Extractive Efficiency: Global Systems, Global Objects
The research project Material Ecologies of Design welcomes everyone to join the one-day symposium Extractive Efficiency: Global Systems, Global Objects. The symposium is free to attend, and basic lunch and coffee will be provided for those who register in advance. Please register by 6 February.
Which strategies and methods for more efficient use of extractive materials did designers develop in response to the issue of resource scarcity raised by the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s? This seminar will examine how design culture responded to the over-exploitation of resources by deploying the full arsenal of late-modernist preoccupations with rationalism, economy, and effectiveness. This “scientification” of design as an activity and profession is underpinned by an ideology of efficiency. In this optic, extractive materials are seen as finite resources which are increasingly scarce (or will become so), and which therefore must be utilized with care, prudence and the greatest possible economy. Presentations will offer a range of case studies, from arguably the most global product of all, the Monobloc plastic chair, via the material ramifications of intercontinental gold trade and the diplomatic functions of coal in Cold War Europe, to the neocolonial extractivism of Swedish iron ore mining in Liberia.
Provisional Programme (subject to change)
11:00-11:15
Welcome by Kjetil Fallan (Professor at University of Oslo) and Ingrid Halland (Associate Professor at University of Bergen)
11:15-12:00
Keynote lecture by Robin Schuldenfrei (Professor at The Courtauld, University of London): Tracking global materials: Objects between the global and the local
This lecture focusses on the material politics of global objects. It follows the global rise of essential materials to consider the transference of things between cultures and places by looking closely at the materiality, which is also political, of universal goods. Therein, this paper elucidates some ways in which materials are deeply engaged in historic and ongoing colonial ecologies and cultures, and sheds light on their attendant politics, their exportation of power and cultural influence. Considering the modern rise of materials that are deeply entangled with the empire’s vast web, it focuses on raw goods, production methods, trade colonialism and other actions, as well as transport networks, technological infrastructures, and other large global forces at work that impact the most basic material components, influencing the resulting objects. The British Empire and its networks will be one starting locus.
Plastic, as a material, presents the opportunity to consider one object in depth— the ubiquitous Monobloc polypropylene chair, mainstay of school classrooms, outdoor cafés, and allotments. It is an object which has achieved the ultimate placelessness, while replacing a local culture’s chairs, from Bangladesh to Guyana.
A seemingly minor note within underlying global systems’ reach of mass-scale destruction of the environment through extraction of materials and related labour abuses, the Monobloc chair will be used to exemplify some paradoxes of our present. Holding the local and the global in dialectic, the chair offers local bodies respite, yet serves far-flung markets. The chair's rise is indicative – a symptom of postcolonialism’s worst ills, including cultural erasure of local furniture typologies, and a panacea in the form of a readily available low-cost furnishing type. By focussing on the Monobloc chair, this lecture excavates the pathways of current global capital that allows for the circulation of the very cheapest of goods, whether for the British schoolroom or the Nairobi mega-church. In tracking global materials, certain objects became so ubiquitous that they seem universal. Their rise is not accidental, this paper argues, but indicative of underlying global systems, cultures of origin, and changing cultural norms.
12:00-12:15
Questions and discussion
12:30-13:30
Lunch
13:30-14:00
Anders Munch (Professor at University of Southern Denmark): Plasticising Consumer Experience: Discussions of waste and resource management in Danish plastic design
14:00-14:15
Questions and discussion
14:15-14:45
Kasia Jezowska (Senior Lecturer at University of New South Wales, Sydney): An Extractive-Industrial-Exhibitionary Complex: Coal Diplomacy in Cold War Europe
14:45-15:00
Questions and discussion
15:00-15:30
Coffee break
15:30-16:00
Elisa Maria Lopez (Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Architecture, KTH Royal Institute of Technology): A Swedish People’s Home in Africa: The Architecture, Planning, and Design of a Liberian Iron Mining Town, 1960–1980
16:00-16:15
Questions and discussion
16:30
End