MODERN 2.0 – Post-criticality and Transdisciplinarity

Abstract

In Chapter 4, “MODERN 2.0 – Post-Criticality & Transdisciplinarity”, Rolf Hughes and Ronald Jones give an account of a graduate seminar on transdisciplinarity they led in December 2009, for the Experience Design Group at Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Stockholm. Rather than deliver a pair of prepared monologues, they decided on a more dialogic mode of presentation. This chapter is the record of their conversation. Developing Jack Burnham's identification of a paradigm shift from an “object-oriented” to a “systems-oriented” culture, Hughes and Jones consider how contemporary designers pursuing greater responsibility, influence, and relevance might contribute to today’s complex social problems. Their answer: by designing transdisciplinary social, political, economic, and educational “systems”. In a global economy, the authors argue, the seductive promise of epistemological transformation is less significant than the transdisciplinary design team’s capacity to impact meaningfully on urgent social, political, and ethical questions in ways beyond the reach of corresponding monodisciplinary, crossdisciplinary or even interdisciplinary initiatives. They discuss the increasing need to design transdisciplines “as interdisciplinary methods begin hitting walls, finding their own limits of relevance”. Citing examples ranging from Hans Haacke’s Rhinewater Purification Plant and Filipe Balestra’s Samba Architecture project in Brazil, to Freeman Dyson’s vision of artists and designers in the near future using genomes to create new forms of plant and animal life that will proactively reverse the effects of global warming, their vision is that of a debugged modernism - a post-critical, transdisciplinary project - a “Modern 2.0” capable of “realistically rebooting the Modern dream of an attainable Eden”

Train wreck at Montparnasse Station, at Place de Rennes (now Place du 18 Juin 1940), Paris, France, 1895