Design & Culture

Society + Identity = Culture

Whenever you combine particular individuals in a large group and that group has unique characteristics you have culture. Culture is also normally associated with place.

In "The Artefact as Manufactured Object," Daniel Miller describes “artefacts” as the products of human creation. Some artefacts are subtractive as in the carving of the natural in wood. Other manufactured materials are manipulated for appearance, such as plastic. Technology is understood as the manipulation of materials to create tools. Miller suggests that technology in primitive cultures drives the aesthetic. Many primitive objects are valued as more authentic.

Personal property is about a relationship to the self, what Jean Paul Sartre called being and having. By having private artefacts an individual makes a claim to separation from the group. Artefacts are then understood as cultural design objects because they represent both personal identity and society.

It is important to understand that all cultures have cultural goods that are specific to their region or values. It is the cultural goods that are then exchanged, while culture itself remains communal and cannot be bought or sold. In the contemporary global world we have many American and Western products that dominate global exchange.

Debord’s idea of the Society of the Spectacle was that all images advance the desires of capitalism. Theodor Adorno, writing with Max Horkheimer was concerned with mass production and "The Culture Industry." Adorno suggested that mass production is mass produced culture, a culture that serviced capitalist desires.

The actual culture industry is the entire system of mass cultural production from mass made dvd’s to multiple souvenirs to manufactured home décor. Adorno explains that the real world must pass through the filter of the culture industry. The real particular aspects of regional cultures are now combined with aspects of mass culture.

This controversial image is from the British National Party on the issue of exporting Disney

In many ways, Adorno’s charge is to designers. Expressions like “the culture industry perpetually cheats its consumer of what it perpetually promises,” can only be resolved through creating products that deliver on expectations (expectation effect). Adorno also emphasizes that culture uses “predetermined” needs. A way for a designer to respond is by asking “what is needed?” Rather than creating for mass needs, try to have an authentic assessment of the true circumstance.

The responsibility is also on the consumer. Adorno explains that products are “no longer exchanged,” but “blindly consumed.” As discussed with Marx, thinking about the values represented in cultural goods is one way to understand exchange. Adorno also describes that one problem for the whole “cult of objects” is that advertising, already in 1944, was not informing a consumer but simply dazzling him. But Adorno concludes by saying consumers already know this: “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use products even though they can see right through them.”

Artist Sylvia Fluery, 2002