Why Heritage is Important to Design: and what we can learn from it.
Posted on October 28, 2013 | posted by:Our histories define us, shapes us, inspire us, and influence our motivations. But our histories are not definitive of our futures; they are just the context in which our futures lay. One can imagine heritage involving learned culture, mores, and design narratives that manifest into message and perspective.
The literature on design and heritage runs surprisingly thin. However, the physical manifestation of it is present within each designer’s process. Designers make a great effort to try to develop empathy for others’ experiences, but I stress the importance of self-awareness and introspection. Some of these capacities may include: local distinctiveness; contemporary culture and sensitivity; cultural and physical heritage; and relative environmental sustainability efforts. Both empathy and self-awareness are needed to create a more holistic design process.
Designers can and should learn more about each others’ histories, as it would make the field much more empathetic. Bill Bryson once said, “History matters because it reminds us who we are, what we’ve done, and what we might do better.” Designers, and especially students, should be taking the time to understand more thoroughly about who the designers really are (heritage), what we have done (history), and therefore, what we might do better (motivations).
“Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?”
Take for example Zaha Hadid. She was the first woman to ever win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004 (it’s awarded annually to an architect whose work demonstrates talent, vision and commitment, and which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.) Perhaps more well known for her stubborn temperament than for her buildings, she has paved a path that was unknown to her in 1950 Baghdad.
“Zaha Hadid was single-minded from an early age. Born in 1950 in Baghdad, she grew up in a very different Iraq from the one we know today. The Iraq of her childhood was a liberal, secular, western-focused country with a fast-growing economy that flourished until the Ba’ath party took power in 1963, and where her bourgeois intellectual family played a leading role. Hadid’s father was a politician, economist and industrialist, a co-founder of the Iraqi National Democratic and a leader of the Iraqi Progressive Democratic Parties. Hadid saw no reason why she should not be equally ambitious. Female role models were plentiful in liberal Iraq, but in architecture, female role models anywhere, let alone in the Middle East, were thin on the ground in the 1950s and 1960s.”
To not understand her history, her context, is to not understand her work.
I am surprised by how little emphasis designers put upon their own histories; their backgrounds. It is the preconceived context to their opinions, styles, and assertions. The good, the bad, and the ugly all regulate our perspectives and our narratives. It then has to be part of the design process, part of the conversation; not just the subplot. To design is to be part designer, part sociologist.
As Ezio Manzini & Virginia Tassinari wrote in Sustainable Qualities, “Although the ensuing qualities have an innovative character, we can make use of several cultural, historical, philosophical, and sociological references from the past in order to help is better understand and define them.” I’d argue that we need to extend that definition to behavioral and emotional references, and to the role of designers, and what designers might become.
The current paradigm in which the designer finds him/herself in is not pure coincidence. Donald Norman talks about emotional The Design of Everyday Things, specifically with that of three different aspects of design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Reflective design focuses on the rationalization and intellectuality of a product – specifically if you can tell a story about it? Does it appeal to your self-image, to your pride? He goes on to argue that emotions are inseparable from everything we do, everything we think is tinged with emotion, much of it subconscious. In turn, our emotions change the way we think, and serve as constant guides to appropriate behavior.
As a student of industrial design, I was lead to read a plethora of design publications, books, and articles. The far majority would clump all practice into one little category of “design thinking.” However, there is a vast mixture of design styles, aesthetics, narratives, perspectives, and motivations. “Design thinking” is just practice, and we each practice differently. It is an abuse of semantics to generalize design and design practice. By saying “design thinking,” we mask each of our unique experiences and innate nuances we bring to design. I would propose a new paradigm in which we categorize how designers practice.
C. Wright Mills believed there is no such thing as true objectivity. “To say that you can have experience, means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman.” I would extend the argument to designers, not just to social scientists. It is the responsibility of the designer to understand his/her capacities when approaching any problem. Not until we fully understand the uniqueness that makes each designer different can we then start to fully recognize our individual narratives. Only then can we fully realize our capacities as designers.
REFERENCES
http://designmuseum.org/design/zaha-hadid
Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. USA: Doubleday, 1990.