On the Poetry of Design (original) (raw)
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The Word “ Design ” : Early Modern English Dictionaries and Literature on Design , 1604-1837
2010
It is normally accepted that Design History starts with mechanization and mass industrialization; however, it is also acknowledged that the word „design‟ was related to the production of artefacts since the end of the sixteenth century. This era concurs with the „early modern‟ period of Western history. This coincidence with the progressive constitution of modernity, which is not of course a coincidence at all for the emergence of „design‟ as an internal aspect of early modern society that was to become fully existent and further self-defined in the nineteenth century, is remarkable and deserves to be examined. This study‟s main objective is to clarify the origin and maturation of the word through the revelation that design related to the arts (as project drawing) provided the origin for the contemporary use of the word, as well as contributing to institutionalizing its discipline as a practical and intellectual activity. The following paper examines the meaning of the word „design‟...
Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New, 2019
The chapter considers second-order cybernetics as a framework that is accurately described as a poetics. An overview is provided on what it means to be in a world that is uncertain, e.g., how under conditions of limited understanding any activity is an activity that designs and constructs, and how designing objects, spaces, and situations relates to the (designed) meta-world of second-order cybernetics. If it cannot be determined whether the world is complex or not, to assume that the world is complex is a matter of choice linked to an attitude of generosity. The chapter highlights that It is this attitude, which makes designing an ethical challenge. Designers require a framework that is open, but one that supplies ethical guidance when ’constructing’ something new. Relating second-order design thinking to insights in philosophy and aesthetics, the chapter argues that second-order cybernetics provides a response to this ethical challenge and essentially it entails a poetics of designing. Available online via academic libraries from Springer Link (login with Shiboleth or Athens): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-18557-2\_13
This article addresses the dichotomy between design regarded as fashion and styling, and design as problem solving. Design involves both, and there is a continuum between them. The most successful designed objects, whether chairs, cars or office blocks, exhibit an interpenetration of styling and problem solving, and design has an ineliminable aesthetic component. Consumerism, on the other hand -the production of artifacts for a consumer market -is not essential to design. The term, and perhaps the profession of design originated in the 18th century. But the kind of work that designers since the eighteenth century have done, was earlier done in a less professional and self-conscious way by makers of the object in question. Thus one can speak of narrower and broader concepts of design. A narrower concept involves the formulation of production plans by a class of designers, separate from producers, and which at some stage became professionalized; these products are manufactured, giving rise to consumerism. A broad sense, in contrast, involves planning in some form, whether or not by plans and professional designers; consumerism is not involved. This broad sense is ancient, and goes back to Neolithic crafting of flint tools, for instance.
Design and its Relations, special issue
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2025
Design is an omnipresent, aesthetic-functional phenomenon, one that is culturally loaded and broadly influential. Since ancient times, design has played a crucial role in shaping both our intimate daily experiences and broader societal structures. It influences behavior, preferences, cultural norms and movements, political or personal identities, and economic systems. Today, design is not only a thriving field of practice but also an evolving area of academic inquiry, one that is becoming a self-standing discipline. It is, of course, important to define ‘design’ . But, in developing our understanding of it, we also need to analyze its relationships to associated fields, such as ontology, cognition and perception, ethics, politics, social conduct, fine or popular art, everyday aesthetics, and science and technology. The special issue Design and its Relations takes up this mission. We aim to reveal and study the interactions between design as an aesthetic-functional field and various auxiliary concepts, ideas, phenomena, and disciplines. The essays in the special issue thus address a range of design affiliations. These include both (a) relatively abstract affiliations—such as aesthetics, perception and appreciation, beauty, ethics, science, rationalism, and the idea of abstractness itself—and (b) more direct topics, including design’s relations to photographic systems and even cultural views of parenthood given through the evolution of crib shapes (which is a typical substantiation of design’s impact on humanity’s foundations).
Design as Meaning and Form Making: An Introduction
2017
This chapter presents the scope and ambition of the research: to produce a model of design that accounts for the practices of designers, artists, and researchers in engineering. The goal is to reveal what connects these practices while respecting their respective contributions to the challenge of invention. The main question is what does it take to produce an original work of science, art, or design? According to the author, the answer lies in the humanities, in particular the use of semiotics and media studies that help to understand and produce the autonomous poetic space of design.
Design Philosophy Papers, 2014
Heidegger's well-trammeled essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" as an object of reflection, engagement, and redirective innovation in order to think design now. The approach taken rests upon reading Heidegger from the perspective of a very different context: our present. By implication, engaging his text becomes informed by contemporary political, cultural, and environmental circumstances and imperatives. Such a reframed reading of Heidegger is then able to be taken to the ongoing project of rethinking design, not least its relation to art.
Literary Techniques in the Service of Design
Overdose: From the Galila Barzilai Hollander Collection. Neil Nenner and Avihai Mizrahi (eds.), 2022
Design might offer conspicuous and surprising manipulations of everyday objects. By transforming their appearance, materiality, and composition, creators communicate a range of messages and meanings. Rather than answering a need or solving a problem, these designs cause us to reflect, laugh and wonder about things that one might take for granted. Yet how does the design gap between the familiar and the strange serve to create meaning? This paper offers an analysis of design manipulations by means of literary techniques. Discussing a few of the works exhibited in “Overdose,” Design Museum Holon (2022), it shows that similarly to writers and poets, designers make use of allusions, metaphors, overstatements, understatements, oxymorons, ironies and synecdoches to tell a story and enrich the complexity of their work.
Design: a chorocronic construction on occasion of three myths, an epos and a painting
2010
Time has always concerned thinkers in an intimate way for their observation, and participation is a part of its flow. Although unseen, time does not contain tangible characteristics and represents the abstract, movement, the arrow which penetrates the image of reality, it is woven into the material characteristics of space; and this, in a manner perhaps elastic and adaptable which allows for the vocalization of both these systems within the common definition of time-space continuum. This paper attempts to discuss this concept of the time-space continuum as the framework of a creator's, and more specifically a designer's initial thought process. The construction, the shape, the content of a design, the art work, are tangible, they can be visible, are material objects and are, therefore, ephemeral, finite, dated. The relationship, however, of the invisible idea at the point of its formation can be defined in time-space terms, or otherwise "chorochronical" terms.
Advancements in the Philosophy of Design
2018
With this volume we present 24 contributions to the philosophy of design. Design is an emerging topic in philosophy and not yet one on which work is shaped by a common set of questions or by an academically entrenched discipline of philosophy of design. We therefore consider it an effort in itself that we can present 24 contributions. Throughout the years we have approached in our careers design from our separate disciplinary perspectives and probed whether design was becoming a more general topic of philosophical re ection. One of us (Pieter) is working in a philosophy department and analyzed design as part of a larger project within the philosophy of technology. This has led to a predecessor volume on the philosophy of design (Vermaas et al. 2008), analyses of design (Houkes and Vermaas 2010), joint work with design researchers on the structure of design (e.g., Vermaas and Dorst 2007), and to the creation of the Design Research Foundations book series, in which this volume has appeared. The second of us (Stéphane) is working in a design department and a design research center. He analyzed design from a phenomenological perspective and contributed to developing the knowledge of design in France. These efforts led to a monograph about how design affects, structures, and frames experience (Vial 2010) and to the founding of the French- speaking journal Sciences du Design edited by Stéphane. Our separate work may be taken as proof that design has found its way to philosophy, yet when teaming up we discovered a more substantial interest.