FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Design Delirium – an attempt at formulating a popularized critique (in the form of a book)

The seminar will present an ongoing book project, based on highly topical design examples aimed at formulating a ‘critique of civilization,’ i.e. a combined societal- and knowledge critique. The seminar will focus on exchange of experiences, and two aspects will take centre stage, on the one hand design as political-economic boundary phenomenon, on the other ‘sakprosa’ – non-fictional writing or ‘factual prose’ – as an experience- and research-based form of expression.

While the language of the book is Swedish, the seminar will be held mainly in English.

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Background

Design Delirium – an attempt at formulating a popularized critique (in the form of a book)
When the architect Rem Koolhaas explored the modern condition in his book Delirious New York in the late 1970s, he did so as the urban designer/‘ghost writer’ of sorts. His starting point was Manhattan; an accumulation of utopian fragments, irrational devices, cancelled projects and popular fantasies. This ‘phantom architecture’ would now receive its retroactive manifesto. Attracting the ghost writer was all that lay beneath the rational surface of the metropolis, i.e. the city as a historical experiment, whose unformulated program was to explore what it means ‘to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e., to live inside fantasy;’ a program that in a time of rationality and efficiency ‘was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated. Inspiringly shameless, transgressive and totally devoid of self-loathing, the ‘Manhattanism’ thus developed was equally taboo. Physically detached, it evolved as a manic tapestry of illusion and speculation, deserving respect precisely because it had deliberately ‘gone too far’ and fully transformed into an artificial flow of dependencies, in Koolhaas’ words unfolding as “a delirium of translation,” independent of physical, moral or other reality-related constraints.

What surprises me is how well these 70s arguments fit into the contemporary Anthropocene design debate. And at the same time, I wonder what the affirmation of delirium means today. Against the backdrop of the perpetual crisis, the one that has now become the multiple crisis, many seem to believe that we must now embrace the breakdown, allow ourselves to explore the limit state and put the creative energies released into play. With global warming comes new opportunities for extensive vineyards in Mälardalen and a tourist boom in the Lapland mountains, or, based on the same delirious geography, as a certain delirious figure has repeatedly pointed out, ever new oceanfront properties.

The starting point for this book is that any consideration of design as a contemporary historical phenomenon is necessarily also a political-economic consideration of a larger existential crisis. In short, it will be about how and why design has come to be the privileged but also self-destructive fixer of boundless and formless capitalism, the defender of what the cultural theorist Gayatri Spivak has called ‘sanctioned ignorance.’ The question I am asking is simply how to legitimise design in a thoroughly designed world about to consume itself to death. And the answer, well, it might include some of the attempts that are being made, to develop design as a politically-ecologically savvy production of desire beyond capitalist intoxication.