Design and technology: is there space for critical sense

Design Philosophy Papers, 2005

Strategic Design Research Journal, 2015

Our vision of the future depends on the one we have about the past. In this paper, the prevailing stances in the study of design history are analysed to clarify their infl uence on the shaping of our concept about design: what it is and could be. The traditional thread in the study of design history has its roots in Pevsner's work, who purports a vision of design as heir to the architectural tradition, and in Geidion's texts, that emphasize the notion of technological evolution. As a result, the vision of design that is taught (therefore directing most of our professional practice) favours the notion of this profession as "art" and the fi gure of individual designers as cultural heroes, leaving out other postures that could be more akin to our needs and possibilities. Therefore a critical refl ection about design history is fundamental in order to imagine different futures and other models of professional practice. From this analysis, the proposal to explore other perspectives than those of the dominant approaches emerges, in order to stimulate the required refl ection that could help formulate innovative scenarios and thus shape future products and services.

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.

Techne, 2021

Starting from a critical interpreta- tion of some authors involved in the debate raised by the call, this paper hypothesizes practicable conditions for a circular, non- pyramidal integration of technological dis- ciplines into design processes, presenting some experimental investigations in sup- port of these concepts. The paper aims to investigate, in particular, how the role of digital technologies, the key players in a full- blown transformation of thought, impacts the designer’s education models and has a tendency to redefine both the boundaries between disciplines and the very role of the designer. Some significant international ex- periences in the field of the education of de- signers show that a humanistic approach to controlling technologies and to “ubiquitous” cooperation among strains of knowledge presents a possible scenario of profound rethinking of the role of the technological designer within a framework of shared fra- gility of the planet’s economic models.

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

Comunicação e Sociedade

Our lives are dominated by digital technologies, it influences how we socialise, we work, we play, we shop, we explore the world around us and access knowledge and services. We live in both the digital and the physical world, but the digital world has the power to change what we experience every second, this has resulted in constant enhancement. Spontaneity and reactivity assume an increasingly prominent role in this communication universe. This inevitably influences social, economic, and political dynamics. Faced with a highly mediated and mediatised world, communication has attained significant power. A dispersed power, shared between different protagonists. A power that is not always identifiable and which often tends to be more associated with rumour and crisis than with information and clarification. This power of communication, more and more horizontal, challenges established power bases. Technological change in the digital world is occurring at a pace that neither society or legislators are able to keep up with. Since the call for this volume of Comunicação e Sociedade journal we have seen the launch of CHATgpt and BARD. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, internet of things (IoT) and robotics are sweeping all areas of society in the developed world, enhancing our transport systems, our healthcare, industry and much more. It is still not clear how it will affect our jobs, our security, and our life. There is so much to understand and communicate. Where does the role of design fit into this system of communication? The discipline of design is extremely diverse, design competencies include planning and strategy, visualising, and prototyping, creating the material and the digital world. But designers work materially and immaterially. Design, in its most varied perspectives and disciplines, can be an important contribution to the construction of more informed, enlightened

Routledge eBooks, 2008

Under the assumption that design is a hypothetical test of building, this paper introduces a method of employing architectural knowledge through direct manipulation of geometric objects. Proposing a framework for retrieving and analyzing not only what is modeled but also how it is designed, this paper demonstrates that designing can be viewed as an object of research. The paper also discusses the issues pertaining to the implementation of the aforementioned framework. In the Recueil et Parallèle des Édifices de Tout Genre, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760-1834) investigated and organized noteworthy buildings (i.e., architectural precedents) according to functional and morphological type of each building. In the nineteenth century, the Recueil... constituted a precious reference for the study of architectural form in academic and professional circles. It was a " comparative taxonomy,"

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.

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.