to: ellipsis ...
from: jcj
21 July 1996
subject: letter twenty-one U
attachments: e-mails of utopia and numeroso,
: depending on everyone
dear ellipsis ...
This letter is a bridge between my fictions and
the future, as are the other four letters to come.
The fictions began, as you see, from my
dissatisfactions with industrial design as a way
of improving life. It's not comprehensive enough.*
Nor is architecture, nor engineering, as all are
tied to the finding of forms for specific objects:
products, buildings, or machines. Not to mention
graphics and books and all computer software, such
as it is. None is adequate to the design of the
culture itself.
And of course there is this new question of 'the
design of the internet' which no one to my
knowledge, apart from Nick Routledge in
'World3',** has considered at the large scale of
'how it is experienced' instead of at the smaller
scale of 'how it is produced and sold'. End of
story so far.
But
It is a strange story, and an unfinished one, and
these letters could be the next step towards
completion of that vision of 1967 when for me it
all began (in 'Trying to design the future'*).
Others have wondered why I put so much of my
thinking out in fictional form and 'what am I
supposed to get out of it?', as Tom Mitchell said
to me recently. So, in this brief letter I will
try to answer that question.
'But how', as Tom Mitchell wrote in a recent
letter, 'are your fictions supposed to resolve
this? Why not limit yourself to clear descriptions
of how you see things, such as in the texts on
automation, or or ?'
Well, I'll try to answer in a paragraph, though
there is something in me that resists ...
... The answers that come to me when I pause to
think are as follows:
- I enjoy it enormously
- there are no social barriers
- I don't have to explain
- as in the design plays,** or the u+n piece, I
don't have to be 'someone telling others what
to think'
- you're not meant to 'get something out of it';
you are encouraged to make worlds of your own
- 'what does it mean?' is a wrong question, always
fatal to art or to nature
- what is the meaning of a tree?
- it is meant to undo, not to fix ...
But I'm not going to continue, it's too out of
character for the one who is writing this to
explain; it subverts my 'designing', my art. So
I'm going to pass the question to the next
attachment in which Utopia and Numeroso are free
to give any answers they like (if they want to and
if they can).* And I will also attach 'Depending
on everyone' which is one of my most rationally
inexplicable pieces, one that began more factually
until suddenly it became fiction and flew (thanks
to some words from a friend).
So now I'm hopeful that anyone who is still
reading will jump from 'what's this?' to 'enjoy'.
jcj