Maurice Barnwell - Design and Culture: A Transdisciplinary History

and Culture

and Culture

A Transdisciplinary History

MAURICE BARNWELL

PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA

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ISBN: 978-1-61249-665-8 (hardback)

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The Whys and Wherefores of Design

There is considerable debate as to when our cognitive forbears began to think for themselves. The journey from then to today was long and arduous. Along the way they learned to communicate, discovered fire, developed flint tools, began to practice life-sustaining agriculture, and developed technology. Ella Beaudoin and Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian Institution ask, What does it mean to be human? What makes us unique among all other organisms on Earth? Is it cooperation? Conflict? Creativity? Cognition? Likely its all four.

The beginning is always a good place to start. Stone tools are the most ubiquitous and oldest variety of archaeological artifacts, says anthropology professor Grant McCall. Humans have made stone tools for the last 2.6 million years on every continent of the inhabited world. As such, they constitute the most important source of information about both past patterns of human behavior and evolution. We do not know but assume that this making process was shared rather than person-specific, passed from generation to generation by the show-and-tell process.

Homo heidelbergensislived in Britain about 500,000 years ago. Mammoths, rhinos, and saber-toothed cats are known to have inhabited the area. In order to survive, these early humans shaped tools with precision, which suggests that they were able to plan and cooperate, thus allowing hunting as a group.

We think of design as being a relatively new human activity. I argue that it is design, more than language, more than numeric notation, more than any other human activity, that allowed our ancestors to overcome apparent insurmountable challenges to propagate the entire planet. For humans, the sharing of symbolic information has been crucial to our success, says science journalist Melissa Hogenboom. Every new idea we pick up has the chance to become immortal by being passed down through the generations. In your future you will make new histories.

We have new tools, new ways of working, and new ways of thinking. Our world has been transformed and digitized by technology. The Internet makes possible our collective capacity to forage for the nourishment of our imaginations and our curiosities turns everything we choose to create into either a weak or a strong signal. We are aware that these signals go out, not just to those we know and to those who know us, but to the rest of the world, through possibly endless relays and loops to our past, present and future. Consider the transformative and communicative organization of design.

A Swanscombe hand axe. One of many hand axes that have been discovered at the Homo neanderthalensissite of Swanscombe, Kent, which was inhabited approximately 500,000 to 300,000 years ago. ( The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Reproduced with permission.)

The design and production of flint tools provides an example of what Christopher Alexander termed the unselfconscious design process. Exciting times lie ahead, and it all began with a hand axe 500,000 years ago.

Design is a decision-making process. To quote design management pioneer Frank Pick, it is intelligence made visible.

After design and manufacture there is the challenge of acceptance in an increasingly culturally diverse marketplace, where ever-changing values and social concerns impact the design process. The ethics and personal philosophy of the designer will influence how these diverse threads are brought together.