The Humanities Forum
2024-25 Schedule
NOV
21
Labor-Centered and Worker-Centered Design for Just Transitions
Damian White Professor of Sociology and Political Theory Department of History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences
Prov-Wash Building ╱ Auditorium 143
20 Washington Place
Providence, RI 02903
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Registration required. Please register here:
Paper Abstract
The just transition is a foundation concept of labor-environmentalism (Morena, Krause, and Stevis 2020) and it has long been deployed by more enlightened labor unions, indigenous activists, environmental justice movements, and climate justice campaigners as the necessary horizon for a progressive climate politics. More recently and as talk of just transitions has entered the space of international climate negotiations since the Paris Agreement in 2015, it now regularly appears in UNEP, OECD, NGO and even corporate documents, and is used by all manner of diplomatic, political, and commercial actors in the Global North and South, with very different views of who should direct and benefit from decarbonization. Despite the proliferation of the term, we have seen growing currents of radical activists and practitioners in design, architecture and planning argue that the just transition offers a horizon for political engagement which allows us to think about how design might be systematically redirected not only to address decarbonization and climate just but also issues of labor justice. In this presentation, we seek to accomplish three tasks. (i) We explore why many currents of design have long viewed the ecological and labor questions as a problem for design. (ii) We explore resources within design that have sought to think about labor friendly worker-centered modes of design, architecture and planning and consider their intersections with environmental concerns. (iii) We consider contemporary examples of labor-orientated design, architectural and planning ventures that are attempting to directly address and draw together the matter of climate labor, the need for just transitions and the work of decarbonization.
Presenter’s Bio
Damian White is a sociologist and political theorist with current teaching and research interests in the sociology and political economy of post-carbon transitions, urban political ecology, environmental-labor studies, critical theory/critical geography and the sociology/political theory of design/architecture and planning. White has published four books to date: Bookchin–A Critical Appraisal (Pluto Press, UK/University of Michigan Press USA, 2008); Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces and Places in the Twenty-First Century (Wilfred Laurier Press, 2009); Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (AK Press, 2011) with Chris Wilbert; and Environments, Nature and Social Theory: Hybrid Approaches (Palgrave Macmillian, 2015) with Alan Rudy and Brian Gareau. He is presently working on a book project entitled Imagining Just Transitions: Design Politics, Labor and Post Carbon Futures, which is under contract with Bloomsbury. He has been on the editorial board of Design Philosophy Papers and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and has been a guest editor of Science as Culture and InTAR:Journal of Adaptive Reuse.
Karl-Marx-Hof, a Gemeindebau in Vienna, situated in Heiligenstadt, a neighborhood of the 19th district of Vienna, Döbling.
OCT
03
Otl Aicher’s India Excursion: Promises and Perils of Designing Across Borders circa 1960
Eric Anderson Professor of Modern Design History Department of Theory and History of Art and Design
Prov-Wash Building ╱ Auditorium 143
20 Washington Place
Providence, RI 02903
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Registration required. Please register here:
Paper Abstract
This paper considers the border-crossing career of West German designer and teacher Otl Aicher. Celebrated as a leading practitioner of international modernism in the post-war era and a founder of the Ulm College of Design, Aicher is less known for an equally important role in establishing a new paradigm of the Western designer as consultant on development projects in the Global South.
In 1960 Aicher traveled from West Germany to India, both newly formed states that shared recent histories of violence and partition, as well as national agendas of cultural and economic reconstruction supported by international alliances. I propose that Aicher undertook his work as a design consultant in India as a form of ethical transnationalism in the face of hardening Cold War borders. For evidence, I consider a pair of unpublished documents presently held in the collection of HfG Ulm Archives: a report titled “Thoughts Related to a Visit to India in May 1960,” and the manuscript of a lecture on “The Future of India.”
Aicher’s statements explore the potential as well as the ethical and practical difficulties of employing the design tools of Western modernism toward economic development in India. My paper asks how Aicher (like Ray and Charles Eames earlier) understood the supposed universality of Western design, its adaptability to local conditions, practices, and identities, and its role in colonial power and postcolonial nation building. What did it mean to Aicher to design in and for the “Third World?” To what extent did he maintain or reject, either passively or actively, received ideas of geographical, cultural, or racial difference? Finally, how might his India excursion have reflected more broadly prevalent ideas at the Ulm School and in West Germany about design, development, and politics of aid across borders?
Keywords: development, systems design, Third World
Presenter’s Bio
Eric Anderson (Professor, THAD) is a historian of modern design with interests in interiors and domesticity, exhibitions and media, the cultural history of Vienna and psychoanalysis, and the global history of modernism. He is currently working on wrapping up one book project, The Chromatic Unconscious, and beginning another, Ulm in the World.
U.S. stamp commemorating the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich were designed by illustrator Peter Max, based on pictograms created by Otl Aicher.
