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THE LAST VIRIDIAN NOTE

Key concepts: summaries, farewells, Papal_Imperial sermons, the end of a design
movement



Attention Conservation Notice: This is the last one.

Links:
A new steampunk manifesto. Wow, steampunk is a LOT older than Viridian, and look
how lively steampunk is now. This implies a Viridian revival someday –
"Neo-Viridian," "retroviridian"... "greenpunk" even. Lo, it was ever thus.
http://gogbot.nl.vedor.com/thema/

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Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has
changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the
years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major
change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a
few meditative suggestions.

As I explained in the first Viridian speech, any design movement – social
movements of any kind, really – should be designed with an explicit expiration
date. The year 2012 would have been the extreme to which Viridian could have
persisted. Since the course of history has grown quite jittery, this longer term
was spared us.

Some Viridian principles can be lightly re-phrased, buffed-up and likely made of
practical use in days to come. Others are period notions to be gently tossed
into the cultural compost. I could try to describe which are which – but that's
a proper job for someone younger.

I'm following current events with keen interest. There's never been a better
time for major political and financial interventions in the green space.
However, Viridian List is about design interventions, it was not about politics
or finance, so a decent reticence is in order at this juncture.

I would like to cordially thank Viridian readers and contributors and advisors
for their patience and their generous help over nine years. I hope you feel you
derived some benefit from it. I did my best with the effort, I learned a lot by
it, and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I can't say what Viridian may have done for you; that's up to you to judge.
Since this is last Viridian note, however, I'd like to describe what Viridian
did for me.

Since the halcyon days of 1999 my life has changed radically.

Rather than "thinking globally and acting locally," as in the old futurist
theme, I now live and think glocally. I once had a stable, settled life within a
single city, state and nation. Nowadays, I divide my time between three
different polities: the United States, the European Union and the Balkans. With
various junkets elsewhere.

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn't approve of my lifestyle, although
it's increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It's stressful to
live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I've got
broadband, I'm perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet's
surface is arbitrary. It's the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by
these changes – it's freaking out over currency flows, migration through
airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

I know that, by the cultural standards of the 20th century, my newfangled glocal
lifestyle ought to bother me. I ought to feel deracinated, and I should suffer
from culture shock, and I should stoically endure the mournful silence and exile
of a writer torn from the kindly matrix of his national culture. A traditional
story.

However, I've been at this life for years now; I really tried; the traditional
regret is just not happening. Clearly the existence of the net has obliterated
many former operational difficulties.

Furthermore, my sensibility no longer operates in that 20th-century framework.
That's become an archaic way to feel, and I just can't get there from here.

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It's got its
practical drawbacks, but I'm much more perturbed about contemporary indignities
such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry of cellphone
roaming. This is what's troublesome. The rest of it, I'm rather at ease about.
Unless I'm physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don't think I'm going to
stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet.
This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see
certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion – purportedly
mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now
that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like
leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively
pernicious.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like
the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes
the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any
effective way. It doesn't do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it
practical, or a working path to a better life.

My personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been
revolutionized since 1999. Let me try your patience by describing this change in
some detail, because it really is a different mode of being in the world.

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that
fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social
relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar
and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is "sustainability?" Sustainable practices navigate successfully through
time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable
is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to
material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that
are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been
far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and
ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social
prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family
silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising
your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself
with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible
police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all
major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It's not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of
material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you
from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone
with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now
learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you
waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing,
those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime.
Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them
from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your
children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you
GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the
world. The rest is dross.

Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly
insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole.
So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary
simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal,
boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones.
They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It's
in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," and it is
"what is going on."

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it's the opposite of the
legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the
best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too
much money on a bed – (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I
do not). You're spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be
sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to
that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious
notice. See it. Replace it.

Sell – even give away– anything you never use. Fancy ball gowns, tuxedos,
beautiful shoes wrapped in bubblepak that you never wear, useless Christmas
gifts from well-meaning relatives, junk that you inherited. Sell that stuff.
Take the money, get a real bed. Get radically improved everyday things.

The same goes for a working chair. Notice it. Take action. Bad chairs can
seriously injure you from repetitive stresses. Get a decent ergonomic chair.
Someone may accuse you of "indulging yourself" because you possess a chair that
functions properly. This guy is a reactionary. He is useless to futurity. Listen
carefully to whatever else he says, and do the opposite. You will benefit
greatly.

Expensive clothing is generally designed to make you look like an aristocrat who
can afford couture. Unless you are a celebrity on professional display, forget
this consumer theatricality. You should buy relatively-expensive clothing that
is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.

Anything placed next to your skin for long periods is of high priority. Shoes
are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear.
You really need to work on selecting these – yes, on "shopping for shoes." You
should spend more time on shoes than you do on cars, unless you're in a car
during pretty much every waking moment. In which case, God help you.

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of
these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a
beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your
multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative
interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a
multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous
untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more
capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose
threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a
file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have
tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take
notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and
colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than
someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should
aspire to this better condition.

Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear
unless you are Stewart Brand. Furthermore, unless you are a professional
emergency worker, you can abstain from post-apocalyptic "bug-out bags" and
omnicompetent heaps of survivalist rations. Do not stock the fort with tiresome,
life-consuming, freeze-dried everything, unless you can clearly sense the
visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The clearest
way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have left your
area. If that's the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and prepare to
knuckle down.

Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious
design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or
several friends to help you.

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

 1. Beautiful things.
 2. Emotionally important things.
 3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
 4. Everything else.

"Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not
touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in
"everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers'
marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for
some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures
somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central
digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in
your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your
opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it.
You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You
are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

Beautiful things are important. If they're truly beautiful, they should be so
beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you
should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should
enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.

They're not really that beautiful? Then they're not really beautiful. Take a
picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.

Emotionally important things. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we can't
bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke a
panicky sense of potential loss – they don't help us to establish who we are, or
to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.

Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with
your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this
clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing yourself
better?

Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down. Then –
yes – away with it.

You are not "losing things" by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining
time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will
certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where
they matter – in the everyday.

Not in Oz or in some museum vitrine. In the every day. For sustainability, it is
every day that matters. Not green Manhattan Projects, green moon shots, green
New Years' resolutions, or wild scifi speculations. Those are for dabblers and
amateurs. The sustainable is about the every day.

Now for category three, tools and appliances. They're not beautiful and you are
not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical
standards.

Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is
attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays.
Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact. Expect
this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke anguished
spasms of denial.

You will be told that you should "make do" with broken or semi-broken tools,
devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by
poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.

This material culture of today is not sustainable. Most of the things you own
are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad. If we
stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt
notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater. This will not do.

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings
created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from
today's. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means
you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the
genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the
issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing
more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your
tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of
mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest:
the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking,
partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in life
is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting
semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the
worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to
wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really
need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.

Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory.
They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into
some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to
other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of
private fetishes.

If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to
prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you
are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be
wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less
adventurous. Good.

If you're becoming a techie magpie packrat who never leaves your couch – that's
not good. Forget the shiny gadget. You need to look in the shiny mirror.

So. This approach seems to be working for me. More or less. I'm not urging you
to do any of this right away. Do not jump up from the screen right now and go
reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because
it's not sustainable.

Instead, I am urging you to think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your
mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly
find your comfortable habits disrupted.

That could be a new job, a transfer to a new city, a marriage, the birth or
departure of a child. It could be a death in the family: we are mortal, they
happen. Moments like these are part of the human condition. Suddenly you will
find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. That is
the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize
that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and
sustainable constitution.

But – you may well ask – what if I backslide into the ancien regime? Well, there
is a form of hygiene workable here as well. Every time you move some new object
into your time and space – buy it, receive it as a gift, inherit it, whatever –
remove some equivalent object.

That discipline is not as hard as it sounds. As the design of your immediate
surroundings improves, it'll become obvious to you that more and more of these
time-sucking barnacles are just not up to your standards. They're ugly, or
they're broken, or they're obsolete, or they are visible emblems of nasty,
uncivilized material processes.

Their blissful absence from your life makes new time and space for something
better for you – and for the changed world you want to live to see.

So: that summarizes it. Forgive the Pope-Emperor this last comprehensive sermon;
it is what I learned by doing all this, and you won't be troubled henceforth.

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Now. If you've read this far, you're a diehard. So you may be interested in my
next, post-Viridian, project. And yes, of course I have one. It's not so direct,
confrontational and strident as the Viridian Movement; instead, it suits a guy
of my increasingly scholastic and professorial temperament.

Viridian "imaginary products" were always a major theme of ours, and, since I'm
both a science fiction writer and a design critic, I want to do some innovative
work in this space – yes, the realm of imaginary products. Conceptual designs;
imaginary designs; critical designs; fantastic and impossible designs.

This new effort of mine is a scholarly work exploring material culture,
use-value, ethics, and the relationship between materiality and the imagination.
However, since nobody's easily interested in that huge, grandiose topic, I'm
disguising it as a nifty and attractive gadget book. I plan to call it "The
User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets."

My first step in composing this new book is to methodically survey the space of
all possible imaginary gadgets. It's rather like the exploratory work of "Dead
Media Project."

I'm not yet sure what form this new research effort will take. There will likely
be a mailing list. I may be turning my Wired blog into something of a gadget
site. There might be a wiki or a social network, depending on who wants to help
me, and what they want out of that effort. Still: "design fiction," "critical
design," "futurist scenario design," and the personal, individual,
pocket-and-purse sized approach to postindustriality: this is something I need
to know a lot more about.

If you want to play, send email.

Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com


O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O
BORGO MEDIOEVALE
TORINO, ITALIA WORLD CAPITAL OF DESIGN
NOVEMBER 2008
O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O








Visionary Contest

Art Center has never had anyone "in residence," much less a "visionary." That
means it's up to me to set the tone for all future visionaries who may grace the
confines of this patch of academe.

Clearly, Job One (now that I've met my colleagues and students) is the creation
of an official Art Center VISIONARY IN RESIDENCE T-shirt.

The winner: John Kovach






   




 

 

 

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Managed by Jon Lebkowsky