The Design Division at CCA welcomes Andrew McLuhan as our final speaker in the 2022 Spring Design Lecture Series. These live lectures bring us together across time zones and disciplines as we meet leading designers, strategists, curators, and educators to speak about contemporary practice, discourse, and making.
Andrew McLuhan, the third in a family line of esteemed cultural and media critics, was invited to CCA by the BFA Industrial Design program and hosted by alumni Omar Ansari (BFA IxD 2020). Grandson and son of the esteemed media critics Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Andrew weaves threads of the McLuhan practices with his own teaching, writing, and hopes for designers as we contemplate the profound effects of new media and design in culture. “In design and engineering,” he says, “we make choices that have existential consequences (no pressure).”
Andrew joins us from a beautifully crowded nook in a repurposed barn, surrounded by files, boxes, notes and images. With no slides, his beautifully crafted talk starts by unpacking Marshall’s most famous book title The Medium is the Message. “The message,” Marshall said, “of any new technology, is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts, but the structure of our world.” Consider the shift in our world structure when we go from writing to typing, calling to texting.
The media, Marshall argued, is not simply something we use, but more like an environment we inhabit. As an environment, Marshall argued, media “transforms our perceptions governing the areas of intention and neglect alike.” Andrew describes that while his father’s and grandfather’s work were inspired by a curiosity for how things work, his own path is more focused on practical applications and exercises that help students confront big themes like the impact of the cell phone on our daily lives. He ends the formal part of the talk optimistically, “As much as we design ourselves into these messes, we can design ourselves out of them. In the past, the majority of the effects of our technology were unintended. Tomorrow, with what we know today, we are in a position to potentially make most of the effects beneficial and intentional, by design.”
And in the Q&A at the end, he drops a final gem to help us anticipate effects as we work-the four laws of media, developed and tested by his father and grandfather. New media, they posit, always 1) enhances some function, 2) obsolesces something, 3) brings back something old but in a new way, and 4) and, if pushed to an extreme, reverses its characteristics.
Authored by Sarahleah Fordyce
23 июл 2023
