“Taking Hostages: Exercises in Design Détournement” is now online. The 114-page book contains “design fiction” essays by 13 students from the NSCAD Master of Design class of 2012, edited by me, with a foreword.
Design Détournement
The concept of “détournement” comes from Guy Debord, a poet connected with the “Situationist Internationale” that was active in the 1950’s and ’60’s.
For the Situationist, détournement is “plagiarism, where both the source and the meaning of the original work was subverted to create a new work.” (Urban Dictionary) Subsequent forms of détournement have taken the form of “culture jamming”, where standardized commercial and promotional practices are subverted by campaigns such as Adbusters’ “Buy Nothing Day”. I would argue that these approaches are ultimately self-defeating because they are so easily re-integrated into a corporate agenda.
Culture jamming has been quite recently exercised, for example, in the “Hitler meme” of countless YouTube videos using the movie “Downfall”. In these works, a portion of the movie where Hitler rants emotionally about his Generals’ incompetence and perfidy (which is filmed with actors speaking German) is re-subtitled with text that might lead non-German speakers to believe that Hitler tirade is actually about a lost football match, or the use of the “Comic Sans” font in Nazi propaganda, or how to find a tub of ice cream in war-ravaged Berlin. This phenomena gained its counter-culture cred when the movie’s copyright holder exercised “YouTube takedown” actions, only to reverse them a few months later after an extensive internet brouhaha.
Another recent example of contemporary détournement is Limor Fried’s “TV-B-Gone”, which is a powerful infrared TV remote which allows the operator to switch off a television—or otherwise “jam” it—surreptitiously and anonymously from a distance, or her “Wave Bubble”, a (completely illegal to use) RF jammer that prevents cellphone use. These are just a few more current examples of détournement. Designers can and do make use of parody and—as Limor Fried calls it—“design noir”.
The Essays
The work in “Taking Hostages” are speculations which use as their foundations the work of others. They share a purpose to satirize, and not lecture, but their point is not to merely elicit laughter. Nor are they intended to be didactic or by frontal attack attempt to batter down the walls of our credulity. Each work seeks, with subtlety, to “express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.” (Debord, 1967). This book’s design projects and accompanying essays serve to demonstrate the range of speculative concepts that can be released in a single spasm: “Taking Hostages: Exercises in Design Détournement” includes, among others, Joseph Rau’s tree design which lampoons designers’ inability to leave well-enough alone, Hodgkinson and Cianci’s pop-up store for garbage, Martyn Anstice’s hand-crafted newspaper, and Kevin Dahi’s Syrian T-55 tanks, détourned into ambulances.
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