Bruce Sterling in 2001
This is a speech that Bruce Sterling gave at the Metropolis Conference.
Business UnUsual: Design and Deep Enviromentalism
Author Bruce Sterling speaks about his love and respect for designers & their role in fomenting an environmental revolution. Talk delivered on Saturday May 19, 2001.
Susan S. Szenasy, Metropolis Editor in chief: You known Bruce Sterling as a sci-fi writer, who makes the physical environment, and the stuff in it, come to life. But you probably don’t know that Bruce considers himself a design-groupie. He says he finds designers “adorable,” in that he has not met one that he has not liked–though he adds, with some dismay in his voice, that they do not seem to like one another very much. A born storyteller, Bruce sees great stories to be told about the design world, which he says has its own shamans and witch doctors. Bruce believes in the power of design as well as the ability of designers to help us think through the most challenging ideas of the 21st century in an overstressed and choking environment. Please meet the father of Viridian Design, Bruce Sterling.
Bruce Sterling: Yeah, hi, that was all true. I am Bruce Sterling. I am a science fiction writer and that is my day job. Yeah, I’ve been doing that for over 20 years now. Under normal social conditions I’m perfectly happy to just sit there, typing about Martians. But every once in a while a critical situation arises when it is necessary to ramp up to a higher lever and look for the bigger picture and that explains what I’m doing here hanging out with you. I know we all haven’t had our coffee yet, but nevertheless I want to get right down to some big-picture futuristic tacks here. So let me start off by telling you where we stand–what’s going on right now.
Well, we spent the 1990s chasing the Internet bubble, very typical American process. American Technological Sublime, as the historians like to call it. We did this with railroads, we did it with aviation, we did it with television, we did it with the space race, and at the end of the day American society metabolizes the changes in its technology and it just becomes a boring everyday part of normal life. And that’s what happened to the Internet, and that’s fine and dandy–except that real-life, normal, boring industries have a return of about 7% on investment. So when you get all winded chasing this Techno-Sublime, summer-of-love, California dream you’re generally left with this kinda Altamonte situation, saying stuff like, “Hey, where’s the electrical power? Hey wow, we kinda’ forgot to deal with the physical reality here.”
So the Internet revolution was a profound one, and it soaked up a lot of social and creative energy but it is just one aspect of postindustrial society. And it is just the aspect that had the freshest chrome on it. The World Wide Web still seems kinda’ clean and detached from other parts of reality. But when your sitting there in your Steelcase Leap chair at the computer with your ergonomic laser mouse and trying to point, clip, and chip yourself a blobject-Garbo wastebasket off Design Within Reach.com All of those things actually involve big clunky flows of shape, materials, and energy, not just immaterial bits on the Internet. There’s still a lot shipping, trucks and some smoke stacks and the assembly line and a chief financial officer and some blue collar labor and some routers and injection molders and numerically controlled machine tools and industrial chemistry for all that epoxy and urethane and Techno-gel. And it’s just that we’ve got this kind of brainy-glasses Web-designer digital front end on it now. So it looks a lot prettier.
Now this is a condition like the early days of the horseless carriage, when they used to ship them with this mock-up of a wooden horse on the front so it wouldn’t panic the horses in the street–kind of the streamlined pencil-sharpener stage where we go and put this really cool looking mono-conch shell over our pencil sharpener now. But inside it is the same old 20th century grinding mechanical guts. This explains why natural gas companies can suddenly show up in Silicon Valley with their big rusty pipelines instead of fiber optics. And they just haul these Internet start-up guys right out of their Volvos and just hold them upside down, and just black out both their eyes and just kick them, and kick them repeatedly, until the platinum Visa cards just fall right out of their eel skin wallets. And then these big energy companies just vacuum up all that loose cash and they go back to North Carolina and Texas and the White House.
The Web is like a thin veneer over 20th-century industrialism. It’s one phosphor-dot thick. It’s a thin crispy layer like landlord paint. However this situation calls for some social actors who are heavier duty than Silicon Valley software characters. The contemporary situation, post-bubble, needs somebody who has a Silicon Valley level of brio and imagination, but also has a serious engagement with material reality. The 20th century’s standard methods of industrialism need a major league re-design, not just the standard varnish on barbarism, but a truly deep rethink. The 20th century’s industrial infrastructure is not sustainable. It’s basically a bubble, just like the Internet-bubble. Instead of being based on a finite amount of gullible investors, it’s based on finite amount of ice in our icecaps, and air in our atmosphere bubble, and a finite amount of free room for highways and transmission lines, and so on and so forth.
So in my hometown, Austin, Texas, we have a swarm of unemployed dotcommies at the moment. But in the past three years we also had the hottest June we ever had, and then the hottest July we ever had, and then the hottest August we ever had. Then last Labor Day in Austin it was 112 degrees Fahrenheit in my front yard, which is hot enough to melt transformer cans off of the utility lines, and hot enough to brown-out the traffic signals–and that was in our president’s home town, Mr. No-Kyoto-Treaty.
This is a bubble that is manifesting itself in the realm of bad weather, rather than the realm of NASDAQ evaluations, but from a big-picture historical perspective it is the same kind of phenomenon. Now ladies and gentleman, since I am a Science Fiction writer, I can recognize a major trend when I see one. In fact, wearing the scary black robes of the prophet of doom, that is kind of a default position in my line of work. But if I wanted to actually see some effective upbeat consumer-friendly reform in our worn out and hokey industrial system, I wouldn’t go hiring any Science Fiction writers. No, basically what we need at this juncture are some major league culture heroes. Somebody with working x-ray specs who can see right past the packing and the political hype and the finance hype and get right down to the level of the hardware and rethink our society’s support system so that it’s safer, cozier, and more ergonomic. We need people of the Titanic caliber of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller because those are the basically the three 20th century guys who got us into this mess.
So why should I bring this up to harmless, well-meaning furniture designers? Well, I’m not claiming that you guys are destined to save the world, but you are clearly much, much better at it than us Science Fiction writers. No, it’s just that furniture is a good place to start if you want a truly fresh perspective on industrialism. You don’t want to start from the top by ideologically reeducating the mass consumer to become some kind of rigid hairshirt new-soviet-man green guy. You want to start out practically, with ergonomics and the human body and its affordances, with our health, and our ease, and our comfort and our safety–with our working environment and our home environment and our lungs and our skin and our bones–because that’s what’s at issue.
For instance, what’s the most genuine interface between a computer and a computer user? Is it really all that dancing Flash animation that Jakob Nielsen always complains about? Or is it our wrist tendons that blow out from carpal-tunnel, and our lumbar vertebrae that give out from bad office chairs? Did you ever actually look at these masters of the digital universe, these heavy-duty programmers building the Internet, these portly guys with the wrist supports? Kind of pair shaped, with thick glasses and midlife heart attacks?
They didn’t get that way by accident. They were made that way. They got that way by chronic repeated industrial abuse. That is not a digital problem. That is a furniture problem. It’s all about an industrial system that cruelly sacrifices our human flesh for the sake of dysfunctional machinery.
So why don’t designers just charge right out there and save the whole world right away? I’ll just get Stumpf and Chadwick, and Ayse Birsel, and, oh, Lord Norman Foster and maybe Frank Gehry, and we’ll break out the old Amanda Brown Suit and Henry Dreyfuss ergonomics bible. We’ll have ourselves a conference call and we’ll just save the world with design–sort of. We’ll that’s like saying that we’ll call up a bunch of top-flight Hollywood screenwriters and get them together and they’ll write the ultimate movie and they’ll save the movie business. And nobody will ever have to watch another movie again, because now we have created the perfect one.
There are two sets of problems here. First, there aren’t any perfect design solutions where form could follow function, because the functions keep changing along with the technologically changing society. And second, designers don’t call the shots in industrialism anymore than screenwriters do in the movie business.
Before the advent of Streamlining in the 1930s, there was basically no such thing as industrial designers, there was just these eccentric guys like Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss, who were doing set design for Broadway stage shows. Then they went along to these Robber Barron tycoons of the 1930s, who were grinding the working class underfoot as the shadows of fascism lengthened in Europe. And they said, “Hey Mr. Capitalist! You really want to sell some stuff in the middle of a global depression? Why don’t you make it shinier, and sleeker, and easier to use?” These oppressive running-dog bosses from Westinghouse and AT&T, they replied, “Why on earth should I pay some clown like you anything when I can just have my own idiot nephew figure out how the product should look?” and being Raymond Lowey or Norman B el Geddes you replied, “It is because I am a glamorous, visionary genius!”
Actually if you were Henry Dreyfuss, you were even cooler than that. Because Henry Dreyfuss, never boasted, he would just put on his brown suit and he would go to the meeting of the Board of Directors and he would draw a picture of his new product re-design on a table napkin–only upside-down. Now it takes about a week to figure out how to do this drawing upside down, but the psychological effect is just stunning. Before he drew them the picture upside down, they said, “Who is this Henry Dreyfuss? Some kind of Broadway designer is he? He sounds like he’s Jewish.” But once he drew the product, on the napkin, upside down, they waited until he left boardroom, then they told each other, “He’s a supreme visionary genius!”
I’m not claiming that designers really are supreme visionary geniuses. In fact even though designers have a rap for being kind of flaky, and arty, and temperamental, and since I, myself am a Science Fiction writer, I can see that designers are just crammed full of stony common sense. I actually trust designers. I think that designers are the salt of the earth. I have a better opinion of designers than designers have of themselves. Like, let’s just imagine, that I myself am in some really terrible situation, like one of those mythic scale horrible problems you would see in a Science Fiction novel. Let’ s say I just fell of the edge of a cliff, and I am hanging halfway down the cliff by my fingernails, clutching this long root and below me there are three hungry tigers just licking their chops for my flesh. And then these two buzzards fly in and they’re just pecking, pecking, pecking away at my root. And I can’t climb up and I can’t climb down and sweat is breaking out all over me and my doom is clearly at hand and I am in desperate peril. And then, an industrial designer comes along. Well, hope dawns ladies and gentleman, not because this guy is a saint or a hero or a visionary genius or moral good Samaritan, or anything like that–it’s because designers just can’t resist problems like that, that’s why. Those buzzards, those tigers, and that root with its modulus of elasticity; he’s just bound to get all interested.
And since I love designers so dearly and I want to see them get richer, more powerful, and more famous. Well, how does one go about that? Well, traditionally designers have a rather narrow window in the value chain of industrial society. A designer thinks up a chair and draws a picture of a chair–but he doesn’t cut the wood, smelt the metal, design the assembly line. He doesn’t package it, ship it, or promote it; he doesn’t junk it, he doesn’t recycle it. All those other realms of activity belong to other older professions, such as capitalist, miners, wood companies, labor unions, ad agencies, and governmental bureaus.
So there are enormous sunk costs and lock-in in this chain of production. This is not a new problem for the design profession; this is pretty much the oldest problem that the design profession has. It dates way back to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, where this William Morris character, who made furniture–probably the greatest wallpaper designer ever–tried his best to foment a, no-kidding, social transformation to a better world by striking at the heart of the industrial process, which is to say, the alienation of the worker from the products of his labor. William Morris, this guy who made that furniture, he had this system pretty well figured out. A gal who’s making herself a tapestry on a hand loom, sitting in her own little cottage parlor, making that tapestry, thread by thread. Yeah, she’s a lot more physically and emotionally engaged with that product than some oppressed child laborer in the giant cotton mill in Manchester who’s churning out yard-goods industrial carpeting for the general store and the export market.
Now the reason that William Morris wasn’t bigger, richer, and more powerful than Henry Ford was that assembly-line standard production beats the living daylights out of making stuff with your hands. The only way to make stuff by hand is to recruit people who are ideological lunatics, like hippie leather-makers, and the Amish, and the Shakers. I am novelist who writes with a computer, I’m not going to pay a thin dime for a goddamn Shaker chair. My health has improved radically since I bought a Stumpf and Chadwick Aeron chair with its mobile arm rests, resilient pellicle, and recycled a luminum frame. Every Shaker on the goddamn planet could not build me this thing. This product is beyond the ability of any human hand to mimic ever.
So what’s wrong with this situation? Huh, why aren’t I just the happy little consumer about my Aeron chair? Why am I up here demanding more, more, more! Well, I have three big problems with my Aeron. First, I have to adjust it, because it wasn’t built just for me. Ideally, it shouldn’t say “Herman Miller Aeron” on it–I resent that. It should just say “Bruce Sterling” on it. What’s with this Herman Miller guy getting top-billing here? He didn’t think it up. He’s not the auteur here. I don’t care about Herman Miller’s relationship to my chair. He can’t help me. If I want to consult with someone about my Aeron chair, I want to talk to Stumpf and Chadwick. You can’t pay me to talk Herman Miller. On the contrary, Herman Miller pays to get access to me. That’s what the advertising industry is for. That’s why the airways and the urban landscape and even the Internet, fax machines, and cell phones are saturated with hucksters demanding my attention and trying to shake me down. Is this a civilization?
If I am the customer, why can’t I be king?
If this were really about what I want as a consumer, the ultimate source of the revenue stream, the furniture industry would look entirely different–it would look something like this: first, all my furniture would be peripherals of a household system, it would surround me like a digital gesamtkunstwerk. Then when I wanted a chair, that chair would be manufactured for me, to my measurements, in a production run of one, which I get to watch. Kinda’ like a hungry guy watching a Bennihana chef. This would be transparent production–my chair as a kind of entertainment destination, a delightful novelty display in which I am absolutely assured that my chair does not harm my flesh or my environment in any way. On the contrary, every single aspect of the entire production stream has been designerized. I got designer lumberjacks, a designer fabric factory, a designer fabricator plant, designet shippers, designer trucks, and a designer highway system. I can point and click onto this whole shebang at any moment, and when I see something going on in the industrial system that I particularly like, I just click on it and buy stock in it.
Then when my new super-personal chair arrives, they take away the old one, which is dematerialized as smart garbage, and refolded, back into the production stream without effluence or pollutants of any kind. And in fact, I’m probably not even paying for that chair, with any kind of luck I’m paying for my relationship with the designer. The whole system hinges on the designer’s charisma and leadership. In effect we finally brushed away all the dead mechanical clutter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries–we are paying directly for imagination and ingenuity. I’ve gotten right to the source; the primal wellspring of technical innovation and so has that designer. Instead of fighting his way through the traditional thicket of numbskull capitalists, he’s busily agglutinating his own worshipful demographic of consumers. Instead of lecturing off a podium, like me or William Morris, he can lecture me right out of his forks, chairs, and teakettles. All I have to do is click on the hotlink and, bingo, there I am at Taliesin West in the Frank Lloyd Wright indoctrination compound. And I follow this supreme visionary genius, as his fan, not just because he is this grand Broadway showboat, as he obviously must be, but because he can demonstrate to me a kind of truly profound insight that is required to manage a system of this kind of sophistication and complexity. He really is a visionary genius.
Now I’m not saying that any of this is actually fated to happen. I’m just saying that’s what I want. And it could happen thanks to computer-aided design and manufacturing and the advent of the Internet. A window has opened up that could allow something like this to occur. Now no one is going to waltz up to designers and give them this kind of power–if designers want this level of command and control of the infrastructure of society, they are going to have to seize it.
Basically designers would have to rise to true greatness by growing with the scope of our challenge. They would have to break the old-fashion limits of the design profession and at the time they were done doing that they probably wouldn’t be called designers. They’d be called something like icons, or designer-tycoons, or maybe designer-moguls. But at some point a transformation along this line is definitely called for, because our industrial system is so old and creaky now that our political problems are our technological problems.
Our current president is trying to define himself in office by redesigning our electrical net. While the other guy, the guy who got more votes but isn’t the president, he tried to define himself by inventing the Internet. Any number of power players could move into this twenty-first century space–it could be venture capitalists, or politicians, or non-governmental organizations, or even the military. If designers are going to get there, they are goin=g to have to play from their own strength, which is their ingenuity and their visionary charisma, their ability to define the times on a material level, a unique combination of freeform thinking and physical practicality. Now it has been a very long time since designers have been this audacious, but it is not unheard of in the design profession.
So, instead of just walking out of here with my rants and exhortations ringing in your ears, I would suggest a practical experimentation, just try this out a little and see how it makes you feel. Like next time some journalist is interviewing you about your colleagues, let’s say Karim Rashid and his blob exhibit. Instead of saying, “Oh, yeah. Karim, that stackable plastic Oh chair. Yeah, he’s really out there. He’s not hokey.” You could kind of clear your throat, and lower your voice and say, “I consider Karim Rashid the prophet of a new and better way of life.” And then you’re on some panel at an IDSA gig, and someone says “Blobjects” you might say, “Blobjects are the harbinger of a new and radically flexible means of production.” And then somebody asks you why on earth they should ever pay ten bucks for a Oral-B radically ergonomic toothbrush. You kinda’ draw up your scarlet cloak, in this gush of dry ice, and you can declare, “Every tool is a handle at one end and raw possibility at the other!” And that would probably work great. Why? Because the Internet hype is all digested now and without vision the people parish. That is why. There is a major hype-famine.
Right now, there is a lot of loose money around with a loss of direction. The stage is empty. And the first crowd with a really compelling, totally out-there pitch will get all the VC money they can eat.
Now, I’m not saying this accomplishment is simple or easy. If you drink your own bath water it generally ends in tears. I’m merely saying something very plonking, simple and obvious to everybody, which is, that it is entirely possible to utterly destroy the twentieth century industrial paradigm and establish a new set of standards for performance that radically improves our society’s accumulation of wealth and power. Simple, necessary, got to get done. And most people are not up to this strenuous activity, but some few people in any society generally are. And when I look across the contemporary social landscape, I’m thinking, “Hey, man–designers.” It’s those war stories that attract me really.
It’s like Henry Dreyfuss used to say about Norman Bel Geddes. He said, “Bel Geddes always had his desk facing a blank wall.” Now Norman Bel Geddes was a top-end Broadway set designer. He knew what a window treatment looked like. Norman Bel Geddes could have made any of office he wanted. So what’s with the blank-wall? Because that’s where Norman Bel Geddes got his really big ideas–that’s why. Now I consider that an act of raw courage. That is the maximum; that is the Holy Grail. We need some more of that stuff nowadays. Somewhere out there in today’s designer-land, there is some guy who can really do that. And I want to know all about that guy. I want the world to shower that guy with riches, fame, and power. I want to talk to that guy. I want him to meet all my friends. I want the bright-eyed guy’s products. I want him to get traction, horsepower, juice of every kind, and major command and control. I want to see him a super star.
Thank you for your attention and have a great time at the fair.
