The Design of Scarcity = Дизайн дефицита

STRELKA

                ДИЗАЙН ДЕФИЦИТА





3-е издание (электронное)









Москва «Стрелка Пресс» 2017

                THE DESIGN OF SCARCIT





3-rd edition (electronic)









Moscow
Strelka Press
2017

УДК72
ББК 85
    G92


     Goodbun, Jon.
G92 The Design of Scarcity = Дизайн дефицита [Электронный ресурс] / Goodbun J., Klein M., Rumpfhuber A., Till J. — 3-rd ed. (el.). — Electronic text data (1 file pdf : 67 p.). — М. : Strelka Press, 2017. — System requirements: Adobe Reader XI or Adobe Digital Editions 4.5 ; screen 10".

         ISBN 978-5-906264-28-2

         As growth was the defining condition of the 20th century, so scarcity is set to define the 21st. Already it pervades political discourse and shapes our reading of the economy and the environment. But scarcity is not just the inevitable result of growth and resource exploitation — every innovation results in new scarcities. Scarcity is constructed daily through the creation of desire, it is designed. The authors of this timely essay set out to establish a more sophisticated understanding of scarcity. Moving beyond the idea that lack and inequality are simply laws of nature, they argue that scarcity can be challenged. The message for architects and designers — experts in working with constraints — is that scarcity is a process, and one that can be productive. This essay asks us to throw out our simplistic Malthusian graphs and escape the stranglehold that scarcity has on our imaginations.

УДК 72
ББК 85

     The source print publication: The Design of Scarcity / Goodbun J., Klein M., Rumpfhuber A., Till J. — Moscow : Strelka Press, 2014. — 65 p. — ISBN 978-0-9929-2292-4.


ISBN 978-5-906264-28-2

© Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, 2014

        INTRODUCTION


Scarcity: a word that hangs over early twenty-first century society as both threat and reality. Scarcity: a condition that is shaping many of our environmental, economic and political futures. Scarcity: something we take for granted and therefore feel helpless in the face of. But what if scarcity is not inevitable? How then could we deal with it, how then could we design with it?
   There have been previous attempts to address scarcity. Forty years ago, the Club of Rome think-tank published The Limits to Grwth .1 This report took a series of variables - food, non-renewable resources, population, pollution and so on - and mapped how they interacted over time. The authors predicted that if the global economy continued to grow as it had in the past, the world would reach its limits at a certain point. This conclusion was fiercely contested, but recent studies have shown its predictions to have been impressively accurate. Notwithstanding its pessimistic tone, The Limits to Growth attempted to account for many aspects of the modern economy and ecology. It had at its heart the most basic economic concept - scarcity - and for the first time prompted an interpretation of the complex nature of scarcity in relation to other systems.² “Limits to Growth”: Donella H. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: a Report forthe Club of Rome’s Projecton the Predicamentof Mankind (London: Universe Books, 1972)
For a more recent review of the issues see: Ugo Bardi, The Limits to Growth Revisited (Heidelberg: Springer, 2011)
   Forty years on and the issue of scarcity appears ever more relevant. The contemporary politics of austerity raise scarcity as a spectre, while rising inequalities draw attention to its realities.

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Environmental politics invoke the idea of planetary limits as a call to action. Assumptions about perpetual economic growth are being questioned as we confront the diminishing of resources and the degradation of the environment.
    Scarcity runs through all these debates; as a basic economic concept and as a practical reality, it touches us all one way or another. For designers, it affects the production of our environment and hence cuts to the core of contemporary practices in design and architecture. It is essential therefore to understand the historical and contemporary constitutions of scarcity in order to know how to work with it. It is equally important to find new readings of scarcity, readings that escape the dominant structures and processes that limit contemporary economic and social life. Scarcity is not going away, so we had better understand how it is created and what it means.
    In the most general terms, scarcity is understood as an insufficiency of supply: a lack. This essay takes “lack” as the working definition for scarcity, but challenges its neutral, uncontested status. Scarcity as simple, inevitable lack appears to shut down opportunities for design and life. But what if other readings of scarcity could offer productive opportunities, moving away from a negative and limiting conception? To find these other readings we have to understand that, far from being neutral, scarcity is designed. In turn architecture and design have to deal with these constructions of scarcity in order to know better how to design within the context of scarcity. Only then can the full implications and potential of design be explored.
    To be so apparently affirmative about a term that has such bleak connotations probably appears counter-intuitive, even foolhardy. But a fresh understanding of scarcity allows one to imagine new possibilities, and with them new social formations.

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        DESIGN


Working within externally defined constraints is a fundamental part of the design process; scarcity is thus always a context for design. Design here is seen not as a noun, a set of objects, but as a verb, a set of processes that necessarily deal with surrounding systems and contexts, including scarcity. This engagement with the limits thrown up by scarcity can be productive. In the early 20th century one finds fascinating attempts not just to design in the context of financial and material shortages, but more to construct architectural and design values out of that very engagement, and so produce a collective language out of our societies’ confrontation with scarcity. Thus urbanists worked with the politics of distribution, architects explored collective languages of minimal dwelling and designers explored a new functional objectivity in their designs.
    Perhaps the most sophisticated attempt to construct an architectural value out of a sublimated engagement with scarcity is Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum “Less is More”. However, it also shows how complicated design’s engagement with scarcity could become in a capitalist society. Mies’s catchphrase for engaging design in a relationship of means and ends found itself turned into an economic imperative. It is a self-imposed aesthetic programme expanded into a general principle, employing the architect and designer as a servant of modern capitalism. The credo of reduction merged with the logic of efficiency: make more with less.3 Creativity has always been absorbed by capital: the creative professional was never outside accumulation, but an essential part of it. He and she were capital’s strongest workers, adapting to ever-new constraints, expanding the logics of the creation of value to ever-new margins: the creative designer became the epitome of the entrepreneurial self.4

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