Speculations "In the bubble" - J ohn
Thackara The expression "in the bubble" is used by air traffic controllers to describe their mood when the lights of display screens and information flows, all goes well and the situation is under control. Most of us feel far from having control. We are filling the world of devices and systems formidable only to discover that these complex systems now appear uncontrollable: too complicated to be understood fully, or even to be modified or redirected.
Things may seem out of our control, but are not beyond our reach. Many reasons for concern that plague our world are the result of design decisions. Eighty percent of the environmental impact from products, services and infrastructure around us is determined at the planning stage. Decisions made at this stage give shape to the processes that determine the quality of the products we use, the materials and energy needed for their production, how to use them daily, their destination when we do not need . Although it was not our intention to get to this point and we regret the way things are going, we are the ones to have designed the situations with which we are forced to confront today.
It is a good example of the habit, quite improper to define "irrational" the sprawl, sprawl in the suburbs of our cities. We are concerned the continued expansion of low-density suburban areas on millions of hectares of virgin land, as well as the environmental impact of these areas, obesity in people who live there and a whole host of social problems connected with it . No one seems to have planned this expansion urban sprawl: it just happened, or so it seems. A closer examination, however, the sprawl of urban areas does not seem irrational at all: it is rather the result of zoning laws developed by the legislative bodies, buildings, low density building designed by the manufacturers, marketing strategies created by advertising agencies, tax concessions designed economists, lines of credit offered by banks, traders applied geomatics, data analysis software developed by fast food chains and, of course, cars are designed by designers. The interaction of all these systems and human behavior is complicated and difficult to understand, but those policies are not due to chance. The out of control is an ideology, not a fact.
If we can design ways to make life difficult, we can design others to solve our problems. The scientist Herbert Simon argues that each of us is a designer, when he finds a way to change an existing situation by making it more favorable. Even by Victor Papanek design is the basis of all human activities: a structured any actions aimed at a desired goal is a design process. The human activity is in itself a project.
