- Email: [email protected]
Designing designing
354
Book reviews
begin to affect more and more people, Ferkiss hopes that environmental politicization will follow. But for Ferkiss, like many other modern ecological theorists, politicization is not enough. Spiritualization is the answer. Ferkiss sees a change of values, consciousness and an entire re-evaluation of the human place in the world as necessary for ecological harmony to become manifest. Is such a spiritualization or change of consciousness imminent? Ferkiss dares not answer. But the questions he asks make it apparent what he believes. The answer is up to us, as individuals. If one is looking for an excellent overview of the historical relationship between human beings, their tools and their natural environment, in a global setting, then Ferkiss’s book is an excellent choice. If one desires a good introduction to modern, Western-based, ecological movements, including the Greens, ecofeminism, ecotheology, Earth Firstism and social ecology, then this book is also a must read. The major weakness of Nature, Technology and Society, which Ferkiss admits in his introduction, is his lack of familiarity with non-
Western, ecologically sensitive and spiritually based social movements active on the current political scene. A final chapter detailing the theoretical underpinnings, praxis orientations and future visions of movements such as Ananda Marga, Prout, Sarvodaya, the Chipko ‘tree-huggers’, or any selection of similar movements would have added to the feeling that positive change can and is actually occurring. Oh well Victor, perhaps this is the focus of your next book?
Works
mentioned
Fritjov Capra, The Turning Point (New York, Bantam Books, 1982). Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York, Fawcett Publications, 1962). Rianne Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco, CA, Harper and Row, 1987). Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York, Harmony Books, 1991). Samuel Williams, History of Vermont, 1809 as cited in William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York, Hilland Wang, 1983), pages 122123.
Setting the future well afloat Chris Crickmay Designing
Designing
John
Jones
Chris
London,
Phaidon
Press, 1991
The late composer, John Cage, once declared that a good reply to a question ‘sets everything well afloat’. The book Designing Designing by John Chris Jones has done just this for his topic, expanding what we usually mean by the word ‘design’ so that it becomes a matter of how we head for the future, a question of interest to everybody, not just to a few professionals. It is over 20 years since this author wrote his first book on designing, called
Chris Crickmay Place, Maudlin UK.
can be contacted at 2 Garfield Road, Totnes, Devon TQ9 STB,
Design Methods, still a key text on the subject.’ Designing Designing is a collection of lectures and articles that span the years since Design Methods was published. It gives useful summaries and commentaries upon the original work and goes well beyond it, extending the ideas at the larger scale of technological and cultural change. Design Methods was a breakthrough in thinking about modern design problems and how they might be addressed. It was the culmination of the first phase of the Design Methods Movement that had been gathering strength since the 1950s. Its key assumption (drawn from the early systems theorists), was that modern design problems presented themselves, not at the level of individual products (where design effort was mainly addressed), but in the interaction between products as part of larger
FUTURES
April
1994
Book reviews
systems. To take one of John Chris Jones’s own examples (included in his more recent book), no amount of road building will come anywhere near solving today’s traffic problems. Instead, the appropriate design process will have to engage with the entire complex of: cars, drivers, car ownership, roads, car parks, bridges, traffic information, signs, signals, and codes of procedure, as a whole. Crucial in this shift of scale is the inclusion of information as well as material objects within the compass of design. A number of consequences flowed from this starting point. One was that no one specialist could expect to tackle these multifaceted problems alone. Second, drawing (the designer’s traditional tool), was no longer adequate as a way of representing ideas. Third, the problems were so new that no one could rely on their experience alone in order to tackle them. The need for new solutions and new thought and the jump in scale of the problems being faced called for a radically different approach to designing. Design methods used words and diagrams to externalize the designer’s mental process, making it shareable between specialists from many disciplines. The methods assumed that no one understood a problem at the outset and included intensive research into the use and limitations of existing systems to start off with in order to diagnose what the real problems were. To break free from preconceptions about what could exist, the designer’s thinking focused on process or iunction, rather than existing types of product (don’t think ‘table’, think what a table does). This shift, though implicit in the ‘functionalism’ of the Modern Movement in design, now took on a more distinctive and radical character. The results of applying such thinking were often a revelation. Taking the ‘user’s view’ of things, doing research into the effects of existing designs almost always revealed the unexpected. More people than one might expect had difficulties with the instructions in public ‘phone boxes. Longdistance lorry drivers suffered not from bad seating, as expected, but from draughts. By approaching problems from first principles, without preconceptions and with the fresh perspective of new (useoriented) information, the resulting proposals were often radically different from what
FUTURES
April 1994
3%
existed. Major technological achievements, such as the moon landings, could be ascribed to the new approach. It was borne along by immense optimism about the potential of information technology. Many major contemporary problems-congestion, accidents, waiting time, shortages of provision-could be addressed, not through adding more and more material (roads, buildings etc), but through timing, procedure and information. Systems would not be in a mess if we all had enough information to act intelligently within them. The least used but richest potential of any system is the collective intelligence of those within it (even ants know this!). So what went wrong with this systematic and systemic way of designing? Why has the reasoning outlined above failed to yield its initial promise? Why have the problems it appeared to be able to solve persisted? The new methods were supposed to result in a technology that was more sensitive and responsive to human life. Instead we are witnessing technologies that are increasingly oppressive in their effects: why is this? These are the questions that John Chris Jones addresses in Designing Designing. In John Chris’s view, systematic methods of designing were mistakenly assumed to substitute for the designer’s imagination. One might say they were misinterpreted as ‘automatic’ rather than ‘systematic’ methods. The essence of the original approach was the flexibility of mind needed in reformulating a problem and in anticipating the impact of a new system. It emphasized what John Chris has termed, the ‘interdependency of problem and solution’. When any new system or invention is introduced it changes the context in which it operates, changing the nature of the needs it set out to satisfy (the invention of TV is a good example). Thus, an overdeterministic view of ‘problems’, ‘functions’, ‘requirements’ and ‘needs’ is either doomed to failure, or at least becomes a fatal restriction on subsequent use. Some early attempts to use Design Methods failed on just this pointby achieving a perfect fit, they were defeated by their own success. It is this unfortunate potential of design, to smother what it touches, that constitutes one of the repeating themes and main philosophical issues in John Chris Jones’s continuing thought.
356
Rook reviews
He proposes a number of remedies, but none feels to me like a totally convincing answer. Perhaps the easiest to envisage is the strategy of modular design, where the designer focuses on flexible units (like bricks) which are open to various uses, many unpredictable at the start. Harder to see is the idea of universal participation in design processes, perhaps initially in ‘test cities’ that try out new technological and social possibilities. What such ideas seem to ignore are all the usual human conflicts and vested interests that infuse any social grouping. But of course many special communities do exist in the world today. More immediate is Chris Jones’s own favoured device (frequently used in the book itself) which is the inclusion of an element of chance in the design process (more of this later). It may well be that Design Methods have been misapplied, but one can’t help thinking that they probably never reached the kind of people who needed them most. Design professionals are probably too locked into their current scale of operation to take advantage of them. Interestingly, there is no term in common use that describes system-wide innovation. We live in a time of constant institutional upheaval and yet the words used suggest a very pedestrian application of pre-existing remedies: ‘modernization’, ‘rationalization’, ‘restructuring’. There is no tradition of conceiving The New (the really new!) in management or civil service parlance as there is, of necessity, in design or in the arts. Designing Designing can be viewed within the long tradition of radical texts, written since the Industrial Revolution, which have addressed the inhumane uses of technology. in line with such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse, John Chris Jones identifies the mechanizationas it were-of human behaviour and mentality as the most serious effect of industrialization (the limited horizons of the organization man or woman, the homogenization of taste, the mechanistic language of management, the rigidity of bureaucracy). What makes this book an interesting addition to the literature is, first, that it stems from a practical source in designing and a first-hand acquaintance with tackling material problems; second (perhaps surprisingly), that it draws its inspiration from the arts and literature, especially the avant
garde of the 20th century; and third (more surprising still), it follows its own advice and tries to do what is recommends. It is this last point which leads in places to a somewhat challenging read. The writer has been driven by his own logic to experiment with the manner of writing as well as the subject matter of the book. This means the inclusion of ‘rough’ material, normally edited out of books, such as notes and letters, and a recurring use of systematically random procedures (derived from Cage) in compiling parts of the text. This is most evident in several conference papers (which John Chris has preferred to call ‘plays’) where fragments of quotation from various authors are used to form an imaginary conversation. To see why all this is necessary it is helpful to know the main lines of argument. The book subscribes to the view that contemporary problems in technology and society persist because of fragmentary and overspecialized thinking. Fundamental to this is the splitting of mind and body, thought and things (after Descartes). While this traditional orientation of Western thought has been challenged in many fields since the 1950s (fields as far apart as psychiatry and ecology), it seemingly lives on in the ways we behave. Both singly and collectively we often fail to perceive things systemically, to acknowledge complexity. One context where integrative (nonfragmentary) modes of perception are common is in the arts. Not only in making but also in enjoying a work of art we become participants in it. As interpreters of the work we ourselves help, in a sense, to create it (a fact much emphasized in post-modern theory). Apply this kind of thinking to technology and there may be a clue as to how it could be less oppressive, less confining. The art critic and author john Berger once cfaimed that a good art work puts each person (the viewer or audience) more in charge of their own destiny. Could this be the measure of a successful technology? Any self-respecting designer begins with the idea that things could be marvellous. This is how he or she moves mentally out of the status quo into what could exist. So too, John Chris starts with the encouraging premise that technology (large or small) could be beautiful. But we have gone much too far in assuming that beauty is to do with
FUTURES
April 1994
Book reviews
seamlessness, homogenization; hence the shopping mall and the current predictability of broadcasting. What we seem to need are systems that are rougher, less predictable and less determining-systems that leave predictability to machines and leave humans to do what they do best, which is (in the view of John Chris) to improvise. In fact the vision this book offers of a ‘fully human’ existence is the ancient Buddhist ideal of purposelessness (a principle also known, consciously or not, to the average daydreamer). As many people would acknowledge, we often feel most in touch with ourselves and the world around us-most creative-when we succeed in momentarily switching off the busy preoccupations (aims, purposes) of daily life. Being without purpose is surely the antithesis of doing things by design. It is therefore tempting to conclude that John Chris Jones has abandoned his earlier writ-
357
ings altogether. But close reading of this, sometimes convoluted, text reveals that this is not the case. On the contrary, both books are discourses on the productive relationship of reason and imagination. Both are also to do with unseating our preconceptions when considering the future. New problems do require systematic research and rational analysis in order to provide an informed basis for decision. But reason alone can only extend what it already knows (the trend curve). To envisage the future as something new, we have to let go of one picture of the world in order to let in another-this requires the acceptance of a transitional state of constructive uncertainty-setting things well afloat,
Reference 1.
J.Chris Jones, Design Methods,
2nd Edition (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992).
Sober view of the W~s~~r~ Pacific Ron Crocombe The Western Pacific: Challenge Sustainable Growth Alan Burnett 270 pages, f45.00, Elgar, 1992
Aldershot,
of
UK, Edward
The Western Pacific is where all the action is expected to come from in the 21st century. The growth in most of it has been phenomenal in recent years. The message of Burnett’s book is about obstacles on the road to the future, challenging the assumption that their present pattern of economic growth will bring unparallelled prosperity. A valuable, sober assessment, though a little repetitious at times, its theme is that ‘it is unwise to assume that sustainable growth is a viable concept’ (page 5).
Ron Crocombe can be contacted at the EastWest Center, Pacific Islands Development Program, 1777 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96848, USA (Tel: i 1 808 944 7778; fax: + 1 808 944 7670).
FUTURES
April 1994
The region is dealt with in four main segments. North-east Asia (Japan, all the ‘Chinas’, and the ‘Koreas’) is where we find the big population-about 1.4 billion people, the main engine of growth, and foci of most kinds of power in the region, ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Brunei), with 330 million people, is growing both economically and in population. Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), will take a long time to emerge from its generation of anguish. Australasia (Australia, New Zealand and the other islands of Oceaniathough the author confines the last largely to Papua New Guinea) is in the process of finding its place as dependent on Asia rather than on Europe. Within each segment, he deals with the situation country by country. Incidentally, the largest country, and the one with the largest coastline on the Western Pacific, is Russia, but unfortunately it is not dealt with in the book. Burnett’s major contribution~ne past time to be spelled out in detail for this
Book reviews
begin to affect more and more people, Ferkiss hopes that environmental politicization will follow. But for Ferkiss, like many other modern ecological theorists, politicization is not enough. Spiritualization is the answer. Ferkiss sees a change of values, consciousness and an entire re-evaluation of the human place in the world as necessary for ecological harmony to become manifest. Is such a spiritualization or change of consciousness imminent? Ferkiss dares not answer. But the questions he asks make it apparent what he believes. The answer is up to us, as individuals. If one is looking for an excellent overview of the historical relationship between human beings, their tools and their natural environment, in a global setting, then Ferkiss’s book is an excellent choice. If one desires a good introduction to modern, Western-based, ecological movements, including the Greens, ecofeminism, ecotheology, Earth Firstism and social ecology, then this book is also a must read. The major weakness of Nature, Technology and Society, which Ferkiss admits in his introduction, is his lack of familiarity with non-
Western, ecologically sensitive and spiritually based social movements active on the current political scene. A final chapter detailing the theoretical underpinnings, praxis orientations and future visions of movements such as Ananda Marga, Prout, Sarvodaya, the Chipko ‘tree-huggers’, or any selection of similar movements would have added to the feeling that positive change can and is actually occurring. Oh well Victor, perhaps this is the focus of your next book?
Works
mentioned
Fritjov Capra, The Turning Point (New York, Bantam Books, 1982). Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York, Fawcett Publications, 1962). Rianne Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco, CA, Harper and Row, 1987). Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York, Harmony Books, 1991). Samuel Williams, History of Vermont, 1809 as cited in William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York, Hilland Wang, 1983), pages 122123.
Setting the future well afloat Chris Crickmay Designing
Designing
John
Jones
Chris
London,
Phaidon
Press, 1991
The late composer, John Cage, once declared that a good reply to a question ‘sets everything well afloat’. The book Designing Designing by John Chris Jones has done just this for his topic, expanding what we usually mean by the word ‘design’ so that it becomes a matter of how we head for the future, a question of interest to everybody, not just to a few professionals. It is over 20 years since this author wrote his first book on designing, called
Chris Crickmay Place, Maudlin UK.
can be contacted at 2 Garfield Road, Totnes, Devon TQ9 STB,
Design Methods, still a key text on the subject.’ Designing Designing is a collection of lectures and articles that span the years since Design Methods was published. It gives useful summaries and commentaries upon the original work and goes well beyond it, extending the ideas at the larger scale of technological and cultural change. Design Methods was a breakthrough in thinking about modern design problems and how they might be addressed. It was the culmination of the first phase of the Design Methods Movement that had been gathering strength since the 1950s. Its key assumption (drawn from the early systems theorists), was that modern design problems presented themselves, not at the level of individual products (where design effort was mainly addressed), but in the interaction between products as part of larger
FUTURES
April
1994
Book reviews
systems. To take one of John Chris Jones’s own examples (included in his more recent book), no amount of road building will come anywhere near solving today’s traffic problems. Instead, the appropriate design process will have to engage with the entire complex of: cars, drivers, car ownership, roads, car parks, bridges, traffic information, signs, signals, and codes of procedure, as a whole. Crucial in this shift of scale is the inclusion of information as well as material objects within the compass of design. A number of consequences flowed from this starting point. One was that no one specialist could expect to tackle these multifaceted problems alone. Second, drawing (the designer’s traditional tool), was no longer adequate as a way of representing ideas. Third, the problems were so new that no one could rely on their experience alone in order to tackle them. The need for new solutions and new thought and the jump in scale of the problems being faced called for a radically different approach to designing. Design methods used words and diagrams to externalize the designer’s mental process, making it shareable between specialists from many disciplines. The methods assumed that no one understood a problem at the outset and included intensive research into the use and limitations of existing systems to start off with in order to diagnose what the real problems were. To break free from preconceptions about what could exist, the designer’s thinking focused on process or iunction, rather than existing types of product (don’t think ‘table’, think what a table does). This shift, though implicit in the ‘functionalism’ of the Modern Movement in design, now took on a more distinctive and radical character. The results of applying such thinking were often a revelation. Taking the ‘user’s view’ of things, doing research into the effects of existing designs almost always revealed the unexpected. More people than one might expect had difficulties with the instructions in public ‘phone boxes. Longdistance lorry drivers suffered not from bad seating, as expected, but from draughts. By approaching problems from first principles, without preconceptions and with the fresh perspective of new (useoriented) information, the resulting proposals were often radically different from what
FUTURES
April 1994
3%
existed. Major technological achievements, such as the moon landings, could be ascribed to the new approach. It was borne along by immense optimism about the potential of information technology. Many major contemporary problems-congestion, accidents, waiting time, shortages of provision-could be addressed, not through adding more and more material (roads, buildings etc), but through timing, procedure and information. Systems would not be in a mess if we all had enough information to act intelligently within them. The least used but richest potential of any system is the collective intelligence of those within it (even ants know this!). So what went wrong with this systematic and systemic way of designing? Why has the reasoning outlined above failed to yield its initial promise? Why have the problems it appeared to be able to solve persisted? The new methods were supposed to result in a technology that was more sensitive and responsive to human life. Instead we are witnessing technologies that are increasingly oppressive in their effects: why is this? These are the questions that John Chris Jones addresses in Designing Designing. In John Chris’s view, systematic methods of designing were mistakenly assumed to substitute for the designer’s imagination. One might say they were misinterpreted as ‘automatic’ rather than ‘systematic’ methods. The essence of the original approach was the flexibility of mind needed in reformulating a problem and in anticipating the impact of a new system. It emphasized what John Chris has termed, the ‘interdependency of problem and solution’. When any new system or invention is introduced it changes the context in which it operates, changing the nature of the needs it set out to satisfy (the invention of TV is a good example). Thus, an overdeterministic view of ‘problems’, ‘functions’, ‘requirements’ and ‘needs’ is either doomed to failure, or at least becomes a fatal restriction on subsequent use. Some early attempts to use Design Methods failed on just this pointby achieving a perfect fit, they were defeated by their own success. It is this unfortunate potential of design, to smother what it touches, that constitutes one of the repeating themes and main philosophical issues in John Chris Jones’s continuing thought.
356
Rook reviews
He proposes a number of remedies, but none feels to me like a totally convincing answer. Perhaps the easiest to envisage is the strategy of modular design, where the designer focuses on flexible units (like bricks) which are open to various uses, many unpredictable at the start. Harder to see is the idea of universal participation in design processes, perhaps initially in ‘test cities’ that try out new technological and social possibilities. What such ideas seem to ignore are all the usual human conflicts and vested interests that infuse any social grouping. But of course many special communities do exist in the world today. More immediate is Chris Jones’s own favoured device (frequently used in the book itself) which is the inclusion of an element of chance in the design process (more of this later). It may well be that Design Methods have been misapplied, but one can’t help thinking that they probably never reached the kind of people who needed them most. Design professionals are probably too locked into their current scale of operation to take advantage of them. Interestingly, there is no term in common use that describes system-wide innovation. We live in a time of constant institutional upheaval and yet the words used suggest a very pedestrian application of pre-existing remedies: ‘modernization’, ‘rationalization’, ‘restructuring’. There is no tradition of conceiving The New (the really new!) in management or civil service parlance as there is, of necessity, in design or in the arts. Designing Designing can be viewed within the long tradition of radical texts, written since the Industrial Revolution, which have addressed the inhumane uses of technology. in line with such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse, John Chris Jones identifies the mechanizationas it were-of human behaviour and mentality as the most serious effect of industrialization (the limited horizons of the organization man or woman, the homogenization of taste, the mechanistic language of management, the rigidity of bureaucracy). What makes this book an interesting addition to the literature is, first, that it stems from a practical source in designing and a first-hand acquaintance with tackling material problems; second (perhaps surprisingly), that it draws its inspiration from the arts and literature, especially the avant
garde of the 20th century; and third (more surprising still), it follows its own advice and tries to do what is recommends. It is this last point which leads in places to a somewhat challenging read. The writer has been driven by his own logic to experiment with the manner of writing as well as the subject matter of the book. This means the inclusion of ‘rough’ material, normally edited out of books, such as notes and letters, and a recurring use of systematically random procedures (derived from Cage) in compiling parts of the text. This is most evident in several conference papers (which John Chris has preferred to call ‘plays’) where fragments of quotation from various authors are used to form an imaginary conversation. To see why all this is necessary it is helpful to know the main lines of argument. The book subscribes to the view that contemporary problems in technology and society persist because of fragmentary and overspecialized thinking. Fundamental to this is the splitting of mind and body, thought and things (after Descartes). While this traditional orientation of Western thought has been challenged in many fields since the 1950s (fields as far apart as psychiatry and ecology), it seemingly lives on in the ways we behave. Both singly and collectively we often fail to perceive things systemically, to acknowledge complexity. One context where integrative (nonfragmentary) modes of perception are common is in the arts. Not only in making but also in enjoying a work of art we become participants in it. As interpreters of the work we ourselves help, in a sense, to create it (a fact much emphasized in post-modern theory). Apply this kind of thinking to technology and there may be a clue as to how it could be less oppressive, less confining. The art critic and author john Berger once cfaimed that a good art work puts each person (the viewer or audience) more in charge of their own destiny. Could this be the measure of a successful technology? Any self-respecting designer begins with the idea that things could be marvellous. This is how he or she moves mentally out of the status quo into what could exist. So too, John Chris starts with the encouraging premise that technology (large or small) could be beautiful. But we have gone much too far in assuming that beauty is to do with
FUTURES
April 1994
Book reviews
seamlessness, homogenization; hence the shopping mall and the current predictability of broadcasting. What we seem to need are systems that are rougher, less predictable and less determining-systems that leave predictability to machines and leave humans to do what they do best, which is (in the view of John Chris) to improvise. In fact the vision this book offers of a ‘fully human’ existence is the ancient Buddhist ideal of purposelessness (a principle also known, consciously or not, to the average daydreamer). As many people would acknowledge, we often feel most in touch with ourselves and the world around us-most creative-when we succeed in momentarily switching off the busy preoccupations (aims, purposes) of daily life. Being without purpose is surely the antithesis of doing things by design. It is therefore tempting to conclude that John Chris Jones has abandoned his earlier writ-
357
ings altogether. But close reading of this, sometimes convoluted, text reveals that this is not the case. On the contrary, both books are discourses on the productive relationship of reason and imagination. Both are also to do with unseating our preconceptions when considering the future. New problems do require systematic research and rational analysis in order to provide an informed basis for decision. But reason alone can only extend what it already knows (the trend curve). To envisage the future as something new, we have to let go of one picture of the world in order to let in another-this requires the acceptance of a transitional state of constructive uncertainty-setting things well afloat,
Reference 1.
J.Chris Jones, Design Methods,
2nd Edition (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992).
Sober view of the W~s~~r~ Pacific Ron Crocombe The Western Pacific: Challenge Sustainable Growth Alan Burnett 270 pages, f45.00, Elgar, 1992
Aldershot,
of
UK, Edward
The Western Pacific is where all the action is expected to come from in the 21st century. The growth in most of it has been phenomenal in recent years. The message of Burnett’s book is about obstacles on the road to the future, challenging the assumption that their present pattern of economic growth will bring unparallelled prosperity. A valuable, sober assessment, though a little repetitious at times, its theme is that ‘it is unwise to assume that sustainable growth is a viable concept’ (page 5).
Ron Crocombe can be contacted at the EastWest Center, Pacific Islands Development Program, 1777 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96848, USA (Tel: i 1 808 944 7778; fax: + 1 808 944 7670).
FUTURES
April 1994
The region is dealt with in four main segments. North-east Asia (Japan, all the ‘Chinas’, and the ‘Koreas’) is where we find the big population-about 1.4 billion people, the main engine of growth, and foci of most kinds of power in the region, ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Brunei), with 330 million people, is growing both economically and in population. Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), will take a long time to emerge from its generation of anguish. Australasia (Australia, New Zealand and the other islands of Oceaniathough the author confines the last largely to Papua New Guinea) is in the process of finding its place as dependent on Asia rather than on Europe. Within each segment, he deals with the situation country by country. Incidentally, the largest country, and the one with the largest coastline on the Western Pacific, is Russia, but unfortunately it is not dealt with in the book. Burnett’s major contribution~ne past time to be spelled out in detail for this