NextD Journal I ReRethinking Design Conversation 6
Intervals-Ideas-Initiatives
10 GK VanPatter: In your comments about globalism versus globalization you seem to be referencing an eventuality of wholeness, unification and oneness. I see concern and optimism there. I see intentionality not just observation and analysis. Does this represent a change from the way Dr McLuhan thought about the world? Derrick de Kerckhove: McLuhan used to say that adopting a moral stance was premature in a world given to such fast technological and sociopolitical changes. He was essentially correct during the sixties and seventies when we were still adapting to the first phase of electricity, the analogue, broadcast phase. But we are now well into the second, more mature phase of the social body’s adaptation to electricity, the digital networked phase (it is very likely, in that order of thinking, that the next and fully matured - phase will be based on quantum operations). I think that is critical now, that we have begun to experience the perils and the thrills of globalization, to develop that new moral stance, a new ethics similar to civism, but pushed at the global scale. What that changes is primarily a profound sense of tolerance for other cultural and religious values, just as tolerance of the inviolability of the private psyche was critical to achieve a mature stage in the literate cultures of the 17th-19th centuries in Western Europe. Political correctness is an example, albeit still rather timid, of this new ethics I call globalism.
11 GK VanPatter: Let me reference a couple of “Big Picture” design related quotes here that you might appreciate. In the international design community we have numerous thinkers writing about the reinvention of design in and for the 21st century. Some are very business focused, while others are almost spiritual. Below is an example from a new book entitled “The Design Way” / Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World by Dr. Harold G. Nelson & Dr. Erik Stolterman. “Design is an act of world creation. The world is becoming more and more a human artifact, a designed place. To be a designer is therefore to be a creator of new worlds.. It is a calling of enormous responsibility, with its concomitant accountability...As designers, we believe that we need to view the world from the systems perspective. The systems approach is the logic of design...Design is a process of meaning making because it is engaged in creation from a systems perspective, holistically and compositionally…” “We are captured by the realization that design is about the creation of a soulful world...What a remarkable challenge - to aid in the ensoulment of the world!…When we start to understand design as a process of ensoulment, when we become aware that every design process and composition ultimately contributes to a larger whole, we - as designers - begin to realize more fully our responsibility to the planet as a whole. We become aware that every design process, every composition, contributes to this larger design. To design is not to create things that make the world more fundamentally true, rather to create a world that has more meaning.” I wonder if intentionally endeavoring to create a more soulful world might underlie your connected intelligence work as well?
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