Guy Julier

Urban Designscapes and the Production of Aesthetic Consent

Studies on the identity formation of urban centres and the use of aesthetic markers within that regeneration process largely fall into two camps that reflect their respective academic provenance. On the one hand, this effect is assessed by reference to urban planning and architectural processes. Here, the interest is firmly in the design hardware of buildings, streets and public spaces and how they are used to differentiate and communicate. On the other, this is reviewed by reference to the marketing strategies of place branding. Here the emotional software of brand identity programmes, as carried through literature, websites, the copywriting of slogans and other largely two-dimensional platforms comes into view. Within the remit of culture-led regeneration, the article considers a more extended version of the role of design in this process. Designers are implicated among networks of urban elites that decide strategies. But their involvement takes the process of design-led regeneration beyond buildings or leaflets to a loosely coherent, hegemonic network of signifiers to produce what I call designscapes. The article takes a critical approach to three designscapes: Barcelona, Manchester and Hull. In doing so, it evaluates contrasting approaches while keeping in view the interactions of design elites and their public, the flows between individual and collective consumption and their roles in forming an urban habitus.

From Visual Culture to Design Culture

From Visual Culture to Design Culture The past ten years of academia have seen the establishment of Visual Culture, Material Culture and, most recently, Design Culture as scholarly disciplines. Visual Culture partly has emerged from art history through its incorporation of cultural studies. Material Culture’s provenance is in a mixture of anthropology, museum studies, and design history. The term “design culture” has been used more sporadically, and not just in academia. It also has been employed in journalism and the design industry itself. But if design culture is to be consolidated as an academic discipline, what relationship would it have to these other categories and, indeed, to design practice itself? Given the foci of Visual Culture in images, and that of Material Culture in things, they should, theoretically, provide a scholastic springboard for Design Culture. Visual Culture is now firmly established as an academic discipline in universities across Europe and the Americas. It sports two refereed journals,1 at least five student introductory texts,2 and three substantial readers.3 Undergraduate and postgraduate courses have been established. While differing in their approaches, Visual Culture authors generally include design alongside fine art, photography, film, TV, and advertising within their scope.4 Visual Culture, therefore, challenges and widens the field of investigation previously occupied by Art History. This project was instigated in the 1970s within the then-called “New Art History.” Proponents turned away from traditional interests in formal analysis, provenance, and patronage to embrace a more anthropological attitude to the visual in society. Henceforth, all visual forms are admissible into the academic canon—a notion spurred on by the rise of Cultural Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Media Studies and, indeed, Design History. As the academic discipline of Visual Culture emerged through the 1990s, its central concern was the investigation of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Nonetheless, despite this apparent openness, this article contends that the methods of Visual Culture have limited use for developing an understanding of the cultural role of contemporary design in society. Victor Margolin previously has suggested the need for doctoral-level studies of design and culture.5 In essence, 1 The Journal of Visual Culture (Sage, founded 2002) and Visual Culture in Britain (Ashgate, founded 2000). 2 For example, see Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Richard Howells, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999): Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Visual Culture: An Introduction, John Walker and Sarah Chaplin, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 3 For example, see Visual Culture: The Reader, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998); and The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Amelia Jones, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003). 4 Malcolm Barnard, Art, Design, and Visual Culture: An Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1998) includes some short references to design. 5 See Victor Margolin, “Design History and Design Studies” in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

From Design Culture to Design Activism

ABSTRACT Design culture has emerged as a broadly applied term in the past decade. Analytically, we can take it to describe the networking of the domains of design, production, and consumption within which questions of value, circulation, and practice reside. The reflexive promotion of design cultures and the enrollment of subjects and objects into its cause are taken to be of particular importance within neoliberalism. Since design cultures are networks, issues of their density and scale and the speed and strength of their interactions are of interest. Design activism has emerged as a movement, partly in response to the recent crises of neoliberalism. However, it is not necessarily independent of mainstream design culture. Instead, it picks up and runs with some of its key themes, including intensification, co-articulation, temporality, and territorialization.

Design Activism Meets Place-branding: Reconfiguring Urban Representation and Everyday Practice

This chapter provides a critical approach to place-branding, firstly by analysing its instabilities and secondly by developing an account of how design activism generates alternative identities and processes of identity formation. The research is underpinned by Julier’s work on design-led urban regeneration and his practical experience as director of Leeds Love It Share It, a community interest company set up to research and design new scenarios for Leeds in the context of long-term economic recession and climate change. This collective brought together human geographers from the University of Leeds, Bauman Lyons Architects, the Permaculture Association, and Media and Arts Partnership, undertaking research for Yorkshire Forward, Leeds City Council and the Local Enterprise Generation Initiative. The research involved a fine grain mapping of social networks, undervalued enterprise and underutilised spaces in Leeds’ Richmond Hill, an area of high deprivation. From this action research, design and social innovation processes were developed in collaboration with its community assets. The findings were published in a co-authored peer-reviewed article for Cityjournal (‘Building resilience and well‐being in the margins within the city’, 2011) and in a full report for Yorkshire Forward. Bringing together design, human geography, urbanism, permaculture thinking and community development, this cross-disciplinary and cross-professional/academic project resulted in the prototyping of low-cost regeneration approaches. In this chapter Julier considers the findings of this project in the context of place-branding, arguing for new approaches that focus upon social inclusion. Stemming from the development of this framework and in partnership with Bauman Lyons Architects, Julier has gone on to develop research approaches for Yorkshire Forward to look at processes of change for distinctive rural towns.

Value, Relationality and Unfinished Objects: Guy Julier Interview with Scott Lash and Celia Lury

ABSTRACT This “dialog” features an edited conversation with sociologists Scott Lash and Celia Lury. It explores their recent thinking in relation to political economy, critical theory, design and branding. Primarily, it opens up a discussion regarding the role of design objects, value and relationality. This perceives them not as fixed things fulfilling finite use-values, but as objects that are located within flows of meaning and capital. These have movement, not just in terms of their circulation, but also in the way they are not always temporally fixed. This is apparent in their relationship to other objects but also to the systems of financialization within which they are engaged. By continuation, design becomes a “meta” activity where the structures of meaning production are fashioned as much as the objects that circulate within them. Within this analysis, the “user” may be understood to involve a multiplicity of individual and collective forms.

Global Design Activism Survey

Introduction Design activism is enacted through a range of discourses, practices, and institutions around the globe. As such, it has been a formidable influence on the way design is imagined and practiced in worldwide localities, shaping whole design cultures. Still, activist ideas and tendencies have not been uniform in their distribution or their impact. To map the global influence of activism on design cultures, we asked ten designers, design scholars, and historians from different localities all around the world to comment upon the following questions:

Introduction: Material Preference and Design Activism

Developing out of the 2011 Design History Society conference held in Barcelona (convened by Julier), this special issue brings together scholarship on social design, design activism, participatory design and sustainable design in the context of crises in neoliberal economics, social justice and climate change. Edited by Julier, it is the first peer-reviewed journal issue to provide a focused investigation of design activism that examines the relationship between historical enquiry and contemporary design practice and policy. The approach taken by Julier to the edited collection emerged from discussions at the Barcelona conference and research undertaken for a number of invited lectures that Julier gave at the Festival de la Imagen in Colombia (2012) and the Graphic Knowledge Fair in Warsaw (2012). Observing the increased attention design activism has received at international conferences (e.g. Changing the Change 2008, NORDES 2011, Cumulus 2011) and the frequent focus upon the possibilities for design activism, this issue adds to these discussions by providing a critical analysis of past and contemporary practices to help establish a practical and theoretical framework for design activism. Julier’s single-authored article explores the interrelationship between design culture, design activism, and neoliberalism. Undertaking an historical assessment of the aims, objectives, and results of design activist projects, Julier highlights the role design activism can play in design culture and provides a conceptual framework for understanding design activism in relation to the processes of neoliberalism. Thus Julier’s research is in opening out discussion of design into political economy theory and placing the analysis of design activism between these.

Spatial Planning and Design Citizenship

The application of design within city planning and governance has hitherto taken various, related guises. It is to be found in the renovation of streetscapes for urban regeneration, the development of place-brands, through policies that promote the ‘creative city’ and within cultural planning. Each of these represents relatively ‘top-down’ approaches. More recently, design has been drawn closer into public sector innovation processes in some instances. This may be read as part of a shift in public policymaking from New Public Management to network governance. It also involves a move from design as an objectoidal outcome to design as process. It includes a more person-centred, results-driven approach that pragmatically looks to the most efficient outcome in terms of public sector service delivery. This challenges traditional bureaucracies and spatial arrangements for it invariably transcends their usual hierarchies and boundaries. Key drivers here have been the multiple challenges that have been set through austerity agenda in public policy. New alliances and hybrid possibilities for connecting public administrations and citizens may emerge. This chapter traces some key tendencies and examples here, in order to critically analyse the possibilities and limitations of a concept of design citizenship.

Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, by Anne Balsamo

Old Empire and New Global Luxury: Fashioning Global Design, a specific case study analyzing the complexity of contemporary fashions global dimension through a detailed analysis of the Australian fashion designers Easton Pearson. Finally, Michael Golecs essay on the technology of the telephone analyzes the dominant role of telecommunications in the organization of the flow of global capital (p. 91), highlighting the intimate connection between design, new technologies, and globalization. As well as providing a multitude of provocative perspectives, Global Design History also includes a useful research guide comprising museums, research networks, libraries and archives, and websites and related resources, in addition to a bibliography, making the anthology invaluable as both a teaching resource and guide to further research.