nuevos valores del diseño new design values - IED Madrid

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Imagining the Future
Latour y Peter Weibel en Making Things Public, hace apenas
un año en el ZKM, podrían ser los referentes problemáticos
para una discusión abierta sobre estas cuestiones.
Lo importante es construir una nueva forma de pensar,
acorde con las condiciones de la nueva complejidad. Hoy, por
ejemplo, la ecología nos obliga a pensar la ciencia y la política
al mismo tiempo. Es la debilidad de ciertos discursos sobre la
sostenibilidad, que terminan siendo un inútil pliego de buenas
intenciones. Si nos situamos en esa perspectiva, todo lo
que tiene que ver con la cultura del proyecto debe ser repensado.
John Berger lo recordaba recientemente. La primera tarea
de cualquier cultura es proponer una comprensión del tiempo,
de las relaciones del pasado con el futuro, entendidas en su
tensión, en la dirección en la que convergen contradicciones
y esperanzas, sueños y proyectos. Comme le rêve le dessin! Sí,
como el sueño, el proyecto, en esa extraña relación en la que se
encuentran las ideas y los hechos, la tensión de un afuera que
la historia transforma y el lugar.
El design entra así como uno de los instrumentos más significativos
a la hora de definir las formas nuevas de la cultura. En
su intención pertenece por derecho propio a la llamada cultura
del proyecto; en sus aplicaciones es el momento en el que
se deciden todos aquellos elementos que modernizan y transforman
no solo los usos, sino también los gustos, las formas
de percepción y hasta las necesidades. Toda reflexión sobre el
design termina siendo una reflexión sobre las tendencias de la
cultura y sus proyectos. A nadie escapa que estas observaciones
adquieren una mayor fuerza si el contexto que las define
es el de una cultura como la nuestra, sometida a procesos de
aceleración e innovación profundos, cuyo alcance atraviesa
todos los dominios de la ciencia y la vida, la producción y la
sociedad. Intervenir en estos procesos es una de las responsabilidades
de quienes hacen suya la tarea de la construcción
de las sociedades futuras, como pueden ser los proyectos de
tesis realizados con indiscutible entusiasmo por los alumnos
del IED de Madrid.
Francisco Jarauta
Director del Comité Científico del IED Madrid
Design has never had an autonomous history. It has always
been considered as part of industrial culture or as a social ornament
or an odd aspect of the history of customs. Norbert
Elias recalls the fascination aroused by visiting and discovering
all those collections of objects made during the second half
of the 19th century, which eventually configured the world of
the metropolis and its lifestyles, as described on the pages of
the great realist novels. This fascination grows if the viewer’s
gaze or curiosity takes him through industrial spaces, new machines
and objects, and materials whose shine, in the case of
German steel in the 1920s, trapped the retinas of the photographers
employed by Fritz Lang.
In a perfectly articulated sequence, which cultural sociology
can reconstruct, lie the different stages of a process which,
driven by the impulse set in motion by the Industrial Revolution,
went on to be defined in the specific forms of objects
from domestic and public life, with a coherence in consonance
with the style of a historical period. The Modern Movement
lived off this idea by claiming as its own the building project
for a new cultural system in which the relationship between
design, architecture and urban planning combined to form a
logic or an idea which many of the movement’s representatives
believed to be ethical. I am thinking of Walter Gropius and
Bauhaus, to test this attitude and way of thinking when faced
with the cost of projectual culture. Although it is true that the
only proposal by the Modern Movement, based on a rigid hierarchy
of decision making, imploded quite a while ago, leaving
an open space for conflict between the three disciplines
which, as of today, after a thrilling period of agreements and
disagreements, is again taking place in different contexts, such
as those derived from post-industrial societies, built on the
foundations of a growing complexity, which simultaneously
enjoys new technological possibilities which allow for hitherto
unheard-of innovation.
On the basis of this complexity, it can be observed that, over
the last few years, a progressive expansion of the theoretical
and operative field of design has taken place. Its programmes
have come to be defined from the perspective of a permeable
relationship with the great transformations in the life systems
of post-industrial society, which are mainly defined by cultural
standardisation and production internationalisation. It is essential
to keep in mind that the stages of increasing globalisation
must not be viewed only from economic and political
perspectives, but that, finally, cultural aspects also define the
true field of effects. After communications and the market
–the two true agents in the globalisation process– it is necessary
to mention the generalisation of cultural patterns which
eventually define new models of symbolic frames of reference,
around which are articulated the processes of identity and difference
of the contemporary world.
Indeed, these problematic contexts are the focus of debate
in the current projectual culture. When it comes to responding
to the demand for new ways of living, we again come up
against the two main traditions of the 20th century: a universalism
which the Modern Movement postulated as a strategy
to achieve a new form of culture which would be valid for all;
and a position which found the freedom of games and proposals
in the experiments of post-modern culture, and was legitimised
by a culture dominated by the privilege of individualism
and a vague aesthetization of life. Certainly, nowadays those
experiments seem to us as distant as the 1980s. But this was
not the case with all that took place during the so-called “radical
movement” of the 1970s, which directly shook the theoretical
and moral conventions of the time, giving rise to a debate
whose main achievement was to open the way to new critical
perspectives which still address the basic problems of the projectual
culture.
We may have to go back to these ideas in order to establish
a dialogue with its limitations and lacks. It is a question of recognising
an initial complexity in which all the variables underlying
the project come together. Robert Venturi admitted it
when he spoke of these difficulties. According to him, “Mod-
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