o_19po8js951tvs1r0t1r8s4bb1vpla.pdf

Gui Bonsiepe
more, in transgressing the current situation. People advocate in favor of a clinically
antiseptic design, perfectly consistent with the politics of the status quo that has
dominated – and still does, some how – the discourse in the past three decades.
I say that it is symptomatic that today people think it is necessary to remind
these relations of design with its social context, what has been silenced by the
weight of the strict criteria of marketing, of branding and of competitiveness. I
consider that the current world crisis has ended up motivating this re-discovery
of the most dignified traditions of the modern project, which had been vilified by
the post-modern postures, with their two main variants: post-structuralism and
new-conservationism, according to Hal Foster (1985).
Although the word “crisis” has started to occupy the headlines of the media
only after the year of 2008, as a consequence of the financial cataclysm, the
symptoms of broader and deeper crisis had been manifesting for a long time. This
crisis, according to the Center´s vision – in this case, the Center is Europe – has
been attributed to the “Four Knights of the Apocalypse of the 21st century”. Slavoj
Zizek (2010) formulates the following list:
- the environmental crisis,
- the consequences of the bio-energetic revolution,
- the imbalance inside of the social system (specially the exploitation of natural
resources), and the
- explosive growth of exclusion (that is to say bi-polarization of societies).
Seen from the Periphery, or if we prefer, from the Semi-Periphery, we need to add
a Fifth Knight, represented by the hegemonic interests that crush the needs of the
local population, represented, among others, by: deforestation, monoculture with
the intense use of pesticides, open cast mining, and the contamination of hydrous
resources. These tend to undermine the bases of the population’s biological and
economical survival.
Inevitably, these crisis are also reflected in design, including design discourse,
design teaching and professional design practice. I do not tend to formulate
apocalyptic previsions, that could provoke discouragement and fatalism. This type
of attitude would not be acceptable for a designer, who must preserve his selfconfidence,
so he may interfere in reality with his projectual actions, even if the
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Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 131-139