Which is why, these days, I find myself arguing for some kind of benign chaos, and abandoning a measure of organisation and structure (both inherent in the definition of ‘design’) to allow for more random, unmediated patches of unmanaged response and purposelessness – even just plain silence. I’m arguing for more humanity, for more Africa.
We’re reminded by post-modern social thinkers that the emphasis on design nowadays is inextricable from the emergence of shopping as the primary culture of developed societies. More and more products compete for our attention, and each has to communicate a unique distinction to capture a jaded consumer’s attention. The trouble is, the context (design) often overwhelms the content and the consumer, who is drawn by the context is left dissatisfied and frustrated. Which makes them harder and harder to reach, to communicate with. It becomes a self-negating cycle: design rather than substance is used to attract the and briefly sustain the consumer’s attention. Its allure fades and ends up disappearing into the irritating white noise that surrounds our lives. And the disappointed consumer, still compelled by a search for meaning or resonance, just moves onto the next thing.
Marketers and product managers too often think of their markets as somehow orderly, navigable, the result of a coherent architecture, rather like the cities of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, or Canberra (both of which were purpose-built as their nation’s capitals but suffer from a sterility that compels a degree of both individual isolation and collective dysfunction). In fact, most markets are like Lagos in Nigeria. If you’ve seen recent photos of this city, you’ll immediately understand what I mean: there, unfinished freeways and main roads blocked by cars and buses — which use them as parking lots — evolve as extemporary autonomous zones, as shanty towns and massive, makeshift bazaars, loci for simultaneous domestic, social and commercial interaction; they’re no longer useful as arteries for any kind of mechanized traffic, but work effectively, if chaotically, in other, better ways.
In 1999 and 2000, the Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas and the Harvard Design School’s Project on the City studied Lagos, Nigeria and the total breakdown of basic infrastructure and civil order there that defies conventional wisdom on how cities develop. Koolhaas wrote, “We resist the notion that Lagos represents an African city en route to becoming modern… Rather, we think it possible to argue that it represents an extreme and paradigmatic study of a city at the forefront of globalizing modernity.
“That is to say, Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos.”
If design and communications are to evolve, if they’re to continue to be effective, they have to acknowledge the increasing incoherence and lack of control that are apparent in today’s fragmented, individualised audience/consumer base. They have to become somehow chaos-compliant, rather than operate on the artificial construct of demographic or social order.
They have to respond to the human, and the natural disorder that defines that.
First published, in a slightly different form, as the preface of Living Brands: Collaboration + Innovation = Customer Fascination by Raymond Nadeau (published by McGraw-Hill), USA, 2006.
