Community Service

To start from design at all, when looking at social relationships (which includes the role of communication design [1]) is perhaps to start from the wrong end. New areas of conviviality and community are continually emerging: from ‘experiments’ in mobile living from senior citizens in Recreational Vehicle (RV) communities in the US [2] to evolving SMS languages. Where these organic communication networks differ from traditional systemic design/networks is how previously unimaginable communities have emerged: undesigned.

A pre-digital world, the world of (mass) communications, is predominantly rhetorical – what the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, in his book Relational Aesthetics, calls looped information [3] – and demands no response other than that you follow. It is a system of communication of one-to-many; rather than today, where the possibility of many-to-many networks can drive much communication and design (or at least provide the possibility for a rupture from the top-down approach of so much design!).

Going back to SMS messaging for a moment, we can look to see how this works in two communities. In East Africa, a grassroots, alternative economy began to emerge after Vodafone set up their pay-as-you-go mobile network. This simply started with users sending cash to each other and comparing market prices by phone – fruit and vegetables for instance – from one market to another (in a sense the technology was utilised to provide a commodities market). A technological network was put into place and the local community intervened to create a network contingent to their needs.

More broadly, SMS has become a predominant form of mobile communication where teenagers, first in Japan, followed by Europe and eventually the USA, took up SMS, originally a by product of mobile telephony; it is now the predominant form of communication across a wide demographic of all ages.

The examples given above are driven by a many-to-many network rather than communication design or marketing strategies (although it has now provided opportunities for both).

Processes like these have been well documented and informs much current thinking about design and the real world; like John Thackara who comments: ‘we know what new technology can do but what is it for and how do we want to live?’ [4].

The questions, What is it for? and How do we want to live? in a sense can be used as a catalyst to help focus the ideas put forward in relational aesthetics. Bourriaud’s other key terms, relational, open-ended, everyday micro-utopias, social interstices, communication zones and micro-community, have been much discussed but for the sake of our argument here it boils down to the role of process and community: what and how do we create in a community sphere?

Community itself can be problematic. Community separates out, so you are defined by being in one and not the other. In simple terms, design community, art community but in more radical cases it can be situated outside of systems, capitalism, religion, national boundaries etc.

‘Community is posited as particular where capitalism is abstract. Posited as its other, its opposite, community is often presented as a complement to capitalism, balancing and humanizing it, even, in fact, enabling it’ [5].

Design has a role in the ‘balancing and humanizing’ of the culture it acts within, but needs to focus on the ‘What is it for?’, ‘How do we want to live?’ Before it can radically do this. It requires an understanding of the minutiae of the subject-at-hand which provides assistance in answering these questions.

In an analogue context, much research in community/urban development (where a transformative engagement with community is called for) the minutiae can be a critical catalyst in informing the design process and the eventual material outcome.

Jodi Polzin, who recounts her experience of working with design students and the local community in inner city St. Louis, eloquently captures the problem of a one-to-many approach to design in her paper Reconsidering the Margin: Relationships of Difference and Transformative Education:‘The disparity between how the students and the residents experienced the same neighborhood was exemplified by the eventual selection of a site which the students described in a written presentation as “a trash-strewn vacant lot of no present value.” The site turned out to be an important baseball field where the neighborhood children played and which had significant meaning to many in the community. The children, with whom the students did not consult, maintained that they did not want it touched because it would attract the older youth and no longer be theirs. This exasperated the students who felt that the residents did not appreciate something better in their neighborhood, a design which had been highly lauded by design faculty during in-house reviews’ [6].

In a different context, up until recently, social networking and ‘tweeting’ online has been derided precisely because its content is considered ‘minutiae’. However, this is to think from a privileged (one to many) position.

For instance, the Baghdad Blogger was simply putting his diary online during the war in Iraq hoping a friend in Turkey might log in. Instead, to the world’s press, starved of insider information, it became a mainframe for disseminating information [7].

In the summer, the newspapers spoke of the ‘Twitter revolutionary’. Community can’t be prescriptive or pre-defined; but in any given context will see design as a starter-kit that can become something else. Metaphors still frame these spaces on the Web, so the user ‘knows where they are’; the browser home page and computer Desktop bookend any computer-mediated experience.

In a sense, Design has long been impotent in the networked city, whose institutions/edifices – business centres, banks, airports, classrooms – are essentially nodal points that organise the exchange of information, capital and power in what Manuel Castells calls the ‘space of flows’ [8].

Today’s Web 2.0 technology allows the opportunity to focus upon interpersonal communications; often the minutiae of social communication and, as such, can provide a shift in emphasis when thinking about ‘network building’ in design more

broadly.

Following on from Castells, ‘liquidity’ is the dominant metaphor in a relational community orientated design environment, where in the realm of digital networks, ‘Social structures are dissolving into “streams” of human beings, information, goods and specific signs or cultural symbols’ [9].

But is it the end of design as we know it… it will be for some!

References

1 Some of the thoughts here have developed on from an original article we wrote between 2005-6 called Part of the Process http://www.limitedlanguage.org/articles/relational.php

This looked for the relational in visual communication. In 2009 in the article ‘Strained Relations’ the design writer Rick Poynor returned to Relational Aesthetics suggesting the line of enquiry didn’t convince within the context of communication design: ‘While it’s possible to find graphic design projects that offer some degree of interactivity or draw people into a relationship with a space, projects that promote social relationships between people are rare.’ Rick Poynor, Strained Relations, Print, April 2009, www.printmag.com/design_articles/observer_strained_relations/tabid/519

2 In America, although the mobile elderly communities are clearly nomads by leisure and not through need, this meant they were amongst the first to arrive as volunteer aid workers after Hurricane Katrina, when New Orleans was shattered in 2005. See for instance, Deane Simpson, RV Urbanism: Nomadic Network Settlements of the Senior Recreational Vehicle Community in the US, www.holcimfoundation.org/Portals/1/docs/F07/WK-Temp/F07-WK-Tempsimpson02.pdf, (accessed 08/05/2009).

3 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du Réel, English translation 2002).

4 John Thackara, Director, Doors of Perception, Competitiveness Summit ‘06. http://bit.ly/Thackara

5 Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 1.

6 Jodi Polzin, Reconsidering the Margin: Relationships of Difference and Transformative Education (Saint Louis: Washington University in Saint Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, College of Architecture, 2009), 4.

7 Baghdad Blogger: ‘In the run-up to war, a Web diary from the Iraqi capital captured an international following as its author, writing under the pen name Salam Pax, charted the daily lives of a people caught between a feared regime and a

foreign invasion force’.

8 The economist Manuel Castells uses ‘space of flows’ to refer to the system of information, capital and power that structures societies and economies regardless of location: ‘The space of flows, superseding the space of places, epitomizes the increasing differentiation between power and experience, the separation between meaning and function.’ Manuel Castells, ‘European cities, the Informational Society and the Global Economy’ in Richard Le Gates and Frederic Stout (eds.), The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 483.

9 Scott Lash and John Urry referenced in Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 80-81.