Spotty. Neglected. Abandoned. Dead-ended. Nevertheless some dead-ends are worth revisiting. If the fall of Soviet Union some 20 odd years ago consigned Communism and Marxist to some sort of imaginary intellectual dustbin, it is interesting to contemplate the counterfactual: what if the cybernetic central planned economy actually could function as a utopian provider of plenty for all?  This quixotic idea is the subject of Francis Spufford’s “novel” Red Plenty, an impossible to categorize book which sounds like it is an anatomy of the Soviet economic system masquerading as dystopian speculative fiction. Adam Roberts review is excellent, even if the book sounds like it is almost impossible to describe. Spufford also wrote a piece for the Guardian on the background of the book. He offers this fascinating tidbit about USSR economic growth in the 50s:

Give your imagination permission to engage with some unlikely facts: in the 1950s, the USSR was one of the growth stars of the planetary economy, second only to Japan in the speed with which it was hauling itself up from the wreckage of the war years. And this is on the basis not of the official Soviet figures of the time, or even of the CIA’s anxious recalculations of them, but of the figures arrived at after the Soviet Union’s fall by sceptical historians with access to the archives. The Soviet economy grew through the second half of the 50s at 5%, 6%, 7% a year. As Paul Krugman has mischievously pointed out, the USSR’s growth record in the 50s elicited exactly the same awed commentary as Chinese and Indian growth does today.

Unsurprisingly the book is not yet available in the US. Eventually I presume.

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Ugly Vegas Carpets is a design thesis waiting to happen (if only the grads would get their collective heads out of the clouds of conceptual conceits and nouveau zine making).  These carpets are a fantastic trainwreck of perverted pattern making, subliminal venality and casinos. Vastly more ugly carpets here.

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Having spent the weekend a few weeks ago attending the New Contexts/New Practices conference to contemplate design education in all its tangential manifestations, I am strangely reminded of this Keith Thomas essay on the “working methods” of historians. Of the course the term “working methods” turns out to be something of a joke since it implies some kind of rigorous methodology of proceeding through research. Thomas instead offers a litany of bad note taking, misplaced references, random procedures, pathetically inept filing systems and a general apathy toward anything systematic. All this coming from an Oxford type! In my experience design education at its most practical is basically a way of trying to get you to cultivate some sort of coherent “working method” beyond pushing crap around on a screen or piece of paper to make a slightly more attractive composition. This is  far easier said than done, often merely resulting in opaque and slightly shoddy rationalizations of why one pushed crap around on a screen into a more attractive composition. Historians seemingly can do no better.