Dialogues
Seven Voices
The Future

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Seeds of Utopia
by Tucker Viemeister
Address to the Humane Village Forum, June 17, 1995

We need to construct utopian models "not as blueprints but as aids to the imagination," says Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel winning physicist and founder of the Santa Fe Institute. Designers like Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dryfuss imagined futuristic concepts in the 30's and 40's that have become normal products today. Industrial designers create the seeds of a humane future world.

Whether humans were sneaking up on a sabertooth tiger thousands of years ago, or are putting in a backyard pool this summer, we all exploit our intuition, creativity and ingenuity to improve our lives. What's special about designers is - that's our job. Designers do more than make things look better. Designers give tangible form to our dreams through a holistic interconnected design process. Designers make sense out of change and give meaning to innovation. From little things to big ideas, design is thinking ahead. Designers make life easier, more comfortable and more interesting. Industrial designers translate marketing goals into viable products that fit user needs and desires. J. Gordon Lippincott (the inventor of corporate identity) believes that "we have done our job too well. We have created a beyond-human-scale environment. We help make poverty worse. . . We have reached a critical point where professionals in marketing have greater power to persuade than the consumers have to resist."

The fragmentation of our society, the explosion of technology and the collapse of the natural environment is demanding a new - improved designer. Vital in an age of great change - more sweeping than the Industrial Revolution, more dominating than the Egyptian Empire, even more dynamic than the Renaissance. In the hundred years since my grandfather was born, the world has changed a lot. Telephones, radio, TV, airplanes, rockets, A-bombs,satellites, cars, computers, copiers, Faxes, FedEx, Post-Its and the World Wide Web: amazing inventions that shake society's foundation. People's whole lives are in flux- their technology, jobs, neighbourhoods, families, governments, medicine, everything is changing. There is more change happening to everyone now than happened to any other life form since that big meteor landed on the dinosaurs. From now on, the changes will be bigger and faster leading to "progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without costs," writes Neil Postman in Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology. As interpreters of new technology, designers have pretty heavy obligations!

Ever since the beginning of the Stone Age, human intelligence has defined "progress." We survived because we used the discoveries to propelled us forward. Evolution's next step is based on design - on the choices people make. Designers will be the editors - wisemen who make critical choices about which new discoveries should be developed. In this critical era, everything must be re-evaluated and possibly redesigned. Our opportunities for utopia are slipping away; the world's population that is now divided between the Have's and the Have Not's, will be further split between the Know's and the Dunno's. Soon instead of working to improve the quality of our lives, all our energy may be consumed by basic survival, spent protecting our lives.

Although modern designers can find "Bad Design" everywhere, it is more difficult for normal consumers to distinguish good from bad design when they sort through their popular culture. Bad Design is more than messy typography, dangerous toys, uncomfortable furniture, trashy decoration and poor sell-through. Design has practical value; bad design, like bad morals, cause problems. Real Bad Design makes people feel bad, wastes their time and makes them act badly. What causes bad design? Does it come from dumb mistakes or from a fiendish designer who wants to make things worse on purpose? The Nazis demonstrated the difference between incompetent design and Evil Design. Clear, powerful, dramatic, appropriate, ergonomic, efficient - Nazi stuff was the best design and it certainly furthered the most sinister ends. Did Nazi designers believe that they were doing Good Design creating their thousand year "utopia" or were they trying to cause a lot of pain and suffering?

It's easy to see how you can do everything right and still end up wrong - even following a perfect design methodology is no guarantee of perfection. Playwright Tom Stoppard doesn't think it is possible to design utopia: "If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soy beans!"

Designing Utopia is more like raising a child than programming a computer. A "Good Design" process should lead to Paul Hawken's world where "the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism."

A healthy Utopia includes problems. "As a physician," wrote Oliver Sacks in Anthropologist on Mars, "nature's richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life."

So what will be the role of designers in utopia? When everything somehow reaches perfection, will designers' work be finished? What if, as Carnegie Melon's roboticist and artificial intelligence explorer Hans Moravic predicts, robots will be doing most of the work by the year 2050? He thinks that robots will be making all the products, cleaning our houses, cooking the food, driving the cars. Pretty soon they'll be fighting the wars and teaching our kids! The robots will be pretty busy - so what should we do? Robot repair? They will do that better. How are we going to pay them for all the stuff they do for us? What are we going to get paid for? (Watching TV?) What kind of economy will we need? Why should the robots share with us? They might be better adapted for survival than humans.

We do have an edge according to evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould: "human brain power, for reasons quite unrelated to its evolutionary origins, has the damnedest capacity to discover the most fascinating things, and think the most peculiar thoughts."

For me, a fulfilling design experience is a teaching/learning social/physical activity. Everyone should be encouraged to design for two reasons: first, they too will find it fulfilling and second, there will always be plenty of work to do. "We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there,"Charles F. Kettering, the inventor of the automobile self-starter wrote in Seeds for Thought.

By the way, when we finally reach Utopia, because of a combination of human nature and thermal dynamics - it will seem like there is green grass just over the horizon, and as entropy sets in - someone should begin to create an even better Utopia. \

TOP