2/12/10: Symposium 3 of 8, Making High Quality Design Available to the General Public

Overall, I think our group presentation was a success. For me personally, it started off on a bad not because my group did not even know I was a member. When I contacted them, they were surprised and had already started thinking about the project. Because of that, from then on I always felt a little disjointed from the rest of them, as if I was an intruder upon their project.

Nevertheless, we all got along well, cooperated and split up the work fairly equally. Group projects are often frustrating to me because I often end of being the person that carries the heaviest workload but that did not happen to me this time. I always felt I was doing my share of the work but knew that my teammates were doing the same. I never had to ask if they had completed something, they just did it. And the same went for me. After we split up the work and I found out that I was covering Classicism and Threats to Democratic Design, they did not need to check up on me and follow my progression. Instead, each time we met to prepare for the presentation, we would report to the others what we had found, bounce ideas off on another, and think up questions that we wanted to present to the class.

Although it was quite easy for me to discuss Threats to Democratic Design because of the suggested reading, “The Architect & The Other: Can architecture be democratic?” by Jeremy Till, I found it much more difficult to come up with material for Danish Classicism based on the required reading. Instead, I did a little research into Danish History between the late 1700’s and mid 1800’s and ended up finding more interesting and relevant material than the reading presented. For instance, I think the Copenhagen fires and the rebuilding that followed were very interesting examples of how the city was designed for a more democratic living experience.

Also, quite by chance, in my Memory & Identity: France course that previous Monday, a guest lecturer mentioned the Grande Arc de la Defense in Paris that was designed by a Danish Architect. When she also mentioned that it was built to celebrate humanitarian victories as opposed to military ones, I thought it was a perfect example of what our group was trying to describe. A design that not only reflected democratic ideals but could be enjoyed by anyone. It was a very small aspect of our presentation but I was pleased with it nonetheless. I thought Holly’s idea for the Tiger game was very clever and made the class interact with the presentation. I do wish that they could have been more awake but over my last month at DIS, I have come to realize that students here just do not participate as much as they do at my home university. That said, our group was planning on doing a debate, with one half of the class arguing that Democratic design has to be for the “other 90%” and the other side arguing that it does not, but because of their low level of participation, I don’t know if it would have been successful and so in retrospect, I am a bit relieved that we did not end up carrying it out.

La Grande Arche de la Défense
http://www.channel4.com/4homes/images/mb/Channel4/4homes/architecture/styles-of-architiecture/french-architecture/La-Grande-Arche-La-Defense---gt_full_width_landscape.jpg

In the end, I certainly learned a lot - about Danish history, product design, and democratic design. And I think the conclusion I walked away with is that democratic is an ideal more than anything else. It is an aspiration that can never quite be attained because people will never be quite equal. But, I think a very good point was raised that our group never considered: the aspect of choice. Democracy is not equitable with social equality but it does imply the ability to choose. If this is the case, then perhaps democratic design can and does exist.