This lecture seeks to problematize the relationship between design and labor. Given that design plays a critical role in giving form to industrial motivation and technology, labor is not a simple outcome of industrial advancement. Rather, it is shaped by the design imbued with capitalist logic associated with accelerating human activities and systematic control over laborers.
In particular, this lecture’s research investigates the design approach to enhance continuous flowline labor as a prevalent aesthetic and functional objective across architecture, industrial design, and the recently rising interface design for Artificial Intelligence. The research focuses on how flowline design grew out of the idealism of productivity in industrial society, and continuously influences designs in the information society.
To make sense of the broad spectrum of human management in different times and conditions, this lecture identifies the key features of the flowline labor system and discusses how they contextualize the zeitgeist of labor for each periodic ideology. The lecture tracks the development of the design logic by flowline labor from Ford’s assembly line in automobile manufacturing to the current AI algorithms for various platforms.