The Idea of Newness - Case Study Example

PRODUCT DESIGN: NEWNESS VERSUS NOVELTY We understand newness as a concept denoting events, products, ideas, technologies, works of art, and processes of collaboration or coordination that have an irritating impact when they occur. This working definition incorporates at least two problem fields, which can lead to a more differentiated understanding of newness and novelty. On the one hand, an object or practice becomes a novelty on the basis that it opens up new possibilities (cf. Barry 1999). The concern here is not only with the novelty of the objects or processes themselves, but also with the novelty of the references, within which new objects attract attention. The attribution of newness usually arises in association with positively valued qualities, often supported by the inclusion of criteria such as originality, progress, or truth. From a historical perspective, the positive treatment and appreciation of newness can be described as a consequence of the functional differentiation of modern society. Religion, the political system, science, business, and art not only display different degrees of receptivity to novelties, they also react to it at different speeds. The appreciation of newness can be observed, in particular, in the field of fine art towards the end of the 19th century (Hughes 1971). The establishment of the idea that the value of works of art arises from the special skill of the artist and the privileging of the original over the copy, channeled attention to new works of art. The associated appreciation of newness also abandoned the idea of the work of art as a representation of reality and therefore highlighted the self-referentiality of art (Luhmann 1999b). Hence, newness assumed a key position within the art system both in the sense of a product (novelty) and in the sense of an evaluation criterion (newness). Newness plays an increasingly significant role in the field of science and technology. There is a permanent quest in these fields for new scientific insights and technological inventions, which are only deemed to be novelties if they extend or transform technological and scientific paradigms (Schummer, forthcoming). In addition, technical objects and scientific facts achieve visibility and value by being marked as “new”, thereby providing orientation to users. Can newness be considered new any longer? Is the concept of originality in contemporary art even possible or relevant? Interpreted as fresh, transformative, or even deliberately backward-looking, the idea of newness seems empowered by our own personal and idiosyncratic senses of perception, achieved via emotional, intellectual, and physical responses to art. While encountering art, is it our individual experience, together with our collective cultural participation (one informed by familiarity and repetition of exposure to the particulars), that develops a sensation of the new? The resulting voices collected here are diverse. While some responses explore newness as the embodiment of growth—in the artists’ use of material and conceptual explorations—other participants define development in their practice in relation to their environment, understanding of history, and/or marrying of sensibilities. Newness, then, becomes a grouping of ideas, concepts, and histories contextualizing each of these artist’s works. Some responses, stemming from disciplined routine and ritual studio practices, point to experiential growth (Joshua Abelow, Franklin Evans), while others reference the recombining of influences and environment (Ali Banisadr) and an elastic temporality stretching from the present (Josephine Halvorson). In addition, several display a self-aware engagement with political, scientific, and mythological histories (LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Brooks, Matthew Day Jackson, respectively). Lastly, other replies locate a socially conscious awareness and reinterpretation of capitalist and material contradictions (Liz Magic Laser, Mary Mattingly, Georgia Sagri). The idea of newness is extended and challenged by the global reach of information technology. In this process, freshness is achieved by a synthesis of recombined and pre-existing elements. As in cooking, no work of art can be repeated exactly the same way twice. Making art becomes about the foraging of components and the reconstitution of history, influence, and the current moment. In the end, it is evident that we are continually reassembling universal and personal lexicons already used countless times before—but never exactly collected in this particular way—in a context that, until now, has never before existed. The demand for the new is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it places the artist at the whim of a somewhat sinister dimension of consumerism, and on the other hand, I am disappointed by art that lacks the ambition to innovate the conversation. An artwork is never inherently new, but we can strive to break down concepts and methods, to digest and reconstitute them anew. Most recently I have been looking to the journalist as a role model of someone who insinuates themselves in an ongoing dialogue between the media and the public. My idealized model of the journalist I’d like to emulate is someone whose commentary takes up pre-existing terms to offer a new perspective that has the potential to impact the situation at hand. History of New: Then and Now Newness was at the core of modernism—Harold Rosenberg extolled the Tradition of the New and Robert Hughes explored The Shock of the New. In 1936 Alfred Barr theorized the emergence of the New with a complicated engineering-style diagram that illustrated his theory that art evolves through a process of exhaustion and reaction. Three years earlier, Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias had offered a model based on the image of the family tree ever sprouting new growth. Clement Greenberg, of course, did away with diagrams altogether and espoused a theory of new development based on a linear drive toward ever more reductive purity. Today, the New is old news, a tattered, moth-eaten idea that has gone the way of progress, originality, and beauty. As artists and curators serve up helpings of slightly refurbished old dishes—among them appropriations of appropriations, reenactments of 1970s-era performance works, and collections of battered objects and unshaped materials whose roots in post minimalism and arte povera are obscured by labels like Unmonumental and The Ungovernables—critics lament that it’s all been seen before. Collectors, meanwhile, don’t care as long as their oddly familiar acquisitions come swaddled in the rhetoric of avant-gardism and risk. Newness is less a matter of seeking to do something that has never been done before than it is a byproduct of practices that embrace and even fuse art with other disciplines, explorations, and fields of study. Museums, art fairs, the art market, and the commercial gallery make this kind of radical newness harder to recognize because they are designed to deliver reliable products. By contrast, the really New may not fit neatly into a gallery space or exhibition booth. In fact, it may not look much like art. The attribution of “newness” is itself a cultural valuation process which, according to our thesis, determines innovation along with the other constellations. The concept of newness highlights the fact that innovations are neither obvious nor attributable to individual creativity. (3) Causality does not provide an adequate explanation for the modes of action whereby cultural configurations influence novelty. Cultural sources do not necessarily give rise to newness but rather create opportunities that are recognized and acted upon by people, who are then deemed creative. It is apparent that the internet, the satellite, as well as other forms of information communication technologies will herald the greatest revolution in information since the printing press was invented. The extent to which this will happen is not a major concern for this paper. Rather, it is to discern how change in information technology is evaluated, conceptualized, and manifested in attempts to reshape institutions and laws. Governments the world over are trying to discern how the newness of technology is affecting the capabilities of old institutions to regulate the newfound realities. Furthermore, there are efforts to understand the cultural dimensions that emanate from altered patterns of information and image flows. Then, on the basis of inadequate information, governments are trying to probe methods of managing what are perceived as the consequences. Another critical quality of newness is how people describe the social organization through which information comes from the source of original content to those who consume it. The new media technology has portrayed its potential to alter the power of contemporary entities such as political parties, department stores, and television networks. Policy makers and stakeholders who desire for a technology that destroys the current mediators-creating a freer pathway between producers and consumers of information- may be more tolerant in implementing issues than those who harbour the perception that the new technology merely re-mediates. Newness has many facets; it can present itself as newness within technology, for example, in the design of the shifts or interface in control over computational processes. Newness can be discerned in the impact of altering notions of distance or changing the speed of processes that could otherwise be hard to accomplish in a slower environment. Thus, newness can mean shifting institutional arrangements, for example, when governments lose power or institutions lose their force. Furthermore, newness can result in epistemological impacts, for instance when technology alters a person’s perception of self or of collectively, and when it challenges the existing ethical perceptions. It would be precise to speak of newness if technology could herald new narratives, new apocalyptic stories, and new notions of immortality or perfection. Therefore, the newness of new technology can be assessed by whether its emergence alters, profoundly, human behaviour. Such broader senses of the new are crucial even as people turn to the narrow sense of the introduction of new technology. In many industries, new products are same in functional properties though they tend to compete on their unique design. Companies such as Apple, Alessi, and Kartell follow a design-oriented innovation approach and utilize their products’ visual appearance as the major mean of differentiation. Despite this, design newness does not form any subject of discussion among the dimensions of product innovativeness. Rather, conceptualizations of product innovativeness often focus on a product’s technical newness or the changes that it implies for the innovating company or for its intended market. Advantages and Disadvantages of New Technology With the introduction of the new technology, production and consistency has become greater as new production methods are adopted. New technology has precipitated greater job satisfaction which serves as a motivation to employees to work harder since boring and repetitive tasks are now performed by machines supported by the technology. New technology facilitates the production of better quality products due to the precise production techniques and better quality control procedures. With new technology, there is prompt communication and reduced paper work, due to computers, results in increased profitability. Technology advances show people a more efficient way to do things, and these processes get results. For example, education has been greatly advanced by the technological advances of computers. Students are able to learn on a global scale without ever leaving their classrooms. Agricultural processes that once required dozens upon dozens of human workers can now be automated, thanks to advances in technology, which means cost-efficiency for farmers. Medical discoveries occur at a much more rapid rate, thanks to machines and computers that aid in the research process and allow for more intense educational research into medical matters. Disadvantages of New Technology The rate of unemployment increases as computers replace human workforce in offices and industries. New technology is changing very fast and may eventually become outdated at some time in the future. This will force businesses to look for new alternatives in order to maintain their competitive edge. With the introduction of new technology, employees need to be trained constantly thus increasing the operational costs in industries and factories. The more advanced society becomes technologically, the more people begin to depend on computers and other forms of technology for everyday existence. This means that when a machine breaks or a computer crashes, humans become almost disabled until the problem is resolved. This kind of dependency on technology puts people at a distinct disadvantage, because they become less self-reliant. At the same time, human workers retain less value, which is a disadvantage of technological advances. Because machines automate processes and do the work of 10 people with one computer, companies find they don't need to employ as many people to get the job done. As machines and computers become even more advanced and efficient, this will continue to be a growing disadvantage of technology and an issue that has a global impact. The various ways in which we think about newness – revolution, evolution, paradigm shift – can all be traced back to earlier and simpler models that were first put together by the Greeks. It’s not the case that later thinkers were consciously copying earlier ones. Instead, the fact that the same models persist over time suggests that there is something necessary about them. What you might say is that the history of ideas about novelty illustrates the main point I’m making about novelty itself, that what passes for new is actually the old revived or rearranged in some way. Modernism, as a movement and as a collection of works, has turned out to be more durable than the postmodernism that was supposed to replace it.” Technology makes more technology possible, as we can see if we look for a moment at the process of innovation. Technological innovation consists of three stages, linked together into a self-reinforcing cycle. First, there is the creative, feasible idea. Second, it is practical application. Third, its diffusion through society. The process is completed, the loop closed, when the diffusion of technology embodying the new idea, in turn, helps generate new creative ideas. Today there is evidence that the time between each of the steps in this cycle has been shortened. References Berthoin Antal, Ariane (2009): Research Report: Research Framework for Evaluating the Effects of Artistic Interventions in Organizations. TILLT Europe: Göteborg Carr, Adrian/Philip Hancock (eds.) (2003): Art and Aesthetics at Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Joy, B. (January 01, 2000). Why the Future Doesn't Need Us - Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech -are threatening to make humans an endangered species. Wired, 8, 4, 238. Read More