14.2.20 Happy Valentine's Day!

Today is Valentine's Day, but it does not seem to have anything to do with me.

This week's lecture talked about imagining Life Beyond Capitalism. The tutor explains the Capitalism in detail. And introduced what is the adversarial design. I have learned a lot from this lesson about how capitalism affects human life and society, and also found the relationship between capitalism and the Anthropocene in my research, which is the environmental impact of the consumer society we live in. One absurdity is especially powerful: Capitalism is premised on the separation of Humanity and Nature, but in fact, I think capitalism may only accentuate a certain tension between man and Nature.

Reading

This week I read The Shock of The Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Interestingly, the relationship between capitalism and the Anthropocene is also mentioned in this book. The author proposes that capitalism, to some extent, has also aggravated the development of Anthropocene and environmental degradation. I think the new technology brought by the expansion of capital will do great harm to the environment. For example, The Great Smog that arose in London in The 20th century was caused by The smokestacks that were erected after The industrial Revolution of The 19th century in Britain, and large quantities of industrial exhaust accumulated for decades. It can be seen that capitalism, while bringing convenience to human life, also brings irreparable harm to the environment and climate.

Besides, about adversarial design, the term "Adversarial design" was originally used by Carl DiSalvo in his book Adversarial Design (2012), as an attempt to provide design criticism as an approach to thinking about political expression, computation as a medium and the processes and products of design. In addition, the idea of design as a process of competition, disagreement and debate is rooted in its design practice and philosophy. Carl DiSalvo thinks "The urge to design - to consider a situation, imagine a better situation, and act to create that improved situation - goes back to our prehuman ancestors." I think as a kind of design method, it is not necessarily a critique of The political, Adversarial design is more about getting people thinking. It is different from human-centred design or user-centred design, and I think it's more of a reflection of what's going on in society today, like global warming, species extinction, the Anthropocene.

What I learned this week

1. Rediscovered capitalism and realized that capitalism is not just the political and economic system of a country. However, in capitalist realism, Mark Fisher argues that society seems unable to imagine life outside capitalism. Mark Fisher identifies many social problems, including rising temporary values, unstable employment, short-term memory, illiteracy and attention deficit.

2. Learn about the adversarial design methodology from the lecture and reading, including the theories, concepts, and methods of adversarial design. And understand the representation form of Adversarial design from some projects.

Some useful links about Unit 2.1

1.Adversarial Design - Carl DiSalvo

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhbs4?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=Adversarial&searchText=Design&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DAdversarial%2BDesign%26amp%3Bfilter%3D&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search%3A403588e3ebc87e109dcf3adfae516bfb

2.“Western Melancholy” / How to Imagine Different Futures in the ”Real World“?

http://interakcije.net/en/2018/08/27/western-melancholy-how-to-imagine-different-futures-in-the-real-world/

3.What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/

4.Capitalist Realism (2009) - Mark Fisher

https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf