The Blindspot Initiative

The Blindspot Initiative: Design Resistance and Alternative Modes of Practice
Jose Sánchez
eVolo Press, February 2019



Hardcover | 7 x 9-1/2 inches | 232 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1938740237 | $39.95

Publisher Description:

The Blindspot Initiative: Design Resistance and Alternative Modes of Practice documents the professional work of twenty-one design practices that are expanding their respective fields and hybridizing traditional design outputs through the intersection of other disciplines. The expansion of architectural and design practices toward the domain of robotics, material science, film, simulation, or software, redefine the skillsets required to engage with a creative output that challenges the conventions of established domains.

All practices curated in this volume, propose an autonomous approach towards design research, resisting the pervasive design competition model that requires free labor and speculative remuneration. The critique of such a model is present throughout this volume, rejecting the wasteful discarding of immaterial labor that is commonplace in the ‘winner takes all’ paradigm that currently dominates the design marketplace.

The hybridization of practice has, in many cases, aided a creative business proposition, one that seeks to engage not only through its final output but also through reconsidering the means of production. By blurring the boundaries between fields, design innovation can become more aware of the systemic interdependencies that often live in our current disciplinary blind spots.

dDAB Commentary:

Recently I received an email from Fiverr about the launch of the architecture, landscape design, and interior design "store" on their platform. I had seen Fiverr ads on the subway so I knew it existed, though I had no idea what it was or how it worked. Turns out the name refers to the starting cost for a service provided by a freelancer ⁠— be it a writer, a copy editor, a computer programmer, or even an architect ⁠— that users can hire for a particular job. Fiverr takes $1 from the five, so a freelancer's minimum pay for a job is $4. I hope that freelancers offering their services on that platform earn money commensurate with the time they put in and the value of those services. But I doubt that's the case, particularly with architects and other designers, whose value is so low in the eyes of others. With architects participating in competitions for no pay, designers asked to submit designs before being hired, and companies crowdsourcing ideas for designs rather than hiring a designer, it's no wonder they are taken advantage of through platforms like Fiverr.

Although Jose Sánchez does not mention Fiverr in the introduction to The Blindspot Initiative, his critique of the free-labor practices enabled and promoted by architectural competitions makes me think he would be less than enamored with the online platform. For Sánchez, who has assembled the work of 21 young designers (including his own Plethora Project), the key to the "design resistance" of the book's subtitle is "celebrat[ing] modes of practice that move away from the neoliberal exploitation of networks and resist the emerging models of crowdsourcing and speculative work for our design field." Flipping through the pages of architects and designers departing from traditional practice and delving into prototypes, product design, film, software, and robotics, one would be excused in thinking the book was about new technologies and the new forms enabled by them. But Sánchez's framing points to these 21 "alternative modes of practice" as creative businesses: different ways for designers to find their way and make a living in the world today ⁠— or eye candy with substance.

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Author Bio:

Jose Sanchez is an Architect / Programmer / Game Designer based in Los Angeles, California. He is the director of the Plethora Project, a research and learning project investing in the future of on-line open-source knowledge. He is also the creator of Block’hood, an award winning city building video game exploring notions of crowdsourced urbanism.

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