The culture of design: a critical analysis of contemporary designers’ identities (original) (raw)

Research for Cultural DNA in Design

Computational Studies on Cultural Variation and Heredity, 2018

This position paper commences with a brief overview of where the cultural DNA may lie in the enterprise of designing. It puts forward the concept that cultural DNA is not a unitary concept and needs to be treated multi-dimensionally deriving from multiple sources. The paper outlines research that supports cultural DNA research in design.

LOOKING AT “DESIGN and DESIGNER” FROM a CULTURAL POINT of VIEW

LOOKING AT “DESIGN and DESIGNER” FROM a CULTURAL POINT of VIEW, 2022

Design is a phenomenon encompassing multiple fields such as culture, technique, art, and sociology. The design, which constitutes a kind of buffer zone due to its position, exists in direct and indirect relations with the ipseity of life. In a multidisciplinary structure, the organization of inputs from each different field is one of the core elements at the heart of design. The designed object, on the other hand, is an entity emerging from the combination of culture and technique in terms of providing an aesthetic and ergonomic solution to the existing need and having the potency to shape the way of living and habit. The paradigms used in design fall outside the zeitgeist when created solely based on conventional data and pre-existing knowledge. The needs and culture that move alongside time also form the essence of culture. This formation, in fact, is a depiction of the way of life. The shaped environment, again, involves movement whether with places or metas; it evolves and changes with a dynamic nature. The design is also a phenomenon that shares this dynamism in the most basic sense and takes form within its own timeframe. The ability to use this dynamic nature either in a negative or positive direction finds existence under the responsibility of the designer. The design-related core that is created by the culture, once again, reaches a point where it creates the culture. The purpose of this study is to interpret the role of the contemporary design object in our reality by discussing sections from the definitions of metas as well as from the meanings attributed to their social cores and contents within the design process from industrial production to our present day. In this regard, the study discusses the relevance and relation of the design to the concepts of culture, consumption, and meta. Moreover, based on the formation of the 21st-century modern world, this interpretation process provides an insight into the place where the design and designer stand and should stand. Tasarım; kültür, teknik, sanat, sosyoloji gibi birçok alanı içinde barındırır. Pozisyonu gereği bir tampon bölge oluşturan tasarım hayatın kendiliği ile direkt ve dolaylı ilişkilerdedir. Farklı alanlardan girdilerin organizasyonu tasarımın özünde yatan nüvelerdendir. Tasarlanmış obje; ihtiyacın, estetik ve ergonomik olarak çözümlenmesi noktasında kültür ve tekniğin bir birleşimi, yaşayışı ve alışkanlığı biçimlendiren bir varlıktır. Tasarım paradigmaları sadece konvansiyonel veriyle oluşturulduğunda zamanın ruhunun dışında kalır. Zamanda hareket eden ihtiyaçlar ve kültür tasarımı şekillendirir. Bu şekilleniş yaşayışın tasviridir. Şekillenmiş çevre, mekanlarda ve metalarda hareket barındırır, değişir, dinamiktir. Tasarım da en temelde dinamik bir yapıda olan ve zaman dahilinde biçimlenen bir olgudur. Bu yapıyı negatif-pozitif yönde kullanabilme kabiliyeti tasarımcının sorumluluğundadır. Kültürden var olan tasarımsal nüve yine kültürü oluşturan bir noktaya varır. Bu çalışma zanaattan günümüze kadar tasarım sürecinde metaların tanımlanmalarından, toplumsal nüvelerinden, anlamlarından ve içeriklerinden kesitler tartışarak günümüz tasarım objesinin gerçekliğimizdeki yerini anlamlandırmayı amaçlamaktadır. Kültür, tüketim, meta gibi kavramlar üzerinden tasarım ile ilgi-ilişki tartışılmış ve 21. Yüzyıl modern dünyasının oluşumundan hareketle tasarımın ve tasarımcının durduğu/durması gereken yere bir bakış sağlamaktadır.

Taste and attunement: Design Culture as World Making

Design Culture: Objects and Approaches, 2018

This chapter is a speculative attempt to position ‘design culture’ at the centre of our descriptions and understandings of the world. In it I argue that ‘design culture’ allows us to see the world as particular sets of qualities, feelings and meanings as well as a purposefully fashioned material environment. But rather than claiming that design is at the centre of the world (a claim that, to my mind, would be no less spurious than any other claim for the centrality of one particular phenomenon) I want to more modestly explore what it would mean to position design at the centre. In other words, my interest is in the generative affordance of inquiries that treat design as somehow foundational to how the world seems to us (the qualia of our being in the world). In some ways this centrality is already assumed by the actual term ‘design culture’, which orients the ambition of investigation about design towards considering the world-forming activity of design. ‘Culture’, as a qualification for the word ‘design’, offers significantly different capacities than the word ‘history’ or ‘social’, for instance. At its most limited ‘design culture’ might suggest a form of attention aimed at investigating the practices and values enacted, say, by a particular design studio, in the same way that anthropologists might want to look at practices and values of a group of Trobriand Islanders. At its most extensive, though, ‘design culture’ might well try to attend to any and every aspect of society where tools, technology, clothing and the fashioning of an environment are central.

BOOK REVIEW “An Introduction to Design and Culture: from 1900 to the present”

Tsinghua Design Magazine, Beijing , 2014

Central Arguments In the 2013 and third edition of her book, “An Introduction to Design and Culture: from 1900 to the present,” distinguished design history writer and professor, Penny Sparke, continues to ably trace the development and the role of Western design and designers as she has done in her two previous editions in 1986 and 2004. In this, her latest and updated version, Sparke efficiently weaves in the global and influential role design holds in shaping identities of the world’s cultures and lifestyles through the first decade of the 21st century. In doing so, she firmly situates today’s design practice and profession as one of leadership and prime mover in 2013. At the same time and where applicable, she intelligently updates chapters in the previous edition of her 2004 book to reflect more current attitudes of the social, technological and economic forces pervasive on design today. She accomplishes this task by tracing the role of Western design and designers in their relationship to global consumer culture and drawing from theories found in post-modern academic disciplines such as social history, visual culture, and media studies. Additionally, she includes current and fast changing technological trends such as design’s engagement in social media, virtual reality, and immersive environments. Next Sparke concludes her book with the rise of ‘glo-cal’ism’ i.e. the integration of global and local design sensibilities in the first decade of the 21st century. Lastly Sparke has ably documented the design enterprise from the periphery of being a decorator of commerce at the turn of the 20th century, towards part of the inner circle during Modernism at the mid- century, later becoming a business partner of corporate globalism, and then entrepreneur in ‘glo- calism.” In the final analysis, Sparke summarizes the profession and practice as being highly able to flex and adapt to the forces and contexts of culture and commerce. © Catherine Jo Ishino, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Catherine Jo Ishino and 2014 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Cultural study in design: In search of a meaningful approach

2014

Does the Circuit of Culture help design students to do a cultural study that is meaningful for their design project? Indeed, it provides a good view on the phenomenon culture, its complexity and how contemporary cultures can be studied, providing an overview and structure of the processes that influence cultural change. However, there are difficulties that need extra attention; (1) clear definitions of the process elements and their interrelationships; (2) a method or possible procedure to carry out a cultural study; (3) guidelines to determine and demarcate the cultural study in such a way that it contributes to the project assignment; (4) examples of how insights from a cultural study can contribute to the development of a design vision; (5) an extra lens to look at culture to distinguish it from the individual and the universal; (6) discouraging the use of the model as a checklist and (7) discussion about the designers’ influence on culture and society.

A Sideboard Manifesto: Design Culture in an Artificial World

The Design Culture Reader, 2008

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.