In 1881, lightbulbs lasted 1500 hours, and by 1924 designers had increased that number to 2500 hours. On December 23, 1924, a group of electronics manufacturers including Osram, Philips, and General Electric started the Phoebus cartel. A cartel is a group of manufacturers who regulate price, production, quality and the marketing of goods. This particular cartel controlled the production of lightbulbs.
Two years after it was founded, the Phoebus cartel had decreased the average life of lightbulbs to less than 1500 hours. They were planning obsolescence into their lightbulbs in order to make consumers buy more. They believed “lasting lights are an economic disadvantage” (The Lightbulb Conspiracy). The cartel made lightbulb manufactures ensure “the average life of lamps… must not be guaranteed… for another value than 1000 hours” (The Lightbulb Conspiracy). Members of the cartel were fined if their bulbs were found to last longer than 1000 hours.
It is ironic that the lightbulb, a symbol of innovation and thinking, was the first example of planned obsolescence.
Works cited: The Lightbulb Conspiracy. Cosima Dannoritzer. Yleisradio (YLE), 2010. Documentary.
Planned obsolescence – a strategy designers employ whereby their products become obsolete quickly and so require replacing, thus giving the designers more money. The products are made obsolete through frequent changes in design, end of production of spare parts, and the use of non-durable materials.
Activism – the action of using protests, campaigns and debates to promote social or political change.
Visual activism – using visual media to convey messages. Visual means are helpful for promoting change because they’re accessible to a large audience (films, graffiti etc.), and they’re forms of expression that an audience can look it and understand quickly and easily.
Citizenship – being a citizen of a particular country.
Change agents – people that help transform/change something by focussing on improvement and development. In a design context, these are the people who use visual texts (posters, signs, graffiti etc.) to promote change.
Cultural critics – people who make informed comments on a given culture, by taking into account its social, political, historical, and artistic background; how people responded to and were involved in the culture; and concepts like ideology and sense of self.
Protest – the physical act of expressing objection to something and making change.
Resistance – the ability to be unaffected by something. This could be the ability to resist the laws a government has put in place, which could in turn result in protests.
Agency – the capacity for an individual to make their own choices and act independently of others. Also; the result of a particular action or intervention.
Social responsibility – the duty of every individual in a society to act for the benefit of the entire society, not just themselves. This is to keep balance in the economy, environment etc.
Transformative practices – practical and strategic actions to affect a revolutionary change within a society.
Chris Jordan is an artist based in Seattle. His project Camel Gastrolith is a display of the pollution generated from humankind’s ‘disposable culture’, and how that pollution effects the environment. Jordan says “I care about the bigger phenomenon of desert plastic pollution, and what it mirrors back to us about the insanity of our disposable culture” (Jordan).
Flint and Tinder – 10-Year Hoodie
It is not just electronics that are purpose built to fail quickly. Some clothing manufactures use course thread with delicate fabrics, or use single seams instead of double, which are techniques that ensure their clothing will break down more quickly, making consumers buy more of their clothes. Brooklyn designers Flint and Tinder are doing the opposite to this, and have designed a hoodie that is “built for life, guaranteed to last at least a decade and backed with free mending” (Flint and Tinder). Its features include: reinforced stress points and safety seams; 3-end yarn knit; and a 10-Year Guarantee including free mending service.
Flint and Tinder. 10 Year-Hoodie.
Dave Hakkens – Phonebloks
Massey University’s School of Design – Space Between
Newlight Technologies – AirCarbon
“AirCarbon is a thermoplastic material made by combining air and greenhouse gas, and is being used to replace oil-based plastics in a variety of application areas, including furniture, electronics, packaging, and others.”
Planned obsolescence is the strategy of designing components to fail sooner than they should, minimising the life of the design, thus forcing consumers to spend more money buying a new product. In companies’ eyes, this is an important strategy to implement, because it ensures they get more money, but it has devastating effects on the Earth and its resources.
Continuous replacement of products produces more waste, pollution and uses more natural resources than repairing the products.
In France in 2015, the government implemented a legislation that made it compulsory for appliance manufacturers to declare for how long they will continue making spare parts for a given appliance, and from this year they will also have to repair or replace faulty goods for free within the first two years of being purchased (Prindle).
Still from “The Man in the White Suit”, an Ealing comedy about a man who invents an ever-lasting material.
Works cited:
Prindle, Drew. “New French law tells consumers how long new appliances will last”. Digital Trends 3 March, 2015. Web. 18 May 2016.
In assessment three for my University paper Communications in Creative Cultures, I am asked to consider how I might make a difference in building a better world through my art or design. I will take a specific issue, injustice or concern, and generate a creative work that responds to this issue.
In “Changing the World” (Mirzoeff, Chapter 7, 253-286) and “Visual Activism” (Mirzoeff, Afterword, 287-298), Mirzoeff considers how visual imagery has changed how we see the world and how we see ourselves.
Visual mediums have become more accessible to the general public through advancements in technology and the subsequent reductions in the price of said technology, access to the internet, and social media. The ways we use these mediums have changed. In 1990, visual culture was used to “criticise and counter the way that we were depicted in art, film and mass media” (Mirzoeff, 297). The key idea here is that these depictions of humankind were made by the artists and filmmakers, and were viewed, analysed and discussed by the general public. In the modern world, with access to cameras, sites like YouTube and Twitter and Snapchat, the general public themselves become the artists or the filmmakers, and can “use visual culture to create new self-images, new ways to see and be seen, and new ways to see the world” (Mirzoeff, 297).
An example of how visual texts are used by the public to generate new ways to see the world are in political protests. After the dictatorship was overthrown in Egypt in 2011, many protestors began to use graffiti – a medium that had been previously impossible to use because of the government’s strict control over public spaces (Mirzoeff, 264). Egyptian artist Ganzeer painted this graffito of a tank bearing down on a much smaller cyclist. It is a political comment on how the government and police forces are watching and controlling the general public – they were even monitoring the public doing ordinary and harmless activities like riding a bicycle. Because the image is painted in a public place, many people can see it and its message is disseminated throughout the public.
Ganzeer. Tank Versus Biker. Graffiti. Cairo, Egypt. 2011.
Designed objects can also be used as means to promote social or political change. The everyday objects people have in their houses “signify identity, social relations, history, power, resistance, economic standing and politics” (Boradkar, 25). And these everyday objects were not necessarily designed with these cultural connotations in mind. When designers are intentionally making a political comment, their design can be as powerful as a piece of art. Brooklyn designers Flint and Tinder have designed a hoodie that is “built for life, guaranteed to last at least a decade and backed with free mending” (Flint and Tinder). Its features include: reinforced stress points and safety seams; 3-end yarn knit; and a 10-Year Guarantee including free mending service.
Works cited:
Boradkar, Prasad. Designing Things: A Critical Introduction to the Culture of Objects. English ed. New York: Berg, 2010. Print.
Flint and Tinder. “10-Year Hoodie”. Huckberry. Web. 4 June 2016.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World. London: Pelican, 2015. 253-298. Print.
Considering the skills, protocols, approaches and tools I have acquired during this assessment, these are some that I will take with me to future contextual writing projects:
Planning and Preparation
Word clouds to identify key ideas that could be used to find resources
Using mind-map generators that are a bit more in-depth than word clouds, and help making connections between ideas/texts easier
5 minute free writing helps identify what key ideas stick with us the best; helps us work out what we want to talk about
Reading the essay question over and over, breaking it apart and writing it in our own words to understand it completely
Writing
Using topic sentences to introduce each idea
Breaking complex paragraphs from sourced texts down to 3-5 key points, then writing it again in our own words
Not misquoting sources, e.g. including my own ideas inside the cited sentence
Content and Visual Text Analysis
Doing a complete analysis of production, image and audience of a visual text before writing the essay
Describing the visual text; then analysing it; then interpreting it. Description involves no personal views, just what is in the visual text
Considering what was happening in the world at the time of a visual text’s production
Understanding people look at visual texts differently depending on culture, world-view etc.
Research and Information Gathering
Searching with key terms, making our searches more accurate with ‘*’ etc.
Making sure the sources are academic, i.e. peer-reviewed, contains sources
Using videos/oral presentations because their information tends to ‘stick’ better than that of written texts
Western cultures in particular are concerned with their ‘conquest of nature’ (Mirzoeff, 220). Their conquest has changed what the Earth looks like and how it functions. There is a tendency to be oblivious to the effects that one has on the environment, and to simply accept the ‘changed world’. However, not all cultures want to conquer nature. Indigenous people’s world view is to live alongside nature, giving back to the Earth as much, if not more, than they took. Sadly their view is a marginalised one, and as such they get little attention from the media. Art is a useful tool to talk about environmental impacts, and to try to get people to understand the devastating effects they are having on the environment. Artists are raising awareness of climate change and the negative impacts of human activities on the environment by utilizing “icons of climate change, such as glaciers, polar bears and images of flooding and industrial pollution” (Giannachi, 127).
Works cited:
Giannachi, Gabriella. ‘Representing, Performing and Mitigating Climate Change in Contemporary Art Practice’. Leonardo 45.2 (2012): 124–131. Print.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World. London: Pelican, 2015. Print.
Identifying the causes of climate change allows us to make necessary changes to stop it.
Since the West started its ‘conquest of nature’ the surface temperature of the Earth has increased by 0.75 degrees Celsius, and sea levels have risen due to ice melting in the warmer climate (Buckland, et al. 17). But around 20 percent of people don’t even believe in climate change, and many more think that humans are not the issue (Chameides, par. 1). Artists are raising awareness of climate change and the negative impacts of human activities on the environment by utilizing “icons of climate change, such as glaciers, polar bears and images of flooding and industrial pollution” (Giannachi, 127).
Forty-two kids shows that pollution is something that the public have to deal with, but that they don’t mind it. To this day the East River is polluted and people still swim in it – there is even an annual ‘Brooklyn Bridge Swim’. Through repeated exposure to the pollution, the people of New York have become accustomed to it, and see it as normal.
Bellows, George. Forty-two Kids. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Maskbook is an ongoing online event aimed at telling the public about health, pollution and climate. People upload portraits with a mask they’ve created on to an international portrait gallery. These masks must be made of certified/recycled paper, dust masks or other upcycled objects. “Maskbook flips the potentially worrisome image of the mask in order to make it a means of expressing everyone’s creative originality and ecological solutions.” While humans are a major cause of climate change, Maskbook is trying to show that they can also be the solution. Maskbook is a creative, hands-on project, which makes people more inclined to get involved, have fun, and ultimately take a lot of information and ideas away from it.
Works cited:
Buckland, David, Chris Wainwright, and Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain), eds. U-N-F-O-L-D: A Cultural Response to Climate Change. Vienna, Austria: Springer Wien New York, 2010. Print.
Chameides, Bill. ‘Art Makes Environmental Change Real’. University of Washington: Conservation. N.p., 24 Jan. 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2016.
Giannachi, Gabriella. ‘Representing, Performing and Mitigating Climate Change in Contemporary Art Practice’. Leonardo 45.2 (2012): 124–131. Print.
World views are beliefs of the Earth and human life held by an individual or group, ideology is a set of ideas that determine social and cultural norms, and the ‘myth of photographic truth’ is the notion that art depicts reality but is not reality, and that it is read by different people in different ways. These three concepts are all influenced by who we surround ourselves with and are therefore influenced by, our past experiences, legislation, rules and regulations.
When critically evaluating a visual text, these three concepts help us understand different ways the text can be read. By considering world views held at the time the text was made, we can understand who the text was aimed at, why it was made, and what message it was trying to convey, and we can also find out who the text excluded. Marginalised cultures, indigenous people for example, are often excluded in visual texts because they do not hold a dominant world view, and therefore their perspectives are not represented.
Unlike world views which are simply perspectives, ideology dictates people’s actions, thoughts and policies. Ideology makes people look at a text in what they think is the socially, politically or culturally ‘correct’ way. This makes their view of the text narrow and superficial, and they don’t consider different or opposing views. In Forty-two Kids by George Bellows,the viewer would probably assume that the kids swimming in the polluted river are poor immigrants. In actual fact, in New York in 1907, even the rich families were indifferent to the pollution, and these kids could be New York’s richest (Mirzoeff, 234).
Bellows, George. Forty-two Kids. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Works cited:
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Changing World”. How to See the World. London: Pelican, 2015. 213-252. Print.
Identifying the causes of climate change allows us to make necessary changes to stop it.
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