Technology Mitigation

Definition

Technology mitigation is Wentling's name for the retention of superseded technology's look in new design — decoration that keeps the image of an obsolete function after the function itself has disappeared. The book's two canonical instances: the fireplace, "retained in homes over 150 years after their utilitarian purpose was eliminated by centralized heating sources, as a testament to its sentimental and emotional value" (Wentling 2017, p. 162); and the fake window muntin — "The popularity of 'fake' window muntins is another excellent illustration of the high-tech/high touch phenomenon, where manufacturers responded to the public's interest in technology mitigation" (p. 194). Over three centuries, "one could approximate the age of a home by the number of panes of glass found in the window sash"; as glass technology improved, muntins vanished — and then returned as snap-in fakes because "Homeowners prefer the appearance and charm of the older windows that had muntins, especially since the muntins divided the glass into more human scale elements" (p. 194).

The concept generalizes to a theory of style: the Craftsman ethos ("if we must live in a machine age, houses should present an image of craftsmanship and the art of building by hand," p. 27 — though most such houses were machine-tooled), nonfunctional shutters defended as legitimate decoration ("almost every culture since antiquity has included some form of decoration on their architecture… the fact that they are simply decorative is of no consequence," p. 182), and the fireplace's survival as "the symbolic heart of the dwelling" (p. 162). Against the modernist prohibition on fake ornament, technology mitigation asserts that mitigation is the vernacular's mode: mass-market housing processes technological change by retaining its superseded imagery as sentiment and human scale.

Key Thinkers

• wentling-james — the concept's namer and its production-housing evidence (2017)
• Frank Lloyd Wright (not yet paged — see log) — the compressed entry sequence as deliberate emotional-scale design (p. 150), adjacent to the mitigation argument

Related Concepts

• design-reform — the reform tradition whose honesty-dogma (structural honesty, functional expression) technology mitigation quietly refuses
• domestic-interior — the fireplace/media-wall field where mitigation operates
• modernism — the movement against whose machine-age idiom the mitigation runs
• habitus — familiarity as the taste engine of mitigation (muntins and shutters as acquired human scale)
• hypernaturalization — the wiki's other technology/nature remediation concept

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the fireplace as 150-year survivor and "technology mitigation" (p. 162); the flat-screen TV as "the contemporary electronic hearth" beside the retained fireplace (p. 164); snap-in muntins and the "high-tech/high touch phenomenon" (p. 194); the shutter defense (p. 182); the Craftsman style's machine-age mitigation ethic (p. 27)

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Wentling ingest; awaits design-historical sources on ornament, camp, and retro-technologie.

Open Questions

• Is technology mitigation the vernacular's dialectic (a popular synthesis of high-tech production and low-tech image) or mere false consciousness in decorative form? Wentling defends it without apology; the modernist tradition condemns it.
• How does the concept relate to Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour's decorated shed? Both accept applied imagery; mitigation names the temporal mechanism (superseded function retained as image) the decorated shed argument implies.
• If the flat-screen TV is now the electronic hearth (p. 164), will the media wall in turn be mitigated when its technology is superseded — is mitigation cyclical, and does every medium leave a fossil ornament?