Design and Postmodernity

“Postmodernity is everywhere, from literature, design and philosophy, to MTV, ice-cream and underwear” – Michael J Dear and Steven Flusty

                                             Spaces of Postmoderism

                                             2003

-ities and –isms

-ities describe the value system, that ideology

-isms are the qualities associated with those ideas.

Post modernity: the state or ideaology of being postmodern

Postmodernism: The associations of being postmodern

Value systems provide societal, cultural, and economic meaning

Design features of Post WWII

Shows innovation and technologically based design

HfG – Rotary Slide projector - 1963

         - electric shaver - 1961

Levitown – thousands of houses in rows, nature suppressed

-       Depressed housewives, “is this all?”

-       Lack of public facilities

Postmodernism about choice, feminism about choice

Those disabled, different race, religion, all fitted into woman’s lib, global awareness. Woman’s lib postmoderist

Richard Hamilton – “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, SO Appealing.”

         - Collage, 1956, Tate, London

 Abstract Expresionism

De Kooning’s Untitled XXIII, 1977

Shifano, Mario Coca Cola, 1972

70’s CRAZY design man.

3-Legged Arne Jacobsen Ant Chair, 1952.

Form moulded Plastic

1970’s Apollo design. Looks like a space helmet :/

1962 Oldenburg Cloth Hamburger

1967 Inflatable Blow Chair

1968 Bean bag chair

1981 Carlton cabinet – Ettore Sottsass

1969 Portable red typewriter – Olivetti

1970 Nefertiti desk

1985 Tartar Table

Paris – Student Uprising

Mechanical Calculator

Slide Rule

Apple Computer

WWW – 1993

Semiotics

Structuralism

                  Sign

                  ^      ^

             ^              ^

         ^                         ^

Signified———————Signifier

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space 1958

Underlies the rationalism of the imagination

Phenomenology, the experience of space, includes the poetic notion.

Basement: Dark, damp frightening

Attic: Light, mysterious, discovering of secrets

Difference between horizontal and vertical

 Jean-Francois Lyotard 1925-1998

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Knowledge has become ‘splintered’ into fragments.

The synthesis of a small narrative, the telling of events.

-       Discourse opens without pre-conditions, no rules or conditions…

Postmodern narrative is situational, provisional, temporary, with no claim to universality, truth or reason.

Science legitimates itself for reasons which assume a unified, progressive, universal total truth…

But none of these are so…

Bias and distortion have changed blah blah blahfgdfsjkghdfg

Frederick Jameson 1934

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991

Postmodern war (Vietnam) created a postmodern culture of alienation and disorientation. High-tech fantasies are morally questionable.

Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007

Simulcra and Simulation 1988

Values of commoditities as a philosophy of culture

-Functional value of an object (eg pen)