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Design Philosophy: Refusal of Solid

When the question of ‘what we design’ is replaced with ‘for whom we design’ the definition of the user becomes more critical than the object itself. Refusal of Solid is a thematic path to propose designs in coordination with behavioral changes in the society.

To define the society in transition today, is also quite complicated in itself. Sociologist Ulrich Beck starts by judging the word ‘post’ as the key word of our times, where he says everything is post. İn his words; “it hints at a ‘beyond’ which it can not name, and in the substantive elements that it names and negates it remains tied to the familiar.”

“Just as modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernization today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being. The difference being, in the nineteenth century, modernization took place against the background of its opposite; a traditional world of mores, and a nature which was to be known and mastered. Today at the treshold of the twenty-first century, modernization has consumed and lost its other and now undermines its own premises as an industrial society along with its functional principles.”

Overall Beck argues that we are witnessing not the end but the beginning of modernity that is of a modernity beyond its classical industrial design.

Within these larger definitions of the structural changes in society, we are witnessing in a much smaller scale; the transition from what we call “knowledge society” to “creative society”. The most critical shift occurs in modes of production and consumption. When we consider the production of our age, we need to distinguish material production from immaterial production. In this respect a deliberate difference occurs in the social behaviour of our age compared to the passive consumer of the industrial era.

Today specially in the process of immaterial production, the user is an active participant, where they share the creation process in a common ground with the producer. Hence the definition of consumer evolves into user, who is an active part of the creation process. The degrees of participation depends on how open and knowledge based the product is.

Refusal of Solid is a proposal more concerned with the design process than the end product. The overall aim is to create a fluid, flexible and an open design process for users to take part in the development process. Refusal in this sense refers to abolishing the absolute position of the designer, shaping our environment as a supreme power. Opening the design process to the participation of users, provides a chance to create numerous authorities.

This condition is specifically defined in Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman; Light, consumer-friendly capitalism did not abolish the law-proferring authorities, nor did it make them redundant. It has merely brought into being and allowed to coexist authorities too numerous for any one of them to stay in authority for long.

‘Numerous authorities is, come to think of it, a contradiction in terms. When the authorities are many, they tend to cancel each other out, and the sole effective authority in the field is one who must choose between them. It is by the courtesy of the chooser that a would-be authority becomes and authority. Authorities no longer command; they integrate themselves with the chooser; they tempt and seduce’.