power week 3
04/05
LOTTE VAN HULST
LAURENS STUDIO 17
Power is embedded in social fabric of societies. This is a form of structure. The blueprint. However, the structures and boundaries in this are not constant. They can be stretched and changed and engaged with within the agency. Look at activism. Here, agency ensures individuals to reflect on what they do. Having this privilege is in itself a form of power. Does having free will and therefore agency, give you power? Or is it only possible to attain power in relation to someone or something else? Is it a form of privilege to take a stand and express your opinion? I think so and that is why I think it is so important to speak up, even if it might be further away from what you associate yourself with or have experience with. People have power. But not all people. So, if you have it, use it for those who don’t. Power in design The panopticon is a conceptual idea on power that is reflected in the design of a prison. Here the imprisoned are under power by the intrinsic feeling of being watched, which is evoked by a design where the prisoners are unable to see when or when not they are being surveilled. Foucault critiques Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon. According to Foucault (2020), power is a relation between actors that can determine each other’s behaviour. In the panopticon, knowledge is power. Foucault states that one does not possess power, but it is rather about the factors within a context that gives someone or something power. Power is not money for example. Income inequality is not always linked to power positions because there are more differences to consider, such as culture, gender or skin colour. One of Foucault’s criticisms is on the penetration of regulation that is based on a mental mechanism of discipline, contemporarily known as the quantified self. The panopticon means visual power. I agree with Foucault. Such design is cruel and inherently based on the mistrust of others. The primary goal of a prison to me is not to punish but to isolate dangers on society and get them ready to eventually re-integrate them into the world as positive participators in society. The panopticon is a design that is based on internalised coercive power. Instead of viewing it as the guard of the imprisoned that is empowered in its position of being able to contain punishment, the design of the panopticon is really based on the empowerment of the prisoner to self-discipline. So not only “knowledge is power” but perhaps, in this situation, the knowledge of not knowing is a form of power as well. The agency in knowledge does not lie with the individual in this situation. Can someone have power without having agency? Designers are equipped with the power of giving people (back) agency. People have power, governments and corporates inflict power and take away agency. Design, when done well, can give back agency and empower people to interact freely in society. Or, as Toni Morrison famously puts it: “Your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
