Bye bye, Bauhaus.

Nov 30, 2022

Hello, —spores?

TED Conferences started in 1984 (the year I started design school), a presage of powerful social transformations led by the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design. Since then, that formula has driven innovations in product and business models and human behaviors. Things progressed so far that design is a different discipline than it was when my career started.

And now, design is on the brink of a transformation that will change some of the discipline’s core notions (going back to rationalism, Bauhaus, and the Ulm School of Design) and its methodologies and outputs.

Before you freak out, remember that everything that brought us here prepared us for what’s next.

Bye-bye, Bauhaus

Visit a design school and talk to designers; you’ll see that the Bauhaus still greatly influences design today. Its preoccupation with techniques and materials as the foundation for design practice broke in the early days of the 20th century. The Bauhaus (from Bau: building; and Haus: house), and post-war the Ulm School of Design, are the foundation of modern design: rational efficiency, human centrism, and systemic creative approaches all sprung from their teachings. They started us on a path to questions about design’s role in society that are still relevant today.

But the 20s (and, for that matter, the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and even the 10s) are long gone. Nearly all Americans own a smartphone post-pandemic — with similar projections for the rest of the world in a few years. The share of the day we spend working, playing, and staring at screens also continues to grow. We are now digital beings (we connect, work, and play through digital technology), and we’ll soon spend our time primarily in a parallel digital universe.

In the digital context, the Bauhaus focus on construction (and ‘reproducibility,’ which evolved into modular systems and later into nested systems ) is less valuable than it used to be. Digital space is non-sequential and unaffected by physics, digital tools are by nature multipurpose, and visual communication is dynamic and micro-targeted.

Add to that the upcoming decentralization of the web, which will transform how we access anything and do everything. What will e-commerce look like without a store? What will social look like without a network? And movies without streaming platforms?

Decentralization puts relevance and utility at the center. Interactions are spontaneous and staged in any context (e.g., shopping for clothes while watching a film or training while gaming.) Utility follows context and results from associations.

Hello — Spores?

Trees are majestic and elegantly simple. They also strive for space, take a long time to grow, and thrive on constant resource availability (like brands and digital ecosystems.)

Web3 brings an opportunity to rethink scale and permanence. What will decentralization mean for products, content, and brands? Do we keep growing businesses through trunking and branching, or is there an alternative strategy?

Look at the mushroom.

Humble, slight, and spontaneous, the mushroom takes a different approach. It is content to show up only when it’s likely to succeed. It reaches maturity quickly and vanishes as fast when done. It thrives on utility and grows through dispersal.

In some ways, trees and fungi use opposing strategies. A tree’s success depends on its centralized superstructure and longevity. Fungi succeed through a vast and unobtrusive infrastructure and spontaneity.

World Wide Spores

Design is an exercise of balancing utopia and frustration. We celebrate bold and radical visions and archive them as impracticable in complexity, scale, and resources. Most times, the size of the ambition slows down progress. In this regard, What’s freeing about thinking of a decentralized context is the ability to deemphasize structure and prioritize utility.

‘Scattering’ utility’ will require a new skill set. Decentralization will afford designers a wider creative space (consider the limited options currently allowed by set patterns in e-commerce platforms.) The need for authorship and interdisciplinary integration will grow.

To clarify this point, imagine a shopping experience independent of a store. Current patterns (i.e., landing, browsing, picking, checkout, etc.) become irrelevant. The designer shapes a new and original shopping experience (e.g., filmshopping, gamelearning, adventuretraining, etc.) Once fine-tuned, these experiences can and deployed in new contexts over and over.

New! BBBlog

This topic is too vast to approach in a single article or by myself, plus it’s always more fun to collaborate. Bye bye , Bauhaus can extend into investigations about:

Metaverse — So far, I have avoided using the term metaverse because it comes loaded with preconceptions of replicas of the physical world in the digital space. Yet our possibilities in a digital environment allow for more radical visions, and over time new digital habits end up impacting the physical world. Is the Gucci Town in Roblox an impulsive application of a fixation with building?

Design Systems — In my Systems Design class, I discuss with students the difference between a modular and a nesting system (e.g., Lego vs. Atomic.) Systems that scatter utility will have to solve for matching functionalities in varied contexts, which neither modular nor nesting can do.

Design Disciplines — Most would agree that today, the lines dividing the three ‘core’ disciplines of design (architecture, industrial and graphic design) are blurred and that many new fields have emerged over the past 20 years. One can think of UX as an amalgamation of visual and ‘industrial’ design. Web3 is likely to mush them further (think of a CG artist asked to create spaces, tools, and visual languages.) Are the x/y/z dimensional boundaries still valid? Will they be replaced by others (e.g., visual, utility, immersive.) Or gone forever?

Design fiction — ‘Scattered utility‘ scenarios!

Relationship Design — If you read my previous articles on relationship design, you’re familiar with the concept of mutualism between business, customer, and community. Web3 supercharges the designer’s ability to create productive relationships (as an early example, see Nike’s swoosh.nike, which invites customers to ‘co-create the future of Nike.’)

Notes:

No, I didn’t indulge in ‘shrooms while writing this article.
“Bye, bye, Bauhaus” was the headline of a review of the exhibit Josef Albers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by John Canaday, as quoted by Jeffrey Saletnik’s introduction to Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022, pp. 1–14.
The term Protopias is borrowed from Protopia now: Monika Bielskyte on designing better futures for humanity, by Adam Tinworth, linked here.
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