, embed them in that table's information, not just leave it in the heritage to be transported from your family house to the auction house.
Re: Design operates exactly on the never balanced level of human understanding and learning, where form and function interact. In an 'Age of Interaction' then, the idea of 'function following form' is no recalcitrant theoretical fancy, but a major design challenge and opportunity.
in conclusion I would add
Re: art, re: form and function... Design is no art form (which belongs in the museum, fixed to the wall like that old phone or an old bus, or those beautiful old Dutch lighthouses and sun flowers), design is an art function, with us, born symbol pushers, who happily trade sun flowers and lighthouses, like we have been trading beads and shells and pigs and whatever, for ever.
For design the only clue, in the stretchy times that we are living for both form and function, is not to be anti-functional but to be anti-formal.
OK, let me disconnect here, unless you want to call me back, thank you very much.
correspondence: masartequedinero@idie.net
© Jouke Kleerebezem, idie.net: Innovation and Design for Information Empowerment 2002