The idea of creative democracy

Transcript from his talk at the colloquium on metadesign on 28th June 2007

By John Chris Jones

A little bit about my experience which is listed on one of the sheets of paper. It begins very much in a similar way as the photograph of the sparks in the high voltage electricity lab with Mr. Tesla sitting in the lab - I think sitting very dangerously beneath the sparks. I started up my life in the 50´s in the electrical industry and the first job I had to do when I became a graduate apprentice, after my degree in engineering. I was trusted into the high voltage test lab for measuring how switch gears would react under half a million volts or such number, hundred thousend volts, these sort of numbers. I didn’t know what a switch gear was, I got this engineering degree and nobody mentioned switch gear. I only see this switch the little thing on the wall, to see a switch which was as big as this room, nearly, was a surprise and I realised it was too dangerous to approach. I don’t know how Mr. Tesla survived sitting where he is here. Anyway, I learnt a great deal with my second education, I learnt nothing at college I think. I learnt a lot at art school, I went from engineering school to Central School and I learned some sculpture there, Central School of Arts and Crafts and that changed me greatly, I think. I got the feeling that humanity and engineering could be combined which led me to industrial design and which I was doing along with ergonomics in the electrical industry in the 50´s. And then in the 60´s, I was dragged into academia, somehow reluctantly, University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology, and eventually to the Open University from which I resigned on principle, really, because all these issues were not taught seriously, I thought.
Then I started in the 70´s when I wrote a book on design methods, amongst all this, which was meant to be my good-bye present to design. The book still survives and I still survive many years later, just about. I took the precaution then of going on re-education. I attended lectures in American poetry given by a fellow student, a man who has been a fellow student of mine at College and now he is a professor of American poetry. I said: Can I sit at the back of your class for a year, Eric Motrom? and he said: yes, and so I re-learnt engineering and industrial design in the light of poetry and in the light of John Cage in particular and chance processes. I was still very uneasy about all this industrialism althought attracted to it immensely. Sort of trusting it and distrusting it. And then along came computers, which I have been concerned with in the early days. I helped design one of the first main frames, and the ergonomics of it and the exterior of it. Then the internet came along and I felt much happier all of a sudden. I wrote a book about the internet which looks like a bible. This is it - this very small, very thick book, of about six hundred pages. I am going to read bits from it today, little bits of it which refer to the concept of creative democracy; which like Metadesign, has not yet been defined and I hope it never will be, because it will be dead as soon as it is defined.

If you look at my website, you will find a long list of quotations which are at the bottom of the web page here. I wrote this last night feeling that the quotations were to fragmenty for this meeting, and too abstract and too dificult to take in. So, I wrote this bit that I am going to read as a story.

As I see it today, before a colloquium on Metadesign, the idea of democracy is too confused to grasp, is beyond me. Reading the fragments below from varios pages of “The internet and everyone”, that is the name of this book, “I find it’s central part to be absent or as yet unborn, but strongly gestating in our thoughts and mind; in our dissatisfactions with design and with life as it is, the evident threath to the Earth by the technologies we inherit which keep us alive in such numbers.”
Now we are going to a quotation which I expand slightly from George Oppen, one of the American poets I learned from or about: “Obssesed, bewillded by the shipwreck of the singular, we have chosen the meaning of being numerous”. I thought it is the most marvelous phrase and this is one result: a wish to abandon what is impossed by ourselves as specialists, as experts and as consumers and to act with the adaptiveness of nature and not as people paid to think narrowly. Thats the whole trouble: being paid to think narrowly. THE trouble. But where is the birds-eye view that can raise us above our confusions and enable us to see what can be seen of the unknownable totallity. I think our yes-no discussion completely fails to bring the unknowness of everything. And what can we do about it. There is something that can be known but not everything can be known about everything, I think.

But then I remembered a dream which is called “The wheelchair of my aunt” and that is what I really came to say today. I originally wrote this on the internet and I have it as a sort of event in 1998 while I was in the middle of writing that book.
“To Marcelo Suarez and everyone. Reading your request, (this is a request he gave on the Design Research Society discussion list), ask the names of the wheelchair designers so you can study how they take account of users, and then I dreamt of asking my aunt Elizabeth who uses a wheelchair, she is 93 and highly intelligent. She ran a large business for many years after her husband died and now she is dead, unfortunately. I say this in memory of her. She would like to design a better one than she has, a better wheelchair. The first reaction is the same as everyone´s. She assumes that she can´t. She has no idea how to go about it, etc. Design is a business of professionals, she says. But then, I point out that this is a dream in which she can do whatever she likes. She can design everything because here is the wonderful Dr. Suarez who has made for his doctoral research a website, which she can contact from her chair and which would do all the technical bits while she becomes the designer and says exactly what kind of wheelchair she would like.”
At this point the dream changes to virtual reality and yes, aunt Elizabeth is able to try out her first ideas, and then her second, third and fourth version until finally she gets the hang of it and finds that she has made a far better wheelchair, than any designer (except from wonderful Dr. Suarez) had ever thought possible. She has plenty of money so she is able to pay for a super prototype. When I told her about it, she got a bit annoyed with me.

And now, with this dream in mind to complete the description of creative democracy, at the bottom of this very blown design page, web page, which scrolls down to a lot of abstract quotations from this book.
Now with this dream in mind, to complete the descriptions from the quotations, imagine if you can, the extention of every creative democracy from my aunt and her wheelchair to every kind of prosthesis, not only wheelchairs and hearing aids, spectacles and artificial legs and hearts to every other addition to nature; cars and roads, telephones and broadcasting and everything else including the government, the banks, the schools, the health service and the other services and yes, the internet. And as soon as I think of that, I remember the spontaniety in the using of mobile phones, the unexpected appearance of texting, of open source software. Texting... designed by users, unknown by the designers of the thing. Open source software, google, wikipedia and many other decentralized developments. All that is becoming possible when the power of computing is married to the connectivity of the telephone system, what I call ‘Computer Net.’
And what is the essential part, the critical element in all this? What is it? To me, the essential part is the possibility evident in the dream of my aunt, becoming able to design her own wheelchair, of every professional skill being distributed in several ways.
1. The conscious part: describable in textbooks or computer programs and available to all of us. That is rationality.
2. The bodily skill that everyone can learn given the suitably designed context. This is very argueable, I think, but it is based on trying to imagine what it would be for an ordinary person to do an operational appendix, for instance. I think they could do it.
3. The third element, not yet present, of professionals ceasing to operate in determing the form and material of every aspect of life, ceasing to do paid work and instead becoming full time active citizens, we need a name for this... (talking to John Wood)... John Wood? Sharing by computernet, the shaping and operating of all aspects of life, now controlled by government and management and specialisation and hierarchy. This could become “designing without a product”, for the sake of living the process, as it can be in any unpaid activity such as family life.
4. The fourth element, which i think requires meta-skills, the meta skills we are discussing at this meeting. The, perhaps indescribable, actions of re-creating specialised work as decentralised collective sharing of the design function and, all other professional roles, by everyone and much more than that.

“These things can as yet be spoken of only in discreet whispers for they are the stuff of political revolution and can be deeply disturbing to any of us” (you wont be able to read this until you read the proceedings).

I wrote all this yesterday evening from my memories of this 1998 event, the story, because these bits are too long for the conference and too difficult to read.

This one is about mothers and children, it is called “Order and conflict” and it is from my blog…

“I'm surrounded by infants, and by adults serving and directing their development, and amidst the sights and sounds of the children's wayward and exploratory actions and protests, and the commands of the adults… “stop it now” says a woman struggling to get infant and pram and baby to move through a narrow space between tables.
As I experience some of the local power of this worldwide process, or improvised plan of child care, that over-rides conflicts between the conscious aims of the adults and the likes and dislikes of the children, I wonder if there is any hope for new ways, however right or worthwhile, if they do not coincide with the wishes of those who guide, and often force, the direction of children?”
One countervailing force is of course fashion and new culture etc. and this goes on and on…

“Constructive Realism”… this is a theoretical piece…

“This is a new term for us type the fingers, the fingers are characters in the fiction I was writing about the care-takers that are thrown into another planet. The fingers have a life of their own, they want to be characters in the story. what does it mean, whose mind did it come from?”
It came off reading a text by E H Carr, the famous historian, socialist historian, historian of the Soviet Russia, in particular, and particularly by his self-defining descriptions of how history is written, or invented. For instance: “The historian, before he begins to write history, is the product of history”. And a more complicated one: “The absolute in history is something still incomplete and in process of becoming something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually shape our interpretation of the past”.
As we read these, and his other such descriptions, we feel history becoming an extended kind of, wait for it… designing of course!
We are rather arrogant, we make the whole world ‘aspects of design’ and why not? Industrial design is where are the wholists, in the whole industrial spectrum I think. From the days when they were formed out of Ruskin and Morris and the Bauhaus and the Berlin and the Arts and Crafts´ movement, it led to Industrial design, it led to a marriage of arts and industry and still is a kind of sustaining thing, I think. And from there it goes to creative democracy.

I have reached the end of my time and I have got some more remarks to finish. I am a big hater of science fiction, not a fan. I don’t like science fiction in many ways but recentry I came across Olaf Stapelton and his book, his most famous book “Last and first man”. He wrote this and afterwards someone said: “This is Science Fiction” and he said: “What is that?” He didn’t know what science fiction was and most of the great science fiction writers say they learnt most from reading his book. This book goes millions of years ahead, even billions. Towards populating the stars and humans evolve to get even wings like angels at a certain point and goodness knows what. He takes that kind of perspective and I think, a bit of long distance perspective is what would be helpful for us here. I am going to read the last words of his book and this will be the last words of what I am going to say I think, as well. The last words of his very nice book are: “…and so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts and peace, thankful for the past and for our own courage. For which it will teach us to make after all a fair conclusion for this brief music that is man”…