Design as politics // Preface
Tony Fry
"Whatever we write is always... from a perspective." p. vii
—substitute "write" with "design" "draw" "illustrate" "paint"
"... the reader is faced with the challenge of judging what is said and discovering what is not." p. vii
—critical thinking and analysis is based on this concept. Just think about the state of American politics at the moment and try to understand why so many people refuse to read the underlying principles on which the words Trump says are founded.
"... the entire project of the book can be summed up as the transformation of design and of politics combining, for all agents of change, to become the means by which the moment and process of Sustainment (the overcoming of the unsustainable) is attained." p. viii
—sometimes I think academics like to write sentences and look back and go, "whoa, that was a good one. Look what I just did there."
"We simply do not see, feel or think about what has become embedded in our mode of being. For instance, we make judgement about so many things every day, and while we are aware of those that are obvious, mostly we do not even notice." p. ix
—we form habits from previous decisions that we begin to engage in through routine and subconscious autopilot which prevents us from understanding that these habits can be altered when conscious thought is attributed to them.
"What is harder to recognise and work with is the reality of our world-making as culturally directed. Essentially, we see and make a world through the prism of our culture, but mostly it exists as an unconsidered condition of normality."
—he's doing that double-talk thing again. Saying the same thing twice but in a different way. Fry loves to waste words. However, he does have a point. It's a repeat of the above statement re: habits but in the context of culture. Normality is just the way we view the world.
"'We' simply cannot continue to be and be as we are: we are literally taking 'our' future away. What this means is that a commonality of human being has to be created rather than appealed to tokenistically (and often ethnocentrically)."
—change behaviour, affect the future. etc.
Question
Fry argues that 'what all agents of change need to do is to learn how to move design out of its economic function and into a political frame'. As a student designer, do you see yourself as an 'agent of change?'
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