2 January 2000
Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 21:59:25 +0000
From: brian carroll <human@ARCHITEXTUREZ.COM>
Subject: review: Hertzian Tales
To: DESIGN-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU
By Anthony Dunne
a.dunne@rca.ac.ukhttp://www.crd.rca.ac.uk/dunne-raby/
Computer Related Design's Critical Design Unit,
Royal College of Art, c.1999
ISBN: 1 874175 27 6
Reviewed by Brian Carroll
Mr. Carroll is author of The Architecture of Electricity: http://www.architexturez.com/ae/
It is my great pleasure to be able to share my views on a substantial piece of work in the cultural investigation of electromagnetic phenomena, natural, artificial, and virtual.
What is so refreshing is that this book does not merely repackage old ideas and ideologies about technological enthusiasm, but instead questions them, through thinking, writing, and design. If works in the past have been groundbreaking, this is a literal penetration of the design field by Hertzian radio waves.
Anthony Dunne, with written and visual clarity, gives dozens of examples of previous attempts by industrial designers, artists, and architects to grapple with the more philosophical aspects of designing electronic products. This research in itself makes the book an invaluable resource.
But interestingly this is where the book begins in its critical approach, leveraging serious and relevant criticism of much work to date. This is because traditional notions of design have been mapped onto the new electronic object, in effect unquestioningly repackaging them for a totally different paradigm of electronic reality these new technologies help create and could themselves help reveal, through a new design awareness.
Mr. Dunne refers to architecture and fine art as inspirations for industrial designers whom are looking for meaning beyond the commercial marketplace alone. A place where investigating design ideas, as non-commercial ideas, can be encouraged as a way of exploring and furthering the aesthetic development of electronic products, and thus peoples awareness of them in their more poetic dimensions.
From a paradoxical perspective, one of the most basic and interesting aspects of Dunne's work is also somewhat difficult to accept, in total. It is that the electronic object can be designed as a 'post-optimal' object, meaning an object that exists beyond its optimization through its design. It is this proposition which launches one into a new world of electronic awareness, and its active interrogation through design thinking.
The difficulty comes with the assumption that is the basis for the post-optimized object, which is that which is most often at odds with critical thinking. From one perspective, the optimal may still be a critical and unresolved issue, well beyond aesthetics and into the economic, social, and political aspects of the electronic object. For example, a computer may be aesthetically optimized, such as the iMac by Apple, but it may still use the inefficient, polluting, and wasteful systems of obsolescence as most all of the other electronic products on the market. Thus, in this respect, the critical aspects of the industrial design of electronic objects must remember the infrastructure which makes and distributes and disposes of these very objects. Doing so reminds one that things are far from optimized in terms of their design.
But this fact does not limit the importance of the ideas that are expressed based on the design of electronics past that of their optimization. For Mr. Dunne it is about awareness. Not just of the object, but the object as a type of portal into a new way of perceiving the electromagnetic space of Hertzian waves, outside the confines of traditional media, such as radio and television. Instead of answering what this new design should be like, Mr. Dunne makes it clear that this is instead a question to be explored by many people through critical design.
Mr. Dunne's writing is both smooth and densely packed with ideas, so much so that it is very difficult to try to re-rationalize the text with its own complex reasoning. But this is not to say that the thinking is just another private language and perspective. It is most definitely not, and his public conscience is revealed in every chapter, reminding the reader why design investigations of electronic objects need to be made, and these are for their social and their cultural impacts, and our need to understand them better so that we can design the electromagnetic world we want to exist within.
That this commitment is not simply about equating aesthetics with beauty is actively demonstrated in the acknowledgement of the dark side of electromagnetism, in the author's own works based upon this thinking. Using radio scanners Mr. Dunne maps the spaces emitted by 'objects that dream', that is, electronic objects such as baby intercoms, electronic bugs, and cordless phones which invisibly leak their information out past traditional boundaries of buildings, and into Dunne's moving car, scanning neighborhoods from the streets. Likewise, the 'gauss meter' becomes a design tool in the hands of Mr. Dunne, and electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are measured and mapped for their dreaminess, and become research for critical design thinking.
If there is an analogy to this type of designing, it might be that of gravity. That, like planets, while we may find electronic products attractive, they too are attracting us without our knowing of this force or of its impact upon our daily lives. In summary, Anthony Dunne's Hertzian Tales is about designing ways of knowing the electromagnetic environment we exist within, and establishing a poetic interaction with it through purposeful and critical designs which help establish a cultural awareness of electromagnetism.
brian thomas carroll
architectural
researcher
human@architexturez.com
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 00:25:25 -0800
From: Van Varga <vanvarga@INTERGATE.BC.CA>
Subject: Re: review: Hertzian Tales
To: DESIGN-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU
Brian,
Thank you for your review of H E R T Z I A N T A L E S : Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design by Anthony Dunne.
I am remarking not on the content so much as your presentation. There is a more lucent clarity, a firmer logical cohesiveness, compared to any previous posting. There is a new you it seems. Has something changed for you lately or is it all in my own head?
As I read the review I thought to myself, yes, these are interesting ideas but it was your summary sentence:
"Anthony Dunne's Hertzian Tales is about designing ways of knowing the electromagnetic environment we exist within, and establishing a poetic interaction with it through purposeful and critical designs which help establish a cultural awareness of electromagnetism"
that made me decide to read the book.
//Van
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 01:19:31 +0000
From: brian carroll <human@ARCHITEXTUREZ.COM>
Subject: Re: review: Hertzian Tales
Comments: cc: a.dunne@rca.ac.uk
To: DESIGN-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU
Van writes:
[Snip]
I do think the book is very worthwhile reading for everyone in the design fields, but there is a certain potency to Anthony Dunne's investigation with electromagnetic space which is exactly what is missing from architectural thinking about space today.
That is to say, using tools like radio scanners and EMF meters, one can see the invisible fields of radio waves that extend from objects, through other objects, and into a wider, broader zone than that of the visual. with these new tools, which i think should be basic research equipment for understanding electromagnetic space, a new way of seeing and thinking can be revealed.
For example, while I can use a radio to tune in a certain frequency to listen to a broadcast, and I can thus understand that it is being sent via some sort of parallel particulate-wave that is carrying a signal/message to be deciphered by the technological box, the system is still basically closed empirically, like a conceptual vacuum for 'what is radio'. in contrast, using a radio scanner, one can detect frequencies that are not in a controlled-vacuum of experience and sense that energy-information which permeates all space, such as conversations between air traffic controllers and airplanes flying at 30,000 feet.
Hertzian Tales is rewarding in many ways. For myself, it sparked a renewed belief that this exploration of electromagnetism is both multi-disciplinary and holistic. this is demonstrated in Mr. Dunne's own design 'genotypes' which, for me, are eye- and mind-opening to consider. In all, this work let me give a great sigh of relief in that others are working on the same ideas that I have been working on in architecture, and that together, a shared sense of purpose, research, and action could help transform our current view of the built environment into something which is desperately needed, and that is: understanding.
brian