Transdesign: A prospective exercise on design transformation (original) (raw)
Related papers
A New Designer Paradigm: The Role of the Discipline in Transformative Time
INTED proceedings, 2022
In a world in profound transformation-economic, technological, environmental, social-the role of design, connected to the state of the art of contemporary, must innovate, investigating, in addition to the sphere of physical relationships, the digital and virtual ones, seeking, therefore, visionary solutions to new problems. In this situation we see the birth of design areas that aim to facilitate transformative processes, anticipating possible futures, thanks to a new set of skills and tools. The path of innovation for the discipline is complex and articulated and will require several years to be completed. The paper aims are to contribute to this ongoing discourse, considering the concept of transdisciplinarity as an element of redefinition of the characteristics and capabilities of this figure.
Design in the Expanded Field: Rethinking Contemporary Design
Nordes 2009: Engaging Artifacts
The paper explores the contemporary condition of design, proposing a parallel reading between a diagnosis of modernist sculpture of the 1960s by art historian Rosalind Krauss and the state of present-day design. Two competing notions of design will be presented and discussed; a broad notion represented by Herbert Simon and the expanded notion of design, and a guarded notion represented by Bruce Archer. Using a structuralist mapping of the field of design, the objective is to rethink contemporary design and dislocate our attention from what design is to how design works. 1
Redesigning design; an invitation to a responsible future
1995
This essay proposes new contours for design as a profession in a world whose industrial products have become more and more language-like and incommensurate discourses compete with one another for hegemony-the design discourse being merely one of many. It takes design to be constituted (that is, defined with)in processes of languaging. It calls on us to recognize and act in the awareness of how our discursive practices identify us as the experts we are, create the objects of our concerns, and provide us with a vocabulary to communicate or coordinate our actions relative to each other. 1 The motivation for this essay stems from the far too common experience that whenever designers do work with their counterparts from the so-called 'harder' disciplines, professionals who can argue with statistics, with experimental findings, with calculations or from positions of administrative authority, they most often lose out. Examples are abound. 2 I conclude from them that, first, designers often are preoccupied with products when what matters is how their ideas occur in talk, in clear presentations, in hard evidence, and in compelling arguments. It is communication that makes a difference and gets results. Second, design is foremost conceptual and creative of future conditions. Dwelling on existing facts often inhibits and is generally less important than the ability to bring a multiplicity of people to recognize the benefits of collaborating in the realization of new ideas. Designers are bound to fail when they do not act on the premise that their conceptualizations must make sense to those that matter. Third, the success of famous designers is based primarily on carefully nourished publicity, personal connections, or longtime working relationships with clients. The visual qualities and functionalities in terms of which 1 The insight that we humans, whether as ordinary people, as professionals or as scientists of one kind or another, are living in language is the starting point of several philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty. I can not review their ground and must go on here. 2 The version of this essay which was presented to the conference included five examples, among them Robert Blaich's account of how Philips' well known Roller Radio almost didn't come to be. See Robert Blaich (1990), Forms of Design, pp. d1-d14 in Seppo Väkevä (Ed.
Design today has become an extremely wide area of expertise, overlapping with many other disciplines. Knowledge of the classics of modern design has almost become a common cultural property. Design objects today are presented in a similar manner as art. This book is my interpretation of the design process, covering all disciplines. In the book, I will be occasionally shifting from one discipline to another, but this is because, in reality, disciplines are overlapping themselves. I think it is important to provide as much as possible a holistic overview. There are many different interpretations of design and according to me, as long as the designer can explain and communicate his work in a rational matter, there are no wrong or right design interpretations. I make no attempt here to create an encyclopedic enumeration of some kind; rather this book is designed, to present a survey of the main lines of the design development, and influential factors that may and will determine the future of the design process. This book represents a contemporary overview of that process and relates to the tendencies of the integrated design approaches in industry and the knowledge that lies behind. This book has been written and designed as a Masters Project at the Bergen National Academy of Arts (2004 - 2006). I would like to thank this institution for choosing me to become a part of the first generation of the Master students in Design and Visual Communication in Norway. Having American, German, French, British, and Norwegian professors, made the work on this book a valuable international experience.
The End of Design Theory: a project
2017
By the advent of the Bauhaus, the notion of design did engage in a two-track operation. Without dissociating itself from themes central to the formation of the architectural discipline, the concept of design, on the one hand, had to recode and at times delete thematic that had attained visibility in the context of labour and skills that were not sustainable under the rising regime of mechanical reproducibility. On the other hand, design became interactive in a web of communication and consumption systems that were informed by the exigencies of a culture that in less than fifty years would be coined the culture-industry. The nemesis of design in contemporary situation marked by the globalization of capital and information, I will argue, demands a radical departure from design recipes, past and present, that do not engage critically with the present production and consumption conditions of architecture. Discussing the collective implicitly involved in tectonics, this paper highlights the paradox in the contemporary theorization of design. This involves a different praxis, one that would surpass the prevailing rapport between academia (history/theory) and profession (practice).
Design Discourses of Transformation
She Ji, 2022
The aim of this article is to develop knowledge and understanding that supports critical conceptual interventions in design innovation theory and practice. Existing discourses of design are dissonant and paradoxical, for example positioning design as at once value-free and virtuous. We explain various instances of dissonance by establishing relationships between modes of design, design discourses, and knowledge systems. We map and interpret four design discourses, revealing the plural, dynamic, and mutable nature they share. Our understanding of design in the context of social transformation varies according to how we relate to knowledge systems, how these are produced through discourses, and how the two inform distinct modes of design. We argue that dominant discourses and entrenched knowledge systems must be consciously and actively upended. For this, we present a framework for transformative action to foster encounters across discourses and engender new critical expressions of and interventions in design theory and practice.
Changing concepts of design? :Myth and reality in design practices (with Q & A section)
2020
Draft for the keynote speech for 2020 International Conference on Art, Craft, Culture, and Design (ICON-ARCCADE), Institut Technologi Bandung(ITB), November 21, 2020 With a newly added record of Q & A after the conference This talk discusses the potential and the limitation of ongoing diversification and extension of design activities in the face of complex way of handling collaboration with other existing disciplines, with the references to such cases as design in space science, infrastructure building, architecture, community design and design-engineering, among others.
Editorial Preface: : Contemporary Histories of Design and Transience
Res Mobilis
In view of the current global condition characterised by indeterminacy and volatility caused by the global-scale humanitarian, ecologic and economic crises, the conference urged scholars and professionals in the field to reflect on the ways design and design history would deal with the issue of transience. The Covid-19 pandemic further led to a painstaking realisation of our own ephemerality as well as of everything we took for granted. In this context, the debate mainly focused on the ways designers and design historians, through their disciplinary practices, would cope with the consequences of natural disasters, wars, migration, displacement, and political tensions. The preoccupation with the issue of transience was further reinforced by the fact that information and knowledge have increasingly been subject to digital retrieval and manipulation, which constantly brings about new challenges and opportunities to compile, document, and preserve data. The instances whereby the condition of transience both informs and transforms user experiences, design disciplines, and design discourses were also of particular concern. The call for papers of the conference invited authors to address the multifaceted relationship between design and transience by resituating transience as a historiographic, cultural and design challenge. The essays included in this special issue all responded to this call in creative ways, and they loosely fall under such thematic categorisations as digital history, museums and preservation; politics, identity, and memory; postcolonial criticism and curatorial
Design Philosophy Papers, 2015
Parsons school of Design, The new school, new york 1. 'In the future design will be very important, designers less so' Two hundred years ago a Design Research Society conference was not possible. Indeed, Design, as we know it, as a professional activity, did not exist. One hundred years ago we could have had debates on design-in 1914 there was a famous debate between Gropius and Van der Velde at the German Werkbund (in effect on art versus industry, some things do not change much)-but at that date the idea of design research was all but impossible and indeed the Design profession itself, as we know it was still incipient. The concepts of high-level design education and of design research waited for another half-century. The point I am making here is obvious-almost, but not quite, for to point to the historical emergence of design as profession is to remind us what we continually tend to forget, namely that if design is what we think of today as (in effect) an anthropological capacity-without which we could not be fully human (in the words of the late British design historian John Heskett, 'a unique characteristic of what defines us as human beings on a par with literature and music') it is also specifically, in the form that it takes as capacity, a historical phenomenon. In other words, if design, again to quote Heskett, allows us, or helps us, 'to create a world of artifice to meet our needs and give meaning to our lives, ' and thus (ideally if not always in practice) 'beneficially reshape the world of artifice we have created and inhabit, ' it does so always under particular historical conditions. Design is never outside of history: it occurs; in the context of forces and circumstances; in the play that is set in motion between a relation of forces and the potential (shi) which is implied by that situation, and can be made to play in one's favor. Hegel argued that philosophy is always its own time reflected in thought. Design partakes on something of the same condition. It is always at once beholden to and reflective of, its