My partner Titus Levi has raised all sorts of interesting questions: from the alternatives to war economics to who we take seriously about framing "the news," and by extension, meaning. What strikes me about what Titus writes is so much is about resource allocation, whether physical, financial or mental.
There's irony in the fact that beyond building tanks and jets or making movies, the economy of California is part of this nation's bread basket. Or more accurately, fruit basket. I still remember my father, an environmental planner, marveling at a visit to San Diego County in the 1980s as he saw the color of the dirt. "It's so rich what you can grow here," he said. "Look at how beautifully rich and dark it is." He was visiting me at school at UCSD, and back then, in 1987, fruit farms still graced the drive much of the distance south of Irvine until you came in to the edges of San Diego, and if you drove just out of the San Fernando Valley, it was farming country all the way to the northern boundaries of the California. Bountiful.
Within years, land that had been farms had been turned to condominiums, the hills of Southern California blossoming with town house developments. I'm not going to bemoan development. We all need a place to live. And construction provided an awful lot of people an awful lot of work. The mysterious thing to me is this: first, at what point do we, as individuals have any real power to have a "say" into what growth happens and how? Sure, we elect officials, but my bet is half the carpenters who built those homes, and even folks who live there now, bemoan what San Diego development lost in its gain.
Last weekend, surfers from the quiet town of San Clemente were interviewed on NPR, angry at the possible loss of a terrific beach called Trestles to make way for a new toll road. To ease the traffic.
I'd surfed Trestles once, and it's a terrific beach, even for a lousy surfer like me. It's next to a nuclear power plant, which may have its own bad side effects, but the water is clear and the sand bright and the contours of the land give the waves a long lovely swell. I still remember the earth beneath the ocean shaking as some of those waves would break.
Whose interests finally rule in such allocation of money and land - surfers or drivers? And are those even the competing parties? In the last year we have been writing about infrastructure. One of the reasons it fascinates us is its massiveness. How do we get access to shape it?
As a colleague at my branding firm says, "infrastructure predetermines solutions. How do we frame what we view as "solutions?" There are some interesting blogs like Treehugger doing a good job of reframing what constitutes a solution. And one thing Titus and I always wanted on That's Capital is to involve designers to talk about economics. In my experience, designers are great thinkers, not as ideological as architects, more willing to blue-sky ideas than "planners," usually tactile men and women who enjoy working with their hands. I wonder why designers, outside of product development for business, are so rarely brought to the table to think of "solutions" about society as a collective.
What would a designer who worked on chairs or computers or cars do around designing an economy? Recently, there was a New York Times' article about America's Great Plains farmers abandoning their tradition of growing wheat to plant corn for ethanol. America as "breadbasket for the world" will be no longer.
Having spent a few summers on a farm, I know enough not to be sentimental about that world. It's hard as hell, demanding a discipline few of us have. Early to bed, early to rise. These family farmers are simply trying to survive best they can. They are following a market. A market spurred by pursuit of alternative fuels to oil.
Whether the person who shapes what's considered "news" is Katie Couric or John Stewart, the real news seems to be happening so much more mysteriously. Under our noses in the quiet but steady decisions impacted by and impacting infrastructure. I have no answers for this. Only questions. Concretely, how can we bring a more transparent or understandable design process to the market? And where are the designers willing to take that on?
Last year in an effort to get an interview with Bruce Mau, I went to hear him talk. He was a fun performer, a passionate, "can do" man with interesting ideas. The idea I best remember was when he pointed out that the organization of American business has changed multiple times in the last 200 years. But our political system has remained static.
In one sense he was displaying the hubristic idealism of all big designers. But in another he was dead-on. Where are the designers willing to take on politics and market politics... not simply to save great surf beaches like Trestles or even build better housing developments and roads, but to help all of us design a way to understand what "good" means and what are the values that underlie our "solutions?"
Jonathan Field
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