Design, Daily Life and Matters of Taste (original) (raw)
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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.
THE POTENTIAL OF DESIGN AESTHETICS
Proceedings of the 11th European Academy of Design Conference, 2015
Design School Kolding University of Southern Denmark University of Southern Denmark Design School Kolding alb@dskd.dk mnf@sdu.dk hacj@sdu.dk vri@dskd.dk The paper is a contribution to building a research discourse and methodology across disciplines. Taking design aesthetics as our theme, we present and discuss a research framework with roots in the interest in aesthetics within the humanities but aimed at producing research perspectives across design practice, the humanities and the social sciences. The initial research question is a meta-question contesting the relevance of the concept of design aesthetics in design research in terms of the interest in practice methodology within design practice, the interest in understanding the object within the humanities and the interest within the social sciences in investigating patterns and aspects of consumption. The research frame is guided by two aims: (i) to enable specific research interests by looking at possible combinations of empirical material and phenomena (processes, objects, contexts) and speculative settings of employed concepts, and (ii) to investigate the methodological setting of how the research frame may be engaged in an overall framework of aesthetics while the participants simultaneously operate with the particular interests of their disciplines. After a presentation of the concept of design aesthetics, we discuss the methodological and theoretical setting of the framework and its visualization in a model and present two projects which in different ways engage and explore design aesthetics: (i) the role of tactile sensing in textile design in relation to the articulation of aesthetic qualities for both designers and consumers and (ii) a critical-analytical project investigating different levels of aesthetics in design and the role of their specific cultural setting.
Design and Culture, 2020
A definition of design under everyday conditions often falls under the conventions of craft, placing emphasis on tangible objects resulting from personal design practices. Design also occurs as part of a routine process, found in sometimes banal, repetitive activities of everyday life. In order to understand how design operates as a productive practice in the everyday, this article looks at cooking as a type of design and, by extension, designers as cooks. As a “wild” practice of design – one that defies the division between production and consumption – this study on cooking articulates an alternative meaning of design that specifically looks at practices of engagement with ephemeral materiality in relation to design. This approach to design operates through processes of distributed agency rather than a traditional object-centered approach.
The Aesthetics in Design and Cultural Studies
2019
Discussing aesthetics as an aspect of design touches upon one of the most vital matters of how design functions as a means of communication. <br> Especially in non-professional contexts, when design artifacts are noticed and appreciated, it is more often for their aesthetic qualities than their practical or functional ability to solve more or less complex or well-defined problems. Furthermore, working with aesthetics is often regarded as a core competence in design, and the pervasive attention paid to aesthetics can be annoying to designers, as it implies that they work solely with artistic matters of surface, appearance, and styling as opposed to, for example, functionality. The theoretical framework proposed here can be used in analyses and discussions of aesthetics in design, but it can also inform designers who need to deal practically with the challenges of the aesthetic in design. The two aspects of aesthetics in design that are put forward in this paper— design as a str...
A taste for practices: Unrepressing style in design thinking
Design Studies, 2011
The current vogue for design in management discourses results in abstractions of the design process that repress the role of aesthetic judgments. This paper offers an explanation as to why design-as-styling is being neglected or concealed, and then explains what is at stake. It theorizes that a key aspect of the agency of designing, as the creation of artifacts to facilitate activities, lies in this taste literacy of designers. The framework for the argument of this paper is Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ and the notion of ‘style’ as proposed by Fernando Flores and his coauthors. The paper argues that designers are hermeneutists of proximal taste regimes, for the possibilities of new styles of action.► Design thinking promotions and cognitive research of designing de-emphasize style. ► Bourdieu’s work can link judgments of style and the designing of useful artifacts. ► Designers, as expert innovators, operate within discernments of style. ► Usability of designed artifacts depends upon coherence with taste regimes of users. ► Research on style judgments in designing can explain how tools like personas work.
Design and the Question of Aesthetics
Artifact
In the article an approach to aesthetics is suggested with the focus on the education of the designer rather than on the outcome of the design. Design is taken to be an interpretative intervention into a social context which requires a sensibility for the context. The forming of this sensibility is the goal of an aesthetic education. Through discussions of different approaches to aesthetics like Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics and Kant’s critique of the faculty of judgement, it is emphasized how sensibility as the key focus of aesthetics rather than art and beauty makes the ability to manoeuvre in the social context a central issue of aesthetics. Here, is the argument, is the link to an aesthetic education understood as an education of our senses through cultural products which is also a link to a perspective that appears to be absent in present debates on aesthetics in relation to design. Taking up this approach to aesthetics, is the argument, is to suggest a more profitable view on aesthetics in relation to design and an educational aspects of the designers competences.