The line between what’s real and what’s not is very blurred.

Some people would argue that the September 11 happened before it really happened.
There was a certain familiarity to images of September 11, when the real event does not seem real.

There is something in the nature of the media that is deceptive.
Representation is inherently evil.

(diagrams here)

They don’t neutrally perceive the world.
Images produce reality.
The image has a power to deceive us.

Falseness of the Image

We are given the event without the reality of it = sensory deprivation, because we see only the picture, without experiencing the smell, touch, overall context of the situation. We receive a cleaned up version, very neutralized. It distances us from the real event, because we do not need to experience the sadness, pain, despair, or joy and happiness of those in the picture, we receive it as a fact, but exactly that makes us indifferent to the world, which is very sad indeed.

Consumer led design started with a style, called streaming in North America in the 1920s.

Designers:

Walter Dorwin Teague
Norman Bel Geddes
Henry Dreyfus
Raymond Loewy

Economic recession in the late 20th was blamed on people not buying enough.

Q: How to make people buy more?

A: Make it cheap (mass production technique), style it (make it look ‘different’)

- this led to the trend of making things that would break down quickly or look out of date quickly. This is called 'built on obsolescence'
- 'built on obsolescence' made room for people to buy more and cheaper products, so they could own more things than before.
- Unsustainability is a direct result of this trend

Reference:

Nigel Whiteley, Design for Society, London, Reaktion Books, 1993
Tony Fry, A New Design Philosophy: a defuturing, Sydney, UNSW Press, 1999

links here