In New York, a city that has been designed so that people exist shoulder to shoulder and on top of one another, previously banal facts of urban existence - the subway, the grassy knoll of a park - transformed overnight into dangerous propositions that had to be avoided as the city began to emerge from quarantine, these same transformed banalities became symbols of how design often reflects the changes in the world around it: Some parks have instigated social-distancing circles, drawn in white chalk, so that visitors know to stay six feet apart from one another in an effort to curb transmission of the virus. Writing for Dezeen in March, the Ukrainian architect and designer Sergey Makhno predicted a new zeal for bunkerlike houses instead of apartments, an end to the trend of mass industry and a rise in private farming and general self-sufficiency. With that irony in mind, it is unsurprising that the height of the Covid-19 outbreak this past spring gave birth to a booming speculative industry for designers - be they architects, urban planners or product developers - who began reimagining parks, homes and offices in a world whose rhythms would be controlled not by the stock market or the climate but by rising and falling infection levels. The work suggests the fundamental paradox of contemporary design - that in an attempt to make our environment more and more comfortable, we have destroyed that environment itself. It is thought to have gone extinct because of the overhunting of buffalo, without whose grazing the plant couldn’t survive. The particular specimen evoked in the installation - an unassuming room with two glass sides containing three large limestone rocks, in which an almost sickly floral scent is diffused in the midst of the otherwise anodyne museum environment - is Orbexilum stipulatum, or Falls-of-the-Ohio scurfpea, a flowering plant last found in 1881 on the now defunct Rock Island in the Ohio River near present-day Louisville, Ky. The piece recreates the scent of flowers that have gone extinct in the last 200 years. One of the works featured in the show in Philadelphia, “ Resurrecting the Sublime” (2019), is a collaboration between the synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis, the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and the smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas, with the help of the biotechnology firm Ginkgo Bioworks and the sensory experiences company International Flavors & Fragrances. The show’s assumptions about the future preceded the coronavirus, so its focus is predominantly on climate change, war, refugees and mass surveillance rather than disease. One of the institutional reckonings with this predicament is “ Designs for Different Futures,” an exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where it is currently on view. Eames responded, “What are the boundaries of problems?” “What are the boundaries of design?” was the question posed in 1969 to Charles Eames, who, with his partner, Ray, designed chairs, toys, housing, films, exhibitions and, to a certain extent, the very nature of communication. In its most heroic phase, the mid-20th century, industrial designers gave themselves over to pronouncements that suggested they alone held the key to this savage parade. Once industrial design became a profession in the early 20th century, the promiscuity of its aims and undefined nature of its objectives meant that designers felt they could do very nearly anything. At various times it has encompassed drawing and architecture, products and graphics - in fact, everything short of the creation of the world itself (and, in the risible concept of “intelligent design,” sometimes that, too). To look ahead at what role design will play on an increasingly troubled planet takes us back to the fundamental polysemy behind the word itself. Today is not so different, but what we mean by “the future,” a utopian ideal throughout much of the 20th century, is now undeniably much darker as we progress further into the 21st. In the 1960s, as the writer Maggie Gram has noted, key figures in the Modern design movement often used the word “design” indistinguishably from the word “planning.” This isn’t surprising: Design, like planning, was the profession most concerned with the future. AT ITS CORE, design is an inherently futurist medium.
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