Dead Ends: Vernacular

Welcome to Dead Ends, a monthly podcast about how the world around us is designed and how it got that way. And then mostly. And isn't that interesting? I'm one half of your host, Sarah Drummond, and.

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Lou

I'm the other half. Lay down and this is the Dead Ends podcast. We hope you enjoy the show. So this month we are talking about one of my favorite topics, which is vernacular.

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Sarah

You know, this month was supposed to be last month.

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Lou

Yes, I am aware of that. But we both had really bad colds and you seem to have got another one.

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Sarah

I. So if I sound a little stuffed up today, that's because I am. I'm so I'm writing the second wave of flu.

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Lou

Yeah. Excellent. Second wave is always the best wave.

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Sarah

So what was June's topic? You know, in July, June's.

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Lou

Topic was vernacular, which is something that I think about pretty much every day. I'm a bit like that meme, where, you know, you ask your partner how often they think about the Roman Empire.

00:02:13:07 - 00:02:14:22

Sarah

Do you think often about the Roman Empire?

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Lou

I actually don't, but I think every day about vernacular design.

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Sarah

I think quite a lot about the Roman Empire.

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Lou

Okay. Well,

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Sarah

I had a book on it.

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Lou

Right. What do you think about the Roman Empire?

00:02:24:20 - 00:02:36:08

Sarah

Well, I often think about the tactics where they don't get the shields together, and then they'd move left and kind of right in this kind of unit. I often think about that. And the very nice kind of leather skirts and skirts.

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Lou

You had it here first, the technical term, the leather skirts.

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Sarah

So you were saying that you often think about vernacular.

00:02:42:06 - 00:03:10:19

Lou

I often think about the vernacular. Do not think about the Roman Empire. but that word takes a lot of explanation. I feel, because it conjures up lots of things that are to do with architecture that are maybe kind of hard to work out how they apply to design. But anyway, the thing that got me thinking about it, I was gonna say this week, but imagine this week, last month was that we had someone come to visit, our barn, which is made out of copper.

00:03:10:19 - 00:03:39:03

Lou

And some of you know that we live in a very old house in Devon. and the barn that we have is made out of basically earth, and Cobus material that is basically just clay mixed with straw and hair and sometimes animal poo. and it's basically used to make, a solid wool, and it's used as a building material around the world in loads of different places where there's heavy clay, and sometimes it's called Adobe, sometimes it's called club, which I think is weird.

00:03:39:03 - 00:04:11:09

Lou

But anyway, moving on. so our cabana is in the Devon Redlands area, which makes it really bright red. And it's kind of that way because basically it used to be a desert here millions of years ago, on this very high iron deposit. So it's really beautiful. And the sky that came out to have a look at our barn, I couldn't help but ask him the question of whether or not Redlands compounds are different in any way to Cobb that he's seen in any other area, because it's quite a common building material.

00:04:11:11 - 00:04:33:03

Lou

And he said something kind of weird. He said, basically, the Cobb in our area is straighter and I was like, why? Why is it straighter? I think I might have just grilled him because basically. Tldr he had no idea why it was straight, so he just said it was and it just got me thinking, like, is it the materials that mean that it has to be straighter?

00:04:33:03 - 00:04:58:11

Lou

Or is it the person who was doing it, was there like someone hundreds of years ago who was like teaching everyone how to make cow bones with really straight walls in our area? It just got me thinking about the fact that actually what goes into the architecture of your area or the materials that are used, a kind of a mixture of geology and personality and materials.

00:04:58:11 - 00:05:13:01

Lou

And it got me thinking about vernacular and how important it is to the built world around us, and also got me thinking about whether or not it shows up in services and if so, how. But first, I think we need to do a bit of a dictionary definition of what we mean by vernacular.

00:05:13:02 - 00:05:41:04

Sarah

Well, I told people actually that we were going to do a podcast about vernacular, and people's first response was often thinking about speech. I would also kind of naturally be inclined to think vernacular is about speech. In fact, the term vernacular came from the word vernacular, which means national or domestic in Latin. So I guess it's got some kind of like local, regional, geographic premise to the meaning of how we apply that word to different, things.

00:05:41:04 - 00:06:02:07

Sarah

But yeah, vernacular language was a speech variety spoken locally between a group of people, usually within a particular region. So it's got kind of origins for some people. The mental model around the world vernacular, the word vernacular as speech orientated. But of course, you and I, I guess coming from a bit of a design and art background, have learned a lot about vernacular through the built environment and architecture.

00:06:02:09 - 00:06:34:10

Lou

And it's really interesting how similar the definition is in architecture as well. And, you know, the, the, the shortest dictionary definition of vernacular in architecture I can come up with is the vernacular architecture is an architectural style and concept that reflects the geographic and cultural context of the site and surroundings, focusing on local construction with traditional and regional materials, vernacular architecture usually serves immediate local needs and is constrained by the materials available by a particular region, and reflects local traditions and cultural practices.

00:06:34:12 - 00:06:53:09

Lou

And I think what's really interesting about that is that word constrained, it's constrained by the local materials that are available to you. And it's kind of the same with speech. You know, we're sort of constrained by our understanding within a particular community. The words are important to us. And so they become localized.

00:06:53:10 - 00:07:14:21

Sarah

Do you know, do you have a dictionary reading voice that doesn't exist? Right. So it's quite funny, sort of like a definitely punctuate it. Anyway, so I'd point out, in case you didn't know, you wanted to know. I was so I was thinking about this episode in the word vernacular, and I delved a little bit into some of my very old notes that are stuffed away in a box in our house, from art school.

00:07:14:21 - 00:07:36:23

Sarah

We used to do, historical and critical studies as part of our design, which I really, really enjoyed, the sort of history of how the world gets designed, around us. And I went back to some of the work of Stuart Brand that we learned about. He was an American project developer and writer, best known as a co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, which I'm sure will probably cover in another podcast at another time.

00:07:37:04 - 00:07:59:15

Sarah

But he described and defined vernacular as indigenous building of a place and this kind of idea that it really started out as a survival method by humankind to build their own houses from the locally available materials in an area, because you didn't have access to new and different materials from different ground, different earth, different, you know, manufacturing processes that exist in the places.

00:07:59:15 - 00:08:18:21

Sarah

But it got me thinking a bit like this podcast is about the world around me, and why isn't everything designed to reflect its place using its local materials? And I guess that's a life long podcast episode, I imagine, on capitalism, which often comes up in our episodes. And I started thinking a bit about the idea of formal overseas vernacular architecture.

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Sarah

So take like Lech Abusir, if you don't know, like ABC, I think very modernist, like straight line edged architecture. That's a really very trite explanation of his architecture. But take his plan. Vossen from 1925, which was a redevelopment plan to replace a large area of central Paris on the right bank of the River Seine River and then the River Seine, always saved the time.

00:08:44:04 - 00:09:06:06

Sarah

It was anyway. River flowing river. So you say sign, I say sign, whatever. It was never implemented, but the ideas and principles behind it inspired a movement of architecture around the world. And this was a kind of, I guess, formal architecture. What we mean by that is it's designed by a small number of people over a short period of time, and on a set of assumptions about how a building a place is going to be used.

00:09:06:08 - 00:09:29:03

Sarah

And you can always trace formal architecture back to a couple or a small grouping of architects that worked at a particular point in time. Whereas in contrast, we might consider vernacular as being designed by a large number of people over a long period of time. It's evolving. It has evolution to it. Then this type of architecture is produced by an entire society over the course of several centuries.

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Sarah

It's the product of an evolutionary process which results in structures being adapted to the needs of their actual users. So while you can often identify design oversights with formal architecture, you can't really do this when it comes to vernacular architecture, it's a lot more difficult to do this since the products of this kind of evolutionary process, these buildings, are then perfectly suited to the people who inhabit them.

00:09:53:00 - 00:10:20:23

Sarah

You could kind of say it's a sort of long tail of agile, continuous improvement in local vernacular architecture. What we mean is that these buildings in the vernacular are tailored to the surrounding landscape and the climate around them. So we can kind of take this idea of vernacular as meaning more broadly common designs by common people. And what makes cultural commonness so special is its ability to evolve steadily over time.

00:10:21:01 - 00:10:44:00

Sarah

This all being said, though, we're now seeing architects pick up this conceptual idea of vernacular design and applying it into their more formal forms of architectural design, if that makes sense, to architects not local to a place, but respectful of this common wisdom and cultural common sense are applying it to their architectural designs that go into local regions.

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Sarah

So they might not be from there, but they're using that kind of ancient, you know, even ancient, but centuries of wisdom and knowledge. And we can see this, quite beautifully in a sense, in the work of American architect Diane Kellogg, who, designed the Raj Kumari, Gold School, this was funded by an American foundation, called Sita.

00:11:05:01 - 00:11:26:14

Sarah

And they built a school that educates 120 goals in the heart of the Thar desert. So she inspired, I guess, by the vernacular and wanting logical sense of how she should design that building, opted to use locally sourced sandstone, which is a climate resilient material that's been long used for buildings in that area. And when Diana was interviewed, she said, it's so abundant in this area, it's very reasonable.

00:11:26:14 - 00:12:00:01

Sarah

And price and the extremely talented stonemasons are just magicians with the stone. It actually keeps the heat out and also keeps the coolness out at night. So working to the vernacular made economic sense. but it also made sense in terms of the resilience and the, you know, how to inhabit that building in a comfortable sense. And among some of the traditional, techniques that Diana Kellogg incorporated into the design is lining the inner walls of lime plaster, which is a porous and natural cooling material that helps release any trapped moisture resulting from the kind of high humidity you get out in the desert.

00:12:00:03 - 00:12:23:08

Sarah

And inspired by other buildings in the region, she also installed a jelly wall, which is a kind of massive sandstone grid that enables wind to accelerate in a phenomenon called the Venturi effect, which cools the courtyard space while also providing shade from the sun. And all of this kind of really great design resulted in indoor temperatures at the school approximately 20 to 30°F lower than the outdoors.

00:12:23:10 - 00:12:42:00

Sarah

And when she was actually asked about the vernacular, she said, these are methods that we use to cool spaces that have been used for centuries. What I did is I put them together in a combination that worked. So that was something in what Diana said that really got me, intrigued me into thinking about another part of vernacular, and that's cost an economical context.

00:12:42:05 - 00:12:55:00

Sarah

When she talked about sourcing the sandstone, she talked about how cheap it was. And so I started to think about vernacular in a sort of more expansive way, thinking about constraints again and how they affect designs. Does that make.

00:12:55:00 - 00:13:34:16

Lou

Sense? Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about what you've just described is I can really recognize that design, apart from obviously, the amazing cooling wall, which we don't have, but that's very similar to the construction of our house, actually, big cobbles, lime plaster on the inside. And I think what really unites a lot of these vernacular approaches is that they require the minimum possible effort, and you see that, you know, in building, but you also see that in, you know, kind of, permaculture methods as well in gardening, you know, like the things that stick around within local communities are often the things that require the least effort.

00:13:34:18 - 00:13:53:02

Lou

You know, growing nitrogen fixing beans with your corn means you don't have to fertilize them, you know, means you don't have to support them. You know, they can climb up the corn. All of these, things just require the least effort so that we can get on with our lives because we have time constrained. Right. And I think that's a really interesting constraint, to vernacular as well.

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Lou

Yeah.

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Sarah

And building on this idea of vernacular in constraints, in this sort of almost economic thing that Diana Kellogg nudged out, you know, prompted us to think about it got me thinking about another building that we can sort of analyze to explore this again, this kind of constraints and vernacular. And I remember when we were doing historical and critical studies, we did a bit of reading into the Wainwright Building, which is one of the US's, I don't know, inverted commas.

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Sarah

First skyscrapers, first very tall building. No. If you went to see it now, you'd be like, that is not the total. But at the time and looking at the skyline, it was it was known as a skyscraper. So the Wainwright Building, also known as the Wainwright State Office Building, is a ten story. It's it's not really a skyscraper.

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Sarah

It's just a.

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Lou

Building that's a big building, 40 skyscraper.

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Sarah

41m, 135ft. Terracotta office building at 709 Chestnut Street in downtown Saint Louis, Missouri. And the Wainwright Building is considered to be one of the first as esthetically through the expressed early skyscrapers. It was designed by Dagmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and built between around about 1890 and 1891. It was named for a local brewer, building contract and financier Ellis Wainwright.

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Sarah

So, you know, you got the money, you get a building. Imagine like a building called, like Drummond Towers. But that's like Trump Towers. Oh, God. No, I take that back. I just, you know, when you shouldn't say things out loud. Anyway, it was called. It was named after Ellis, Wainwright and Sullivan. post. This was dubbed the the father of skyscrapers.

00:15:24:03 - 00:15:46:09

Sarah

And I've always loved thinking about this building in terms of this idea of like form follows function function, both form and sort of exploring that. And the first floor of the Wainwright Building was intended for street accessible shops, with the second floor filled with easily accessible public offices. So the higher floors were built in these kind of honeycomb office structures, while the top floor was for water tanks and building machinery.

00:15:46:09 - 00:16:10:10

Sarah

And actually, when you look at the building, you know, this is very tall. The first, the first storeys, very tall sort of window space. And it's designed around the function of the place, which was which was commercial function. Right. Sullivan called the design a proud and soaring thing and kind of in recent years, I guess this perception has since been criticized, as the skyscraper really was designed to make money, not to serve as a symbol.

00:16:10:12 - 00:16:28:19

Sarah

And his kind of co architect on the project, Adler was much more forthright on the topic. And he said, in a utilitarian age like ours, it is safe to assume that the real estate owner and the investor in buildings will continue to erect the class of buildings from which the greatest possible revenue can be obtained, with the least possible outlay.

00:16:28:21 - 00:16:51:15

Sarah

The purpose of erecting buildings other than those required for the shelter of their owners is specifically that of making investments for a profit and lease possible outlay, and what Adler said always stuck out to me in terms of that quote, land was becoming expensive, you know, high real estate. And so to make the most amount of money, it's obvious the building must go up.

00:16:51:17 - 00:16:59:04

Sarah

So, unlike Sullivan, Adler described the building as a plain business structure. What was their vernacular? The cost of the land.

00:16:59:04 - 00:17:22:02

Lou

You can see direct comparisons with that and, and sort of Tudor buildings here in the UK as well. You know, suddenly you have a tax imposed on, on land and, you know, so you find these weird buildings that have very small land footprints, but they, they kind of overhang onto the street, which is also quite convenient for your, you know, inside drop toilet to drop on people's heads.

00:17:22:02 - 00:17:47:11

Lou

But anyway, what's really interesting about what you've described is the inner city. You can build any building that you want out of any materials that you want, any style, any architect, really. Your only true constraint is cost. And so there's something really interesting about, you know, the sort of modern urban global vernacular that is basically just constrained by cost.

00:17:47:11 - 00:18:09:10

Lou

And I guess that's kind of why you now have this kind of generalized style towards very slick, very on ornamental, very standardized buildings that use standard shapes and forms and kind of like the same, which is sort of interesting. but, you know, this kind of constraint being the definition of vernacular has always been the case everywhere vernacular applies.

00:18:09:10 - 00:18:33:07

Lou

And I think it's worth having a look at another area, that we can learn from as well, which is food. and, you know, in food vernacular is really kind of described as being, I suppose, is sort of terroir, which is basically how you describe the effect of place on a particular flavor. and it's something that comes up in a lot of very posh food.

00:18:33:07 - 00:18:57:12

Lou

So think wine, cheese, whiskey, anything is very expensive will have terroir. and people talk about, you know, the amazing water or the, you know, kind of quality of the soil. There's whole books and, you know, industry viticulture is entirely defined towards helping you to understand why exactly this wine tastes exactly the way that it does because of where it's grown.

00:18:57:14 - 00:19:23:15

Lou

but it's also economic circumstance that defines the terroir of food as well, which doesn't get talked about very often. And it's the reason why things like content cheese is hard and sweet. It's because basically it needed to be transported across the Alps to be sold. So if you have a very high water content, if you don't have that high sugar content, then that means your cheese is going to spoil by the time it gets to market.

00:19:23:15 - 00:19:46:02

Lou

So you want to make sure that you have boiled the crap out of that milk. you've released all of the sugars, you have removed all of the unnecessary water, and that that cheese is going to be a delicious, sweet, nutty thing to go and sell. And there's an economic model that defines the flavor of cheese. As much as there is really anything to do with the landscape, and other things.

00:19:46:04 - 00:20:04:04

Lou

and it's the same with whiskey as well, you know, why is Ireland Whiskey smoky? Because basically there was a cheap material of peat around and we use peat to dry, the grain before it was used in the malt. So, you know, economics has always played a huge, role in defining vernacular.

00:20:04:06 - 00:20:24:20

Sarah

Yeah. This economic constraint or non constraint thing is really interesting in relation to the term vernacular. And until we started like thinking about the term, I just hadn't really it wasn't like the most immediate thing that I was considering. But I think as we as our conversations are probably going to flow somewhere, we're going to probably end up back talking about capitalism, I imagine at some point.

00:20:24:22 - 00:20:41:21

Sarah

but I keep coming back to architecture on this because that's again, I guess that's my first understanding of the word, vernacular. What you were saying around the economic stuff reminds me of the tour that we went on in Palm Springs and the proper nerds that we were where most people were probably having a margarita, lying on a swimming pool in the middle of the desert.

00:20:41:23 - 00:20:44:07

Sarah

We went on a modernism tour when we were there, didn't we?

00:20:44:09 - 00:20:48:15

Lou

We did, and it was absolutely fascinating. And I have no regrets. Way better than a margarita.

00:20:48:15 - 00:21:20:10

Sarah

Well, it was amazing. Yeah. The first building we stopped at was the tramway gas station, which was designed by architects Albert Frey and Robson Chambers. Design described the building as a modernist gatehouse for Palm Springs up until the 1990s. It was an amazing kind of petrol station and it do you remember it has this huge, like massive wing shaped roof that kind of dips in the middle, rises up on either side to rest on these really slim poles, and has a kind of pair of verandas that offer up shade from the desert sun.

00:21:20:11 - 00:21:47:14

Sarah

I remember the tour guide who was absolutely excellent. If we can remember his name by the end of the show, and we should drop it in because thoroughly recommend. I think he's the only one that does modernist tours in the region. And just talking about the premise of where modernism came from and what the sort of difference of the Palm Springs modernism that you had in relation to other forms of modernism that was sweeping across the road at the time and what went on to become, I guess, like forms of brutalism, as well.

00:21:47:14 - 00:22:10:06

Sarah

And he talked about how there was such a low cost of the land in the desert at that time, as people were expanding out kind of real estate that allowed for much more expansive expressions and shapes of the original modernist principles. And so Palm Springs has always really helped me to explain modernism to people. And I do remember the moment that we've gone past, like this amazing, house.

00:22:10:06 - 00:22:32:15

Sarah

I can't remember who it was owned by some kind of famous, rich, American like family. And it's beautiful, like this kind of the fencing goes around the rock. So it's like the the world sort of fits the natural environment, these long lines of windows and swimming pools. And it was so beautiful. And then to explain the antithesis to modernism, he took us to peer in the back garden of Liberace's.

00:22:32:20 - 00:22:34:01

Sarah

Do you remember that?

00:22:34:03 - 00:22:46:18

Lou

Yeah, it was absolutely bananas. There were like neoclassical columns and, you know, little cherubs and everywhere there shouldn't have been ornamentation. There was it was absolutely jam packed. I kind of loved it, to be honest.

00:22:46:20 - 00:23:01:03

Sarah

It was very, kitsch and not, I mean, not kitsch in the real meaning of kitsch, but this kind of neoclassical, gothic sort of lots of ornamentation where, if you like orientation. Sure. But I'm way more into kind of form follows function, kind of.

00:23:01:03 - 00:23:13:12

Lou

But it definitely had a strong personal style. And I kind of imagine him having some interesting conversations with his, extremely minimal neighbors about the amount of reflection coming off of the gold in this room pool while.

00:23:13:12 - 00:23:19:01

Sarah

He walked out to get his milk in his, like, velvet cake before lighting it just, I mean, amazing. Who was.

00:23:19:01 - 00:23:20:06

Lou

Happier though?

00:23:20:08 - 00:23:41:11

Sarah

I don't know, he seemed pretty happy with his Las Vegas shows. Anyway, if you don't know Liberace, go look him up. But all of this leads me to think about, again, this idea of regionalization almost. You know, if we if we imagine the word regionalization alongside vernacular of a style or an idea, and, you know, whenever anyone asks me for, like, you know, if we're decorating something and they're asking who's my kind of style influence?

00:23:41:14 - 00:24:02:05

Sarah

I often think back to Albert Frey, who was, I guess, an architect that came to a lot of prominence because of that region, because he was given a lot of space to design what he wanted to. He was one of the half of the architects of that gas station that we talked about. and when you see his own home up on this mountaintop, I would 100% choose, to live in it.

00:24:02:07 - 00:24:28:00

Sarah

So him and a few others, including folks like John Lautner, Richard Neutra, who I also, I'm a big fan on, fan of pioneered this, this desert modernism, which boomed in the mid 20th century in the area. And what they did is not only did they respond to the area's kind of bright and arid climate, but when they when, when when people described the phrase, it's called tree House two, I don't know where House one was, and that's not even a joke.

00:24:28:00 - 00:24:43:09

Sarah

I need to go look this up afterwards. I really like tree House number two. the living room features a native rock. I mean, it's huge, plucked from the site with the house being built completely around it. I think the rocks, actually, if you remember, in is in the living room next to fireplace or in his bedroom, I think it's.

00:24:43:09 - 00:24:57:23

Lou

Actually weirdly in the bedroom and it's quite close to the band. Yeah, like it looks gorgeous. But then there was also this thought that when you wake up in the morning and you get kind of like, you know, grazed by a massive boulder next to your bed, doesn't feel super comfortable.

00:24:57:23 - 00:25:01:17

Sarah

It also maybe you could put your clothes in the next day on it.

00:25:01:19 - 00:25:05:22

Lou

Or you could draw your own tree on her, nice big hot rock. Yeah, that sounds great.

00:25:06:03 - 00:25:30:16

Sarah

Anyway, they they said with these sort of I mean, he, he incorporated lots of ways of including, like the natural materials and building in and around them in the environment. When people write about, wood for his work, they said he exhibited a wise use of vernacular materials, bringing a sense of the surroundings inside the home and in some ways, this new regional vernacular was ideal for a group of people.

00:25:30:16 - 00:26:01:20

Sarah

In the 1980s, a population of people who were impacted by the HIV Aids pandemic. And actually when we went, we went to an incredible, LGBTQ film night, and met a lot of the gay community there. And actually, if you don't know, palm Springs is full of gays, full of LGBTQ people. and, you know, in the 1980s, Palm Springs was, a short flight or a reasonably short car ride shortage car ride in the grand scheme of America away from San Francisco.

00:26:01:22 - 00:26:30:00

Sarah

And so lots of gay men move out into these one storey low, warmer than average buildings, providing them with the ideal conditions to live in with the conditions that they had from contracting HIV Aids. and but it was also like a like minded place for friends and privacy to escape the terrible stigma that many of these, people, mostly gay male population, but we know other people who were massively impacted by this could could find one another.

00:26:30:00 - 00:26:56:11

Sarah

And this all got me into a funk, really thinking about all of this, particularly Palm Springs of true vernacular verses, exotic ization of the vernacular verses, dominant models placed into the vernacular or something of that ilk. Formal ideas made by a small group transplanted somewhere else, but regionalized. I mean, I just I got lost and listener, if you are lost, so am I.

00:26:56:13 - 00:26:58:10

Lou

Reached a dead end too soon?

00:26:58:11 - 00:27:18:19

Sarah

I know our podcast isn't over yet, but I think that just even exploring this, the ideas behind vernacular and looking at it, particularly from an architectural point of view, it it makes you jump around, right? Okay. This is a vernacular in the local and someone's brought an idea that was of modernism, but fitted it and regionalized it or fitted it into the vernacular.

00:27:18:21 - 00:27:38:17

Sarah

Or is it the vernacular fits to the idea and then some. There's bits around, like the regionalization of a bigger idea. And then there's the other way of looking at it, which is taking what we know is the wisdom of the area of the vernacular in the Vatican, the materials. But being used by somebody who is still an individual or small group from somewhere else.

00:27:38:19 - 00:27:52:00

Sarah

So vernacular regionalization and these terms are the complex and complicated. And there's complication in the application. Yeah that's a long term I.

00:27:52:01 - 00:28:02:00

Lou

You check is that was a long a long thought. and it is at the long end.

00:28:02:02 - 00:28:23:11

Lou

Hi it's Lou here. Time for a short ad break. When we're not podcasting we run the school of at services that helps people and organizations learn how to design and deliver great services. We teach courses on service design, how to get by and for your work, and what makes a good and a bad service. So if you want to know more about that and to sign up to one of our courses, check out Good Services.

00:28:23:13 - 00:28:54:07

Lou

And I guess my question, what I'm thinking about you describing all of this is kind of where this shows up in services and does it. And I think when we talk about vernacular in the context of services, where actually what we're talking about is regionalization of global ideas rather than necessarily vernacular. and so you can kind of see that in things like Starbucks and McDonald's where like, yes, they use regional flavors, but they are still basically telling you what to eat.

00:28:54:09 - 00:29:17:13

Lou

according to kind of a global palette of different optional foods and, and most services and is not vernacular, you know, we're taking a dominant understanding of a situation, and we're kind of applying it to different countries. So, you know, Starbucks basically decided that what you need is coffee in a cake. You know, it will taste different in different countries, will be different types of cake, different types of coffee, different flavors of coffee.

00:29:17:14 - 00:29:37:23

Lou

They're still making the decision that what you want is a takeaway, b coffee c a cake to go with that. So it's a very particular pattern of regionalization. And so what we see is kind of regional stylization not necessarily vernacular design. And I think in architecture that's happened to modernism, brutalism, and all of its variants is different in different countries.

00:29:37:23 - 00:29:57:23

Lou

There's a brutalism and modernism is beautiful with big windows and large floor plans. London modernism is enclosed and warm. And there are, you know, kind of these very particular elements to its style, but it's not really necessarily vernacular. They're all using poured concrete and paint windows, you know.

00:29:57:23 - 00:30:34:04

Sarah

Yeah. The style commonly makes use the style of Brutalism commonly makes use of exposed, unpainted concrete or brick angular geometric shapes, and predominantly monochrome color palette. But it is, as you said, different and yet the same in regions. But it is a formal form of architecture. Actually, just let's just note I just like to note out generally in this podcast, but the term nigh Brutalism, which stands for numerous ism, was coined by the Swedish architect Hans Asplund to describe Villa Goth, which is a I don't know why I said Villa Goth, because I feel like it's because I see the word goth and it's not golf like obviously, but like villa golf.

00:30:34:07 - 00:30:36:08

Lou

I feel like brutalism needs to be a bit more jolly.

00:30:36:12 - 00:31:10:00

Sarah

You think so? Yeah. Okay. Go for it. For the go to look golf more than Brick Hole in Uppsala, was designed in January 1950, and the first published usage of the phrase New Brutalism occurred in 1953, when Alison Smithson used it to describe a plan for the unbuilt Soho House, which appeared in the November issue of Architectural Design, and it was further popularized when British architectural historian Rainer Banham use it to identify both an ethic and esthetic style, and in his 1955 essay The New Brutalism.

00:31:10:02 - 00:31:34:06

Sarah

And in this essay Banham described Hunstanton and the Soho House as the reference by which the New Brutalism in architecture may be defined that got traction, describing the work of a group of young British architects in the 50s that became a sort of like movement of New Brutalism. But not only did it describe the material and form, but I think what's just really interesting and what I'm delving into, more architecture like Sarah, stop talking about buildings and architecture.

00:31:34:10 - 00:31:56:20

Sarah

But I just think it's really interesting. It didn't just describe the material and form, but the reflection of social ideas, industrial and vernacular means and humane goals. It's not for now. It's formal and it's formed by a small group of designers. But the vernacular might be the social cultural context for which the designs were being created and which was a postwar Britain.

00:31:56:20 - 00:32:06:19

Sarah

So we can even expand vernacular. We've talked about economics, we've talked about material, we've talked about constraint. It might be the kind of social, cultural context.

00:32:06:21 - 00:32:30:14

Lou

yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think that the clue to Brutalism is kind of in the name, like his really brutal. I do know what controversial I don't. I reckon it because to me it feels hugely didactic, like it tells you how to live. It tells you what to do. you know, I do. I you can't not love places like the Barbican in London, right?

00:32:30:14 - 00:32:56:17

Lou

But God, can you get lost in it, like, you know, the amount of times I'm just like, where am I? Oh, my God, I'm in a pub now. I'm in a like, you know, I don't know, glass house with glazed plants. I once got so lost, I ended up in a stairwell and bumped into a guy wearing a a tortoiseshell, pair of glasses, a, like, turtleneck jumper, and walking a cat like, I was like, where the hell am I?

00:32:56:17 - 00:33:20:14

Lou

Have I dropped into the 1950s, like, luxury design world? anyway, I'm not a massive fan. You can argue that Brutalism reflects a broader set of cultural zeitgeist ideas, right? You know, there were lots of things going on, good and bad, in the 1950s. but broadly, it was kind of synthesized by a very small number of people.

00:33:20:15 - 00:33:45:09

Lou

and that is what you see in regionalized service design. You see a small number of people basically deciding what they think the world looks like, what it tastes like, what to eat, how to live. And then they kind of give it a little bit of a regional flavor. And that's kind of what we do in services. And I think sometimes we go kind of spectacularly wrong when we don't really think about this.

00:33:45:11 - 00:33:47:09

Sarah

Got examples of where it's gone wrong.

00:33:47:11 - 00:34:23:21

Lou

Yeah, I think probably the best example of this is actually the, the very sort of controversial project of the One Laptop per child project, which was led by, the kind of so-called tech visionary, and, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas, Negroponte. And the project from 2005 kind of essentially assumed that we could solve, a lot of the world's problems, by basically giving a laptop to an individual child.

00:34:23:23 - 00:34:46:15

Lou

And it assumed some really big things. Right? It assumed that, ownership would lead to better care and better use, and that therefore, ownership is the right thing to do. Therefore, one laptop to one child, right? So you own your own laptop, you can be able to use it better thing to do. second thing it assumed was that every child needed a laptop in order to learn, right?

00:34:46:17 - 00:35:30:11

Lou

You know, the motivation was correct, but the answer may not necessarily have been right. And, you know, Tldr you can go and read about this. I don't want to over summarize it, but it didn't really work. And actually, there's, a lot of arguments against this project that said that it it kind of led to a lack of funding for other educational programs that would have been much more, culturally suitable, much more context specific, much more led by the communities that were part of and therefore, you know, obviously something that is actually, going to work, and there was no evidence for basically any advantage to children being given a laptop, to

00:35:30:11 - 00:36:05:10

Lou

learn. and I think this quote from The Verge, really kind of hit the nail on the head. And it said 13 years ago, the One Laptop Per Child project told the world that every child should get a laptop and never stopped to prove that they needed one. I mean, it's pretty damning statement, but we see this all the time where we just assume a, you know, kind of a dominant model of how things should work, and then we apply them in situations that just are not led by those communities, are not led by the context.

00:36:05:12 - 00:36:07:00

Lou

and yeah, they don't work.

00:36:07:00 - 00:36:40:22

Sarah

You know, this stuff like totally frustrates the out of me, namely because, you know, like, as you get older, doing a bit of self-reflection on yourself, I look back at my like years growing up as a kids and a teenager, and I feel like I was indoctrinated at an early age in some of the media. That was consuming and newspapers and programs to have this kind of like, Western like savior culture to the rest of the world, you know, I don't know when Live Aid came out as very young, but the replaying of that and musicians like telling us, like, we need to, like, save people around the world.

00:36:40:22 - 00:37:04:05

Sarah

And nowhere was I talked about, you know, local wisdom, indigenous cultures. I wasn't educated about colonialism, anything like that. And it's hard to be an education that I'm still learning. I'm still on a path as an adult to do, you know, this, this, this stuff, this kind of idea of like being like, we've got good ideas. We must export them around.

00:37:04:05 - 00:37:42:09

Sarah

The world is so indoctrinated to so many people. And I think it really impressed the sort of bad power imbalance that was an unstable platform for becoming a designer. And like I said, I feel like I'm trying to shake that off, but it's still a long process of unlearning that there's a constant exporting of cultural dominant logic, ideas being exported to another country, ignorant of the local vernacular, or the possibility that the wisdom to create new futures to face local challenges already exists with the people who have the knowledge of the land, the region and its needs, or alternatively, to power grab for the purpose of making money.

00:37:42:11 - 00:38:10:08

Sarah

And I was reading and a man got from the IDSA is Decolonizing Industrial designs overview that she did as a kind of like program they've been on, and her take on neo colonialism and design and just to kind of cut to lift from that, was that celebrating Eurocentric esthetics and stealing cultures identities for its own. And what neo colonialism does is actively homogenize and embrace cultures to elevate one dominant culture.

00:38:10:10 - 00:38:32:02

Sarah

And we see this clearly play out. And I think a lot of service design, it's found itself, in the home of big export, export of tech. Right. So a lot of service design becomes very associated with digital. And I think if we look at big tech, a lot of these like dominant ideas of how some people in Silicon Valley think the world should work is being exported across the rest of the world.

00:38:32:02 - 00:38:58:09

Sarah

And I think this is really important now, like we're living in an information age, this is the kind of fourth industrial revolution, which is a transition of an economic model that was expansion through the focus on bricks and mortar to, you know, a fourth industrial revolution, which is focusing on data and an economy that's driven by ICT. And if we dig a little bit more into this, there's a brilliant person called Sheedy.

00:38:58:11 - 00:39:20:07

Sarah

O'Gorman. her paper on indigenous data sovereignty. And I was struck by this line in it. The information is the domain of knowledge. And knowledge, as a cliche goes, is power. Whoever controls knowledge wields power in its various manifestations. And I started, like, digging into this and doing a bit more research. And I came across Student code 20.

00:39:20:09 - 00:39:44:00

Sarah

Well, I really hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Who is doing an MSC in International Relations at a C? Who talked about a clear existence of a dichotomy between countries that produce vast amounts of digital data and countries that harness it for their benefit. So, unlike the traditional North-South divide and the global economic order that we've been to, it's been written in documents.

00:39:44:02 - 00:40:00:16

Sarah

The digital gap is being led by tech companies from the United States and China Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba together account for two thirds of the total market value of the global digital economy. Isn't that nuts?

00:40:00:16 - 00:40:05:20

Lou

Yeah, yeah. And it really, gosh, it makes me think of.

00:40:05:22 - 00:40:06:19

Sarah

a sort of.

00:40:06:21 - 00:40:16:10

Lou

Weird and kind of icky phrase that was going around a few years ago about data being the new oil.

00:40:16:12 - 00:40:19:18

Sarah

sorry for the sound effect. So I'm sick, so I'm just really getting into it.

00:40:19:23 - 00:40:35:03

Lou

Gosh. Because we did such a good job of, Yeah, just being horribly extractive about that, didn't we? So comparing data to oil, it just brings a whole new level of gross metaphor to this thing. But anyway, carry on, Michael.

00:40:35:05 - 00:41:05:12

Sarah

He's a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project. Yale Law School wrote for Al-Jazeera, and he drew parallels between the technical architecture of classic colonialism and what we might call digital colonialism, stating it as rooted in design of the tech ecosystem for the purposes of profit and plunder. If the railways and maritime trade routes were the open veins of the global South back then, today digital infrastructure takes on the same role.

00:41:05:12 - 00:41:31:17

Sarah

Big tech corporations use proprietary software, corporate clouds and centralized internet services to spy on users processor data and spit back manufactured services to subjects of their data fiefdoms. So colonialism and technology have always been entwined. European expansionism depended on modern technology to dominate, whether it be through deadlier weapons, faster ships or the laying of telegraph and railway lines across the West.

00:41:31:19 - 00:41:59:02

Sarah

Colonialism in the digital era does not require armies, weapons and shifts. All you need is a tech giant and has captured the digital markets of the Global South. So big tech services and platforms, they feel steeped in extractive and settler colonialism type practice top to bottom. And I think, you know, it got me thinking about colonialization and services, particularly digital colonial colonialism, shows up in a lot of different ways to users.

00:41:59:04 - 00:42:24:23

Sarah

We might see English only development tools, country drop down menus on digital parts of those services might default to USA. The ignore or don't even includes indigenous peoples communities and nations. Services might market three meals a day and be built around, you know, delivering three meals a day when that's maybe not the cultural way that food is consumed or eaten or considered in a certain country.

00:42:25:01 - 00:42:43:12

Sarah

Preference might be given to businesses on maps who play into the model of the platforms that want you to make the list. You know it goes on. There's lots of ways in which the stuff shows up in the design of our services. And a beeper baron, who's a doctor in cognitive science from Ethiopia, discussed this concept of digital colonialism.

00:42:43:12 - 00:43:08:07

Sarah

And they argue that the power of big tech rivals the old colonial empires. When she spoke to Wired on Digital Colonialization, she said it's harms will not affect us all equally. As technologies exported to the global South, it carries embedded Western norms and philosophies along with it. It's sold as a way of helping people in underdeveloped nations, but it's often imposed on them without consultation, pushing them further into the margins.

00:43:08:09 - 00:43:35:23

Sarah

Nobody in Silicon Valley stays up worrying about the unbanked. Black woman in a rural community in Timbuktu, which is a really powerful statement for me, not only is buried in states that embedded Western norms and philosophies are part of these technologies and services, and what they deliver, it's the underlying models that we need to pay attention to, how we've coded these platforms to make decisions, what it presents to people, who it promotes.

00:43:36:01 - 00:43:51:13

Sarah

It's almost too easy to find racism, sexism, homo and transphobia are being baked into the data, models, algorithms and data sets behind these services and platforms. You know, I've been tracking examples of research since around about the mid 20 tens.

00:43:51:15 - 00:44:33:10

Lou

Yeah, I mean, you have many collections, but I think this is your most complete collection. but before you go into some some more thoughts about your collection, of this stuff, which is just so important and I wish that we talked about it more, one example that really springs to mind from quite recently, a group have started to push back against, both Apple and Android for their policies around autocorrect, and particularly auto correction of non European or North American names, which tend to be auto corrected to their, European or North American equivalents.

00:44:33:12 - 00:44:50:22

Lou

and I certainly know from using my own vernacular language, that I frequently find myself being auto corrected to standard American English. So this stuff is everywhere, and it is so deeply encoded in just the guardrails of the way the services work, I think.

00:44:51:00 - 00:45:12:09

Sarah

Totally. And so I think, like as designers and people who are creating services, you know, you've heard me on every episode of this podcast, probably go into what's beneath the surface of the things that we're designing. And I think that's where actually, interestingly, a lot of the the really important work is, no, we're pretty good at designing interfaces, having design system.

00:45:12:09 - 00:45:29:07

Sarah

But I'm not saying that work is easy at all when there's lots of work to be done to make that better across the world, but under the user experience layer, it's all of the kind of decisions that are getting made. And just a couple of kind of quick example, some from Biba in, in her work, some that I've been collecting for years.

00:45:29:07 - 00:45:50:10

Sarah

I mean, the first is it, which is from a Bible study, is 80 Million Tiny Images, which was an MIT set that's been cited in hundreds of academic papers and used for more than a decade to teach machine learning systems how to recognize people and objects. And she found it that it was full of offensive labels, including racist slurs for images of black people and the other data ImageNet.

00:45:50:10 - 00:46:14:14

Sarah

They found pornographic content, including Upskirt images of women, which ostensibly did not require the individual's explicit consent because it was scraped from the internet to two days after, to be blown apart. And I published, the study. The MIT team did apologize and took down the tiny images dataset. And then the one, actually came up quite a while ago before we got really into the kind of, what is our data that's powering?

00:46:14:14 - 00:46:45:01

Sarah

I was the French company. I admire, the algorithms scanned faces by the million. So the facial recognition software stores police in the US, Australia and France. some used on some cruise ships, passengers who are landing in the US against Customs and Border Protection records. And in 2017, a top FBI official told Congress that a facial recognition system that scours 30 million mug shots using their technology helps safeguard the American people.

00:46:45:01 - 00:47:06:14

Sarah

So this is huge. You know, it's it's a huge piece of kit. Their algorithms don't always see all faces equally and clearly when tested. Results from the National Institute of Standards and Technology indicated that two of their latest algorithms were significantly more likely to mix up black women's faces than those of white women or black or white men.

00:47:06:16 - 00:47:30:01

Lou

I mean, I feel like this is literally what's happening to every single image recognition thing that we encounter. I mean, years ago, there was an issue to do with those, automated flushing toilets, basically not, being triggered by darker skin tones. So this is not a new thing that we have been, encoding into technology, this kind of racism.

00:47:30:06 - 00:47:54:22

Sarah

Okay. So we have to start really designing below the surface of the user experience in the algorithms, in the data sets, in the business models. But I want to kind of bring this back to thinking about this with, the idea of vernacular that we started out with. If we've not gone to left or right field, and one of the most fascinating studies I read was this thing called the moral machine test.

00:47:55:00 - 00:48:18:18

Sarah

so in 2014, researchers at the MIT Media Lab designed an experiment called Moral Machine. The idea was to create a game like platform that would crowdsource people's decisions on how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in different variations of what we call the trolley problem. In the process, the data generated would provide insight into the collective ethical priorities of different cultures.

00:48:18:20 - 00:48:36:17

Sarah

So I mentioned the trolley problem here. You might have heard of this. it's kind of this like exercise where you're told that you see a runaway trolley speeding down the tracks, about to hit and killed five people. You have access to a lever that could switch the trolley to a different track, or a different person would meet this untimely demise.

00:48:36:19 - 00:48:56:04

Sarah

I think you could also kill yourself. I'm not really sure, but you should pull the lever. should you pull the lever? And one life to spare. Five kind of thing. So it's like this kind of ethical decision. So the moral machine took the idea to test nine different comparisons chosen to prioritize different people. Should a self-driving car prioritize humans over pets, passengers over pedestrians?

00:48:56:04 - 00:49:22:06

Sarah

More lives over fewer women over men. Young over old, sick over sickly. Higher social status over lower and lower biters over lower benzos. And finally, should the car swerves to take action or stay on course in action. And four years after the platform went live, millions of people in 232 countries and territories have logged 40 million decisions, making it one of the largest studies ever done on global moral preferences.

00:49:22:06 - 00:49:53:17

Sarah

And the analysis of that data reveals how much cross-cultural ethics diverge on the basis of culture, economics and geographic location. And it found some, like super interesting things like some countries with more individualistic cultures are more likely to spare the young. Some people who, really respect their elders will will save older people. That it depends on your religion, on your kind of like geographic, cultural, social, cultural positioning.

00:49:53:17 - 00:50:01:03

Sarah

And similarly, participants from poorer countries with weaker institutions are more tolerant of jaywalkers versus pedestrians who cross legally.

00:50:01:08 - 00:50:23:18

Lou

Can I just pause you on the on the jaywalkers thing because, we'll put a link to it in the show notes, and I cannot remember the reference. But there is a fascinating history of jaywalking. And it was actually, it was surprise, surprise, a, law that was designed basically to promote cars and to stop people from being on the road.

00:50:23:18 - 00:50:43:01

Lou

So in, in and of itself, jaywalking is a fascinating sample of basically, a law that has been engineered against human beings and has also been surprise, surprise, wielded, unfairly and unequally in society. So anyway, stop you mid flow there. But I will put a link to it in the show notes. Fascinating story about jaywalking.

00:50:43:04 - 00:51:12:20

Sarah

But we could just end there. I'd be like, well, that was interesting. anyway, participants from countries with a high level economic inequality show greater gaps between the treatment of individuals with high and low social status. Countries within close proximity to one another also showed closer moral preferences, with three dominant clusters in the west, east and south. So the study has really interesting implications for countries currently testing self-driving cars, since these preferences could play a role in shaping the design and regulation of such vehicles.

00:51:12:22 - 00:51:42:00

Sarah

So what fits the cultural vernacular when it is a globalized technology and product? And, my honest to God like my mind was like bended by this study because I'm thinking like, what happens when you are creating a, a design, a technology and you exporting that around the world and you're seeking to regionalize it, but the regional moral perception of what a car should do is very different to other places.

00:51:42:00 - 00:52:11:20

Sarah

You know, I've, you know, I've recently been reloading and picking up Python, which is a coding language. And I've been doing this to actually just like remind myself about the line by line set of decisions that are made literally in a line of code to change that, you know, like saying like when this camera sensor reads this person, what is going to be the literal responsive line of code when you tell it what to do in response to reading that, that says turn the wheel, brake, go this direction like that is literally in several lines of code.

00:52:11:21 - 00:52:33:17

Sarah

So these are, you know, when you're coding and making decisions in that way. These are opinions and beliefs that are embedded into lines of code. And I'm being a bit facetious here, but I know it's really not. We have one line of code. but these are globalized design decisions being made for very different cultural conditions. And local vernacular is, what minefield?

00:52:33:19 - 00:52:58:08

Sarah

What an absolute minefield. And I think it's interesting because the authors of the study emphasize that the results are not meant to dictate how different countries should act. In fact, in some cases, the authors felt that technologists and policymakers should override the collective public opinion and do the kind of right thing. But the results, he said, should be used by industry and government as a foundation for understanding how the public would react to the ethics of different design and policy decisions.

00:52:58:10 - 00:53:15:05

Sarah

How do you take a dominant model into the social, cultural vernacular of other places, the ethical, moral decisions, and rewrite that into lines of codes? Do you should, you could. You were telling me this is a kind of like, what would you do?

00:53:15:07 - 00:53:43:18

Lou

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the answer we're edging towards is no, you shouldn't. and you know that the kind of, I suppose the, the thing that springs to mind hearing you talk about all that is the, the fantastic, saying that's sort of come out of accessibility and sort of disability, advocacy circles of, you know, there should be no design for us without us.

00:53:43:19 - 00:54:09:02

Lou

And I think we can apply that to pretty much everything that we're working on. but I think what's really important is that, you know, when we're designing, you know, and we're thinking about vernacular and we're thinking about the role of our own, you know, kind of dominant models that we're bringing into those contexts. We need to not just be thinking about, you know, the interface, that we are building.

00:54:09:02 - 00:54:46:14

Lou

We should be thinking about the underlying business model, the organizational model, the technology, the finance thing, and everything else that is edging that thing towards something that is not suitable, perhaps, for that, group that we're designing with. and hopefully not for, but this stuff is really difficult, right. because often what we're talking about is design and supporting design in contexts where perhaps that group of people don't have the time or access to the resources to be able to create these things for themselves.

00:54:46:16 - 00:55:05:14

Lou

and this is complicated, right? And it makes me think of this conference that we went to years ago, at the New School in New York. and it's called platform corporatism. And there was a really it was fantastic. I don't know if it's still on. If it is, we'll put a link in the show notes, with everything else and every other side project we thought about.

00:55:05:16 - 00:55:34:12

Lou

but there was one project that came up that really got me thinking, and it was about basically, a ride hailing app that was being developed, by taxi drivers, in opposition to Uber and the other ride hailing, apps out there. and, you know, kind of long story short, they found it incredibly difficult to build this thing to, you know, kind of get it passed, all of the different tests that it needed to go through.

00:55:34:14 - 00:55:59:19

Lou

and, you know, kind of essentially it was because the communities who were contributing to it and designing that thing did not have the time or the resources to basically take on these global dominant models. you know, it's literally like the little guy against Uber, and they just they just couldn't make it work. So I guess where I'm coming to is kind of why does why does this happen?

00:55:59:19 - 00:56:26:23

Lou

Why do we end up in this situation? And it really makes me think of this, brilliant line by George Monbiot, that he said about the UK's food system that I think we can apply to, you know, pretty much any context. And he said that capitalism wants a monoculture, locally diverse, but globally much less diverse. And it's the reason why we can get an avocado or a banana, anywhere in the world.

00:56:26:23 - 00:56:54:03

Lou

But we can only ever buy one type of banana. And they're all clones, by the way, of each other or two types of, of avocado. And it's the reason why all buildings look the same. Because we can standardize those things for efficiency. And if we can standardize something for efficiency, then we will. And it's almost it's kind of gravitational force that we find the, you know, the efficiency of scale kind of coalesces everything into this kind of consistent sort of munge.

00:56:54:05 - 00:57:15:02

Lou

And that's not to say that we're not responsible for that, that we don't have control of it, that we don't have agency in that space. We absolutely do. And we can think about this as a kind of, apotheosis, essentially the highest point in the development of something, a kind of culmination or a climax of that particular design.

00:57:15:04 - 00:57:38:22

Lou

and these apotheosis kind of often end up being standardized. Right? So, railway gauges are the size that they are because they are the width of basically a horse drawn cart or horse is a kind of the same width. All carts are kind of the same width. So therefore those trackways that were turned into railway lines are also kind of the same size.

00:57:39:00 - 00:58:04:17

Lou

but how many countries had horse drawn transport. And it's kind of specific to a particular type of terrain. And also horses. so, you know, like I said before, these kind of apotheosis sort of end up being quite culturally specific as well. or, you know, we can look at, say, for example, the size of A4 paper, roughly the size of a lamb's bag is my favorite.

00:58:04:19 - 00:58:20:05

Lou

Do you know what? It is weird how often this comes up in conversation with me. The A4 paper is the size of a lamb's back, because we used to use basically lambs of a certain size to produce vellum, which is what we used to write on before we had paper that was produced from trees in Europe.

00:58:20:07 - 00:58:27:14

Sarah

Can you give me the social context when this often comes up, like when you're like posting a letter asking for a stamp at the post office, does this come up?

00:58:27:16 - 00:58:53:08

Lou

Literally every time I sit in place of A4 paper, I think about where it comes from. yeah. Like I said, I think about vernacular a lot. but as you start to dig into these innocuous seeming international standards that seem to have no authorship and come from nowhere, you start to see that they are political, and that they do come from something that's very culturally, specific.

00:58:53:10 - 00:59:20:17

Lou

and, you know, in technology, we can see this in things like the languages that we code in, in English. And they carry the baggage of that homogeneity of that particular language and words like master and slave, which thankfully are not used, or trying to be removed from, coding languages are still there in the way that we describe different objects, equally in things like the legal structure around services.

00:59:20:19 - 00:59:51:16

Lou

you know, information society services, we're essentially a way of us encouraging globalization by saying, hey, if you are operating in a particular country and you don't provide physical things, then you don't have to conform to the laws of that particular country. So we've kind of created these loopholes, these ways of sort of, I suppose, growing a global dominant, culture and spreading that across, which, you know, really shouldn't be a surprise to us, I guess.

00:59:51:18 - 01:00:19:17

Lou

So where does vernacular live now is kind of my main question, that I'm left with, after this really interesting conversation that we've gone on a long journey with. And I think the obvious one is that the vernacular really, truly lives in the things that capitalism could not globalize, the things that were based on kind of entrenched local standards that could not be standardized globally.

01:00:19:19 - 01:00:43:21

Lou

and this is why I think about the Nike on a regular, because it says things like light switches, lights, which is different in every country that you go to because the electrical circuits are different. Toilets, bedsheets, pillows, they're all produced locally or they're really locally specific, and it's the stuff that has to integrate closely with a local standard that becomes a lock in.

01:00:43:23 - 01:01:09:08

Lou

So, you know, different regions, for example, will have different frame rates for films because the lights flicker at different rates in that country, because the electrics are at different voltages. And we might not necessarily think about that when we're watching a, you know, kind of us based something, or a UK based something, or, you know, back in the day when we had to buy the right type of DVD for our region.

01:01:09:08 - 01:01:31:05

Lou

But that's why is because the voltage is at different, frequencies or heavy stuff. Heavy stuff is hard to globalize because it's hard to export. and so there aren't really a lot of kind of globalized, toilets, for example, toilets are very regionally specific knowledge long balls in the UK and US, very small ones in the UK.

01:01:31:05 - 01:01:42:13

Lou

We don't have those kind of, you know, bum washing things because it's not a hot country, vernacular leaves a lot in bathrooms and in light switches and in other things that we just can't globally standardize.

01:01:42:15 - 01:01:46:19

Sarah

So globalism doesn't want a vernacular?

01:01:46:21 - 01:01:48:12

Lou

No, it definitely doesn't.

01:01:48:14 - 01:02:03:21

Sarah

And we seem to only really have it where we're locked into some sort of standard or difficulty in globalizing. yeah. So how do we actively engage with vernacular in a design work? Because I often feel like we get towards a dead end where like, it's all terrible.

01:02:03:23 - 01:02:05:00

Lou

Hashtag capitalism.

01:02:05:01 - 01:02:29:21

Sarah

Yeah. So we nearly end there every time. I think that there's some helpful examples and new models. There are models and systems that we can consider decentralizing, increasing sovereignty for users. Take for example, Freedom Box, which was rolled out to 12 villages as a pilot. The project uses, like all devices, to offer Wi-Fi connectivity to villagers while providing them decentralize services and blocking surveillance.

01:02:29:23 - 01:02:49:22

Sarah

It can host decentralized social networks like Mastodon or G and New Social, as well as email and messenger services, and it builds on the option for Tor onion routing to protect your privacy, and allows you to store your data on your home device and access it on the go. So when we see Microsoft and Google running initiatives like classrooms in the Global South, we're locking people into that software and platform.

01:02:50:03 - 01:03:13:15

Sarah

We should be focusing on decentralizing that stuff. So things like Freedom Books, give me a lot of hope. And if you're really wanting to kind of read more into this, obviously we always have a lot of show notes and things that you can delve more deeply into. But I always recommend people, Design Justice, which is written by Sasha Constanza, choc, and lots of affinity groups that helped in the creation of that book.

01:03:13:17 - 01:03:39:22

Sarah

And they talk a lot about the distribution of power as designers and really challenging power holders in our work. And yeah, and it's really encouraging to see the design industry or elements of it being celebrated, to start thinking about this sort of stuff around bringing back vernacular about trying to combat this power model that exists in economic models and dominant logic ideas being shipped from other places.

01:03:39:23 - 01:04:06:17

Sarah

in the last, I think, I can't remember exactly when this was. I'll put it in the show notes, but in 2018, 19, I think, the, design connected to country in the Australian Indigenous Design charter, won the Australian Good Design Awards. And, one of the kind of founders of co-creators of that charter said that we have far too often exploited country, commodified country and scarred country.

01:04:06:18 - 01:04:36:06

Sarah

And the charter really works to change that and integrate principles like focusing design on country and embody First Nations knowledge into design thinking. So we're actually, I guess, in some ways, taking a look at our modern design practices and starting to think much more about vernacular and about look how, but for me, what would I do? I really think we're in a stage of, of design where we need to start building alternative models to these dominant systems.

01:04:36:08 - 01:05:04:20

Sarah

And the real probable challenge in that is convincing users to go and mass to use those things. But I think there's a real opportunity there, and maybe this is another podcast for another time. But we've seen this in mass migrations from things like Twitter or X to platforms like Mastodon, where users are starting to value trust and a sense of somebody sensible in control of these things, of listening to users, I don't know, what do you think?

01:05:04:22 - 01:05:39:19

Lou

Yeah, I mean, I think the answer to a lot of these sorts of questions is to just be aware of, the way that it's showing up in your work. and to understand actually, if you are involved in any, you know, kind of service design, particularly services that are not for your community directly is to look around to see whether or not those communities are represented in the way that your work is happening, and in, in ways that are not extractive, to that community or overly burdensome to that community.

01:05:39:21 - 01:06:03:12

Lou

I think there's things to look out for. The things that we've mentioned, things like locking communities into particular things that they have no control over of, read, you know, kind of regional sizing stylizing, existing models and ways of being. So if you're, you know, making a regional specific flavored cake, think again. okay. Yeah. I mean, maybe think about other kinds of desserts.

01:06:03:12 - 01:06:26:06

Lou

I don't know. but, you know, in all seriousness, I think a lot of this comes down to awareness, and, and just understanding what is driving those things. and, yeah, I think we may have reached a dead end, but I'm so curious to know, what you all think about this, and where it's showing up in your work.

01:06:26:08 - 01:06:31:21

Lou

and, yeah, I would love to carry on this conversation because, I mean, you know, vernacular is my favorite topic.

01:06:31:21 - 01:06:35:12

Sarah

Well, you're obviously down in the post office talking to people about sheep's backs. Lambs backs?

01:06:35:12 - 01:06:37:20

Lou

Yeah, I'm looking at light switches and toilets, as always.

01:06:37:20 - 01:07:11:05

Sarah

Yeah. Well, look, if you've enjoyed the show and you want to find out a little bit more about some of the stuff that we've talked about, you can go on to our website services. There is a link to our podcast, Dead Ends. And for each episode, we list all of the things we've been reading and researching to bring you this absolute delightful journey of different things that we find interesting and try to derive meeting from, if you've got requests for episodes we've already had a few requests in, so we are taking your time, but we will eventually get around to those, drop us a little email on hello, good services.

01:07:11:07 - 01:07:48:06

Sarah

And if you're on one of the less vernacular platforms like Spotify. God, where have we gone before us? So I tunes, you can find us on iTunes and Spotify as well. Take care. Hope you enjoyed the show. I. Would.

podcastdeadends

Sarah Drummond http://sarah-drummond.com/

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