A Sideboard Manifesto: Design Culture in an Artificial World (original) (raw)

2008, The Design Culture Reader

This introduction is meant to be a manifesto and as such should really demand the complete re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies – 'Stand aside! The train of design studies is coming through!' But it is also a modest manifesto, a sideboard manifesto, and so imagines something far less dogmatic. What it imagines is an opening up of design studies. Or, more modestly still, it seeks to encourage an opening up that is already taking place as design enquiries look across aesthetics, play-theory, sensual perception, technology, global economics and affect theory for its research perspectives. It wants to promote the expansion of what counts as a design object or practice, an expansion already being pursued by researchers who might want to include air, manners, movement, recipes, plumbing, and medicine, as part of the designed environment. What makes design culture such a productive arena for general social and cultural research is that it can supply the objects that demonstrate the thoroughly entangled nature of our interactions in the material world, the way that bodies, emotions, world trade, and aesthetics, for instance, interweave at the most everyday level.