Bare Bones Believer

NSCAD's MDes Programme: a turbid adolescence

2010-06-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

And we’re back! As most of you know, I spent the past year writing my thesis (more on this later), and last month graduated from NSCAD with a masters degree in design. And now, even though it may be interpreted by some as biting the hand, I believe that it’s time for a review of NSCAD’s design division and the MDes programme. As a caveat before I get balls-deep into what promises to be a ripping good rant, I’d like to say that even if I knew beforehand exactly what my time at NSCAD would be like — the challenges, the uncertainties, the disorganization and the frustrations — I would do it all over again. So with that, I unsheathe my pearly-handled dagger…

NSCAD’s reputation was forged in the heyday of avant-garde and experimental art. So it’s no surprise that design has always been an afterthought at NSCAD, and has struggled to create an identity for itself within the school’s overwhelmingly bias towards fine art. An institutional disrespect for design translates into a tense, dog-eat-dog situation on the divisional level, which is palpable even in the classroom.

Like many of its students, the MDes programme yearns to find its place in the world. Is it a multidisciplinary stew of young graduates from various backgrounds tackling relevant projects in new ways? Is it a year of contemplation for professional designers to analyze their practice and approach teaching? Is it a designerly distillery of intellectuals from all disciplines who conceptualize new theories of What Design Is? Is it an international kiosk for sharing information, breaking boundaries and throwing wide the doors of possibilities?

Unfortunately, it’s all an incoherent mush at the moment, and the one year length makes the NSCAD MDes the slam-bam-thank you-ma’am of graduate design degrees. I’ve been told that the short length is meant to encourage professional designers to attend the programme without having to abrogate their lives and livelihoods for very long. Yet most of the graduate students in the programme are not only not professional designers, but come from completely different disciplines and have nary a clue what design is, or how to think about it. The result is a group of students with hugely differing levels of design capabilities, half of whom don’t know their asses from their Macs while the other half appeals to the heavens in exasperation.

This disparity is exaggerated by NSCAD’s short-sighted international recruitment policies. NSCAD recruits heavily from China, and international students, who pay nearly three times what a Canadian does, may currently be the only thing floating NSCAD upon a sea of debt.

So naturally, when international students who applied with excellent portfolios and graduation certificates from English language school show up with barely existent design skills, an insufficient comprehension of English, and no work ethic, NSCAD stretches whatever rules it may have in order to keep them and their fees.

Rather than carefully planning for the imminence of differing educational levels, university expectations and, of course, culture shock by setting up pre-study programmes, services and screening processes, and dismissing students who fail to meet the high expectations of graduate work, NSCAD treated its failing students to an easy ride. While some students, local and international alike, worked hard, displayed the commitment necessary to produce a graduate thesis, and were held to appropriate standards, students who failed to prove their rigour and dedication were shifted into an MDes-lite version of the programme, and breadcrumbed to a degree.

But, despite its confusion of purpose and penchant for selling degrees, I find myself unable to lay too brutal an indictment upon NSCAD or the MDes. The early years are for learning, and this year provided some particularly valuable lessons. And I’m glad I was part of it, even if I had to be a guinea pig, because I believe in the possibilities that a year like this can offer. I know I fared better in the MDes, on account of my decisive and directed approach to my own studies, than others who required more guidance and thrust. But the personal and intellectual development I managed to wrangle out of this past year, in spite of all the snafus, is a testament to the potential inherent in the programme.

Though they fell victim to a convoluted system and divisional conflicts, most of the MDes faculty were without reproach, and pushed me to realize my intentions in form as well as content. People like Lorely Gaunt, Christopher Kaltenbach, Hanno Ehses, Rudi Meyer, Michael LeBlanc, Alexandra Emberley and Marlene Ivey were each responsible for a part of my thesis development, and to them I owe its outcome.

And really, the only thing that stands between the MDes and a proud and cohesive graduate programme is a matter of identity. The schisms that rend the design division and its patriarchal feuds may be felt even by those who have never attended a division meeting, but may in fact be the birth pangs of a stronger and more resolute design community within the school. What’s necessary is a hardcore venture into the realm of openness, inquiry, communication and methodical problem-solving — a laying-bare, a looking-through, and a building-up. This is design process, and only through this caustic but transformative practice will NSCAD’s MDes develop a strong identity, and a name worth upholding.

Design: Way More Fun than Medical School

2009-11-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

Raise your hand if you've seen this "Inside IDEO" video at least once within the first week of undergraduate design school. Click the above link and watch it again while wondering why I'm telling you to watch it again. Raise your other hand if you feel like you're being blatantly manipulated. No, it's not just you. An introductory knowledge of semiotics, dosed with a healthy amount of sarcasm, will illuminate exactly what's going on in this video — and, concurrently, what may be going on in design education on a meta-level.

As this decade-old video will show, you no longer have to work in a boring old office. Sure, you still have to go to work five days a week for a boss in order to exchange your time for currency with which to perpetuate the economic cycle — but as a creative professional, you get to do it wearing jeans and throwing rubber balls into a Fisher-Price basketball net. Instead of being expected to sit quietly at your desk all day, you'll be encouraged to spell words incorrectly, arrange your wheeled furniture erratically around your cubicle space, voice loudly the first idea that comes into your head, take things apart and leave them on the floor, because you, my friend, are a Designer.

What does a Designer do, you might ask? No problem, the video will answer that! Why, a Designer makes things! Things that companies like to sell! Things that people like to buy! Things that look cool! Things that are exactly like other things but with more fun and interesting features! And the best news is: you don't even have to be an expert on anything! As a Designer (an essential element of the modern consumerist lifestyle) you only have to be good at one thing:

Process! There's not much to it. Just pick a thing, any thing (that's what Designers do, remember — make products, and make products slightly different). First, you might want to play with your thing. Jump on it. Throw it in the air. (You might want to have several of your things handy in case you break one.) Then you might want to quote some statistics ABOUT the thing. Make sure your statistics are very serious — it is best to include death and injury. That will make your job as a Designer seem much more important.

Next, make sure you talk about your own ideas — no matter how vapid and insignificant they are. That will let your boss know that you are a creative person, and do indeed deserve to be a Designer. Then you might want to watch people using your thing in its natural environment. Focus on the people who, due to brain damage or a shallow gene pool, are using your product incorrectly and becoming frustrated, badly injured, or homicidal. Take notes. Later on, you'll use these notes to make changes to your product, changes that will make nitwits come up with more ways to misuse your product and make normal people wonder why they just bought a lime green version of something they already own. Write down everything you learn on a big piece of paper, with big bright markers, in point form. Forget things on purpose and then add them with colourful post-it notes — that makes your poster look prettier.

Now comes the fun part. Get some tools, some glue, nails, tape and lots of construction paper, and make your thing different. Maybe add some wings or speed holes. Maybe red would be flashier. Remember to be messy — your boss, also a Designer, will like this. Don't worry about the mess. Someone else will clean it up. If you get frustrated, bored or start to hallucinate, don't panic. Just look up at the slogans on the walls. Your company will have reassuring statements, like "Encourage Wild Ideas" or "Arbeit Macht Frei," posted there in order to lift your spirits.

Don't be afraid to show your thing's new designs to your co-workers. Among Designers, criticism is banned, so remember to keep your dissenting words to yourself. Even if your co-worker's thing is covered in endangered macaque monkey fur, don't say anything — your boss might like his better and then won't you look an ass. This part will soon be over, though — it's not like you're looking for some modernist universality in form, or pureness of content, or any sort of absolute or relative truth. All you need to do is make your product different enough to avoid being sued by your client's competitor.

There is one thing you must remember as a Designer, a Maker of Things Fun and Cool. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you question the social, political, economic, historical, psychological or philosophical context of the product which you are making (or making slightly different). Do not bring up to your co-workers that that new toy might stunt creative and cognitive abilities in children by decreasing attention span and delineating a set of rules for "play" that enforce gender roles and teach children how to become an obedient cog in the mechanism of contemporary culture of instant gratification and thoughtless waste. And while you're at it, do not mention to your boss that the new shopping cart design perpetuates a culture of resource overconsumption by making it easier to buy large amounts of processed and foreign-grown food (flown and trucked in from thousands of miles away) from big-box stores owned by soulless multinational corporations perpetrating untold ills on people in countries you've never even heard of, and then transport said food via automobile long distances to suburban neighbourhoods dependent on the consumption of crude oil for day-to-day existence.

Yeah, don't mention any of that. That's not fun. Just clap and cheer when all your work is done on the project, and be proud of yourself for being part of something that will make absolutely no difference in the lives of millions of people after the marketing department has convinced them to buy it. This is, after all, why you became a Designer — the newest, coolest, and therefore best, job in the world.

One day, all companies will be like Design Companies — an experience of roughly equivalent enjoyment to a barrel of monkeys. In the rosy, not so distant future, every accountant, insurance adjuster and quantity surveyor will wear ill-fitting denim shirts and ties with Warner Bros. cartoon characters on them, shoot memos to each other on the foam points of Nerf guns, and hang flashing Christmas lights from their cubicle walls. Think of the laughter! The innovation! The happiness! And all thanks to Designers!

Like, seriously, folks. Is this what our professors think design is? Slavery to commercial interests under the mantra of "Fun"? Is there no matrix of social responsibility enforced — or even offered — alongside the crazy bandwagon of making stuff that people will buy? Wait, there is? It's called sustainable design? And it basically ensures that no designer is concomitant in any practice or process that places business needs over the social, spiritual and intellectual needs of people and the health of the ecological world around them? Oh, okay. My bad.

Sustained by… Beer and Rhetoric: Day One (Part II)

2009-11-12T07:30:00.000-08:00

(Welcome back to Part II coverage of the first event in last month's "Sustained By Design" conference. The setting is Carbonstock, 8pm, and the scene is a series of Dragon's Den style pitches of "sustainable" solutions.)

The first “contestant” was Jonathan McKeever from Silver Foot Wind Initiative, a non-profit organization which holds workshops on DIY wind turbine building. (Visit their website; the content is absolutely fascinating, and is an example of the type of freeing knowledge that contemporary business-based design would have you not need or want to bother about.) McKeever proposed a kinetic wind sculpture exhibition whose purpose would be to illuminate the beauty and power of wind and dispel negative ideas surrounding wind power. Predictably the Dragons took issue with his proposal because there was no guaranteed “return on investment” — and it was, like most of the initiatives presented at the event, non-confrontational and non-controversial.

Next was Pam Cooley from CarShareHFX, the Halifax chapter of the Canada-wide initiative to reduce automobile ownership and dependency by organizing a membership and hourly fee system for casual car use. Members pay a yearly fee plus an hourly rate for the use of shared cars located at depots around the city, drastically cutting the yearly cost of operating a vehicle and eliminating the need to own a car. Cooley’s pitch was simple: to obtain more capital with which to purchase more vehicles and expand the rapidly growing Halifax chapter. In a province where very little outside HRM (and a lot inside of it) is never touched by even irregular public transit, the car is still seen as an essential mode of transportation. Of course, there are already car rental services, buses and the traditional Student Occasional Transport Method known as “borrowing your parents’ car.” I think, however, that CarShare’s focus on the automobile is still essentially contributing to the “creating solutions for modern lifestyles” camp I vehemently oppose, for the simple reason that modern lifestyle — living in the suburbs, driving to work and taking frequent trips to big-box stores — is the core problem and must be dealt with as such.

Next was Chris Velden, a charismatic German expat and the head chef at Ryan Duffy’s, who has been growing herbs and keeping bees on the restaurant’s rooftop. His pitch was less a business plan and more an exhortation — and an offer of help — to transform more of the city’s bare and desolate rooftops into lush urban gardens. Jane Wright piped up to wonder aloud whether she wanted to eat food grown exposed to the exhaust of the city’s cars rather than food grown in the Annapolis Valley, and was soundly owned by Velden, who reminded her that HRM has a citywide pesticide ban while the Valley does not. Then Uffe Elbaek (bless those Europeans) pointed out that, unlike many urban cities like Berlin, Halifax actually has the ground space to create urban gardens and is simply not using it properly. Both Uffe and Velden make a point about Halifax’s infrastructure: that we are not using what we have, and complaining about what we don’t have. I opined afterward to one of my fellow spectators that perhaps it is the large and unwieldy student presence in this city that is responsible in part for the lack of cultivation of — and lack of respect for — Halifax’s public places.

At this point a couple of “SPIN farmers” were supposed to pitch an idea; they were, sadly, MIA. But from what I could gather from the interwebs, Jean Snow and Bob Kropla of Lake City Farms have been farming their own backyard for a number of years and have since moved on to their neighbours’ backyards in Dartmouth, growing vegetables in the city microclimate, watering and tending the crops by hand. SPIN stands for small plot intensive farming, which is not only a sustainable approach to farming but apparently has very good yields — with enough extra for Snow and Kropla to sell at the Dartmouth farmer’s market. It’s a beautifully simple idea: low startup cost and low maintenance. The only obstacles are promoting the idea and organizing backyard plots in close proximity — a challenge worthy of the design community. Oh, wait. I forgot. We want to enable business to build capital. On to the next sucker, then.

A couple of NSCAD design grads were next up, shilling a silicone green bin container for the freezer. They had developed the product to be easy to grab and empty into the large outside bin, and their sexy concept renderings seemed, at least for the first minute or so, quite brilliant. It was Jane who asked the pivotal question: why do I need to buy I product to freeze my organic garbage when I do that all the time with re-used plastic bags and cardboard boxes? Though I think the students’ intentions were honorable, this is unfortunately the result of a product design education at NSCAD: creating “green” products out of low-impact, biodegradable materials without considering that the most practical contribution to sustainability is not to make anything new at all. This is, of course, considered anathema to product design and is anathema to business — perhaps an ever so subtle indication that design projects should not be conducted by business rules.

Following the students was a member of NSCAD faculty, Gary Markle of the small Fashion division. His was, unfortunately, a bizarre and rambling presentation involving nightmares of cloning organic material for fabric from umbilical cords. Eventually, Thackara and the Dragons gathered that he was trying to get funding for a program on new textile research; the Dragons, of course, basically waved him off because he had no plan whatsoever. I was troubled on a deeper level, particularly that his prime sustainability anxiety seemed to be the possibility that we may be running out of fabric, and that his solution was to research the development of new materials. As a dedicated hunter of secondhand treasures, I know from experience that here in Canada, we have a high ratio of elderly people, and that from time to time they die, and when they die their stuff ends up at the Salvation Army. And their stuff is awesome. There are more perfectly serviceable clothes the world than any of us could ever wear out; it may not all be fashionable at the moment, but that’s what sewing machines and creativity are for. What is strange about so many approaches to sustainability is just this: that we have, present and available, a cornucopia of solutions, and yet they are being overlooked in favour of Something New and Technologically Advanced. And we, as designers, are often far too ready and willing to give the people what they want.

Last, and definitely least sensible, was Morris East owner Jennie Dobbs, with this craptacular idea for a Drunk Shopping Night, which would involve downtown business owners handing out free alcohol in order to encourage business. I shouldn’t have been surprised at how well this idiocy went over, especially with Gordon Stevens, considering that it was free/cheap beer which had packed out Carbonstok that night — and would be responsible for high attendance at the rest of the conference’s events. I’m sure I don’t have to repeat the founding principle of this blog — that consumerism is THE OPPOSITE of sustainability — in order for you, reader, to guess what kind of expression I had on my face at this point in the evening. For pete’s sake, if you want people to choose your local business instead of The Gap and Boston Pizza, perhaps offer them a different aesthetic, a different lifestyle choice, a different ethic aimed at cultivating some inner human imperative than peddling the usual cycle of See-Want-Buy — with an extra side of Drunk.

The Dragons then allocated their fake funds into envelopes labeled with the different pitches of the night. The pecuniary results, let me tell you, were no surprise. Velden’s honey and herb roof farming and Markle’s garbled fabric anxiety each received a hypothetical $300,000. SPIN farming, one of the best ideas I’ve heard in my life, was awarded $400,000. The Wind Initiative and Drunk Shopping — though I loathe to mention them in the same sentence — each garnered $500,000. (Gordon Stevens sounded like he actually wanted to do the Drunk Shopping thing. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for any developments in this area, readers, and and report any future incarnation of it with my usual vitriol.)

The big wieners (I mean winners) of the night were CarShare Halifax with $700,000 Dragon Dollars — perhaps it was because of the word sharing? Or that they are already making a healthy profit? — and Superfluous Freezer Bin with $1.2 m, I think because Gordon Stevens wants to sell it in Carbonstok. I do applaud the NSCAD students for their boldness and for fulfilling some of their professors’ highest expectations, but industrial and product design suffers from intense paradoxes vis-à-vis sustainability which students cannot possibly be held responsible for.

But as skeptical as I was before I walked into Carbonstok that night, and as skeptical as I still was when I left, I do admit that the event did serve to make me aware of sustainability ideas and initiatives — particularly from non-designers — which are already operating in this city. I only hope that we, as designers, can get our heads out of our own asses long enough to realize that the solutions present around us are worthy of, and desperate for, our time and effort.

Sustained by… Beer and Rhetoric: Day One (Part I)

2009-11-09T07:37:00.000-08:00

(In the next few days I'll be posting my thoughts about this design conference, analyzing it event by event. This is Part I of a two-part piece on the first event of "Sustained By Design.")

Last month’s four-day “Sustained by Design” conference here in Halifax was not exactly a ground-breaking symposium on sustainability and design in this city, but it was not exactly useless and unenlightening, either. I put off writing this piece, partly because my ire was up after the events ended and I wanted my broken-bottle-edged opinions to dull a little before I wrote. Though unbiased recounting is not my oeuvre, I will endeavor to give credit and denigration where both have, respectively, been earned.

That said, “Sustained by Design” kicked off with an event whose rhetorical implications confirmed my suspicions about the underlying purpose of this conference. Held at Carbonstok, the south-end boutique which ostensibly “supports” sustainable living by stocking hipster-style gift products make from low-impact materials and flown (that’s right, by jet-engine fuel) in from locations around the globe, Wednesday’s 7pm event was styled after the hit television show “Dragon’s Den.” The show, British in origin, boasts versions in a number of countries including Canada, and involves entrepreneur contestants pitching business ventures to a panel of seasoned investors in an attempt to garner a partnership and cash investment. This focus on capitalist commerce, on the importance of “investment return,” and on a popular reality-television show, instantly connoted to me not this conference’s proclaimed emphasis on new solutions but on the already ingrained socio-economic thinking and behaviour patterns of the prevailing consumerist culture. The whole pretense of the event evidenced the disturbing trend in “green” design, which focuses less on ferreting out and confronting the radix of our habitual overconsumption, and more on cultivating a profitable bottom line from endeavors which attract attention based on their appearance of subverting the mainstream.

Carbonstok’s Barrington location was packed full when I got there, with young and trendy design professionals in lots of grey and black (and sporting a revolting number of soul-patches), drinking Garrison (a sponsor) beer and mingling around the event’s important figures: Carbonstok’s owner and local capitalist Gordon Stevens, Breakhouse’s Peter Wuensch, Danish designer Uffe Elbaek, and of course 4 Days’s headliner, internationally known British author and designer John Thackara. Interestingly enough, Thackara’s role in the night’s event was not one of “dragon,” as the Dragon’s Den investors are known on the show, but rather as moderator, a capacity in which he kept time and delivered funny and affable comments rather than the seasoned advice he is much admired for.

The Dragon panel was made up of Gordon Stevens, the above-mentioned hardboiled business owner, Jane Wright, chef and owner of trendy restaurant Jane’s on the Common (which, it seems, operates exclusively in lower-case like e e cummings, a fact which I will ignore for the perpetuity of proper English grammar), Marc St-Onge, president of Ascenta Heath, a manufacturer of upscale natural health products, who seems to have been qualified for a panel on sustainable design by the related anecdote that his company uses recycled paper exclusively. The final panel member was designer Uffe Elbaek, founder of business/design school KaosPilots (which seems to temper its irritatingly slick, clichéd, design-is-the-answer-to-everything tenor with a focus on social aesthetics), who stood out strongly during the course of the evening both as a panelist and advisor and as a person with actual concerns about sustainability in this city.

With a Breakhouse crew (which may or may not have been hired on the basis of being young and cute) manning the AV equipment, Peter Wuensch gave introductions and an opening statement meant to sound challenging (“We need to rethink the idea that more is better”) and progressive, which fell flat within the context of the night’s location within a bastion of the latest in modern conspicuous consumption. He also explained the mechanics of the game: the Dragons would ask questions and give advice after every presentation, and at the end allot hypothetical cash to the contestants; the one with the most “investment” dollars at the end would be declared the winner.

(Tune in again to read about the "contestants" who presented their contributions to sustainability in Halifax.)

"Sustained By Design": Further Sponsor Shenanigans

2009-11-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

It appears that the (Hali-infamous) architecture firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple has joined the ranks of "4 Days: Sustained By Design" sponsorship — and, consequently, my shortlist of sponsors with questionable motives regarding sustainability. For all those uninitiated in the lore, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple are the geniuses responsible for fiasco that is the NSCAD Port Campus. On the firm's website under its portfolio section, it states that the Port Campus was designed "to accommodate the 'dirty arts' (sculpture, metal work, foundry, woodwork, stone, plastics and ceramics)," but the exclusion of soundproofing in an inherently noisy work environment, and the open-concept space and complete lack of insulation on a waterfront location that gets frigid and windy in the winter, makes the building, despite its "industrial aesthetic," frustrating to work in and a downright financial (and environmental) liability.

I don't know whether it was ego on the part of the architects, fractured communication with the clients, or simply bad planning, but the result is that MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple got a sexy new building to display in their portfolio and NSCAD got a money pit, frostbitten students and a loggia gallery made of such dainty and delicate wood that you can't even hang anything on the walls. It's all very well to install low-flow toilets and automatic sinks under the auspices of sustainability-conscious design, but when your client is going broke paying NS Power for the extravagant tonnes of nature-flaying fossil fuels it takes to warm the ice off the damn place, it's a big fat FAIL.

The Motives of "Sustained By Design" Event Sponsors: I questions dem.

2009-11-09T07:04:00.001-08:00

(Some of you have probably read this when I posted it on my Facebook page last month; I include it here because I am working on a response to the conference after the fact.)

After looking at the list of sponsors for the "Sustained By Design" event in Halifax next week, I was (not so) surprised at certain Halifax design establishments' lack of commitment to the real problems of sustainability. Whether this 4-day event will be a focused look at design's potential contributions to sustainability within the historical, geographical and political particularities of Halifax (and Nova Scotia as a whole), or a nauseating round of back-patting and sweeping rhetorical generalities on "sustainable consumerism" while above-mentioned firms get on tv by piggybacking on the international renown of John Thackara, remains to be seen. There are, however, blatant inconsistencies in the motivations of establishments such as Breakhouse and Carbonstok in regard to the event's worthy — if potentially misleading — themes.

Breakhouse is a multi-disciplinary design studio located in Halifax's south end near Pier 21 and the NSCAD Port Campus (and therefore often proffered by professors as a carrot-on-a-stick to design undergrads). After looking through its online portfolio, I might interpret its motto "Design makes everything better" more as "Design makes everything the same." Breakhouse is responsible for the sleek, shiny, plastic yuppified look of the Aliant store in the Halifax Shopping Centre, overpriced hair salon Fred, Uncommon Grounds, the saddening Mill Brothers makeover, and Carbonstok (which I'll get into later). My favourite WTF moment in looking at the Breakhouse portfolio was the concept renderings for the Blue Ocean Contact Centres makeover — which look ABSOLUTELY 0% like what they actually did inside my former venue of employment — and the fact that they define Blue Ocean as a "boutique level contact centre." Lol.

But the important thing here is that there is NOTHING about Breakhouse that indicates a commitment to sustainability, sustainable development or even an effort to make/build/design with ecologically-affirmative materials. None of Breakhouse's architectural or interior designs appear to measure up to The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™, or are listed on The Canada Green Building Council (one of the "Sustained By Design" sponsors which actually makes sense) website. So why would Breakhouse sponsor this event? Only one answer makes sense to me: publicity, otherwise known as "gettin' on the tee-vee."

The same goes for south-end Halifax designery knick-knack boutique Carbonstok. This is another Gordon Stevens business; he also owns coffee shop chain Uncommon Grounds, ice cream parlour Sugah and cake/tourist paraphernalia store Rum Runners — all of which were designed/branded by Breakhouse. Carbonstok is full of useless junk that yupsters who already own everything get each other for their birthdays, like a sticky-back chalkboard shaped like a mirror or a quirky screen-printed t-shirt or a fish-eye Lomography camera. It's exhausting being in the place, but it only became nauseating when I read this little tidbit on the website: "Sometimes the right choice isn’t about picking the product that’s been made in the most globally conscious way, it’s how you choose to live your life that will have the most impact on our earth." This, ladies and gentlemen, is Carbonstok's take on sustainability: nonsensical, nonconfrontational and borderline delusional. It's as if it is trying to get its customers to think that by buying crap from Carbonstok, they are part of the solution to the world's problem of overconsumption.

My problem with Carbonstok is not that it is a place of business, a store that sells products and solicits buyers using sleek and eye-catching contemporary design. It's that Carbonstok conflates sustainability with consumerism, co-opting a real and serious modern dilemma to sell shit, under the name of design. As a human being and a designer with a responsibility to the public (not to the purposes of the business world), I find such an enterprise morally offensive. But as a writer and a student at a collapsing institute of art education, I also find it amusing.

Therefore, I propose two new words for us young Nova Scotian designers, words which serve the dual purpose of expressing design concepts in our city and poking fun at the two institutions lambasted above. And so, I give you…

breakhouse, verb. To strip an object, building or space of interest and individuality by making it look generically sleek and modern.
ie. "The Heartwood used to be all cool and run-down and mismatched, but it's been totally breakhoused."

carbonstok, verb. To be influenced to purchase something with an integral theme/ethic which contradicts the very act of buying it.
ie. "Dude, you totally got carbonstoked into buying that "Buy Nothing Day" t-shirt."

Now go forth, use these words until they become part of the vernacular, and then drop out of design school and apprentice in a profession which actually solves problems — like plumbing or carpentry.

We Must Dissent

2009-09-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

Design is not a product. It will not make you a web site, or a rug shaped like Warhol's banana, or an intuitive online banking experience, or better anti-lock breaks. It will not make your home greener, your clothes more stain-resistant, your workspace more creative, or your cell phone cooler than everyone else's. Design is not a synonym for form, usability or improvement; it is not a panacea or a solution. Design is not even a foolproof process — despite what your teachers may spout about IDEO.

Design is critical engagement with the artificial, within the void between humans and nature, humans and technology, and nature and technology — plus a million other things, depending on who you ask. This is one of design's inherent problems: it is an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary discipline, with leave to go anywhere and involve everything, to pull together a charybdis of data and values and ethos from a score of different sources and make something new — subverting the internal checks-and-balances of traditional disciplines without instituting any of its own.

As a discourse, design is still a petulant adolescent, yearning for an identity apart from the discourses it siphons from but balking at any structural attempt to limit its creativity. It is often up to individual designers to internalize an ethical practice, to commit to political engagement and social responsibility, and to hold fellow designers to a standard outside of design brief deliverables. This new ethical practice is necessarily critical not only of form and content but of context and connotation. And if designers are ever to effect real change in terms of sustainability or social justice or any of the problematic issues involved with living in contemporary society, we must refuse to enable corporate agendas and perpetuate the cycle of overconsumption.

In short, we must dissent.