Nicole’s Reviews > Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design > Status Update

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"We need to put design on the couch. Design is filled by what it wants to hide. The simple question 'are we human?' is just a way to say 'what is design?' until the confessions and the fantasies come out."

"With the death of God, design became the medium of the soul, the revelation of the subject hidden inside the human body. Thus design took on an ethical dimension it had not had previously. In design, ethics became aesthetics; it became form. Where religion once was, design has emerged. The modern subject now has a new obligation: the obligation to self design an aesthetic presentation as ethical subject." B. Groys

"The end of paid labour and its replacement with creative leisure was already envisioned in utopian projects of the 1960s and the 1970s by Constant, Superstudio and Archigram, including hyperequipped beds."

"The bed may have been the ultimate American office at midcentury. In an interview in the Paris review in 1957, Truman Capote is asked, "What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine? To which he answers: "I am a completely horizontal author. I can think unless I am lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and a coffee handy.""

"Industrialisation brought with it the eight-hour shift and the radical separation between the home and the office or factory, between rest and home, night and day. Postindustrialisation collapses work back into the home and takes it further into the bedroom and into the bed itself."

"The Internet and social media are fundamentally redefining the spaces in which we live, our relationship to objects and to each other. Social media is a new form of urbanisation, the architecture of how we live together."

"While a generation ago design concerned itself with its reception in the printed press (newspapers, professional journals, magazines) now the concern is rather reception in social media. How many tweets? How many likes? How many followers? How many reposts: the ultimate goal is design going viral."

"Early 20th century architects lamented the effect of photography and illustrated journal on architecture. Adolf Loos for example criticised his contemporary and rival Austrian architect Joseph Hoffman because in Loos's view his houses appeared to be made for the camera. [...] Loos was proud of the fact that his clients could not recognise their own houses in photographs."

"Instagram launched in October 2010 had 3000 active users as of December 2014 and 400 hundred million million in 2015. It is one of the social networks that has reason more rapidly popularity 53% of 18 to 29-year-olds use it and only 26% of users are older than 29. It is more urban, the one was used by women Latinos African-Americans and designers."

"Perhaps the whole human race is only a temporarily limited, developmental face of a certain species of animal, so that man evolved from the ape and will evolve back to the ape again, while no one will be there to take any interest in this strange end of the comedy."