Design
At the end of the industrial age, design is in a
profound crisis, remarks Vilém Flusser on the
“state of things,” in a book rst published in
1993. Because design always pretends to be
able to solve problems, without actually being in
a position to do so, it generates rst and foremost
“obstacle[s] for/to the removal of obstacles”
(The Shape of Things, 1999, p. 58). At the
same time, he claims, we are at the beginning
of a post-historical age of technical images:
concepts are breaking down into dimensionless
dot elements, and we need a new power of
imagination to recombine them using calculating
and computing gestures or to recombine them
into technical images. Hence the linear-causal
concept of the world offered by historical thinking
up to now and the programmatic, nonlinear
thinking of post-history are worlds apart. The
latter conceives the universe as an entropic
process and the world as a random realization
of arrangements, of “programs,” whose center
is occupied above all by contingencies. Flusser
sees in this a liberating potential; he writes:
“Freedom consists not in choosing and deciding,
but instead in countering the entropic tendencies
of the world with the improbable: […]
opening up future, hitherto unsuspected areas
for decisions.” (Nachgeschichte, 1997, p. 221;
translated from the German)*
From a post-historical perspective, design
means thinking “programmatically”; that means,
first, bidding farewell to purpose-driven and deterministic
thinking of linear-causal necessities
in categories such as “motive,” “objective and
cause,” and “consequence.” In that same spirit,
Peter Weibel wrote in the mid-1990s of the liberation
of the object by the code: “coding as
design,” as “the attempt to apply the free manipulation
and variability of the digital [image]
to the world of objects” (Weibel, “The Liberated
Object,” in: Teichgräber, Peter Weibel: Hypothetical
Products, 1994, n.p.); this means thinking of
the world in variables.
* Editorial note: This passage does not exist in the English edition.
Original article by Clemens Jahn in Flusseriana