User:ThomasW/Notes design beyond design

Van Toorn, Jan (1998) Design Beyond Design: Critical Reflection and the Practice of Visual Communication, Jan Van Eyck Akademie

susan buck-morss

By what we do every day – or don't do – we make your world. we are implicated without any malcie of intnet. P61

jörg petruschat

Many designers hope to change the world when they go to technologies and l think that is a big illusion. And my duty is not to say to you what you have to do in future, but my duty is to think about what I see in the present. And l think it’s an illusion to run behind the technology changes in the hope of changing the social status quo. In my opinion we should not make the mistake of thinking that we areme greatest because we are the latest.We have to look into the history and the problems of history because the situation, as I showed, from the fifteenth down to the nineteenth century has many similarities with the situation today. That’s the first. The second is that technology is a political structure, it transmits a kind of power, of economic power, and this is a new form that we cannot touch in our everyday life. This technology functions behind a facade. So the political is also structural in this case. When designers think there are possibilities to change the world in contact with these technological systems they think like Walter Gropius, that the computer’s only an instrument. I think that is false. The computer is not only an instrument but a big structure with many standards, and standards affect everyday life. That’s the third reasorn .p90