Design is often held up as the discipline of consumerism. The reasons lie in its wartime European origins when modernism broke with the past and sought to legitimize and aestheticize industrial culture. 50 years on, it is recognized as a primary cause of environmental damage worldwide. Even so, developing countries continue to expect design to trigger consumer demand and fuel industrial growth, unconcerned about the environmental price. This, in spite of most developing countries having rich traditions that combine sustainable behaviour with spirituality, that are now being discarded in favour of modern industrial culture. In this article, the author suggests a way to prevent the loss of the rich knowledge contained in these cultures and how design could reinvent itself as a leading discipline in this knowledge creation.
It is public knowledge that as highly-populated developing countries “modernize”, their contribution to global pollution and environmental degradation takes a huge leap. What is not as widely publicised is the prospect of disruption of traditional culture and values they experience as a consequence.
It is in anticipation of this that Bhutan redefined its index of human, societal and national progress from the universal Gross National Product (GNP) to Gross National Happiness (GNH) in 2003. The ex-Prime Minister of Bhutan and one of the chief architects of this innovation, Jigmi Y. Thinley, stated: “It appeared that material advancement was being obtained at the cost of sprit impoverishment.” (Thinley, 2005)
Another Asian country, Thailand, is also steadily progressing towards switching to a more qualitative index of human well-being than the purely economic GNP, based on its monarch’s concept of “Sufficiency Economy” based on the Buddhist “middle path” principle. The then President of the Privy Council of Thailand, Gen. Prem Tinsulanonda, said in a lecture at the 2001 Leadership Forum in Bangkok: “[Sufficiency economy] means moderation in all human endeavours, reining in expectations to within the bounds of self-support and self-reliance, having enough to live on. It lessens human proneness to the extremes and excesses, both in our insatiable appetite for wealth and wasteful consumption…” He went on to say, “Sufficiency Economy seeks to strengthen the symbiosis between man and his natural environment…” and “…to strengthen the moral fibre of the nation…” (Tinsulanonda, 2001)
Concerns about the apparent inevitability of environmental destruction and loss of cultural continuity accompanying modernisation and development have also been voiced in the popular and activist media of several Asian countries, including India.
However, since there is no alternative to reducing poverty and improving people’s standards of living without high economic growth, most critiques of modernisation, industrialisation and globalisation advocate achieving a ‘balance’ between economic growth and conservation of traditional culture and values. What this forces is a reconfiguration of the past to suit the imperative of modernity, often through an intensifying of nationalism. (Smith, 1994)
Since the modern mode of development profoundly alters humans’ relationship with their environment & nature, this also forces a rupture between culture and the environment/nature. Most often, both nature and culture are largely reduced to its symbolic or commodifiable manifests, as scientific & positivist knowledge systems (and values) replace traditional (value) systems of knowledge and practice.
It is only since the limitations and adverse impacts of uncritical scientism have begun to be acknowledged that science has opened itself to traditional knowledge. The UNESCO-ICSU World Conference on Science, in its 1997 declaration, states: “traditional and local knowledge systems, as dynamic expressions of perceiving and understanding the world, can make, and historically have made, a valuable contribution to science and technology, and that there is a need to preserve, protect, research and promote this cultural heritage and empirical knowledge.” (WCS, 1997)
Of course, there is an equal concern to not place traditional or indigenous knowledge on a pedestal, as reflected in this 2003 editorial of the Science and Development Network: “…one should not paint a picture of traditional knowledge that is too rosy. The real challenge is to find ways that both science and traditional knowledge can work in a complementary fashion towards improving human well-being, not in asserting the primacy of the respective cultures out of which they have developed.” (Dickson, 2003)
Our analysis has so far thrown up the following issues:
If science and tradition were to complement each other, it is essential that the temporality associated with both these concepts were to be removed: that science was no longer treated as the successor of tradition, and tradition was no longer viewed as the past avatar of science.
If we were to redefine human progress and well-being in more qualitative and human terms (like happiness, well-being, satisfaction, etc.), it becomes possible to conceptualise both science and tradition as helping us find ways to design instruments and approaches towards enabling all people to achieve it.
The immediate implication this has on the discipline of design is to liberate it from its modernist frame, and by further implication liberate it from its seemingly inextricable association with purely economic and commercial ends. This opens design up to engaging with tradition and culture without exoticizing it or viewing it as a prospective commodity, but instead as a useful system of knowledge and practices that can help develop innovations that enhance the quality of human life, in ways that do not simultaneously destroy the environment. Tradition and culture can now become legitimate aspects of design theory.
Adopting a qualitative metric for human progress and well-being alters the way we view tradition and culture. It affords us insights into the complex processes and practices by which humans construct and apportion meaning, and design their own life experiences. This also provides us a new standpoint to study, compare and contrast cultures, and convert our learning into new knowledge. Given that this is a new approach, our theories, methods and models will take some time to evolve and stabilize. Until then, it is imperative that we restrain uncritical modernism from overrunning pockets of traditional culture, even those that are apparently very low on the human development index or that exhibit highly unsustainable behaviour.
Given that most traditional cultures are deeply embedded in nature, these provide us with a splendid opportunity to study their conceptualisations and visualisations of our relationship with nature, and map these onto modern scientific models.
Of course, this is not to argue for enforced fossilisation of communities into their present and impoverished state. The option to move on and improve their circumstances must certainly not be denied to them. However, the challenge lies in evolving and enabling modes of improving standards of living without feeling the need to abandon traditional lifestyles and jettisoning traditional knowledge.
Currently, a popular mode of achieving this is the “cultural tourism & cultural industries”, where tourism integrated with marketing traditional produce provides the necessary economic means to sustaining a traditional way of life, even as developmental investments and interventions continue being made in ways that strengthen the social infrastructure without compelling the community to opt for a radical transformation of their way of life.
Another, less popular mode that also has loyal adherents is the “localisation” route, where communities are seeking to become economically and ecologically autonomous based on locally-available and locally-generated resources. This approach is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, revisited many years later by E. F. Schumacher and others. The Shaker community of North America is also believed to live along similar values.
Besides these two, there seems to be no published material on other models that offer the promise of keeping alive the cultural heritage and traditional way of life of a community in a sustainable way.
All said and done, there is little doubt that these models of conserving culture cannot withstand the pressure to change and align closer with the dominant global/urban/industrial culture for very long. They only provide us with an extension at best, a narrow window within which to build our knowledge and develop new and innovative developmental models that can take us closer to the new, qualitative indices. It may well be that some of these models could extend the narrow window and even enable communities to retain their traditional culture whilst attaining better standards of living.
The need of the moment, therefore, is to forge imaginative research collaborations and design research methods that help further unravel the complex that ties together nature, culture and the quality of human experience.
From its origins in the “form versus function” debate, design has since evolved to the understanding and creation of “experiences”. It is evident that it now needs to evolve yet again, to the understanding and creation of something akin to happiness or spirituality, in ways that are intrinsically sustainable and culturally responsible. Since the output of design is culture, it needs to deeply understand it and respond to it in a careful, critical and nuanced manner. Since the materials of design are derived from and impact upon the environment, it needs to deploy these as carefully as it intervenes into culture. Since the subject of design is the human being, it needs to understand not just the physical but the emotional and spiritual aspects of the human experience and respond to it with care and respect. Bridging these three foci is the challenge before design today.
This means that it has to revisit its core premise of enhancing human comfort and convenience as design’s primary raison d’être, and shift its focus not only to our emotional and spiritual well-being but also include earth-friendliness and cultural responsibility as its core objectives. Design must therefore expand its theory base beyond engineering, art and business, and build ties with the wellness disciplines, environmental disciplines and cultural disciplines.
As an action discipline, design can help conceptualise both “projects” – coming up with more and better models to help preserve traditional ways of life, and constructing multi-disciplinary research frameworks that help us study these cultures and unravel their complexities for posterity, and rapidly translate the learnings into design prototypes that can be applied at a wider scale and have a greater impact on the environmental health of the planet as well as the qualitative experience of human life.
As Anjan Mitra, architect and project coordinator of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH)’s cultural preservation project in Bishnupur, West Bengal, remarks: “Documentation is not enough, mainstreaming is necessary so that the tradition lives on.” (Biswas, 2006)
Biswas, R., ‘Preserving Cultural Heritage’, (SPAN, November-December 2006), from the internet: http://usembassy.state.gov/posts/in1/wwwfspnovdec0625.pdf
Dickson, D., ‘Let’s not get too romantic about traditional knowledge’, (SciDev.net, 2003), from the internet: http://www.scidev.net/Editorials/index.cfm?fuseaction=readEditorials&itemid=88&language=1
Smith, A. D., ‘Nationalism and the Reconstruction of Nations’, (1994) from the internet: http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/smith1.htm
Thinley, J. Y., ‘The Philosophy of GNH’. (Speech at the UNDP Asian Regional Conference, Bangkok, 2005) from the internet: http://www.undp.org.bt/Governance/GNH/the philosophy of GNH.pdf
Tinsulanonda, P., ‘Sufficiency Economy, His Majesty’s Philosophy for Development’, (2005) from the internet: http://www.generalprem.com/Speech5.html
World Conference on Science, ‘Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge’, (UNESCO, 2001) from the internet: http://www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/declaration_e.htm
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