Design, sustainability and the urmadic university - RN Future Tense - 4 August 2011

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Future Tense
Design, sustainability and the urmadic university
4 August 2011

Questioning sustainability full image A group of design experts and students gathered together recently to discuss why, despite an increasing focus on sustainability, it seems like the world is actually becoming less sustainable by the day. Doesn't sound like a cheery event, does it? But there was a positive focus and it revolves around the setting up of the urmadic university. Hide Transcript
Transcript
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Antony Funnell: Hi, Antony Funnell here. One of the perks of my job is that I get to meet and chat with some really interesting people. Including some of this lot, about 50 of them from various parts who came together recently for a weekend in Brisbane to talk about...well, a lot of things actually, but mainly about what we really mean by sustainability, and also about setting up an Urmadic university. 'What's an Urmadic university?' I hear you say. Well, here's Dr Tony Fry to explain. Tony Fry: The Urmadic university is a university without a place, it isn't located anywhere, it is nomadic, it can move. So it's a university that is based upon learning from the past for the future, that can travel and proliferate, and can unite people across the kind of divides that currently are not really being crossed. It's really saying...first of all asking the questions: what do we really need to learn in the circumstance that we're in, how do we need to learn it, how do we disperse that learning across the globe, and how can that learning itself do what happened initially with the creation of the modern university, how can it provide something that can be appropriated by the university as it is that ends up transforming it? Antony Funnell: We'll come back to the Urmadic university idea shortly, but it's important to know that almost all of the 50 or so people who gathered together were in some way or other associated with design, and the event was run by the Design Futures outfit at Griffith University. Now, frustration was in the air, I don't think that's an overstatement, frustration about the way in which the pursuit of the notion of sustainability is failing us in our attempts to meet the enormous problems of the future, from rapid urbanisation, to food security to climate change. Cameron Tonkinwise is the Associate Dean of Sustainability at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. Cameron Tonkinwise: I think its primary value is showing concern about the quality of the future. So anybody who is concerned about the types of futures that we are heading towards for me shows some interest in sustainability. Sustainability is normally associated with questions of the quality of resources in the future, whether we're going to have the kind of resources that we have at the moment, whether we're going to have the quantity of resources we have at the moment. But I think it's also a decision about how we want to live, what kind of risks do we want to live with, what kind of pleasures do we want to have, how do we want to organise society. So it has a very futural sense for me, it's very much about people who want the future to be different from the direction that we're currently tracking. Antony Funnell: And yet Tony Fry has pointed out at various times that sometimes when we talk about sustainability we're actually talking about sustaining what is ultimately unsustainable. Would you agree with that?

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Cameron Tonkinwise: Absolutely, the way the discourse happens at the moment, it is very much based on a version of preserving the present, and it is how can we find ways of resourcing the current lifestyles. And it is never a questioning of those lifestyles, or if it is then you're marginalised and considered to be radical or somehow different and marginalised in that way. So I think the really important thing is that it's an opportunity to think about how we can be different, how else could we live, and it represents that opportunity. And it is one of the rare discourses kicking around at the moment that actually does that. We've kind of lost a sense of Marxist utopian, we've lost a sense of the fact that things could be different. There's a fantastic Slovenian cultural theorist, Slavoj Zizek, who once identified the fact that if you were to look at Hollywood cinema right now, you would say that Hollywood cinema is telling us that we can only imagine radical change if it is forced upon us by giant meteors crashing into the Earth or robots going berserk or something. We cannot imagine choosing to change ourselves, we cannot imagine anymore social revolution, we cannot imagine social change. And so sustainability for me represents that opportunity, preserving that chance that we could choose to be different. Antony Funnell: A lot of our governmental structures, a lot of our educational structures are built, in a sense, around that idea of preserving what we've got, trying to hold on to what we've got for as long as we can though, aren't they. Cameron Tonkinwise: Absolutely, and without any recognition that the way you hold onto them actually makes them not able to be held onto. Antony Funnell: So how do you change that mindset, because that is quite a prevalent mindset, isn't it. Cameron Tonkinwise: To some extent I think you need to find cultures, communities and particularly generations who are looking for alternatives and are looking for change and difference. And you give up...this is a rather dangerous thing to say, but you give up on the set of people who are interested in preserving the present. And I think we are starting to see at the moment indicators that coming generations and other kinds of cultures are looking for different futures than the ones that those who are currently in control are offering us. And I think it is working with those people, finding the people who are working on social innovation, who are working on types of social revolution, and finding ways in which something like design can enable those people to roll out those changes on a much larger scale. Antony Funnell: Are there enough people though with that sort of view? Cameron Tonkinwise: I think so. If you take a rather wide perspective on the kinds of change that that could add up to, I think at the moment they're not coalescing into a particular class or into a particular kind of politics. It's quite multivariate in the way in which it is approaching it. But if you look at the number of people who are changing their economic conditions, whether it's downshifting, if you look at the kind of people who are interested in collaborative consumption, who are interested in less material existences, who are interested in sustainability, who are interested in changing the taxation system in this country, for example, you see a lot of different people who, for a lot of different reasons, are looking for alternatives, different futures, different ways of proceeding, and are feeling like the current institutions we have are just not able to deliver any kind of forethought or other possibilities. Antony Funnell: Now, one of the institutions which is supposed to deliver 'other possibilities' is the university. But the traditional university, the gathering heard repeatedly, is not delivering what it once used to. So, why? Cameron Tonkinwise: It is a kind of long, difficult analysis to try and work out why. It has to do I think with the departmental ovation of knowledge, it has to do with the professionalisation of the economy, which was a very powerful productivity boost throughout the 20th century that relied on specialist knowledge and expertise, it has to do with the fact that the modernisation of the university, particularly in a country like Australia, has been all about boosting vocational education, which is very short-termist in its approach. The liberal arts don't really exist in this country any more, and if they do exist they are self-marginalising because they are committed to irrelevant projects around art and aesthetics. And so we just no longer have the sense that the university is the arbiter of what is or is not true, that it is the critic of the directions we are going, and that it is the source of the imagination for how else we might go. Nobody would ever these days turn to university to say 'please give us other visions for the future', it's not the job of the university to be creative in that way. Why? Absolutely it should be. There are no other institutions that can do it because every other institution is too invested in the market to be thinking about alternatives. It's only the university which has or should have some level of protection from the market in that way to be the space in which it can think otherwise, think other kinds of futures, other possibilities. And that's absolutely the task. So while I think current universities are part of the problem, I'm certainly still utterly committed to the project of the university, to the idea of a university. And it's that promise that I think this event is also trying to recover and reactivate. Lisa Norton: I'm Lisa Norton and I'm a professor at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. I think in so many ways, not just speaking about arts and culture and design, but academics are well aware that the time of the university is changing. It's a very crucial moment where all the disciplinary studies are in crisis and there are all kinds of new alignments happening. The criticism that is really afloat right now, that universities have become too protectionist, vocational, concerned with preserving their own knowledge base...and I do think it is real and I do think we have to face it and look at it. My personal view would be to come at that not from an accusatory or blaming place, there are a lot of reasons why we designed that condition into being collectively, societally, for a number of reasons. So again, it's about backing up and saying why did we lose the knowledgeseeking for the sake of itself, the untainted, exploratory, blue-sky nature of knowledge-seeking. Antony Funnell: Do you think that those feelings of loss along those lines are felt by people within the academy, by enough people within the academy?

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Lisa Norton: Absolutely. At my institution, the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, it is a widespread concern, absolutely. I think obviously there are many, many educational worlds, worlds within worlds and academia, but absolutely the best institutions all over the world are engaging this crisis of meaning and crisis of autonomy and utility. Tony Fry: Certainly in the West the first university, the University of Bologna, 11th, 12th century, it was really created as an enterprise that was driven by theological knowledge. By the 15th century, the Renaissance starts to begin to unfold, and knowledge starts to arrive from elsewhere, and through that process, reason starts to unfold as a driver of the acquisition of knowledge. The modern university as we understand it starts to unfold. And that modern university then delivers a great deal of the scientific, social, political, economic knowledge that produces the modern world. Then over the course of the development of the modern world we reach a point of turning where the impact of human activity gets revealed to be, rather than simply sustaining us, contradictory, equally unsustaining us, so that we exist in a condition of producing a world by the way that we make the world that is actually taking its future away. But the future is our future. So what we have now is the kind of university at the end of the project of making the modern world but without it actually recognising that another project is beginning which is to deal with the world that has been created. So while within the university there is a lot of particularly scientific knowledge that is attempting to deal with the problems that we now face, there isn't a fundamental recognition that we need to be going in another direction, another kind of future, based upon another kind of knowledge that prevents many of the dangers that we now confront, not just environmental but in terms of the way in which we interact with the natural environment as we get more people on the planet, the problem of producing food, many, many problems that beg the beginning of another intellectual enterprise. Antony Funnell: And to go in that 'other direction', what Tony Fry is working to set up is this idea of the Urmadic university. One of things that we like about Dr Fry's work is that in a world of caution he's certainly not afraid to think big. You might remember the last time we spoke with him, he and his team had just won an award for a plan to relocate the entire city of the Gold Coast in the event of climate-change related flooding. And I have to say, this new university idea is just as big. As we heard at the beginning of the program, his Urmadic university will have no fixed place. In fact, it's not even what many of us would think of as a university at all. The objective is, over time, to build a social network of people interested in exchanging ideas and working together on issues of sustainability, and on solutions to the sorts of threats mentioned throughout this program. And Tony Fry also hopes his project will quickly become a repository for such ideas, with a website to be launched in about a month's time. We'll keep you posted; one to watch. Now, someone busy working on the site is Daniel Lopera. Daniel Lopera: Yes, the original idea was to create a platform where we can put all the articles and work that we have done and discuss but in a relational way and try to share with others this knowledge. As we were making it we discovered that this knowledge is around the world of course, we cannot do that just ourselves but we have to link it with others. So we created a platform where we kind of facilitate the possibility to link each other and connect each other into this idea, this work of designing futures. Antony Funnell: So more of a collaboration than a straightforward database in that sense, of relative issues and relative ideas? Daniel Lopera: Yes, exactly. It's more a collaboration. It is a possibility for you to enter and don't feel like you are just taking information out. It is more like a way of you putting information there because we are really interested in what you have to say about all of this. So you're part of a community and we like this to be not just another website but the possibility of becoming a community into the design futures team. Antony Funnell: It's always easy to find fault in others but that's not what this event, entitled Design Action, Leadership and the Future, was all about. In fact there was criticism from those present of their own discipline; the profession of design. Leon Fitzpatrick was among the gathering and he's a young industrial designer based in Chicago. Leon Fitzpatrick: When I finished school, and I studied industrial design in a very traditional sense, my first job was a big corporate company, Motorola, they design lots of consumer products. Then going through that process of working there, it's very, very apparent immediately, even before I got there, that we're designing things that are completely redundant and ending up in landfills, and in a much more damaging sense than even just packaging or water bottles, et cetera, because we're not thinking ahead of time that these things contain nasty chemicals and metals that degrade and they're being broken down by people in villages in China and it's very un-responsible. So I think a lot of my feelings working in a company of that scale was that there needs to be a bit of a closed loop. If you're going to produce something that is damaging or potentially damaging to health or the environment, you need to actually be responsible for what happens to it in the end. And I did my best in that situation to really rethink or improve or contribute to a little bit better way of doing things. And then my frustration came from the realisation that that might eventually happen but it wasn't going to be me, it was going to take a lot more time. So I took my experience from that and left and actually took a year to myself to figure out if I wanted to go back into the industry and work from the inside, maybe help to initiate a change or work with people who wanted to change, or go off on my own and do my own independent design work. Antony Funnell: I've heard it said from various people involved in design the idea that design has over time become subservient to commercialisation, to the industrial process. Is that something that resonates with you?

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Leon Fitzpatrick: Yes, completely. If you look into the original definition of industrial design and where it has actually come from, its intent, it was designed for everybody. So you kind of went from the cottage industry of people making things at home in small quantities and then you had the industrial revolution where things get made en masse, in big quantities. And places like the Bauhaus who define that what this industrial design thing was going to be was about people having a better quality of life. So if I designed a system of furniture or housing or vessels to eat or drink from on a mass scale, that would be affordable, and it improves that, again, quality of life across the board. Somehow that became contrived into mass commercialisation and over-designing and over-manufacturing and having...things kind of spread from there, and now the term 'designer' became this exclusivity, expensive, not to be afforded by everybody. So that's where I'm coming from, is industrial design and looking at that, where it started from one thing and it's become something completely different. Antony Funnell: But in saying that, the forces against a change to design, against bringing design back as an everyday function for everyday people, they are quite substantial, aren't they. And for them, the subservience of design is actually quite lucrative, it is part of what they need to do in order to sell more products. Leon Fitzpatrick: Exactly, yes, it is the expectation now from a consumer, and that has been I think guided by these industries, is that you buy something like a phone or a pair of shoes and not even a year later there is a better one. And we've been trained to believe that we need to upgrade, you don't prepare anything anymore. In the past someone would have bought a pair of shoes or a camera or something, and if something went wrong with that it was not economically effective for me to just throw it away and buy another one, I would actually fix it, I would fix it myself, I would take it to, let's say, a shoemaker or someone who would repair it. That has been lost because now things are becoming subsidised, like a cellphone, for example, we don't pay the full price for it, the carrier who provides the service will subsidise the cost of that phone so I can actually get one. And instead of, again, repairing it or keeping it, it's easier or cheaper for me to throw it away or not use it any more and get another one. So that's going to be fuelled by this kind of...every year it is better, it's glossier, it's faster, it's more impressive, and then that feeds back into our desire to constantly have new things. Craig Bremner: The timeline of splitting idea from manufacture really goes back a long, long time but picks up a pace that transforms the world with the Industrial Revolution where machines take over from craft and hand-production. When that takes place you separate idea from manufacture and on an increasingly rapid and fast scale in which you then need a new language to relate idea to manufacture, and that language became the thing we call design today. That then gave us two trajectories, one in which idea would control or persuade manufacture to engage itself in the production of the better world, which was the project of design, or it gave us the other thing which the Great Exhibition demonstrated to us which was that manufacture could take place on a staggering scale requiring no ideas at all. So you suddenly could fill the world full of stuff that had no idea and no relationship to the project of design and the production of the better world. Antony Funnell: That's Craig Bremner, Professor of Design at Charles Sturt University, and he says it's that separation of idea from manufacturing which has helped lead us to a situation where we as a society over-consume. Craig Bremner: It certainly makes it possible because of course you don't really need ideas to create anything in our world anymore, you just need the productive capacity, and certainly the capacity to imagine that ability to produce was also answered by our ability to provide the technology of production. So we produced the infrastructure along with the capacity, and suddenly we have a world full of stuff, full of things. Antony Funnell: You go further, in a sense, don't you, in saying that where we've now got to is a situation where that separation between idea and manufacturing, coupled with what we can do with digital technology, leads us to a situation where we're in danger of generating nothing, of becoming the producers of nothing, the consumers of nothing. Explain that idea to us. Craig Bremner: That's again very much like the very simple idea of industrialisation. With the digital technology which is now ubiquitous, we all are engaged in the production of things which have no physical presence, which I call nothing. So we're now engaged in this massive project of producing nothing, and every one of us is engaged in that production. But what is the most interesting thing is that is resource-negative, in a way. The thing that is taking up all our resources now is the amount of time, effort and energy to consume that nothingness. We call it sharing but in fact it's just a general consumption. So we've reversed the historic arrangement, being production and consumption, where production took all energy and effort and resources, we've now reversed that to say that...what I'm saying is that all our energy, effort and resources go into the consumption of nothing, which we are also engaged in the production of. And that's a very interesting moment. It's not morally good or bad, ethically not a dangerous thing, but it requires us to revisit then suddenly where does the idea which originally split from manufacturing, where does that now reside? Antony Funnell: Some people would say though that what you say is nothing is actually relationships, it's actually relationship-building, it's social networking, it's even the provision of services. How do you factor that in? Craig Bremner: There is a limit to how much one can relate, how much one can consume or experience via the stage service. The quantity sitting in the digital archive now, in the digital cloud as it is being called, is so vast that there is no possibility that we could share or consume any fraction of that. So I think that the project of production, which was just a mountain of stuff coming out of machinery in the 20th century, is just a mountain of files in the 21st century that we...there is no letup in the rate of production of those files. But the huge amount of effort required to navigate your way through, even find back through your own files, is so vast now and so resource-intensive that the reduction of nothing, it does, as I pointed out, it should ask us what are the ideas driving the process and how are we going to respond to the changing planet if we are so busily engaged in the

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project of nothing. Antony Funnell: Those files that you talk about are virtual. In one sense you could look at it and say, well, there is no cost, unlike traditional manufacturing then there is a lesser cost, but of course there is a cost to the environment, isn't there, leaving aside the cost in terms of human time. There is a cost in terms of servers, in terms of the whole infrastructure that is needed to run our digital world. Craig Bremner: You're right, there are measurable costs, but the cost that is increasingly in the conversations around this issue is a kind of ironic cost, it is the cost of loneliness; you know, the more connected we are via this project of the production of nothing, the lonelier we are, the less connected we are. The relationships are in a sense less able to be facilitated somehow, which is a deep irony given that we related historically in public space and we now thought our relationships would move to virtual space but we found that in that space we are increasingly lonely. Antony Funnell: Can we unscramble the omelette? Is it possible to re-establish a link between idea and manufacturing? Craig Bremner: Most certainly, but the key to that is going back to investigate where the idea has gone because we've become preoccupied and engaged with and in a sense swept up by the capacity to manufacture, which is to produce all this digital nothingness. So if we go back to the beginnings of the conversation and say, well, where does the idea now reside? That will lead us I think into some really new interesting terrain because there is a side of the design equation that still thinks all things are driven by ideas, but it's very, very evident that nearly everything is derived or the result of imitation. The real issue then is if that's the case, if you accept that then you have to invent new methods to find out where the idea has gone too. It hasn't disappeared, it's just no longer where we thought it was which was at the start of processes. It may well now be at the end of processes, but we don't have the mechanisms or the tools of detection in place to actually find them. Antony Funnell: Do we have the time to make that rebalancing, if you like, given that the emphasis that we have on manufacturing in its various ways, in a virtual way as well as in a physical way, is so enormous, and that manufacturing in one way or another underpins our modern societies, doesn't it, it underpins the consumption that generates our economies. Craig Bremner: Undoubtedly, absolutely true, and I think the question 'do we have the time?'...I think we have no choice, for a start, because of course in order to respond to changing conditions, and the biggest single change is the crisis of population flows into urban settings, so the crisis of the city, and you can name any other crisis you like but it is fundamentally that is driving all the other crises...unless we investigate the location of ideas in order to respond to the crisis, we are in a deepening crisis. There's a huge amount of evidence that people are starting to realise that the ways in which we've approached that problem of the urban setting is no longer adequate, and that's the single biggest project on the planet, is revisiting the urban crisis. I think there is strong evidence that we are starting to detect firstly the failure of our ideas, historic ideas, and the need to investigate where the ideas are going to come from in the future. So I think we are already engaged in the process of suddenly realising that ideas are no longer where we thought they were and that they might reside somewhere else, but we're yet to actually make the final collection. But I think we're under way, that project is underway. Antony Funnell: The consumption and production of nothing. Professor Greg Bremner from Charles Sturt University. Now, that's the sort of contentious idea that's bound to stir up some feelings, so if you've got a counter-view, we'd love you to post a comment on our website: abc.net.au/rn/futuretense. Thanks to my co-producer Andrew Davies, and sound engineer this week, Peter McMurray.

Comments (6)
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Alice Bell :

04 Aug 2011 12:19:28pm I was both excitedand frustrated at your good prog. Excited as I felt someone has at last caught up with the thinking of many of us that overload has cut off intimacy and that the "omelette" affect has become a cause for illness and dis-connection; frustration because the gap in "catch up" by the so-called experts is so wide, however, also grateful to hear the ideas about burrowing through the mire to bring to fruition some of the buried embryos for the benfit of the future. Reply Alert moderator
Joyce :

04 Aug 2011 12:13:56pm

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Agreed. The amount of stuff we produce, consume and discard is staggering. The book: 'The Greening of America' may yet further an understanding of these calamitous habits. 'Producing nothing' is an oxymoron though. Producing less is the issue here. Reply Alert moderator
Susanna :

04 Aug 2011 11:35:38am This morning's program should be essential listening in schools. It has inspired me to attempt a complete internet detox for as long as I can manage it (as soon as I finish this comment..!). I no longer want to be involved in the pursuit of manufacturing nothing, particularly as I have recently 'manufactured' a small child and would like to spend meaningful time with him, as opposed to saddling him with poorly designed plastic toys for company. Thanks Anthony for another thought-provoking edition. Reply Alert moderator
Tony Shrapnel :

04 Aug 2011 11:12:13am Very interesting programme, but the assertions of Prof. Craig Bremner that the products of the virtual world are "nothing" is arrant nonsense. In this day and age computer files most often precede a physical object or beget an idea or other intellectual consequence. Using his logic an idea is "nothing". This fundamental lack of philosophical and cultural understanding is most disturbing coming from a professor of design. Reply Alert moderator

Susanna :

04 Aug 2011 12:02:18pm Tony, I agree with you to a point - digital technology has produced things of intellectual and physical value - but I think the Professor was referring to the closed loop of social media and the vast amount of time that can be wasted on the internet producing... nothing. I for one would like to cut down on all but the essentials. Reply Alert moderator
deb :

04 Aug 2011 9:10:06am Todays program was utterly facinating and gives me hope for the future in what usually seems like a very bleak world. Reply Alert moderator View all comments

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Guests

Cameron Tonkinwise Associate Dean of Sustainability at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York. Leon Fitzpatrick Designer at MINIMAL Inc, Chicago. Craig Bremner Professor of Design at Charles Sturt University. Professor Tony Fry Design Futures Program, Griffith University. Lisa Norton Professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Daniel Lopera Design Futures, Griffith University.
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Antony Funnell
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Andrew Davies Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites.

Thursday 8.30am repeated Friday 12.30am Presented by Antony Funnell

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08:30: Design, sustainability and the urmadic university

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