Abstract for Design Culture II - The Skateboard: Looking at How a Design Object Can Influence a Culture

     Thoughts about how people are going to interact with the design you make are crucial in the design process. Objects have the possibility to change how a person or group of people view and interact with the world. The skateboard, an object often associated with activity and play, is one example of this. In this essay I will explore different views of culture and use the skateboard to research how design objects can take on a certain role in a society. Focusing in particular on the introduction of the skateboard to Afghanistan, a nation with a culture different to most Western countries, I will look at how this object of design has influenced the kids and whether it can cause a change in culture. Bringing something new and foreign in to an established society can have both its positive and negative sides and I will look at different sources to explore these.
     Due to the differences in culture looking at Afghanistan compared to USA or New Zealand, where skateboarding has been popular for a long time, the meaning of the skateboard also differs. There are strong relations to the activity that are similar between countries and cultures, but also some that only exist with one culture. How does this contemporary object exist in one place compared to another?
     The way skateboarding has evolved in Western culture from the surfboard, is not a part of the story of skateboarding in Afghanistan, where the skateboard was introduced as a completely new object, not as an developed component of a previously designed object. I’m interested in looking more into how the skateboard changed these different cultures and to what extent. How do the values of the people in these countries influence the way the object is used and what it represents?

Annotated Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective

As the title says, this book looks at objects in relation to culture and different societies. I would like to use this as a resource to understand better what different design objects represent to humans.

Brown, Bill. Objects, Others, and Us (The Refabrication of Things). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 2. Chicago Journals. Web. 16. Oct. 2012. 

This is a journal from JSTOR that looks at objects in relation to time and their interactions with humans.

Fitzpatrick, Jim. Skateistan: The Tale of Skateboarding in Afghanistan. Berlin: Skateistan, 2012. Print. 

This is going to be one of my main sources because of its explanations of the Skateistan organisation and general descriptions of how skateboarding was introduced in Afghanistan. It also includes facts about Afghanistan culture and the country.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

I want to see if I can find this book or excerpts from it to use as basis for my essay, especially when writing about the cultural aspects. Geertz, who was a known researcher of cultural anthropology, wrote the book and it includes several topics linked to my research question.

Heller, Steven and Finamore, Marie. Design Culture: An Anthology of Writing From the Aiga Journal of Graphic Design. New York: Allworth Press, 1997. Print 

This book is a good asset to my essay because of it discussing the aspect of cultural ownership and different definitions linked to culture. It also looks at the culture of skateboarding and how the artistic side of it improves interaction with kids (from page 44).

To Know a Lot About a Little or a Little About a Lot

     Looking at "The March of Progress", the famous illustration drawn by Zallinger, it is quite obvious how humans' appearance have changed through time. We have, however, not only gone through great physical changes, we have also changed on a psychological level. Comparing today's society to how it looked just 20 years ago truly shows how humankind's knowledge has developed.

Zallinger, Rudolph. The March of Progress. 1965. Early Man volume, Time-Life Books

     Alongside the development of knowledge itself, our self-awareness has also changed. In "Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas" Silvio Gaggi explores how our view of our own knowledge changed through the shift between modernism and post-modernism. He gives an example using the famous Marilyn Monroe images by Warhol, explaining how the audience's knowledge about the person in the image and the awareness of the process to make it changes the way they perceive the image (57).

Warhol, Andy. Marilyn Diptych. 1962. Tate, London.

Duchamp, Marcel. Fountain. 1917.
Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington.

     During modernity, in the early 20th century, the industrialization helped us become more aware of the different design processes and hence more conscious of how our knowledge is incorporated into our creations. Gaggi writes that "Postmodernism can be understood as differing from modernism either because it extends modernist principles further than modernists themselves did or because it rejects them" (19). So, knowledge started to be used in new ways and the post-modernists were trying to grasp over as many areas within art, politics, music etc., as possible. We still value this mentality today when we're living our lives trying to get the most done out of as little time as possible and searching for new knowledge and information whenever the opportunity arises. In this process of gathering knowledge we also have to remember the idea of how knowledge about an object will enhance its beauty (Gorman 133). So if we're just scratching the surface of everything it might start to be hard finding beauty in anything the way we once could. Can we see the beauty in Duchamp's "Fountain" without having knowledge about the artist and the work itself?
     Knowledge has and will always be a value for us, especially within the area of design, but could it be that the progress of how knowledge is used both as a tool for creation and for interpretation has steered us into a reality where quantity is valued more than quality when it comes to knowledge? Henry Miller's famous words "In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance" might have more relevance today than one would initially think.



Works Cited
Gaggi, Silvio. Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Print.
Gorman, Carma R. The Industrial Design Reader. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. Print