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.

—5—

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.

—6—

        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

—7—

See for example: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Less Is Enough (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2013). As Aureli notes, Mies used the phrase “less is more” for the first time in an interview in the New York Herald Tribune in June 1959
See Ulrich Brockling, Das Unternehm erische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007)
    Mies’s dictum has been revived, dressed in a new coat. Following the excesses of the early 2000s, design, and in particular architecture, has become the agent of contemporary austerity, wrapping the exigencies of pared budgets in a thin veneer of reduced aesthetics, and meanwhile letting the market determine spatial conditions. Once again, design has shown what it is capable of: making more out of less, so creating surplus value. It might be easy therefore to just reject “less is more”. But our argument is that it is necessary to fully engage with it, to consider design as a practice of means and ends, aware of its relation to the wider contexts of production. While it would not be appropriate or sufficient today just to return to the architectural and design experiments of the last century, there are real lessons to be learned from the modernist attempt to construct design values and cultural meaning out of our relationship to scarcity.
    Beyond the complex dimensions of aesthetic experience, design is often considered to be a process of solving problems in the most efficient manner. Design in this guise can easily be reduced to a measurable practice: for example, designing to reduce a building’s carbon emissions. Design, particularly when linked to technology, holds out the promise that the effects of scarcity can be perpetually held at bay on the back of innovative and ever-more efficient systems. The solving of problems and the pursuit of efficiency are often used to legitimate the designer ’s role in society beyond simply the production of an experience. Designers present themselves as part

—8—

of an overall societal effort to overcome scarcity, or at least to mitigate it through the optimal use of resources.
    However, this problem-solving paradigm of design can leave the underlying conditions unconsidered, leading to the paradox that design, far from “solving” the problem of scarcity, may actually exacerbate it. This happens in a number of ways. The first, and most obvious, is the way that obsolescence is actually designed into objects, from buildings to consumer products. At a large design scale, commercially developed housing too often precludes future adaptation, shutting down the opportunity for change, thereby making people move rather than adapt, and so keeping the market in a state of permanent demand.5 At a smaller scale, today’s mobile phone has an average life span of 18 months, with software updates causing slowdowns in older devices. Domestic appliances use proprietary parts that cannot be replaced, and frequently the cost of repairs makes buying new goods more attractive than fixing old ones. See Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Flexible Housing (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2007): Chapter 3
    Without this intentional obsolescence, products would last longer, demand would be reduced and the market stifled. Designed obsolescence is a symptom of the market’s need to constantly produce more scarcities as an engine for more consumption. Contemporary industrial production arose out of conditions of scarcity, and cannot exist outside of them. It projects an image of an abundant society, which can afford to create endless consumables. However, this apparently abundant production of stuff masks the underlying production of scarcity. Scarcities are thus designed into the system of consumption: they haven’t arisen by chance; they are the inevitable and predictable consequence of decisions and actions. In our current social and economic models scarcity must be maintained so

—9—

that production can be maintained.
    Design can also produce scarcity in the way that it changes its own context; the solving of one problem may lead to multiple others. Responding to specific scarcities by design and innovation therefore often causes new scarcities to arise. To give but one example, the invention of the kidney dialysis machine saved lives, but also created an immediate scarcity in dialysis machines. Under scarce conditions, the young physicist Willem Johann Kolff built the first prototype of an artificial kidney for dialysis from sausage casings, wooden drums and juice cans in 1938 at the University of Groningen. By 1945, his dialyser had its first success in saving the life of a patient suffering from kidney failure, which before would have caused death. Once the invention was refined and implemented in the post-war period, demand for it exceeded supply, and still does.6 The overcoming of one problem through design led to the emergence of a new form of demand, and a new form of scarcity. The same is the case in what are termed disruptive technologies, inventions such as mobile phones that transform the field into which they arrive, creating at the same time a context for new scarcities.
The kidney machine is one of the classic illustrations of the problem o scarcity in medical ethics: see e.g.: M. J. Langford, “Who Should Get the Kidney Machine?,” Journal of Medical Ethics 18, no. 1 (March 1, 1992): 12-17.
    Finally, design also contributes to the production of scarcity in the way that it is part of the desire-making machinery on which markets depend. Design increases the fetish nature of commodity and with it the associated desire. The stimulation of desire and the production of want through design thus becomes a key driver of the market, as consumers are led to follow their desires. One almost certainly does not need a new smartphone every year, but their ever

—10—