The Shape of ThingsBOOK GUIDE

by Vilém Flusser

INSTRUCTIONAL TABLE OF CONTENT

This revised table of content catergorized the main ideas of the twenty-two essays in “The Shape of Things”. The page numbers on the right-hand side is the original page number in the book.

Introduction 7Critiques Biography 123

About Design:About the Word Design 17The Lever Strikes Back 51Shamans and Dancers with Masks 104

About Form and Material:Form and Material 22About Forms and Formulae 35The Non-Thing 1 85The Non-Thing 2 90

About the Designer: War and the State of Things 30The Designer’s Way of Seeing 39Design: Obstacle for/to the Removal of Obstacles 58The Ethics of Industrial Design? 66

About Things:Shelters, Screens and Tents 55Wittgenstein’s Architecture 76Bare Walls 78With As Many Holes As a Swiss Cheese 81Carpets 95Pots 99The Submarine 108Wheels 117

Other Ideas:The Factory 43Why Do Typewriters Go ‘Click’? 62Design as Theology 70

This book presents for the first time in English an array of essays on design by the seminal Czech-born media critic and philosopher Vilém Flusser. It puts forward the view that our future depends on design. In a series of insightful essays, touching on a wide range of subjects - industrial ethics; tents, umbrellas and shamans; the architecture of Wittgenstein; ceramic vessels as bearers of social meaning - Flusser emphasizes the interrelationships between art and science, theology and technology, and archaeology and architecture. Just as a formal creativity has produced both weapons of destruction and great works of art, Flusser believed that the shape of things (and the designs behind them) represent both a threat and an opportunity for designers of the future. His essays, introduced here by noted architectural critic Martin Pawley, surprise with their freshness, disarming simplicity, unerring critical acumen and continuing relevance in the post-modern world.

INTRODUCTION

By Martin Pawley

Generally speaking, Flusser’s essays are short, provocative and lucid, with a resemblance to the style of journalistic articles. Critics have noted he is less a ‘systematic’ thinker than a ‘dialogic’ one, purposefully eclectic and provocative (Cubitt 2004).

In the book review, “The butterfly and the potato Vilém Flusser on design” by Chadwick Truscott Smith, a doctoral candidate in German Studies at New York University, Smith points out that Flusser's intervention in the theory of design comes from no experience in the practice of designing objects, but is rather a philosophical challenge. For him, an investigation into design begins to "consider precisely why this word [design] has such significance attached to it in contemporary discourse about culture." Contemporary, in this case, refers to 1990, but the word (at least in an Anglo-American context) has only grown in significance since. It is bound to a network of words that hold the keys to design for Flusser: the network itself, ecology, dialogue, the good, progress, and responsibility. (Smith, The butterfly and the potato Vilém Flusser on design)

However, one of the major critiques also states that regardless of his acute awareness of the painful circumstances in which most human beings live and work, Flusser’s manner of arguing, describing and explaining presents us with the opportunity to learn in an unconventional way but his approach often stays in a rather superficial level and arguments lack depth and detail. The reader is left with many suggestions and questions and one gets the impression that Flusser still owes us some answers and explanations. (Wulf, Journal of Design History)

Nevertheless, Flusser offers us an opportunity to look from a historical perspective and to analyze objects in the present, to understand parts of their meanings and identify their altering and shifting through time, space and the ‘conditio humana’ (human condition).

BOOK CRITIQUE SUMMARY

Vilém Flusser was born in Prague on May 12, 1920, into the family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Gustav Flusser, studied mathematics and physics. Albert Einstein is one of his professors. Flusser attended German and Czech primary schools and later on German grammar school from 1926 to 1930s. The Czechoslovakia of Flusser’s childhood and youth was one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan and avant-garde centers of art, industry and design.

In 1939, shortly after the Nazi occupation, Flusser and his later wife Edith escaped to England and then emigrated to Brazil. In São Paulo, he worked as the manager of a transformer factory, learned Portuguese, studied philosophy, wrote and published series of philosophical articles. In 1963, he published his first book, Lingua e Realidade (Language and Reality). At the same time, he was appointed to lecture in Communication Theories at the University of São Paulo.

In 1972, due to conflict with the military government, the Flussers left Brazil and moved to Merano, Italy and then to Robion in the south of France, where he met and began his long-standing collaboration with the artist Louis Bec and where he adopted the peripatetic life of a writer and lecturer.

In 1983, Flusser published his first book in Germany Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Towards a Philosophy of Photography). He then become a popular speaker at science and artistic conferences about new media in Europe and the United States.

On November 27, 1991, Flusser died in a car accident when he was visiting Prague to give lecture at the Goethe-Institute. He was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Prague.

For more information, please visit http://www.flusser-archive.org. (Biography section).

BIOGRAPHY

“Everything depends on Design.”

In the very first essay of the book, Flusser talks about the word “design” from a linguistic point of view.

The word “design”, as both a noun and a verb, contains a variety of meanings. As a noun, it means, ‘intention’, ‘plan’, ‘intent’, ‘aim’, ‘scheme’, ‘plot’, ‘motif ’, ‘basic structure’, all these being connected with ‘cunning’ and ‘deception’. As a verb, its meanings include ‘to concoct something’, ‘to simulate’, ‘to draft’, ‘to sketch’, ‘to fashion’, ‘to have designs on something’. (p. 17)

Then he goes further into explaining the Greek, Latin, and German origins of these words. “The word design, machine, technology, ars and art are closely related to one another, one term being unthinkable without the others, and they all derive from the same existential view of the world.” He writes.

Flusser claims that “design” formed a bridge between the art and technology. “In contemporary life, design more or less indicates the site where art and technology come together as equals, making a new form of culture possible.” (p.19)

“This essay has had a specific design in mind: it sets out to expose the cunning and deceptive aspects of the word design.” (p.21) The lever, for example, mimics human arm and cheats gravity as it fools nature, that explains his argument that design in the contemporary discourse as “being a human is a design against nature.”

Using plastic pen as an example, Flusser discusses the value of product and how design represents a combination of all the ideas behind the manufacturing of it. That is, the material the pen are made of has practically no value, and work (according to Marx, the source of all value) is accomplished thanks to smart technology by fully automatic machines. The only thing that gives plastic pens any value is their design, which is the reason that they write. (p.20) The word design, he concludes, has managed to retain its key position in everyday discourse because we are starting (perhaps rightly) to lose faith in art and technology as sources of value. Because we are starting to wise up to the design behind them.

ABOUT THE WORD “DESIGN”

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Among the twenty-two essays, Flusser also talks about the role and ethics of the designers. In the essay, “War and the State of Things”, he references Goethe’s statement “ Let man be noble, generous and good” to describe an ideal designer - ‘Noble’ might be replaced by ‘elegant’, and ‘generous’ perhaps by ‘user-friendly’, he wrote. But “the difficulty would be to reformulate the word good for the end of the Millennium.” What is “good”? He asked. (p.30)

In the essay “The Ethics of Industrial Design”, he tried to transfer Goethe’s good into two categories, the pure (moral) good and the applied (functional) good. He asserts that the designer bears the moral and political responsibilities in the process of approaching a solution. (p.66)

However, just like probably everyone else, he didn’t have a clear answer to the question “what is good”. “Everything that is good for something is pure Evil,” he wrote. “The fact that we are beginning to wonder about such questions gives reason for hope.” (p. 33)

In the essay “Design: Obstacle for/to the Removal of Obstacles”, Flusser states that by designing something new, designers create new obstacles get in the way while overturning the old obstacles. (p.58)

Consequently, for designers, “When it comes to creating things, one is faced with the question of responsibility (and thus with freedom). Faced with freedom, naturally. Whoever projects designs for objects of use (whoever produces culture) throws obstacles in other people’s way, and nothing can be done about this (not even for example one’s intention to promote emancipation).” (p.59) And a designer’s responsibility is making decision to answer for things to other people. What is temporary is not pure temporary at all. To some extents, Flusser expresses an early idea of sustainable design as he believes that design always contributes to the future, intentionally or unintentionally.

2 ABOUT DESIGNER

Apart from the ethics, Flusser also discusses the designer’s way of seeing.

He quoted German religious poet Angelus Silesius’s words: “The soul has two eyes: one looking into time, the other one looking away ahead into eternity.” (p. 39)

And the designer’s way of see, he believed, is with the second eye.

“This is the designer’s way of seeing: He has a sort of pineal eye that enables him to perceive and control eternities. And he can give orders to a robot to translate into the here and now that which is perceived and manipulated in the eternal. And he can give orders to a robot to translate into the here and now that which is perceived and manipulated in the eternal (for example, to dig canals or build rockets.)” (p.42)

Through design, designers, to some extents, produce an eternal, immutable form.

The Designer’s Way of Seeing

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The essay “Form and Material” aspires to clear away the distorted concept of the ‘immaterial’.

Again, Flusser starts with the origin of the word “material”. The word materia he explained is the result of Roman’s attempt to translate the Greek term hyle into Latin, which expresses the Greek philosophers concerns of finding an opposite of the term form (Greek morphe). (p. 22)

This hyle/morphe or matter/form relationship, under pressure from information technology, is somehow returning to the original concept of “matter” as a temporary filling of eternal “forms”. One example he gave is table, for him, he sees wood in the form of a table, however, as hard as it is being, the state is transitory, since it can be burnt and decompose into ash. Thus, the form of the table is real, and the content of the table (the wood) is only apparent.

Since the “design” activity always associates with putting in, taking away or changing forms, it’s beneficial for designers to keep in mind that “the world has had the forms it has for us laid down within genetic information since life began on earth. This explains why we cannot impose any forms we wish upon the world. The world only accepts those forms that correspond to the program of our life.”

“form is the how of the material and

the material is the what of

the form.”

3 FORM AND MATERIAL

Flusser died in 1991, but many of the essays in his book foresees the future of the Internet and robots.

In “the Factory”, Flusser finds it difficult to conclude that “human history is the history of manufacturing and everything else is mere footnotes” and “all revolutions are technical revolutions.” He defines the successive phases of the history of manufacturing as: hands - tools - machines - robots. However, he argues that while goods are produced in the factory, new kinds of human beings are produced as well: “First hand-man, then tool-man, then machine-man, and finally robot-man.” The relationship between human and tool is impossible to overlook.

As a visionaire, Flusser foresees that the factories of the future will look like schools in fact where human beings can learn how robots function so that robots can then relieve human beings of the task of turning nature into culture.

“The only crucial thing is that the factory of the future will have to be the place where homo faber (real human being) becomes homo sapiens sapiens (modern wise man?) because he has realized that manufacturing means the same things as learning - i.e. acquiring, producing and passing on information.” (p.50)

THE FACTORY

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5THINGS

[ Walls ] (p. 78, 81)There are two situations about the walls:Outside the walls, people experience the world, lose oneself and return home. Inside the walls, people find oneself.Wall is built historical and structural. And they are the borders of a stage on which the tragedy of the human striving for beauty is enacted.

[ Pots ] (p. 99)Produce empty forms in order to in-form.A pot is a vessel, a tool to be grasped and held. It is an epistemological & phenomenological tool. “ The pot to explore this idea which, as it turns out, is the perfect epistemological vehicle to examine the intersection of many disciplines. ” (Henry, The Shape of Things: Vilém Flusser and the Open Challenges of Form)

[ Carpets ] (p. 95)In this essay, the author describes a situation of culture today where carpets are hung on walls so as to conceal cracks in the wall.Make design appear to cover up the material an appearance is not just beauty but deceit. Conceal truth by means of beauty hang carpet to cover the wall.

[ Wheels ] (p. 117)Vehicle wheel must be a “motorcycle”, and it couldn’t move endlessly forward automatically because it is forced over and over again to overcome the blind, unmotivated resistances of an inanimate world. But now this progress starts to roll automatically, using ‘automobile’. People should look backwards one more time before jumping out of the automobile rolling along without friction.

As suggested in the title, “things” (objects, interactions? systems? infrastructures?) are widely analyzed in the essays. Flusser attempts to use examples and metaphors to tell us that “Design affects how we do everything. And how we see the world. We are inundated with it - whether it is ethereal - the Internet, television, music, etc. or tangible - our cars, highways, signage, airplanes, etc. We can’t get away from it.”

The Submarine

In the introduction, Martin Pawley draws our attention to the essay “The Submarine”, “Perhaps the oddest and most revealing essay in this collection on design”, he writes, “It exemplifies the writing style of Flusser’s later German period.” Flusser described a world in a frenzied state, and ‘‘the eventual destruction of the world of things was only a question of time ... years rather than decades.” Seventeen men and women, from science, art and religion, misappropriating public funds, built the submarine, a kind of inverted Noah’s Oak - “a collective super-brain”, as a threat to everyone in the world with destruction unless they pledge allegiance to a number of ruling principles. At first, the submarine has some success but soon the altruistic principles they propound unite humanity against them. The giant submarine was destroyed. The Submarine is actually a “ metaphor for the revolt of belief against modernity and the return of reality to a world of intolerable abstraction. ” (p.16)

THINGS continues...

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REFERENCE

Vilém Flusser, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, tr. Anthony Mathews, (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 17.

The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design by Vilém Flusser; Anthony Mathews, Review by Andrew Wulf, Journal of Design History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2000), Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Design History Society, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3527162

The Butterfly and the Potato Vilém Flusser on Design, Chadwick Turscott Smith, German Studies at New York University, This essay was originally a presentation given at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands. COPYRIGHT 2009. The Foundation for International Art Criticism. https://www.academia.edu/2282460/_The_Butterfly_and_the_Potato_Vilem_Flusser_on_Design_

The Shape of Things: Vilém Flusser and The Open Challenges of Form., Kevin Henry, IDSA, Columbia College Chicago, W://www.academia.edu/2395909/The_Shape_of_Things_Vilem_Flusser_and_The_Open_Challenges_of_Form

Thinking About Philosophy of Design, http://www.emdezine.com/designwritings/archives/thinking_about_philosophy_of_design.shtml

Cubitt, S (Apr 2004), “Books from Vilém Flusser in English”, Reviews (Leonardo)

Vilém Flusser Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilém_Flusser

Flusser Studies, http://www.flusserstudies.net and Flusser Archive, http://flusser-archive.org

Produced by Frances Wang and Wenzhu Liu | “Design Thinking Seminar” Fall 2014