The Thin Line of the Lemming.

‘‘Even if you try, you can’t escape it.’’ (Fisher).

On Choice & Makeup:

Makeup suggests the borderline between modernity’s promise of being understood through the marketing of selected identities and being a lemming, for me, in that I know when I choose to wear makeup I’m buying into consumerist culture’s thought that wearing it will allow me to - and facilitate me in - expressing my inner self: how I want to be seen in and by the world around me. Photoshopped models selling that flawless female possibility tell me: you’ll be successful and confident when you look your best, and that best is wearing makeup. It’s at the borderline because, while I’m buying into makeup as self-expression, knowing it’s a modern marketing ploy (how can I be showing my best self when I’m covering myself up?), in truth, it actually does aid - in some ways - self-expression: I can change my makeup based on my mood or how I want to be perceived day to day, and I have a sense that I’m portraying my most-refined self: a lemming, I am. I feel like I’m playing myself up, but at the same time like I just hopped on the makeup train with everybody else and their disguise of a social identity.

On Choice & Clothing:

When it comes to clothing, it’s often necessary to succumb to the ‘new’, due to the nature of manufacturing, itself: I often don’t have a choice when I try to choose otherwise. While clothing collections are released each season, I oppose and choose to look elsewhere for clothes: scouring thrift shops for things that are my style, in good shape, and have been saved from landfills - but it can feel like an unviable alternative: the planned obsolescence of clothing manufacturers - that is, the shortened cycle of consumption through its emphasis on the fashionability and ephemerality of everyday goods (Woodham 67) - means that the need to keep clothing desirable (Sparke 21) results in used items that were too trendy or fashionable in their time to be useful, today - they truly are produced with throwaway consumption in mind. For example, the shape and style of jeans from the eighties or nineties literally do not fit me - it could be my body type, but most often it’s the fact that these were designed fleetingly and with one time, style, and silhouette in mind - not lasting, flattering, comfort - so that companies can then produce another trend - meaning, if I’d like a pair of jeans that fit, I’ll most likely have to buy new ones with a modern shape,  despite trying to choose otherwise. Clothing’s on the borderline between modernity’s promise of choice through delivery and being a lemming because I feel like I’m able to choose: but at the same time, I’m not.

On Choice & The Reusable Coffee Cup:

My reusable coffee cup, to me, suggests the borderline between modernity’s promise of choice through delivery of a selected identity and being a lemming because, with it, I’m choosing to do the environmentally, socially responsible thing by using one, but the choice has become a rather lemming thing to do, these days: everybody’s doing it, so it’s trendy. We’re at this time in society where the right behavior - using earth-friendly consumer alternatives - means becoming a lemming that does so. In this case, choosing to follow the masses in this regard is actually beneficial to the earth, making most of us with reusable cups not lemmings. I think you’d be a lemming if you bought many reusable cups because they were pretty, or if you bought a reusable cup every time you got a coffee - thus defeating the whole purpose of limiting harmful consumption, and demonstrating how that lemming isn’t fully aware of what’s going on or what the purpose of the reusable cup actually is. But if you buy one reusable cup knowing full well the impact you’re saving the environment because you’re not using plastic-coated, non-recyclable cups every time you consume a hot beverage, as I have: a lemming you are not. It’s not chosen for me to use one - though I think shops should ban the use, already, of these petulant paper cups for good and force people to go reusable - I choose to use my cup for the right reasons. Bonus points in that I chose to buy an old, used thermos instead of a new plastic cup.

**

It’s a self-deprecating question, choice or chosen: the fact of the matter is, I can choose to go against society by not having a cell phone, cable, a microwave, or not changing my name when I marry: but I’m still just choosing from options A or B that are already chosen for me to choose from. In that case, doesn’t anything we choose make us a lemming?

Photo Sources: 1/2/3  

Works Cited:

Fisher, Maxe. Class Notes. DHIS 201: Design Culture II. Emily Carr University. Vancouver. 31 October, 2012.

Sparke, Penny. ‘‘Consuming Modernity.’’ An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present. London, Routledge.

Woodham, Jonathan M. ‘‘Commerce, Consumerism, and Design.’’ Twentieth Century Design. Oxford University Press, 1997.
 

Industrial Revolution vs. Marital Bliss.

Photo source.

Even with modernity’s promise of universality and the industrial revolution’s advances in industry, women still struggled to have an equal role as men in early modern society. In this essay, I will argue that the changing role of women due to mechanization - and the resulting transformation of the familial domestic platform - disrupted traditional home life and resulted directly in discord within marital relationships: the residual effects of which still exist, today. Beginning with Sarah Gordon’s study of women’s domestic sewing practices at the turn of the twentieth century, Make It Yourself, I will research traditional gender roles, the move to factory jobs, effect on family tensions, and men’s criticism of - and often unwillingness to accept - women’s progression beyond a purely home-based role. I aim to recognize this history, and gauge whether residual male perceptions are - and can be - naturally resolved with further progression and education on the level they continue to exist at, today, by way of studying current domestic issues.

Works Cited:

Baxter, Janine, Hewitt, Belinda, and Haynes, Michele. ‘’Life Courses Transitions and Housework: Marriage, Parenthood, and Time on Housework’’. Journal of Marriage and Family 70. May 2008: 259-272. http://empower-daphne.psy.unipd.it/userfiles/file/pdf/BAXTER_2008.pdf

In this recent study on domestic housework in various situations of cohabitation, it’s concluded that women spend approximately 3 times as much time on housework as men: supporting the idea that an inequality in domestic work still exists today. It was also found that the amount of housework done increases when a woman goes from cohabiting to being married, whereas for men marriage has no change in the number of hours they contribute - and it’s only shown that the time men spend doing housework increases when, and if, they go from being married to separated from the wife: supporting my thesis on continuance of domestic inequality.

Gordon, Sarah A. Make It Yourself: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

In Make It Yourself, Gordon examines domestic sewing practices in the home at the turn of the century, and how they were affected by factory-produced garments and jobs for women. In chapter one, she argues that - while working women found buying clothing necessary due to newfound time constraints with factory jobs, sewing at home continued on a large scale due to social standards and stigmas: even if households could afford manufactured clothing, it was an expected act in a woman’s ability to run and care for a household, to be a ‘good wife’, and to appease her husband by saving money, and was looked down upon if it wasn’t done. Gordon also delves into how sewing eventually earned women cottage-industry independence by way of earning their own incomes, and - though she remains objective - factually states how men believed that a woman earning money diminished his dignity, in this era, with detrimental effect.

Hansen, Thomas and Slagsvold, Britt. Home Equality. NOVA Rapport 8/2012. Nova - Norwegian Institute for Research on Adolescence, Welfare and Aging. 223. http://nova.no/asset/5912/1/5912_1.pdf

This European study examines how cohabiting or married men and women divide housework: it reinforces the typical statistics that in the majority of unions women do more housework, but also delves into the role of gender stereotypical traits in the division of chores: finding that men and women with less stereotypical ideas about gender are more likely to equally divide housework, and vice versa - and that younger couples are more apt to think this way, as opposed to older generations, in which these gender stereotypes of men’s and women’s roles in the home are highly integrated. It also reveals that women tend to be more open to gender equality ideas than men, and the correlation between the amount of housework done and the opposite partner’s resulting relationship satisfaction.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada, 1986.

In this feminist study of Motherhood and feminine strength, originally written in 1976, Rich openly opposes society’s ‘higher intrinsic human value to men than to women’: declaring resistance to the traditionally oppressed role of the woman as the housewife and mother, and the man as the sole wage-earner. She argues that men fundamentally oppose the idea of strong women - stemming from feelings of inadequacy, due to the power of women in harnessing all life on the planet - at a subconscious, profound level, and therefore oppression stems from men’s fear, resentment, and harbored anxiety - and that it has an economic cause and solution.

Wosk, Julie. Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

In this text, the fine line between gender stereotypes and the liberation of the working girl in the industrial ‘domain of men’ is examined (with a celebratory undertone) as Wosk overviews women’s role in many facets of industry, from Bicycles to Wartime - all the while proving the contradictory push and pull between how women were working in industry, and how it’s was perceived in an opposite light by men. She also explores, in chapter seven, how men’s stereotypical views failed to change and progress with time, and how machines helped women reconfigure their roles and redefine their identities in the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the face of ever-present male criticism and doubt.

Zlotnick, Susan. A ‘’World Turned Upside Downwards’’: Men, Dematerialization, and the Disposition-of-England Question. JHU Press, 2001. Google Book. <books.google.ca/books?isbn=0801866499>

In this examination of written work in the era of Britain’s industrial revolution - with an objective but ‘turn of the century men are ludicrous’ stance – Zlotnick examines case studies and testimonials cited in critical and fictional men’s writing of the new industrial era. She identifies the underlying issues in these written pieces in the early chapters to be men’s unyielding fear of the changing gender roles of the time, throughout: citing proof that the liberation of women as the factory worker was seen as a threat to the male role, and therefore it was openly criticized by the majority of men in written literature as a degrading ‘perversion of nature’ that signified the breakdown of patriarchal traditions in Britain: complete with case studies of the ‘abandoned’ man who’s unable to manage and care for his kids while his wife works at the factory, at a time when this is genuinely seen as the woman’s downfall, not the man’s blatant inadequacy.

Design with no Soul: To market, to market.

Dehumanization was valued in Modernism, and continues to underpin design today.

In the modernist era, the move away from the decorative and personal toward a widely appealing style
(Raizman 167) meant that items were designed in uncluttered functionality, with clean necessary lines, and were homogenously produced by precise industrial machines: pumping out generically-styled items for the masses: in essence, epitomizing all the things we as complicated, imperfect human beings are not.

We don't align in geometric rows, nor are any two of us the same. Our pen to paper is not flawless.
Some of us are downright cluttered: we relate to the personal in design.

Modernism extracted that connective human component in favor of homogeny, and it continues to thrive: objects are designed almost solely for mass manufacture - if an object is too ‘decorated’ or geared toward one, it will not span utopia successfully. The iPhone, for example, is a widespread plain silver sleeve. We all carry the same rectangular laptop. We all own a pair of jeans. Our homes come as blank canvases that we customize.

Things are so dehumanized now that if you want to make one of these generically designed items your own, you must purchase another mass-produced item made to ‘customize’ that first generic item: which a few thousand other people also own. The success of objects meant purely for the customization of other objects alone is enough to cement that this simple dehumanization of objects not only carried forward from modernism, but that it spurned a perpetual cycle of generic consumerism.

Thankfully, the questioning of whether designers are meant to conform to such impersonal standards also underpins design today, as it did in the Modernist era. 

Henry Van de Velde - in antitheses of the Werkbund - likened the imposition of design standardization to castration of the artist’s gifts of invention (Conrads 30) in 1914, and states that the artist ‘‘Of his own free will he will never subordinate himself to a discipline that imposes upon him a type’’ (Conrads 31), and that what one has found to be a standard shouldn’t be imposed on others (Conrads 31).

And, ironically, the De Stijl design group - which began in the spirit of unified modernist collaboration (Raizman 170) seems to have been driven apart when founder Van Doesburg leaned toward individually-geared design as valued over the collective (Raizman 172): disbanding because ‘‘despite shared principles, individualistic preferences persisted’’ (Raizman 171).

Our means of production carry on this dehumanization, so is the designer's natural inclination against it the only thing that prevents design from becoming impersonal, aesthetically - today as it did then?

‘‘Too perfectly made is a sign of enslavement and is dehumanizing’’ (Fisher).

Photo Sources: 1/2/3/4/5/6/7.

Works Cited: 

Conrads, Ulrich. ‘’1914 Muthesius/Van de Velde: Werkbund Theses and Antitheses.’’ Programs and manifestoes on 20^th-century architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1975. Ed. Ulrich Conrads. 28-31. <http://books.google.ca/books?id=lXSg6NMDAN0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Fisher, Maxe. Class Notes (John Ruskin Quote). DHIS 201: Design Culture II. Emily Carr University Vancouver. Sept. 18, 2012.

Raizman, David. ‘’The ‘First Machine Age’ in Europe. Part III: After World War (1918-44): Art, Industry, and Utopias.’’ History of Modern Design: Graphics and Products Since the Industrial Revolution. King Publishing, 2003. Ch 9, 167-191. <http://books.google.ca/books?id=J_NcHIW-zt8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Design was primarily a moral act.

''Don’t let the machine determine what you make/design'' (Fisher).

As a designer, your values are the key driver of societal change. 

It’s what you choose to do with technology, not technology itself that drives this change: it is but a tool in a designer’s arsenal - to help carry out what one wishes to impart on the world. Today, you can accept it. Ignore it. Work alongside it. Mindlessly follow or break away from it: create new things using old ways to keep alive the nostalgic sense of the artist’s touch - that evocative ''character of the handmade surface'' (Kaufmann Jr. 61).

It is, in my opinion, an admirable independent distinction in this technologically-driven age to hand-draw your font, to paint your poster’s text, to letterpress print a logo, to whittle a chair.

To move away from the standardization of things.

With the loss of the commercial craftsman at the introduction of the industrial age, so too did we lose individuality in design - but now, full circle, the fortunate designer can choose to hand-make in a sea of technology-aided production, and technology can also aid in finding a commercial audience! Both the traditional methods and the benefit of the new are for there for the taking.

The use of an old printing press, for example, is not to 'revert back' - but is rather a moral branch out from the firm base upon which design and technology as we know it today are based: a foundation we as designers are innately aware of the need for (Kaufmann Jr. 61).

''One must realize that it (society) embodies at one and the same time everything that it has been, is, and will be in future'' (Raizman 63).

If our values and traditions as designers are abandoned, with technology instead
solely driving change - where does that leave design?

Photo Sources: 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, 9/10, 11/12.

Title Excerpt: (Kaufmann Jr. 59)

Works Cited:

Fisher, Maxe. Class Notes (On William Morris). DHIS 201: Design Culture II. Emily Carr University. Vancouver, BC. Sept. 12, 2012.

Kaufmann Jr., Edgar. ''Nineteenth-Century Design.'' The MIT Press, on behalf of Perspecta. Perspecta, Vol. 6 (1960), pp. 56-67. Sept. 23, 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566892>

Raizman, David. ''Chapter 4: Design, Society, and Standards.'' History of Modern Design: Graphics and Products Since the Industrial Revolution. <http://courses2.ecuad.ca/pluginfile.php/32735/mod_resource/content/1/Reading%20THREE.%20Design%2C%20Society%20%20Standards.pdf>

On Design.

I sand and paint a small yellow ceramic chick when I am five, and I remember holding it up in incredulous wonder. I made this. My mom hangs my elementary drawings on the fridge, and my teacher's happiness when I illustrate my kindergarten journal in slurred crayon is exuberant - the cover on which I recall pasting a patterned wallpaper scrap. Things can be made from my hands. That addicting realization of transforming small parts into amazingly tactile things. Hands on. Made. Fondled. Befuddling personality and ripe humanness, melded into every visible thread. Stitched together bit by careful haphazard bit. Spent some time with. Felt. Sensory happenstance. It jumps off the paper to be experienced in the coziest of surprise. Home after a long day. A familiar hug.

But, racing downhill in exhilarating newness faster than your legs can circumvolve. The wind mussing your hair. Adventuring into new territory, blind. We've been here, it says. Once nothing, something firm that won't wisp out of your grasp. Didn't materialize out of thin air. Connected. Firm roots. Remembering where it all came from in a kind of familiar relative confusion.

What it's like to be both five, and one hundred and five.

Photo Sources: 1/2/3/4/5