Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

Designer and design theorist Tony Fry presented a PNCA-sponsored lecture today based on his book ”Design Futuring, Culture and the Coming Age of Unsettlement“.

The idea were huge and his presence steady, quiet and firm. He began by framing his talk with the idea that we (human beings) are designers, we design our world, we live in a designed world. We are very good at creating things, and very bad at recognizing what we’re destroying in the process. The implications of this are of course enormous as we face global climate catastrophe. The social and cultural changes to be forced upon us from dealing with upheavals, including the displacement of about 10% of the world’s population, will be of a scale not seen since the last time humanity reacted to major climate change, about 12,000 years ago when disparate peoples moved into Mesopotamia, and nomads turned agrarian.

The following selective bits and pieces from the rest of Fry’s lecture made it into my notes:

War is the most dramatic manifestation of unsustainment. It destroys the environment, it destroys bodies.

The current economic recovery is really just a reinstatement of the status quo, rather than the paradigm shift needed from a quantitative economy to a qualitative economy.

An economy base on perpetual growth is like the concept of perpetual motion. It’s physically impossible.

Our current form of democracy won’t deliver sustainment. People won’t vote for a different world if they are unable to imagine it. What’s needed is the creation and dissemination of a vision of a different world.

The problems we’re facing can’t be solved by individuals (i.e. the ‘genius’ model). What’s required are teams of people with ranges of expertise.

Designers need to move from just designing things, to learning how to mobilize them strategically. Fry proposes a ‘redirective practice’, which entails new design practices and new design activities. E.g a practice of ‘design for elimination’ - how do you turn a designer’s eye toward the problem of how to get rid of things? 

It’s not just about changing the world, it’’s about changing ourselves. It’s a process as big as the Enlightenment, but we don’t have 500 years to do it.

Seems impossible? Human history is the history of the attainment of the impossible. It’s about changing the perception of what’s possible. The world, after all, is not flat.

When the inevitable audience question came up of, ‘there’s so much to be done, how does one prioritize?’, Fry quoted a Swedish associate: “Dig where you stand.”

Agave nectar (which sounds so foreign, so of-the-desert, and damn hard to get out of agave) tastes remarkably like the Golden Syrup of my NZ youth! I mean, it’s like Golden Syrup is really agave nectar but they never said so!  Or someone’s been syringing Golden Syrup into agave plants!

I have yet to try it out as a substitute for Golden Syrup in making Hokey Pokey. 

Don’t know what Hokey Pokey is? It’s an easy-to-make candy that’s like honeycombed caramel. It’s brittle like toffee, but full of bubbles like, well, pumice. But it tastes way better than pumice. Here’s a recipe.

It doesn’t do raw, but it does a lot of other things. Here it is chatting with PhotoBooth. I think they liked each other.