Interactions - November/December 2014

DOI: 10.1145/2669617 COPYRIGHT HELD BY AUTHOR from it was an appreciation of the fact that crisis is a recurring affair. From the perspective of the curator, there are three notable decades of economic crisis identified within 100 years.

The subtitle “Autarky, Austerity,
Autonomy” refers to not the conditions
of the economic crisis but rather a set
of responses to economic crisis. These
responses become historical motifs,
repeated patterns of design activity. In
addition to providing interpretation
of the work in the past, we might also
use such themes as starting points for
work in the present. If we chose to do
so, it would not be because there is
some empirical or theoretical validity
to them, only so we could say, “This is
what designers have done repeatedly in
the past. Might that be an appropriate
strategy for today?”
We might even look at the specifics
of a single designer, someone whose
response to crisis in the past was
especially notable. In the same way that
Ive turned to Rams for design thinking
and a formal language to shape our
appreciation of and interaction with
modern technology, we might, for
example, look to designers such as
Enzo Mari to help us craft a design
strategy for practices and products in
support of sustainability. I had never
seen the work of Enzo Mari before the
exhibition. This is a loss for me because
his work could be so informative to
HCI, particularly to those areas of HCI
design concerned with sustainability.
Mari, who at 82 just recently closed his
Milan studio, developed a furniture
series that could be made by anyone.
Well-designed furniture available to
all. Mari had a value-laden DI Y design
approach to producing everyday
products that would have real use
value—the same kind of approach
many strive for in sustainable HCI.
Perhaps if I had taken that course
on the history of Italian design I would
have known of Mari’s work. Or perhaps
if I had kept up with reading design
history as I delved into the “current”
research of sustainability I would have
come across his work sooner and been
able to draw lessons from it for my work.

What is important is the recognition of
the importance of history. I’m not the
first to say this. Susan Wyche, Phoebe
Sengers, and Beki Grinter wrote a
fantastic paper on the use of history
in HCI [ 2]. And Paul Dourish and
Genevieve Bell have also made good use
of history in their work on ubiquitous
computing [ 3]. But I think we need
to attend to history even more, and
specifically to design history. If we want
to understand how the world is made,
we need to develop a better appreciation
for the history of that making. And if we
want to make the world differently (and
isn’t that really what much of design is
about?) then we should try to learn from
those who have made before us.

Endnotes

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ anthonykosner/2013/11/30/jony-ives-no- longer-so-secret-design-weapon/

2. Wyche, S., Sengers, P., Grinter, R.E. Historical analysis: Using the past to design the future. Proc. of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. P. Dourish and A. Friday, eds. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006, 35–51; DOI= 10.1007/11853565_ 3; http:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/11853565_3

3. Dourish, P. and Bell, G. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. MIT Press, 2011.

Carl DiSalvo is an associate professor in the Digital Media program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he studies the social and political qualities of design and computing. He is also co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing.