Lina-Marie Köppen

Department: Social Design
Website: www.linamariekoeppen.de

Learn To Unlearn:

Please disable me or lets design failure

How did we become who we are today?
Wondering about evolution you start to wonder
why things evolve the way they do. How we
became us, and I became me.
When we are born the first thing we do is
learn. We learn from others who have learned
before us and we become part of a construct
of knowledge that has developed throughout
evolution. The new medial worlds have widened
our sphere. We have the opportunity to be an
active part of our own identity, to let fiction
become reality, to stimulate our own evolution
which eventually be¬comes our identity. But
what is the relationship between the way we
create ourselves and the things that we create
around us?

Before we became who we are today, we would
extract function from what things were, rather then what they were supposed to be. We simply didn’t know what we know today. We would repeat what older people showed us and our children would repeat what we showed them. Creating never meant anything less then educating. Everything manifests somehow through a tool that educates. Education isn’t bordered by institutions like schools or families, but more like a thin layer surrounding every little thing that exists.

Man shapes its environment and the environment
reconfigures man. In the exchange, we create
our identity. The way we interact with our
environment is based on social char¬acteristics
defined through time, participation and
reputation. The ultimate goal of all the tools and appliances we have shaped is to extend natural human life to become stronger then before. The continuing update of man reaches out to a superman ideal. This ambition becomes our guiding ideology, resulting in automatic behavior, automatic identity, a bigger distance between you and yourself.

The question arises: How can design be human,
when we design to become someone other than
human?
The relationship between production/consumption
and being, is a schizophrenic relationship.
We have been built to avoid failure. We are
constantly solving our conflict with nature. Man tries to become superman. In the end, we simply know too much and we need to unlearn in order to get to know ourselves. Learn to learn is the belief in limitation as an endorsement of personal identity.