079 Christian Hoffelner – Ruinous Speculation Objects
in Dizziness – A Resource, Ruth Anderwald and Leonhard Grond, translated by Inez Templeton, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna 2016 Christian Hoffelner – Ruinous Speculation Objects

‘So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.’3

3         Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 27. Auflage, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbeck bei Hamburg, Hamburg, 2012 (Orig. 1930), p. 16; English version: http://www.robertmusil.net, 8.2.2016

A         What is the ruin seeking in graphic design?

B         It is a metaphor – a narrative, which I am using to write about methodological figures in graphic design. Here, the ‘Ruinous’ has a lot to do with leaving secure conditions, secure work, secure working conditions, secure future – a patchy, economic context of design. The form of service that I can contribute as a graphic designer of social development must inevitably respond, due to design’s inherent, civil responsibility. I do not accept that the tone for this is set by the commercial, fashion focus of the advertising and consumer industry, which in large part has prevailed over the tools of visual production. Viewed in this light, the concept of designwill be ruined and frayed, if one tries to sabotage the travelling ship.

As a matter of principle, the ruin – the term coined by history – nourishes itself from the past. My reasoning, however, does not merely use it retrogressively.4 Precisely in consideration of the future, of enduring, the ruinprovokes points of reference for a theoretical-practical discourse. Speculative moments. Vacancies, artefacts, breaks, and relics. Images emerge that I find stimulating, images and ideas that I can edge toward.

4         In a radio broadcast, the architectural theorist Jan Tabor spoke of the ruinous potential of architecture. Tabor situated the concept of ruin between a totality and a fragment, between past and present, a condition that is hardly future-oriented. He spoke of the reception of modern building shells, backward building shells, ofunfinished buildings that he equated with ruins, of a building that was never finished, even if it is already occupied or used, because it will be further dismantled or built. But he also spoke of the fact that the disintegration is actually determined by building itself, because the dwelling and the living beings of the sameontogenesis follow and are closely related to each other. Thereby, it does not matter whether the building shell – thus the ruin – would ideally exist on paper or is already situated in the world. (Jan Tabor in: Diagonal, Oe1, 11.02.2012, 00:25:10)

A         Thus the speculation for this purpose?

B         To comprehend speculation as a creative concept seems to be progressively helpful: for years,speculation has been associated with the bursting of real estate bubbles and thus has a primarily negative connotation. Added to this in 2007, however, was an evaluation of and detachment from this in the emergence of unavoidable procedures by art: a philosophical school of thought. Speculative Realism.

A         What are you alluding to?

B         As with all processes designed or conceived in artistic disciplines, design is also constantly developing its aesthetic dimensions. Projects initially suspend preconceptions, for example about form and function. They question machine manufacturing or the principles of selling goods. They take on different roles as mediators in our societies. Artifacts, systems, or processes are useful, conceivable, and applicable in many ways. Design therefore does not always aim at a specific purpose in its application – neither in its conception nor in its use.

However, the range of possible designs is limited by preconceptions in the development process of design projects based on the requirements of an anachronistic industrial consumer culture, without exploiting the potential of a project’s content orientation. Fundamental decisions have often already been made and fixed. However, similar to works of art, design products can produce characteristics that enable them to have a subversive effect or stimulate critical reflection on our environment. For this process, i.e., the period in which design is carried out, the disintegration or expansion of its sphere of influence and disciplinary boundaries is of great importance. Design must therefore be broken down to a certain extent and combined with new ways of thinking and approaches in order to unlock its potential. In this way, things can approach their tasks in a different way. Whether objects actually emerge in the process is irrelevant in these speculations.

In art, one is indeed trying to create objects that are deeper than their components, through which theyannounce themselves; or art tries to incorporate things or phenomena or processes in themselves, which cannot be completely visualised.5 Extended spaces of action are revealed through resources, methods, or strategies. To create multi-dimensionality in the design process would therefore be an aim of a possibleapproach.

5         See: Graham Harman, ‘Der dritte Tisch’, translation by Barbara Hess, Documenta (13): 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken # 085, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012, p. 29

A         That would mean that the classic task of problem-solving per se is to be assigned to the past? Thecapacity of the protagonists to act would thus be enormously restricted wouldn’t it?

B         Naturally, we cannot talk about an absolute reorientation. That makes little sense. Rather, it is a matter of small alterations of thinking and negotiation spaces, where an experimental design intervenes in the creation of objects and artefacts. Different design approaches work like this or that with content – however, they are no longer purely disciplinary, intended in the most straightforward way, and completed. Theydecontextualise, for example, their origin and intentions through formats, or describe an object whereby the form possibly subordinates a more important aspect of the project, yet argues this conclusively. Seen from this angle, I like the approach in the text The Third Table by the philosopher Graham Harman, which proposes positioning the culture of art as a third table next to the table of the humanities and the natural sciences.6 Thiscultural practice is automatically prompted to include several approaches. As the theorist Tom Holert describesit, there would also arise a kind of practice of opportunities, non-disciplinary actions and movements with theconsideration of procedural articulation, in order to actually initiate effects to some extent.7

6         See: Graham Harman, The Third Table: 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts/100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken, Documenta (13): No. 085, Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 6

7         See: Tom Holert, Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality in: Civic City Cahier 3, Bedford Press AA Publications Ltd., London, 2011, p. 51

‘When weighing the respective merits of the everyday and scientific tables, we shall find both are ‘equally unreal’, since both amount simply to opposite forms of reductionism. The scientist reduces the table downward to tiny particles invisible to the eye; the humanist reduces it upward to a series of effects on people and other things. To put it bluntly, both of Eddington’s tables are utter shams that confuse the table with its internal and external environments, respectively. The real table is in fact a third table lying between these two others. And if Eddington’s two tables provided the moral support of Snow’s two cultures of scientists and humanists, our third table will probably require a third culture completely different from these two. This is not to say that the third culture is a completely new one: perhaps it is the culture of the “arts”, which do not seem to reduce tables either to quarks and electrons or to table-effects on humans.’ (Graham Harman, The Third Table, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken # 085, Hatje Cantz, 2012, S. 6 f.

A         In my opinion, the situation is similar to the one in the novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, when the protagonists stand in front of the supercomputer ‘Deep Thought’, which has just announced the long-awaited answer to the question of questions, and now the actual question has to be sought.

B         Abolishing the dualism of arts, the relationship between object and viewers/users does not make sense. Design lives through the reception and utilisation of people. I cannot make books for posterity from bosons androbots. Yet, I can identify a very exciting point for me in the philosophical school of thought – namely to take a position that allows a return to the core of an object and makes it possible to imagine extended lines of action. Techniques of an ontological redesign, so to speak.

A         To what extent is this applicable to a practice concept?

B         As a practitioner, one can draw on theory in a very solution-oriented way, or negotiate this for his/her own position. In my case, I see this with speculation also very pragmatically, in the sense of not having to be skilled at tracking philosophical discourses in order to make a watertight classification, in order to derive impulses that are of great importance for ideational, subjective work. Heuristic to some extent. In order to not be positioned alone on one side as a designer, formally fixated on working away in one’s own puddle – sometimes more, sometimes less – is knowledge production; both to actively develop theory and working relationships, in order to further process them, as well as to profit as recipient from the production of others, an important thing. Because: commissions are usually delicate tasks from clients, who in reality are posing a deeper confrontation with questions concerning the entire spectrum of design. Whether this transfer is nowaimed at theory and knowledge production, or their applications, at percepts etc. remains to be seen, depending on the project and possibility. However, the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ play the decisive role for such a development.

A         At least arguments for alternative forms of practice are emerging. Thus it raises the question of what an alternative is offered against. What or who is the adversary? The mainstream? The establishment? Neo-liberalism?

B         The field of design is, like the questioning itself, very heterogeneous, so that in general there is already no nice view of a categorical imperative: to depict Alternative! Radical! Trendy! Political! or the like as paradise, somehow no longer works. But it is evident in consideration of the examples that it is modulated with conventional means and possibilities.

A         So content-driven design stimulates design processes?

B         To say it with an example: apart from the original and immediate tasks of discipline, such as designing the next chair, it would be interesting to actually engage in a dialogue, or to actively look for this in order to find out what can be actually worked on, what represents a challenge for the period ahead, what the actual progressive alignment of the respective discipline can be. To tie back to the example of the stool, questions might be: Where did the plan to design a chair come from in the first place? Perhaps it does not have to be a chair that solves the problem raised? From what material is the object made? Is an object actually necessary? How long is its use cycle? How much grey energy is consumed by production and supply? What happens in terms of waste disposal? How is material recycled? And so on.

A         I am thinking of self-produced and distributed products or self-publishing or the changing role models of authorship in design and art. This could be interpreted as the blossoming of a next attempt to break out of the work-on-demand system, as well as a questioning of the synchronized barriers of the corporate software toolbox used by designers.

B         Abraham Maslow and Paul Watzlawick said, in essence: ‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ This requires an expansion of pioneering approaches and content, through which knowledge production can take place again through processing and reflection. At what point do various professions link together? For what are they applicable and their approach useful? Which disciplines take part in which design processes? When is it worth leaving the purely disciplinary subject behind? In doing so, with which methodology do I equip myself?

A         In this respect, book design would be many things, for example. So not just the visual and material design and production of the medium?

B         As a rule, thinking in categories usually helps us to classify things better. When you say, “Yes, I design books!” What happens in your studio when a design calls for a different form, an exhibition, a program for a film screening, or a radio broadcast? Suddenly, the carefully constructed boundaries of what designers are supposed to design become blurred. Then, it is no longer entirely clear when you are faced with a result from the graphic design studio that you can decipher the original story behind its creation. The theme of publishing would therefore be the actual common denominator for design, to which the conception of a radio program could also be subordinated. Only the content had to appear in different forms and formats than usual. Its fundamental characteristic, namely to make things public, remains the same.8 Issues relating to distribution, recipients, presentation, etc. were not discussed at all.

8         ‘Publishing can take a myriad of forms and formats which are united in the act of making public. Referring to the original Latin sense of the word “publicare” (to make public) the question of publishing is a hybrid of display and making physically available in order to create a public.’ (Wessel von Gegnung: Leipzig Papers, Workshop with Can Altay and Zak Kyes, in: Zak Kyes, Barbara Steiner, Zak Kyes Working With…, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2012, S. 247)

To query these moments with speculative scepticism about how to engage in a process of change anddevelopment has become very important in exploring the limits of a creative active-becoming. What roles do designers actually play?

A         Your argument would be to engage in speculation about what such a scenario might look like?

B         Not with this distance to an assignment. As you know, design never begins from a neutral point. The difference between idea and speculation could be helpful for our deliberations: the idea is the image or archetype capable of mutation of mentally perceptible phenomena, whereas the speculation peers vaguely into the distance and aims at a possible target. Exchanging the vague basis order conducting basic research, describes this ‘applied’ speculating very well. This is an important prerequisite that makes it possible in the first place to use speculation as a means of design. Very impressive in this light, for example, is the project Forensic Architecture9 – initiated by the architect Eyal Weizman – which attempts to reconstruct war crimes or legal violations starting from the inscribed memorial architectural and spatial structures and situations, using video and data technologies.10

9         Forensic Architecture, http://www.forensic-architecture.org, 25.9.2015, 19:30 Uhr

10       See: Elvia Wilk, Architektur als Zeuge, in: Spike Art Quarterly #42 Winter 2014/2015, “History in a Time of Hypercirculation”, Spike Art Magazine OG, Wien/Berlin, 2014, p. 108

A         Would critical design, which has one of its origins in the product design from Dunne & Raby11, not also be a possible direction?

11       Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything – Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013

‘Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction … Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more – about everything – reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.’ (https://mitpress.mit.edu/index.php?q=books/speculative-everything, 18.09.2015, 14:50 Uhr)

B         Critical design practice or Critical Design or Criticality is exactly the direction in which also Design Fiction and Social Design are going. This is not unlike one of the speculative methods in the artistic sense. Dunne and Raby’s design arrangements clearly follow a tradition of critical practice, such as those from Archigram or Superstudio. Their results expand them. They are created first through a research process. They question the application of openness of a design concept – and occasionally often the final form. They question procedures, in order to not necessarily favour that which corresponds to the genre, to possess a nice result at the end. The critical aspect is responsible for this and reveals something that the designers put up for discussion. At this point, it must be said that the growing results list – which makes certain products in a certain field recognisable and usable – is solely to blame for the updated, rather inflationary use of the term ‘criticism’ in the nomenclature of aesthetic discourse. But also: the clear preoccupation with which possibilities emerge, to confront uncertain positions and questions in order to effectively update them in a disciplinary manner, to project, implement, and/or situate them with a certain urgency. One could try to implement projects and initiate systematic changes with those new results.

A         Are categorical attributions still useful at all?

B         With the aid of form, categorisation is simple: a house, a picture, a book – thus, at least when one sees the products. In his text, ‘A Cautious Prometheus?’12, Bruno Latour described a state that declares the field of design to be non-fundamental, roughly describing the design process as continuous redesign. Processes overlap and merge, designers change their situation and positions in order to question the objective nature of things. However, they do not create anything new ex nihilo.

12       See: Bruno Latour in: Ein vorsichtiger Prometheus? Einige Schritte hin zu einer Philosophie des Designs, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Peter Sloterdijk, in: Marc Jongen, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Koenraad Hemelsoet Hg., Die Vermessung des Ungeheuren – Philosophie nach Peter Sloterdijk, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, München, 2009 (Orig. 2008), p. 358:

‘Today everyone with an iPhone knows that it would be absurd to distinguish what has been designed from what has been planned, calculated, arrayed, arranged, packed, packaged, defined, projected, tinkered, written down in code, disposed of and so on. From now on, “to design” could mean equally any or all of those verbs. Secondly, it has grown in extension – design is applicable to ever larger assemblages of production. The range of things that can be designed is far wider now than a limited list of ordinary or even luxury goods.’ (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf, 29.9.2015, 12:58 Uhr)

I would even go so far as to claim that an object – such as the book or the mobile telephone, which is so often cited – is no longer needed, in and of itself, to completely dissolve the system of the design in order to bring it to life again afterwards. I would think that if the origin of the actual work can come from different fields, and for an examination only specifies a starting point, the resulting progress of work defines the ‘vessel’ to be filled. Thus, the form is always constituted of itself, whilst the most meaningful potential for the constellation and intent emerges in a created free space. To understand this construct as ‘witnesses’ of the questions raised, it is necessary to strongly integrate design techniques and teaching. Such an approach lives from the exposure of economical constraints, a downgrade, so to speak.

The actual form of the created changes, when it suddenly does not depend purely on developing or refining the assignability and the market for a product. My point is certainly an experimental zone in the confrontationwith strongly disciplinary questions. As an Anglicism, the word ‘design’ in German is unfortunately used for this in a very loaded and inflationary manner; likewise, the use of the concept in a cultural studies sense, whosecontexts of meaning and attributions widely diverge. Whether that approaches my argument regarding theapplications of design? That remains to be seen.