Hybrid Response #10 – Fuller/Brand – “Comprehensive Designer”
This weeks reading was rather interesting, after having gotten the understanding from last week’s class discussion. That insight helped me to grasp the concept relating to Brand & Fuller. The idea of the comprehensive designer by Fuller, represents the idea of the symbiotic relationship of technology and the human capacity for creativity. Fuller describes the “Comprehensive Designer” as people with the technological knowledge to utilize the various products of science, technology, big business, etc – but, who is not a total adherent to just one discipline, but rather someone with the ability to see, understand and imagine new and beneficial ways of translating these concepts into useful applications for the benefit of humanity in diverse ways.
For Brand, a proponent of the New Communal Movement of the 60’s counterculture, which was evidenced by his involvement with the USCO, Fuller’s concept of the “Comprehensive Designer” helped shape his work, tempered by his group’s creative and technical knowledge. Brand was whole-heartedly against growing up to be an adult stuck in mediocrity and becoming a mindless drown of the bureaucratic hierarchy. The freedom and almost nomadic concept of the Comprehensive Designer, represented the all encompassing aspect of embracing technology and the products it produced, with the freedom to bend and shape these tools to creating useful and beneficial expressions for humanity. This meant that, he was free to collaborate with people of diverse knowledge and backgrounds, to achieve new ways to implement and utilize everything that was available. Looking at these products and concepts from new and different viewpoints, could/would allow for visionaries to collaborate and imagine/design advances yet thought of; and, ultimately to share these new and innovative advances for the betterment of humanity.
To Brand, whose idealized vision of human society was a harmonious, nonhierarchical world – the idea of interdisciplinary collaboration would have seemed a natural fit to his world and way of thinking. The abilities to process vast amounts of information, while being removed enough to see/imagine ways in which this technological information and industrial/military tools can be used, amazing benefits and ground breaking advances can be achieved. Brand was captivated by and looked to the Native American Indians as his ideal for the “authentic and alternative community. Brand’s ultimate goal was a de-institutionalized freedom from the constraints of government and to create a way of living that encompassed the totality of knowledge towards a “cosmic consciousness” equally and freely shared by the communal whole.
