The Disobedience of Design

Gui Bonsiepe

Lara Penin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350162464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica del diseño

This volume presents for the first time in English a curated selection of writings by the design thinker Gui Bonsiepe from the 1960s to the present day. Addressing as it does questions of non-Western design and a design practice that is both radical and democratic, Bonsiepe's work has assumed new importance for current debates inspired by global political and environmental crises. Structured into three sections, the anthology first addresses Bonsiepe's work on design theory and practice, particularly in relation to the history and contemporary relevance of the Ulm design school, where Bonsiepe was a professor in the 1960s. A second section then represents Bonsiepe's writings after his move to South America in the 1960s and '70s, where he worked as a design consultant for the Allende government in Chile before the military takeover. In writings from the period, Bonsiepe explores the concept of design 'at the periphery' and the relationship of national design traditions and practices in Latin American countries to those of 'the core' - Western European and American design. The final section comprises selections of Bonsiepe's writings on design in relation to literacy and language, visuality and cognition. This indispensable volume includes new interviews with Bonsiepe as well as his original, previously unpublished texts.

PART ONE

Thinking Design

Nostalgia Is Futile—Our Future Starts Now

Frederico Duarte

The common principles of freedom, peace, democracy, development, and the rule of law guided the creation of the United Nations Organization and a wide range of other multilateral institutions after the Second World War. Their role: to govern an increasingly interconnected planet shared by a growing list of nations. Their unfailing, if perennially unmet, goal: to design a global future free from exploitation, oppression, conflict, and hunger.

The most eloquent expression of this hopeful effort in human history is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹ Proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, this remarkable document provided the blueprint for a global convivencia, the historical Castilian word that roughly translates as a living-togetherness of distinct communities. Regardless of how humans had hitherto and would henceforth define, organize, and rule their communities according to biology, ideology, religion, or national identity, the women and men who drafted the declaration’s thirty succinct articles set the conditions we all must honor to respect and defend our individual and collective dignity.

This commitment to human dignity is the most distinct hallmark of Gui Bonsiepe’s long-life and prolific career. In over half a century of contributions to design practice and discourse, his dedication to building a rules-based, multilateral institution-led world order on the values of this declaration has been expressed in countless of his actions, reflections, and proposals.

In writings such as the nine texts and one interview gathered in this chapter, which date from 1964 to 2005, Bonsiepe expresses his ideas on design with the authority of an experienced practitioner, educator, and policy adviser. His analysis and reflections are informed by a wealth of references and observations on politics, society, and industry, as well as science, art, and technology, which he articulates with the clarity and criticality of a public intellectual.

These essays reveal how Bonsiepe positioned himself within the professional, institutional, and academic establishments of design as a free mover and independent thinker. Six of them were written as lectures and presented in conferences, symposia, and other functions in Italy, Argentina, Switzerland, Chile, and the Netherlands. Each was written not for the eye but for the ear, as a direct appeal to a specific audience. More specifically, to an audience mainly composed of students, to whom the future is dearest.

As with many of his writings, most of these essays were delivered in languages other than English. Some were since translated, published, and redacted in other languages such as German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Regardless of the time, audience, and language they were first delivered in, they remain remarkably relevant.

Bonsiepe’s ideas on design have not just been spoken in lecture halls or published in academic journals, trade publications, or books of history and theory. Some of his most relevant analysis and consequential proposals were commissioned by governments, as policy papers or reports associated with design and research institutions. He further contributed to the institutionalization of design, on a local and an international level, by participating in congresses, conferences, and programs promoted by professional organizations such as the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID, founded in 1957 and named, since 2015, World Design Organization, or WDO) and international institutions such as the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

One such congress was the Meeting for the Promotion of Industrial Design in Developing Countries, convened by UNIDO and ICSID in January of 1979. In what was the first design conference sponsored by the United Nations, delegates from all over the world gathered at the Indian National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, to present their positions and discuss the principles and recommendations inscribed in the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development.

Bonsiepe was actively involved in both the drafting and discussion of one of the twentieth century’s most exceptional declarations, which over forty years later has lost none of its relevance and urgency. Especially when taking into account the following three of its seventeen principles: by declaring a “firm belief that designers must have a clear understanding of the values of their own societies and of what constitutes a standard of life for their own people”, as well as “that design in the developing world must be committed to a search for local answers to local needs, utilizing indigenous skills, materials and traditions while absorbing the extraordinary power that science and technology can make available to it” and that “designers in every part of the world must work to evolve a new value system which dissolves the disastrous divisions between the worlds of waste and want, preserves the identity of peoples and attends the priority areas of need for the vast majority of mankind,”² its signatories proved remarkably conscious of how design, much like development, can and has been employed, often in the name of progress, to provide but also to dispossess humans of their economic, cultural, and even epistemological dignity.

In his 1992 lecture The Cartography of Modernity (Chapter 1),³ Bonsiepe claims that in the act of design modernity awakens. “To be radically modern,” he pronounced in an event honoring the designer and educator Tomás Maldonado, “is to invent the future, to design and arrange it, and that includes the future of that same modernity” (Chapter 1, p. 13). Such belief in modernity echoed the ethos that ought to have driven the multilateral institutions and international networks to which Bonsiepe dedicated much of his life. Yet while claiming to build a more dignified future for all, the world order that these institutions were designed to govern would by the end of the twentieth cent ury reflect the effects of a hegemonic project of Western (or Euro-American, or central) globalization, instead of a more balanced, multipolar world order. Expressed in economic, cultural, and military dominion, this hegemonic project has increasingly been denounced and debated as grounded on the notorious and long-lasting foundations of exploitative capitalism, coloniality, and empire. The Ahmedabad Declaration is, much like Bonsiepe’s body of work, a key element in this debate.

Delivered in Milan on April 24, 1992, The Cartography of Modernity was heard as the liberal world order was being redesigned. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the creation of an enlarged European Union, the application of Washington Consensus measures in Latin America and China’s implementation of Socialism with Chinese characteristics, a new world order would henceforth adopt the late-capitalist, neoliberal model, reliant on trade liberalization, the superiority of market-based competition, and individualism. Values such as social cohesion or the defense of the public good were undermined by the financialization of an increasingly connected global economy, corporation-led globalization, and the inexorable quest for profit over purpose. A corrosion of the utopian, and therefore imperfect, effort that drove the creation of the postwar world order and the redaction of the two aforementioned declarations led to the relentless weakening of states and institutions, the progressive commodification of every aspect of human life, and a blatant disregard for social inequality and exclusion in both developed and developing or peripheral nations.

In writings found in and beyond this chapter, Bonsiepe has revealed a recurrent concern with the dismantling or the subversion of this world order. He has been particularly critical of the failure of its institutions to address the economic, social, and cultural divisions between center and periphery. This criticism is also aimed at designers, or rather, of those in charge of design discourse, as they have failed to grasp and manifest how critical this activity is in determining a shared future. In other words, in coming to terms with design’s inevitable political dimension, “in that it includes a component of hope—a dream, however vague, with the outlines of the society we want to live in” (Chapter 4, p. 35).

In his Milan lecture on modernity, Bonsiepe proclaims that “What characterizes the peripheral world is the lack of a design discourse. That is why these countries have not, so far, had a future—for the future is where design unfolds. Only through design is it possible to appropriate the future” (Chapter 1, p. 13). This tension is thus greatly a matter to how a discourse over design is produced, maintained, and eventually challenged.

As Bonsiepe addresses in these and other texts, a dominant discourse on design, buttressed by institutions, organizations, and networks of the aforementioned rules-based international order, aimed toward a professional autonomy and economic, cultural, and political recognition of the discipline. Yet, by the late 1980s this discourse was gradually replaced by another, which reduced design to the symbolic and the ephemeral but also, somewhat paradoxically, to an inevitability of objects and images. Design became less about verbs and more about nouns or, worse still, about adjectives. Considered as a populist, frivolous expression of a consumerist lifestyle or as an expression of artistic or personal style, the practice and consumption of design thus became, in postmodern, late-capitalist, turn-of-the-millennium times, more associated with achieving individual success than with building a shared, global future grounded on human dignity.

The essays in Part I therefore read as appeals to designers to (re)discover the meaning of their practice and activity. This discovery starts with the four texts dedicated to the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG Ulm) gathered in the section Essays on Ulm, in which Bonsiepe discusses the aspirations but also the interpretations of the design school where he studied and taught from 1955 to 1968. Built with the support of the Marshall Fund in memory of two members of the resistance to the Nazi regime, HfG Ulm was itself the expression of a desire to build a world beyond war.

As Bonsiepe observes, despite having earned a deserved reputation as a citadel of methodolatry (Chapter 2, p. 17), this institution aimed to ground design as an autonomous discipline committed to the enlightenment project. The school’s commitment to a critical rationalism (Chapter 3, p. 27) included a utopian component and a certain promotion of disquiet (Chapter 2, p. 17), both of which Bonsiepe defends as essential to design practice and life itself. Refusing to “linger on the side of problems,” the Ulm school landed instead squarely on the side of solutions; or, as Bonsiepe rephrases in one of his sharpest observations, “it refused to engage in a purely discursive, theoretical dancing around the problem” (Chapter 3, p. 27).

This is an important point. At Ulm, students and faculty confronted industry and its problems according to a project-oriented approach that unequivocally distinguished design from art. Instead, they focused their attention on the relationship between design and society, which is contextual, contingent, and by no means free of contradiction (Chapter 3, p. 27). This approach considered the teaching and practice of design no less than a critical intervention. Indeed, Bonsiepe sees criticism in design as active criticism, as a practical intervention, which is meant to confront and eventually change the existing system of industrial production. At Ulm, this engagement with and critical attitude toward industry did not however foresee how market problems would replace problems of production (Chapter 4, p.36), especially as the postwar economic miracles of Western Europe gave way to an increasingly complex and interdependent global consumer society.

Nevertheless, Bonsiepe’s remarks on the reputation and legacy of the HfG Ulm, as well as on the teaching of design more broadly, are still strikingly critical in 2020. They include considering design an alien body within a design education (Chapter 7, p. 65) that has become both increasingly commodified and consolidated in traditional universities (Chapter 4, p. 35). In the spirit of the 1948 and 1979 declarations, and of Bonsiepe’s own cosmopolitan education and intensely peripatetic career, he defends the creation of a new kind of design school, operable on an international level (i.e., beyond the nation-state), where a culturally diverse faculty and student body would offer the necessarily critical curriculum and stimulating learning environment (Chapter 3, p. 27). Pursuing a radical cosmopolitanism is, instead of performing some nostalgic version of modernity, the best way to honor the ethos and legacy of the HfG Ulm (and, also, of the Bauhaus). This entails making design political. On this regard, Bonsiepe mentions one of Ulm’s unspoken theses: the question of the meaning of design can only be answered in the social context, which also means in the political context (Chapter 4, p. 35).

In the Theory and Practice section, Bonsiepe steers the attention of students, educators, practitioners, and those involved or interested in producing and keeping design discourse away from objects, forms, or styles and towa...