schneiper’s work is in his words, like research. It’s not about making a definition, but “making a statement that is open to public interperetation, not an opinion, but more of a constellation. It becomes then in a way, a statement which is some kind of aesthetical constellation, which is then your inspiration to move forward”.
Schneiper’s process strikes me as a fine art equivalent of design research. He sets up an experiment, without knowing what the outcome will be, puts it into a gallery and then watches the effects on visitors of the machine’s he’s made or the environment he’s called attention to.
In his process these works are a way for him to understand/draw inspiration and to move forward to the next project.
This process follows very closely the methodology of design research, and sounds very mush to me like he is using the filter of “designerly ways of knowing”. Through creative, active ways of generating knowledge, the designer learns from experiments/probes/interventions and applies those understandings to new directions.
So is this an emerging trend fine art practice? My understanding about design research at the pechakucha was that the design practice and fine art practice were approaching each other. That design was “moving away from producing culture in a primary way, (like object making or product design) and toward commenting on culture in a secondary way”.
Meredith Davis suggests a parallel shift that explains my rather vague “commenting on culture in a secondary way”. Its not that designers are commenting on culture, rather that they have come to deal with culture as the primary site of design. Citing Rheinfrank and Dubberly, she asserts that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in how we look at design from a mechanical object focus to an organics / systems approach. That the “problems are now are in systems and communities, not in products or objects- (nested within systems)”.
Shona Kitchen in her talk her also suggested as much, that “existing technology structures are the designer’s toolbox”. A tool box to what end? I think its this end of social architecture. not interaction design exactly, but a way that the concrete stuff that we are producing cannot be extricated from the system that made it and the system that sustains it,
As the site of societies problems that can be addressed by design is moving into systems design and away from object generation (davis), all design needs to be understood as social architecture.
It is this which will be my departing point for superstudio research-
first, it is my aim to look at the relationships between the media interventions that we made and the domestic environment in which the were installed. How did the families understand the table, the movable surveillance and the wall as part of or not part of their homes? (its seems for the most part, as not part) I will set up the analysis as a we expected a, but got b, and that is different then w set up x and got the opposite, in order to look at possibilities and not at creating dialectics.
Then, I would like to look at other works in which the design of the media is the design of the space, and how in those examples, analyzing whether and how a media-techture works. Most of these are for public space, and as such, I will be looking into how the public is dependent on the creation of the private spaces, and how the architecture of domesticity has shaped the kind of media that has been designed. (ie the death of mary tyler moore show and the fractioning of tv/cable offerings as there are more tvs/technology spaces in the home).
Finally, I’d like to take all of these learnings and analysis and apply it to proposals/diagrams for the possibilites of integrated media and spaces to creating social architectures.
