Reconsiderations
Does Socialist Realism Still Exist in Contemporary Arts and Design in North Korea?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joo Kim, Huxiang Tan
Art is an expression and representation of everyday culture. The art in North Korea is still relatively unknown to Western countries. Pier Luigi Cecioni, an art dealer, has started to introduce and sell North Korean art to the West at his gallery in Tuscany, Italy since 2006. In 2016, an exhibit called “Contemporary North Korean Art” was shown at the American University Museum in Washington D.C. This show was organized and curated by BG Munh, a professor at Georgetown University. This was the first exhibition of North Korean art in the U.S. The definition of contemporary art in this context is artworks created today, unlike contemporary experimentation in the West. North Korean art is mainly based on propaganda, which is approved by the state. According to Cecioni, North Korean artists are not interested in conceptual and abstract art, but rather technical mastery. This study includes 1) analysis of contemporary North Korean visual arts and design, 2) the influence of western aesthetics on North Korean art.
Design as Problem-Seeking Disciplines, Designers as Problem Identifiers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carlos Fiorentino
Designers are traditionally seen, when not as mere applied art practitioners, as problem solvers. Different from other artsy disciplines, “designerly ways” (Cross, 1982) are characterized by focusing on addressing problems, and improving human life (Frascara, 2006). What is not commonly known is that rather than problem-solving, design disciplines can be problem-seeking disciplines (Oxman, 2018) and designers can be also good problem identifiers, by training or by experience. Designers can be reflective practitioners, as well as generalists, and work as synthesists (Papanek, 1998). This essay reflects on these aspects and how they shape design theory and practice, and on the role of designers as problem identifiers at the verge of significant changes involved in a current anthropocentric disciplinary crisis.
A Duck Test for High-fidelity Anthropomorphic Services
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gustav Borgefalk
In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of anthropomorphic (human-like) services and interfaces with a high level of fidelity and realism. Renderings of human characters in photos and videos, chatbots, voice assistants and online influencers are examples of contents of digital mediums that are designed to reflect human looks, voices, conversations, movements, or communication styles. The implication for design is that service designers must now learn how to work with realistic simulations of humans in different aspects of their work. In contrast to cartoons or other non-realistic anthropomorphic representations, high-fidelity human-like characters used in consumer-facing services presents unique ethical challenges. It calls for upgraded frameworks for understanding the limitations and affordances of the novel materiality, which properly highlights the risks and opportunities with technology that passes for human. In this conceptual paper, I introduce a Duck Test for assessing whether a simulation of a human can pass for human or not. The duck analogy was originally minted by James Whitcombe Riley, who once wrote that ‘When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”. (Riley 2017) The Duck Test complements the Turing Test and the purpose is to ascertain whether a subject is believable enough to pass for the real thing.
Towards Responsive Architecture: A New Agenda to Address Global Challenges
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Adam Blaney
The paper proposes an agenda for ‘responsive architecture’ to provide commitment and action to address the significant global challenges of the 21st century. Various strands of design research in this domain exist, however their potential application remains limited due to the lack of a coherent way to understand their diverse capabilities. This paper aims to bring together this emerging field of design research by creating a taxonomy and illustrating it with practice-led research focused on prototype material systems. Mapping the properties and capacities of these novel material systems within a taxonomy begins to shape an agenda for responsive architecture and articulate how it can be used to tackle major global challenges. Furthermore, the practice-based research I have carried out establishes how the range of research mapped within the taxonomy can be unified. The work is interdisciplinary and highlights: 1) the important role design research can play across boundaries in order to explore and address complex problems. 2) New abilities for digital modalities by mapping parameters of digital design representation to parameters of stimuli that can guide material scale self-assembly, which generates patterns and structures that can physically tune and adapt their material properties across length-scales, dimensions-scales (2D to 3D) and time-scales. Significantly, this research establishes various design principles and practices that can unify these diverse areas of research to better understand the contribution that the interdisciplinary collaboration, commitment, and action that underpins responsive architecture provides.
