Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

OROPALLO, Gabriele
environment. Yet, dispositifs, once in motion, set off two processes.
On the one hand, they increase the distance between
man and the very environment, because they interface and
make this relationship more abstract. On the other, they define
and re-define their own subjects functioning as a mold, through
a process of subjectivization.
Digital personal fabrication through 3D printing as a material
technology — but even more as a dispositif — has the potential
to shape new subjects and new visions of the world, maybe even
beyond the already ambitious, socially and economically revolutionary
intentions of the proponents of the RepRap project.
Leroi-Gourhan developed a method for the study of found artifacts,
called chaine opératoire, or ‘operational chain’ (1964). The
method broke down the history of an artifact in all the significant
stages where human intervention had happened: supplying
of materials, designing, execution, improvement, use, disposal.
Even finding a discarded object had its meaning, because in
Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of technical processes the technical acts
are also, and most importantly, social acts. When looking at this
operational chain, authorship is not relevant as the perpetuation
of technology and the reiteration of social cohesion. Certainly,
this may sound unfamiliar in a culture in which breach of copyright
and intellectual property are considered crimes, and in
which brands and the very designers’ signatures are fetishized.
Yet, in a possible world where we can 3D scan an item and reprint
it, or even download it and modify it at will, this syntactic
process of semantic reconfiguration will certainly trigger momentous
questions. We will have to ask ourselves to what extent
we can still talk about a life cycle of an artifact if an object can be
quickly, easily and quietly resurrected at home; and also, whether
products will cease to have a recognizable identity when their
specifications become blurred, imprecise, and limitless as a result
of continuous re-adaptation and hybridization.
References
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About the author
Gabriele Oropallo is a design writer and documentarist. He is currently
a Research Fellow of the University of Oslo, where he is
working on a project on the visions of sustainability in modern
design. His publications include chapters and essays on design
ethics and socially committed design and architecture. His interests
include durability, nomadic and ephemeral design.
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies 334