Learning from all things

I continue with my rereading and personal reinterpretation of the texts of Robert Venturi y Denisse Scott Brown, I find them increasingly appropriate and inspiring to reflect on the origins of current approaches to Interaction Design and User Experience.

In the mid-1960s, Venturi and Scott Brown rebelled against the architects who considered themselves “modern” and who boasted of their heroism for their logical, aesthetic and elitist vision of design, proposing accepting the complications of the common man instead of ignoring them and starting from scratch:

“I prefer the hybrid elements to the “pure”, the compromised to the “clean”, the distorted to the “straight”, the ambiguous to the “articulate”, the distorted yet impersonal to the boring yet “interesting”, the conventional to the “designed”, the integrating to the “excluding”, the redundant to the “simple”, the irregular and equivocal to the direct and clear. I defend confused vitality over transparent unity. I accept illogicality and proclaim duality. I defend richness of meaning over clarity of meaning; implicit function over explicit function. I prefer “this and that” to “this or that”, black and white, and sometimes grey, to black and white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and focuses on many points: its space and its elements are read and function in several ways at the same time”.”

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York, MoMA 1966)

Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi were a kind of postmodernist parenthesis in the elitist world of architecture: they are supporters of a modest, vulgar, conventional and ordinary architecture. They are inspired by the things that surround us in our everyday world, the popular elements, the natural mix of different eras and tastes that coexist in our streets.

They make statements that would make more than a few people pull their hair out (and which are not bad in times of crisis):

When faced with “ordinary” buildings on “ordinary” budgets, we must learn to enjoy the vulgarity, for as Pop artists have shown with their ironic hamburger and inexpressive soup cans, this is the way to get away with what is demanded of us.

That is to say, the world is not perfect, there are projects that do not require any other type of recipe, not everyone values the extra cost of “beauty”, and even the possible rejection that it may provoke in users. We all know some cases of the typical successful project, apparently “ugly” or poorly designed.

They also poke their finger in the eye of designers obsessed with wanting to redesign everything, of taking total control of the environment, designing all the things in it. They don't think that conventional elements (furniture, kitchen utensils, etc.) are so horrible, but rather things that we should pick out of a catalogue. In the case of Interaction Design it could be the native controls of each system or browser (buttons, drop-downs, etc.).

They criticise architects who, deified, impose their taste and way of doing things without taking into account the environment and the socio-economic context of the users. For the latter, they offer some guidelines on the attitude to maintain in the dialogue with the end user or client:

Save your anger for social evils, not for the “degradation” of the taste of the “masses”, and your energy for the difficult task of finding ways to put your knowledge where your heart is. Try to help people to live in homes and cities the way they want to live. Try to do what satisfies you and them. When you disagree, do it honestly and without the tone of the “experts-injured” (...). Irony can be the method that allows all these cultures and values to come together. The ironic (not cynical) observation of the status quo is the gentle subversion of the artist. It harms no one except the self-appointed prophets of architecture, but it helps to keep perspectives in focus.

Denise Scott Brow, Co-op City. Learning to like it. 1971

This all sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?

Incidentally, the title of the blog refers to this fantastic compilation booklet where you can find these and other texts by the authors.

 

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