Table Of ContentCopyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
ДИЗАЙН
ДЕФИЦИТА
3-е издание (электронное)
Москва
«Стрелка Пресс»
2017
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
THE DESIGN
OF
SCARCIT
3-rd edition (electronic)
Moscow
Strelka Press
2017
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
УДК72
ББК 85
G92
Goodbun, Jon.
G92 The Design of Scarcity = Дизайн дефицита [Электронный ре-
сурс] / Goodbun J., Klein M., Rumpfhuber A., Till J. — 3-rd ed.
(el.). — Electronic text data (1 file pdf : 67 p.). — М. : Strelka Press,
2017. — System requirements: Adobe Reader XI or Adobe
Digital Editions 4.5 ; screen 10".
ISBN 978-5-906264-28-2
As growth was the defining condition of the 20th century, so scarcity is set to
define the 21st. Already it pervades political discourse and shapes our reading of
the economy and the environment. But scarcity is not just the inevitable result of
growth and resource exploitation — every innovation results in new scarcities.
Scarcity is constructed daily through the creation of desire, it is designed. The
authors of this timely essay set out to establish a more sophisticated understanding
of scarcity. Moving beyond the idea that lack and inequality are simply laws of
nature, they argue that scarcity can be challenged. The message for architects and
designers — experts in working with constraints — is that scarcity is a process, and
one that can be productive. This essay asks us to throw out our simplistic Malthusian
graphs and escape the stranglehold that scarcity has on our imaginations.
УДК 72
ББК 85
The source print publication: The Design of Scarcity / Goodbun J.,
Klein M., Rumpfhuber A., Till J. — Moscow : Strelka Press, 2014.
— 65 p. — ISBN 978-0-9929-2292-4.
ISBN 978-5-906264-28-2 © Strelka Institute for Media,
Architecture and Design, 2014
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
INTRODUCTION
Scarcity: a word that hangs over early twenty-first century society as
both threat and reality. Scarcity: a condition that is shaping many of
our environmental, economic and political futures. Scarcity:
something we take for granted and therefore feel helpless in the face
of. But what if scarcity is not inevitable? How then could we deal with
it, how then could we design with it?
There have been previous attempts to address scarcity. Forty
years ago, the Club of Rome think-tank published The Limits to
Growth.1 This report took a series of variables – food, non-renewable
resources, population, pollution and so on – and mapped how they
interacted over time. The authors predicted that if the global
economy continued to grow as it had in the past, the world would
reach its limits at a certain point. This conclusion was fiercely
contested, but recent studies have shown its predictions to have been
impressively accurate. Notwithstanding its pessimistic tone, The
Limits to Growth attempted to account for many aspects of the
modern economy and ecology. It had at its heart the most basic
economic concept – scarcity – and for the first time prompted an
interpretation of the complex nature of scarcity in relation to other
systems.2
“Limits to Growth”: Donella H. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: a
Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind
(London: Universe Books, 1972)
For a more recent review of the issues see: Ugo Bardi, The Limits to
Growth Revisited (Heidelberg: Springer, 2011)
Forty years on and the issue of scarcity appears ever more
relevant. The contemporary politics of austerity raise scarcity as a
spectre, while rising inequalities draw attention to its realities.
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Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
Environmental politics invoke the idea of planetary limits as a call to
action. Assumptions about perpetual economic growth are being
questioned as we confront the diminishing of resources and the
degradation of the environment.
Scarcity runs through all these debates; as a basic economic
concept and as a practical reality, it touches us all one way or another.
For designers, it affects the production of our environment and hence
cuts to the core of contemporary practices in design and architecture.
It is essential therefore to understand the historical and contemporary
constitutions of scarcity in order to know how to work with it. It is
equally important to find new readings of scarcity, readings that
escape the dominant structures and processes that limit contemporary
economic and social life. Scarcity is not going away, so we had better
understand how it is created and what it means.
In the most general terms, scarcity is understood as an
insufficiency of supply: a lack. This essay takes “lack” as the working
definition for scarcity, but challenges its neutral, uncontested status.
Scarcity as simple, inevitable lack appears to shut down opportunities
for design and life. But what if other readings of scarcity could offer
productive opportunities, moving away from a negative and limiting
conception? To find these other readings we have to understand that,
far from being neutral, scarcity is designed. In turn architecture and
design have to deal with these constructions of scarcity in order to
know better how to design within the context of scarcity. Only then
can the full implications and potential of design be explored.
To be so apparently affirmative about a term that has such bleak
connotations probably appears counter-intuitive, even foolhardy. But
a fresh understanding of scarcity allows one to imagine new
possibilities, and with them new social formations.
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DESIGN
Working within externally defined constraints is a fundamental part
of the design process; scarcity is thus always a context for design.
Design here is seen not as a noun, a set of objects, but as a verb, a set
of processes that necessarily deal with surrounding systems and
contexts, including scarcity. This engagement with the limits thrown
up by scarcity can be productive. In the early 20th century one finds
fascinating attempts not just to design in the context of financial and
material shortages, but more to construct architectural and design
values out of that very engagement, and so produce a collective
language out of our societies’ confrontation with scarcity. Thus
urbanists worked with the politics of distribution, architects explored
collective languages of minimal dwelling and designers explored a new
functional objectivity in their designs.
Perhaps the most sophisticated attempt to construct an
architectural value out of a sublimated engagement with scarcity is
Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum “Less is More”. However, it also
shows how complicated design’s engagement with scarcity could
become in a capitalist society. Mies’s catchphrase for engaging design
in a relationship of means and ends found itself turned into an
economic imperative. It is a self-imposed aesthetic programme
expanded into a general principle, employing the architect and
designer as a servant of modern capitalism. The credo of reduction
merged with the logic of efficiency: make more with less.3 Creativity
has always been absorbed by capital: the creative professional was
never outside accumulation, but an essential part of it. He and she
were capital’s strongest workers, adapting to ever-new constraints,
expanding the logics of the creation of value to ever-new margins:
the creative designer became the epitome of the entrepreneurial self.4
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See for example: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Less Is Enough (Moscow:
Strelka Press, 2013). As Aureli notes, Mies used the phrase “less is
more” for the first time in an interview in the New York Herald
Tribune in June 1959
See Ulrich Bröckling, Das Unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer
Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007)
Mies’s dictum has been revived, dressed in a new coat. Following
the excesses of the early 2000s, design, and in particular architecture,
has become the agent of contemporary austerity, wrapping the
exigencies of pared budgets in a thin veneer of reduced aesthetics, and
meanwhile letting the market determine spatial conditions. Once
again, design has shown what it is capable of: making more out of less,
so creating surplus value. It might be easy therefore to just reject “less
is more”. But our argument is that it is necessary to fully engage with
it, to consider design as a practice of means and ends, aware of its
relation to the wider contexts of production. While it would not be
appropriate or sufficient today just to return to the architectural and
design experiments of the last century, there are real lessons to be
learned from the modernist attempt to construct design values and
cultural meaning out of our relationship to scarcity.
Beyond the complex dimensions of aesthetic experience, design is
often considered to be a process of solving problems in the most
efficient manner. Design in this guise can easily be reduced to a
measurable practice: for example, designing to reduce a building’s
carbon emissions. Design, particularly when linked to technology,
holds out the promise that the effects of scarcity can be perpetually
held at bay on the back of innovative and ever-more efficient
systems. The solving of problems and the pursuit of efficiency are
often used to legitimate the designer’s role in society beyond simply
the production of an experience. Designers present themselves as part
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of an overall societal effort to overcome scarcity, or at least to
mitigate it through the optimal use of resources.
However, this problem-solving paradigm of design can leave the
underlying conditions unconsidered, leading to the paradox that
design, far from “solving” the problem of scarcity, may actually
exacerbate it. This happens in a number of ways. The first, and most
obvious, is the way that obsolescence is actually designed into objects,
from buildings to consumer products. At a large design scale,
commercially developed housing too often precludes future
adaptation, shutting down the opportunity for change, thereby
making people move rather than adapt, and so keeping the market in
a state of permanent demand.5 At a smaller scale, today’s mobile
phone has an average life span of 18 months, with software updates
causing slowdowns in older devices. Domestic appliances use
proprietary parts that cannot be replaced, and frequently the cost of
repairs makes buying new goods more attractive than fixing old ones.
See Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Flexible Housing (Oxford:
Architectural Press, 2007): Chapter 3
Without this intentional obsolescence, products would last longer,
demand would be reduced and the market stifled. Designed
obsolescence is a symptom of the market’s need to constantly
produce more scarcities as an engine for more consumption.
Contemporary industrial production arose out of conditions of
scarcity, and cannot exist outside of them. It projects an image of an
abundant society, which can afford to create endless consumables.
However, this apparently abundant production of stuff masks the
underlying production of scarcity. Scarcities are thus designed into the
system of consumption: they haven’t arisen by chance; they are the
inevitable and predictable consequence of decisions and actions. In our
current social and economic models scarcity must be maintained so
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