In “From Savage Minds to Savage Machines” (2021), Nolan traces a history of primitivism in architecture and design from 19th century education in industrial arts to the design of technologies for Global South children. She argues this is central (1) to reflect critically on design’s goal to support or drive social integration at the expense of political dissensus and organised social movements; and (2) to reconsider the assumptions behind what is considered good design i.e., objects and structures intuitive to use, a “natural” fit. This is the academic version of ForScale’s request that everyone stop using the word primitive in design.
She demonstrates how designers read anthropology and psychology to envision how to design for innate human characteristics and framed their work as a way to smooth the impact of industrialisation and modernisation, while never fundamentally questioning economic inequalities. This required naturalising some groups for inspiration, constructing them as examples of primitive, unreflective and intuitive relationship to nature and their immediate environment thereby reinforcing or creating racial hierarchies.
Ultimately, designers further distinguished the design recipient, a primitive who may engage in crafts, from themselves, who can derive abstract principles from such crafts and automate production. Nolan argues it takes away from the ability to articulate a different vision for the world, rooted in language. Each chapter weaves together evidence of influence from anthropology with artifacts produced by the designers, documents outlining their vision, describing the epistemic and economic benefits designers derived from primitivism.
The first part focuses on industrial design. Her first chapter illustrating this confluence focuses on Charles Leland, an American intellectual involved in 19th century ethnographic societies and associated debates on the nature of the human mind rooted in mysticism and early psychology. The interest for ‘primitive’ ornaments in this period led him to posit patterns as a reflection of innate creativity – nature mirrored in human cognition, the reconciliation of body and mind. Concerned about the impact of mechanisation on the underprivileged, he set out to develop a curriculum for the industrial crafts based on such embodied creativity. But his ultimate vision was a world free of labour, of machines generating new human habitats, voiding the need for language or intermediate plans.
Nolan then turns to the Bauhaus to articulate how modernist design legitimated itself as an evolution from traditional crafts, in line with Hegelian thought about human evolution. Here again, she traces the influence of racial theories, mysticism (Theosophy and Mazdaznan) and psychology (theories of perceptions such as synaesthesia and Gestalt) for the development of an embodied pedagogy.
But the figure of the artist-designer it upheld served to distinguish designers from guildsmen and labourers. The former can build on its spiritual and embodied knowledge to develop aesthetic laws and systems for the production of objects from nature. The latter is merely reproducing designs, and could eventually be replaced. At the core of this distinction she places copyright: while natural phenomena could not be patented, their translation into designs could, providing the designer with a clear advantage.
The next two parts focus on architecture and urban design after the Second World War, in Western Europe and its colonies, and in the United States; the former concerned with the integration of former colonial populations, and the latter with that of its urban poors.
For architecture, Nolan builds on two cases, the Team Ten collective and Yona Friedman. She argues they represent two influential understandings of vernacular architecture and their integration in mass housing: one seeking to identify and translate core principles, the other envisioning structures for inhabitants to build on. Taking that the habitat structures and reflects cognition and practices, Team Ten sought to identify patterns in vernacular architecture to translate for use in mass housing projects. They focused on architectural features which they believed mirrored the spontaneity of colonised subjects or primitive people. They were especially interested in circulation, networks, organic floor plans. But where vernacular practices led to variability, their approach prefigured programmatic, automated, approaches to architecture. They establish modern architecture as different – and superior – through systematisation.
Turning to Friedman, Nolan first establishes his utopianism and his critical stance towards modernist projects. He approached the tension between local particularism and large-scale projects as requiring the development of bare structures on which populations could build to their own liking – a project that remained at the level of plans and speculation. Nevertheless, Nolan argues his vision for architecture crystallised concerns around self-reliance of humanitarian projects of the time. Notably, Friedman was involved with UNESCO educational initiatives seeking to develop local craft economies in the Global South based on the creative reuse of scraps – echoing Leland’s vision for industrial arts education and the fascination for primitive crafts.
In the third part, Nolan moves back to the United States, focusing on the Aspen Institute, its International Design Conferences (IDCA) and its impacts on urban design. Here again, ethnography is called upon to demonstrate that the environment shapes thoughts prior to language. This has two implications designers attempt to pursue: changing the environment would enable changing peoples’ ways of thinking; and it raises concerns about the ability of audiovisual media to similarly short-circuit reflexivity. Nolan discusses a series of designed environments, often spheres, materialising designers’ fascination for elemental landscapes and their concerns for preserving a humanist subject, immersed in a sphere but able to transcend it. A good reminder that the ideas behind the Las Vegas sphere (which is not exactly a success) are nothing new.
Nolan traces how this design agenda was applied to urban change projects, such as Harlem River Yards, presented at the 1970 IDCA conference. She highlights proposals favouring a view from above, enabling transcending the immediate milieu but privileging a privileged few to the experience of residents. These proposals met two lines of critique, one led by Baudrillard and other French attendees, arguing change through environment design only dissimulates inequalities; and one by Cora Walker, a city resident, lawyer and activist, questioning any design project that doesn’t begin with the local environment and politics. Partly in response to these critiques, and partly out of the broader concern of educating those who would shape the environment, Nolan concludes with their views on the necessary changes to education that would leverage technologies to meet children in their environment and allow them to act on it.
This is the focus of the fourth part, built on accounts of the work of the Architecture Machine (which became the MIT Media Lab) and the Centre mondiale informatique et ressource humaine, a French research centre built to develop the use of computers in the Global South. Technologies were framed by figures associated with these organisations such as Negroponte, Papert and Kay as primarily visual, hence usable regardless of written literacy. Nolan however reminds us they restrict forms of participation to pre-set design parameters and tools, less pliable than writing or speech, while making education a prime market for personal computers.
In the last chapter, Nolan further tracks design principles of educational technologies. Taking children’s minds as particularly pliable, technologists framed computers as a humanitarian project, endlessly adaptable, predicting and tailoring children’s activities, and constraining their attention through games. She opposes this to independent learning, such as reading. She further highlights hopes placed in technologies led countries to disengage from wider infrastructural educational needs – computing is a cheap replacement for schooling institutions. Technologies’ ultimate promise, economic liberation through access to computing professions, may not counterbalance the dependencies on technologies producers from the Global North it introduces.
Nolan concludes with a call for anthropologists to question their investment in designing new digital products, or architects’ involvement in development projects that can only superficially address economic inequalities. But it also problematizes generative projects, separating practices from media production whether in music or visual design. Ambitious in scope, the connections made between those different periods and areas of design, brought together for their concern about spatiality, experiences of space and representations, sometimes feel tenuous. The examples presented serve as prototypes – and their impact on wider design practice is sometimes hard to ascertain. Even sharing her critiques of design with regards to educational technology, the book sometimes falls short of critically examining claims that gamification or adaptive tutors can in fact capture children’s attention. Primitivism is a powerful imaginary — but concerns that technologies effectively eliminate language-based forms of learning and dissensus lack empirical grounding (and I say this as someone lamenting the switch to video and podcasting over blogging and writing). Lending them credit may in fact reinforce efforts and beliefs to bring them into existence.
This is a much longer version of a review written for Technology and Culture.
Related
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/777654
Generating music based on scales from around the world https://isartum.net/apotome
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Emeline Brulé (27 janvier 2024). Review: From Savage Minds to Savage Machines. Design and Society. Consulté le 14 janvier 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/vopy