Introduction to Design Theory: Philosophy, Critique, History and Practice 2022061675, 9781032106175, 9781032106182, 9781003216230

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Introduction to Design Theory

Introduction to Design Theory introduces a comprehensive, systematic and didactic outline of the discourse of design. Formulated both as a course book and as a source for research, this textbook methodically covers the central concepts of design theory and philosophy, definitions of design, its historical milestones and its relations to culture, industry, body, ecology, language, society, gender and ideology. Demonstrated by a shift towards the importance of the sociocultural context in which products are manufactured and embedded, this book showcases design theory as an emerging sub-discipline of design, unique in its practice-based approach and its broad perception of design. It offers an in-depth understanding of the central concepts, such as “form” and “function,” “theory” and “practice,” through a discussion of key case studies and historical examples, such as the advent of the view of design in antiquity, the introduction of mass production to modernist design or the ideological shifts in design in the mid-twentieth century, as well as analytical tools for further dissection and learning in practice. With a focus on a combination of several theoretical knowledge foundations— aesthetics and philosophy, critical theories, cultural studies, design history and design anthropology—the reader is enabled to approach design as a central pivot around which contemporary culture revolves, reflecting, reaffirming or challenging social and cultural structures. Aimed towards undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as teachers and scholars, from across the design disciplines, Introduction to Design Theory invites readers to engage with design from an interdisciplinary perspective, departing from the traditional academic compartmentalisation of practice, history and philosophy. Michalle Gal is a Professor of Philosophy at the Unit of History and Philosophy of Art and Design and the Interdisciplinary Design Graduate Program, Shenkar College, Israel. Gal is the author of Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory of Metaphor (2022) and Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics (2015), and the co-editor of the special issues Art and Gesture (2014), Visual Hybrids (2023, Poetics Today) and Design and its Relations (2023, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics).

Jonathan Ventura is a Professor of Design Theory and Research and the Director of the Unit for History and Philosophy of Art and Design at Shenkar College, Israel; Ventura is also a visiting scholar at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, UK, and an international instructor at the PhD School at MOME University in Budapest Hungary. He is the co-founder and co-director of the international Social Design Network (https://www.socialdesignnetwork.org/).

“Michalle Gal and Jonathan Ventura have produced a fascinating historical tour of the complexities of design theory with all its contradictions and reversals. The stumbles and contradictions are important, for they show that the answer to what appears to be a simple question, ‘what is design?’, changes every time new findings and evidence appear. The book should appeal to students and advanced scholars, showing that this confusion is proper and appropriate. Their summary is apt: design is a bricolage of methods and approaches. We should not ask ‘what is design?’ but instead ask ‘what can design achieve?’.” Don Norman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Diego, USA; and author of “Design for a Better World”. “Michalle Gal and Jonathan Ventura provide a wide-ranging and engaging survey of the many facets of Design. Touching on perennial theoretical questions as well as contemporary examples and issues, An Introduction to Design Theory will appeal to theorists and practitioners alike.” Glenn Parsons, Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada.

Introduction to Design Theory Philosophy, Critique, History and Practice

Michalle Gal and Jonathan Ventura

Designed cover image: T-E-X-T-B-L-O-C-K © Pini Leibovich First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Michalle Gal and Jonathan Ventura The right of Michalle Gal and Jonathan Ventura to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gal, Michalle, author. | Ventura, Jonathan, author. Title: Introduction to design theory: philosophy, critique, history and practice / Michalle Gal and Jonathan Ventura. Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022061675 | ISBN 9781032106175 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032106182 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003216230 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Design—Philosophy. Classification: LCC NK1505 .G34 2023 | DDC 744.01—dc23/eng/20230412 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061675 ISBN: 978-1-032-10617-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-10618-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-21623-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003216230 Typeset in Univers by codeMantra Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Contents

List of Figures

viii

Introduction

1

1

Definitions of Design

6

2

Form and Function

59

3

Design and (or as) Language

95

4

Design between Theory and Practice: Applied Theories of Design

120

5

Design, Culture and Social Institutions

142

6

Design and Industry

188

7

Design, Ecologies and the Body

211

8

Design and Ideology

243

Index

267

vii  

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5

Banana Chair “Zjedzony,” Wam House, 2005 Roger Fry, Druad Chair for Omega Workshops, 1913–1914 Jules Lavirotte, The Lavirotte Building, Paris, 1889–1901 Andrea Branzi, Scoiattolo Nutcracker, 2010 Stephane Janin, from a presentation to industrial design students in Shenkar College, 2022 1.6 Warring States Ancient Chinese Knife Coin, Handan City Museum, Hebei, China, by Gary Lee Todd, CC0 1.0 1.7 Umbra Basket 2.1 Plaza Major, Madrid 2.2 La Gare d’Orsay, 1900, Musée d’Orsay, 2017 2.3 Bialetti Moka Express, 1933 2.4 Stefan Zwicky Grand Confort, Sans Confort, Dommage à Corbu armchair, 1980 2.5 Banana Chair “Zjedzony,” Wam House, 2005 2.6 Shimon Levy’s Ship House, 1934–1935 2.7 The Art Nouveau upper floor of the Wanewright Building, designed by Sullivan in Chicago, 1891 2.8 Michael Thonet Chair no. 14, fit to be presented in your local IKEA store 2.9 Marcel Breuer, Cantilever Wassily Chair 2.10 Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Building, 1925–1926 2.11 One of Martino Gamper’s chairs 2.12 Philippe Starck, Juicy Salif, 1990 3.1 Haka stance at a Wellington traffic light 3.2 A half of the Union Jack in the Mini Cooper’s back light 3.3 Grohe Flush Button 3.4 Zjedzony Banana Chair, Wam House, 2005 3.5 Kamil Güleç Library of Karabuk University, Turkey, 2017 3.6 Central Library, Kansas City, 2004 3.7 Peter Behrens, Turbine Factory, Berlin, 1909 3.8 Bettina Speckner, Brooch, 2018 3.9 Alessandro Martorelli’s Frozen Peas ice cube mould design, 2014

8 24 30 46 46 49 53 66 67 75 78 79 81 83 85 87 88 89 92 96 97 97 100 101 101 103 105 106

viii  

Contents  

3.10 Philipp Starck, Masters Chair, 2009 3.11 Model of Meaning-Making in Design 4.1 Looking at the spectrum of art, design and technology through the trans-disciplinary lens 4.2 Philip Starck, Juicy Salif lemon squeezer, designed in 1998, has been often criticised for lacking in functionality, and in many ways impractical, however, still considered an important conceptual design example 4.3 Between theory and practice map 5.1 Hoover ad from the 1950s 5.2 Two types of messages designed as posters to trigger differing meanings 5.3 Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Arab Uprising protests of 2011 5.4 Ukrainian revolution, Independence Square, Kiev, 2014 5.5 IKEA hackers 5.6 A Situationist advertisement, Paris, 1960s 5.7 Playmobil figures for boys and for girls 5.8 Barbie versus Lammily 5.9 Grace Wristband by Peter Astbury 5.10 “Manspreading chair” by Laila Laurel 5.11 Band-Aid for various skin colours 5.12 Voyager Pioneer plaque 5.13 Smurfette before and after 5.14 Nike sneakers depicting the pink triangle 5.15 The Netherlands lion was transformed into a lioness 5.16 US women’s soccer football uniform 5.17 The 2022 Washington Wizards Capitol Edition jersey 5.18 The San Antonio Spurs’ “support the troops” jersey 5.19 The 2021 NBA jerseys of the Cleveland Cavaliers (L) and the Golden State Warriors (R) 5.20 In a fascinating amalgam of national history, corporate capitalism and global care NGOs, FC Barcelona is a semiotic example of the first order 5.21 Nike Kyrie Irving celebrating Black heritage 5.22 Black Lives Matter slogans on specially designed jerseys 5.23 The 2021 UK Olympic team uniforms 5.24 The 2021 US Olympic Team apparel by Ralph Lauren 5.25 Beatles LEGO set 5.26 Early Christian Pisces symbol 5.27 The classic ladder-back Shake rocking chair 5.28 Greek Hoplites 5.29 The Campana brothers’ Cangaço furniture is based on Brazilian bandits’ clothing 6.1 The Ford Motor assembly plant in La Boca, Buenos Aires, 1921

112 117 138

138 140 143 146 148 149 149 152 157 158 162 162 164 165 166 169 170 170 171 171 172

173 173 174 175 175 178 180 181 182 184 188

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  Contents

6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 6.15 6.16 7.1 7.2 7.3

7.4 7.5 7.6

7.7

The customisable platform of Nike ID Lucky Strike packet designed by Raymond Loewy Loewy in front of a locomotive designed by his team Peter Behrens electric kettle, 1909 Apple’s iMac designed by Jonathan Ive Alfa Romeo’s Pininfarina Spider Philippe Starck, Louis Ghost Chair. This chair is made by Kartell, an Italian-based company loved by all design enthusiasts. It was designed by a French designer living in NY and manufactured in China. It is a modern Baroque (local) turned into a minimalistic plastic chair (global) sold all over the world Fire Station at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, designed by Zaha Hadid in 1993 Japanese or American Minimalism? (Fukasawa on the left, Hecht on the right.) BMW i8 factory The 3D printed dress for burlesque dancer Dita von Teese, designed by Michael Schmidt and architect Francis Bitonti Toy company Mattel’s 3D printer Thingmaker Dreyfuss’s Joe and Josephine, the beginning of standardised ergonomics The OXO peeler originated thanks to the needs of arthritis patients Prosthetic leg cover in the colours of Marvel Iron Man’s armour B17 Flying Fortress’ throttles The Ulm stool, designed by Max Bill, Hans Gugelot and Paul Hildinger, 1955 Left: Illustration of how corsets would change the shape of internal organs, a well-known example of how the body is changed and designed according to social imaginaries and ideologies. Right: Chastity belts, like this seventeenthcentury example (Wellcome Collection, London), is another well-known example of how designed objects were used in controlling orfices Victorian dining etiquette The 2017 Kickstarter-funded Measure of Man by Henry Dreyfuss hostiledesign.com is a website documenting the works of design activist groups who took upon themsleves to mark instances of design in public space that are hostile to certain types of “Others.” Their use of the “design crime” sticker may be seen as a form of “tactic,” in Certeau’s terms, to resist the systems of power that are reflected and reinforced through the design of the public space There is a debate as to whether eyeglasses were first invented in the West by artisans or whether the invention may

191 192 193 194 196 196

198 200 201 202 203 203 206 207 208 213 215

220 222 228

233

x  

Contents  

7.8

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9

have travelled from the Eastern side of the earth, China and India. Adi Sankaracharya (509–477 BC), one of India’s most renowned scholars, is known to have used eyeglasses to support him while reading. The image on the upper left corner is what scholars presume his eyeglasses looked like—very similar to the much older nose crushers you can see on the image on the lower right corner. These are German Type 2 rivet spectacles (Nietbrille) dated from 1350 to 1400. Leaving the question of who came first aside, one can see that the newer model is a design that takes ergonomics into account, with its curved centres to clamp better on the bridge of the nose. In the left image, you can see how such spectacles would be worn. This is considered to be the first painting from Northern Europe depicting a person wearing eyeglasses. The “Glasses Apostle” painting is attributed to Conard von Soest, Brillenpostel (tempra on wood, 1403) Left: An example for an advertisment for the Harelequin Eyeglasses style, popular in the 1950s “as seen in Vogue.” Right: Look magazine with an illustration of the Harelquin design and its iconic stance Neil Morris’s Cloud Table, 1947 Anat Golan, graduate work, 2022 Burqini swimsuit Josiah Wedgwood, Anti-Slavery Medallion, 1787 First World War British recruitment poster Dessau-Törten Housing Estate affordable housing project, designed by Walter Gropius, 1926–1928 Hoover Iron, 1948 Quaderna table by Zanotta, 1970 Marti Guixe, MTKS-3/The Meta-territorial Kitchen System-3, 2003

236

240 246 247 251 252 253 254 255 256 261

xi  

Introduction

Design needs theory. That said, Design Theory needs to develop into a well-established discipline, providing abstract and applied implications to researchers and practitioners alike. Although design is as old as architecture (perhaps even older), and although architecture has been the subject of a rich and elaborate body of theoretical knowledge, design was somewhat left behind until the second half of the twentieth century. Since this time, design theory has evolved: it started out as a supplier of research methodologies, but in recent years has become an engine of ideation and innovation. This book is committed to both: the theory and its establishment as a discipline. Design has been one of the most influential disciplines since antiquity, constituting everyday appearances and conduct, as well as large segments of ontology, culture, society, economy, technology, the aesthetic sphere, behaviour, politics and identity. Moreover, both as a practice and as a subject of academic study, design is a rapidly developing discipline. It is essentially related to recent paradigm shifts in knowledge and media, sustainability, population and environmental conditions, together with current market shifts, business models and ideas of agency. Although design schools are flourishing—and some earning prestige and influence—design theory and the academic study of it is still at an early stage of development. Introduction to Design Theory begins to close this gap and ambitiously offers an infrastructure for this emerging discipline. We—the authors—write on design and work in design schools, teaching the philosophy and history of design and offering theoretical support to design projects in collaboration with designers. Interestingly, we come from adjunct disciplines: Professor Gal from aesthetics and Professor Ventura from design anthropology. Yet both of us have developed complementary spheres of theory: the philosophy and history of design. In teaching, as well as at conferences and in research collaborations, we encounter the need for a well-formulated, rich and didactic body of design knowledge. Beyond academia, we see the need for theory in the design studio and with clients, as well as in design exhibitions and communal projects. The responsibility of designers is increasingly deemed to include the full scope of the production and consumption process, as well as design in practice’s cultural significance, its sustainability and impact on local communities. In

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216230-1

1  

  Introduction

the last two decades, designers learned of the importance of the sociocultural context in which products are manufactured and embedded. Norms of critical thought and ideology, ethics, gender, race and other humanistic and democratic values all influence what we design and how we use design products. This ethical responsibility similarly applies to theoreticians, philosophers, historians and educators of design, who need an appreciation of the depth of design and participate in the project of establishing a discipline of a critical analysis of design. With this theoretical shift, institutional programmes of design theory can be established. It is high time that academia had graduate programmes in this field, as well as more journals, research funds and conferences. Design is amazing: it is beautiful and attractive, and generates discourse and narratives, but it can also pollute our visual and material sphere and environment. It is funny and serious, mundane and glamorous, and high- and low-tech; it dwells in our daily and our distant and desired spheres. It is futurist, but connects us to previous eras; it is helpful but also harmful. Its essence has been stable for several millennia now, but its scope is enlarging all the time. Design is concrete and fluid, temporal and fixed; it is relevant for the next hour and can last for a century. Design is us and we are design. This book presents the foundations of design theory as the point of departure for design thought and practice. It is intended for researchers, design students, instructors, professionals and practitioners in adjacent fields of interest. Design theory is also relevant to artists, material and visual researchers, as well as philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists. Design theory as a discrete discipline combines the abstract characterisation of design with a historical, cultural and anthropological account of its practice, particularly design products. In bringing together abstract and applied modes of deliberation, this project negates the traditional academic compartmentalisation of practice, history, philosophy and applied theory. Design Theory draws on philosophy on one pole and history on the opposite one, but its philosophical approach is historicist in nature and its historical approach foregrounds design’s universal essence, shared by its sub-disciplines. Currently, there is no standard for teaching design theory, both in general and in design sub-disciplines. Every design theoretician approaches the topic in different ways, according to their training. Introduction to Design is intended to standardise the study of design theory. Beginning with a comprehensive exposition of definitions of design, this project analyses design from a variety of perspectives (culture and social institutions, industry, the body, ecology, design theory and practice, language) and concludes with a discussion of design and ideology. This breadth offers the reader both an in-depth understanding of these issues and key analytical tools for thinking further about specific design products. We urge educators to use Introduction to Design as a course book or to see each chapter as an invitation to create either a single lesson or a series of classes. This book is also a call for practitioners to meditate on how they can harness this knowledge for ideation and innovation.

2  

Introduction  

To establish the basis for design theory, the opening chapter considers definitions of design. Employing both analytic and historicist philosophical methods, it starts from an ontological vantage point and aims to identify the essence of design shared by all of its products—“from the spoon to the city”—which concerns both functionality and aesthetics, the relations between which are unique to design. This basic formula is elaborated on through various definitions of design. The chapter evaluates definitions from texts related to design from antiquity to the current day, and divides them according to their underlying views of ontology and human nature: normative versus descriptive definitions; internalist or mentalist versus externalist or materialist; definitions rationalist versus anti-rationalist definitions; socially or politically oriented definitions; functionalist versus formalist definitions; and normative social definitions. The book then proceeds to a chapter devoted to the two main concepts and elements of design, “Form and Function.” The chapter is divided into philosophical and historical sections to illustrate how the discipline of design addresses both of these traditions in thought and practice. The chapter investigates the origins of the concept of “form” in terms of order and composition and of elements in their internal relations to each other and the encompassing entity as a whole. It presents the idea of form also through the framework of formalist accounts of design, which see form and appearance as its essence. Following it, the chapter presents the origin of “function” in teleology and the concept of telos as the intended purpose of a thing. The section on function studies the idea of “proper function,” which sees function as predetermined and stable as opposed to a definition of function based on post-production conventions and the community of users. It also juxtaposes the analysis of function in design as originating as an idea, a mental content, of the designer versus a materialist view which attributes function to the product itself. Anti-functionalist theories that aim to demystify what they view as the illusion of function and its stability in the design discipline are also explored in this chapter. Such theories focus on what we call “the variety of forms for the same function claim,” the fact that design products gain their identity through their appearance. The chapter also provides a comprehensive survey of various views of the relations between form and function in design, ranging from form following or fitting function and the opposite theories to theories about the non-functionality of function and the non-formality of forms in design. After exploring the philosophical nature of form and function, we move to the historical implications of these complementary concepts. We begin in the nineteenth century and the “crime of ornament” after visiting William Morris and the Crystal Palace in 1851. We consider the rise of “form follows function” and trace how it developed into the intricate history of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Design movements rose and challenged the very correlation between form and function, almost to the latter’s destruction. However, the rise of social design and inclusive design brought forth interesting developments resulting in various layers of function.

3  

  Introduction

The third chapter, “Design and (or as) Language,” consists in an exposition of a significant element of design, namely meaning. It presents the classification of design as language and examines its probability and objections to it. A short explanation of the concepts of language, symbol and meaning is followed by a demonstration of the ways in which design manifests semantic features or symbolic work and serves as a communicative vehicle of meanings and interpretation. We consider whether the design product refers to its function or whether there are other kinds of meanings that render it symbolic, such as the zeitgeist, expressions of identities, social status, ideologies and other kinds of messages. This chapter aims to prove that design is not a mere object, but rather something with meaningful significance and aboutness: it belongs in the world but also conveys messages about it. We conclude with a model that presents four layers of design interpretation, starting with the core value or ideology of a design product. The fourth chapter is devoted to “Design between Theory and Practice.” By contrast with art, design holds a unique position between theory and practice, forever on the liminal threshold, yet always in these two dimensions simultaneously. We start with understanding the essence of these two concepts, explore the historical shifts of the great “humanistic project” and consider the structure of design as a part of higher education, as a practice-based and vocational discipline. We highlight the unique ethical responsibility of design as a discipline, as well as its problematic roots in capitalist ideology and its basis in commerce and consumption. We conclude with contemporary perceptions of design as research and current understandings of design through and with research. The fifth chapter, “Design, Culture, and Social Institutions,” presents the intricate story of the holy triumvirate of design: the manufacturer (industry), the designer and the end user. Historically, the intellectual weight shifted towards the users with changes in technology (e.g. 3D printing and social media), influencing and reframing the very role of the design in society. As in other chapters, sociocultural context and historical shifts are shown to have influenced this fluid triangle. Contrary to popular belief, we are not all designers, just as not everyone watching Big Brother is a professional anthropologist. Through this chapter, we seek to better understand the historic role the designer has taken in shaping our visual-material worlds. This understanding will bring us to the sixth chapter, “Design and Industry,” which delves deeper into the various social institutions influencing designed products and the very practice of the designer. We start with the practice of design under the two classic oppositions of democracy and normative power. Using examples from history, including the COVID-19 outbreak, we see how designers help social institutions monitor and mould our actions, decisions and behaviours, thus influencing our individual and communal realities. We go on to highlight the socio-psychological dimensions of identity and examine the ways in which design shapes and moulds our personal, social and professional identities. These are further developed through three key parts of our identity—national,

4  

Introduction  

gender and race—through various designed products. We conclude by outlining several examples in which design changes through the mirror of religion, political culture and war. In the seventh chapter, “Design, Ecologies and the Body,” we move both chronologically and thematically: a baby cradle found in ancient Pompeii with a striking resemblance to a contemporary IKEA product, and questions about the very fairness of participating in professional long runs by comparing Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s sandals with Nike’s Vaporfly 4% trainers. In this chapter, we pass through various historical moments, using examples and theories to better understand this crucial connection between design and the body. Design products have always had a direct and complex influence on our bodies. Richard Dreyfuss’s famous of humanscale approach to modern ergonomics influences an almost endless array of products we have used since the 1950s. We explore the political implications of design and the body and analyse excluded communities, inclusive design and social and humanistic approaches to design. Finally, we move from standard physical ergonomics to social ergonomics, shame, empowerment and the potential of positive design for and through the body. The final chapter, “Design and Ideology,” acts as the counterpart of the opening one, “Definitions of Design.” It seems fitting to begin with an exposition of relatively abstract characterisations of the nature of design and end with the material creeds design is saturated with—either unconsciously, while affirming the dominating ideologies and division of forces, or openly, while viewing design as a political agent in and of itself. From the latter perspective, critical design and calls for a caring discipline (such as ours, throughout this book) are emerging, as grasping the depth of the discipline and supplying tools for analysis and critique has become an urgent and long overdue mission. But design theory is not only a tool to better understand design; it is also a tool to better design. Without design theory, the practice of design will not fulfil its full potential. Therefore, design theory is not simply a “scholarly” and abstract addition to the field, but the necessary apparatus to create a better future for us all. We urge you to take a deep breath, relax and let your imagination roam. Think, reflect and delve into the complex world of design theory.

5  

1

Definitions of Design

1.1 ONTOLOGY Formulating a definition of design (namely, pinpointing its essence) falls under the field of ontology. Design products are omnipresent in our ontological spheres, equipping both quotidian settings and environments that occur in large communities. “From the spoon to the city” is a frequently quoted expression in the philosophy of architecture that promotes the idea of widening this discipline to encompass an all-inclusive design. This expression was coined in 1911 by Hermann Muthesius, an architect and theoretician of architecture and one of the spokespersons of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Werkbund and Arts and Crafts movement. Muthesius supported the expansion of architectural design by liberating it “from disciplinary distinctions and buoyed by a redefinition of hierarchies based on the singular discriminating principle of design” (Cecchetti and Baker 2011, 237). Muthesius’s philosophy of design sought to relate architecture to mass-produced everyday objects and their equivalent modified aesthetic values. “From the spoon to the city” was famously reintroduced to design discourse in 1946 by the Italian architect and designer Ernesto Nathan Rogers to signify the scope of his design aspirations, extending all the way from public environments to the buildings that populate them and to the daily tools that furnish them (Cecchetti and Baker 2011; Kostesic 2017). Among others, Max Bill, the first head of Ulm School of Design, and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school, used versions of this expression to signify that design ranges across all dimensions. In his retrospective Scope of Total Architecture (1943), Gropius contends that: the approach toward any kind of design—of a chair, a building, a whole town, or a regional plan—should be essentially identical not only in respect to their relationship in space but to social aspects as well. The common ideal to which all are addressed should be emphasized above their material and technical means of realization; for all products of design are to be part of the organic whole, part of our human-made environment in town and country. (Gropius 1970, 56)

6  

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216230-2

Definitions of Design  

This quotation, that both emphasises the range of design and subsumes its various products under one discipline, reveals the dialectic character of design: design is essentially diverse and at the same time unified within one ontological group. Design is variety and unity. Gropius refers to this dialectical character as the “conception of the basic unity of all design in relation to life” (Gropius 1970, 20). To track the basic unity of all design is precisely what philosophy aims at in its pursuit of a delineation of the borders and contents of a complex but distinct phenomenon. Definitions of design, philosophy and theory of design ought to seek a cluster of properties which, combined together, are possessed only by this combination of ontology and design works and by all of these disciplines. What combined properties characterise the extension of the phrase “from the spoon to the city”—for example, stationery, kitchenware, interiors of restaurants, necklaces, residential or public buildings, squares, cars, dresses, bags or cellular phones? As implied in the former paragraph, it has been for quite some time that we have applied the concept of “design” to all or the majority of these, classifying as “design” products which are constructed by different design firms, exhibited in design shops, galleries and shows, and whose history and practice is taught in academic schools of design. At the same time, because of the overuse or application of “design,” the borders of the group of design items should be well drawn. Therefore, defining this phenomenon is both rational and required. Moreover, design deserves both descriptive and prescriptive-normative definitions. The descriptive kind distinguishes what is considered as design by the world of design and the general public. The normative kind does not retrieve its data from reality and society, but rather characterises what ought to be classified as design regardless of what is commonly classified as such. Prescriptive theory notes what design should do or be. It is important not to confuse definitions of design and evaluative theories of design, that within the given classifications of design supply the standards of its products’ values and due judgement or simply ask “what is good design?” which is categorically different from asking “what is design?” This is based on three reasons. First, judging the quality of design necessitates a prior classification of the group of design products and accordingly the concept of “design.” Second, the evaluation of design products is based on theoretical and also practical attitudes. A formalist evaluation, which stresses rightness of form, for example, would be quite different from the result of a functionalist approach that examines design product efficiency and fitness to a problem it was supposed to solve. Simply put, the Banana Chair “Zjedzony” by Wam House (Figure 1.1) may gain formalist approval, thanks to its expressivity, happy appearance and structure as a chair which is also a visual metaphor. Functionalists may be indifferent to these features or less impressed by them, scrutinising the quality of its seatability. Then again, functional beauty theories will attribute aesthetic value to the very fitness of the form to the function and will judge the design piece accordingly. Third, it does not make sense to exclude from the group of design products those which fit a definition of design, but are

7  

  Definitions of Design

Figure 1.1 Banana Chair “Zjedzony,” Wam House, 2005.

merely unsuccessful (or not well designed). Therefore, this chapter will focus on definitions rather than evaluative theories. This chapter presents both descriptive and prescriptive alternative definitions of design, which will be further labelled by the following sub-categories. For clarity, they will be presented first in a brief formulation and then in detail, along with examples of specific theories that outline and support them: 1.

2.

Functionalist versus formalist definitions: Functionalism versus formalism is the central controversy, and the fitting distinction, in philosophical thought about design. Functionalism sees the functional problem-solving element as the essence of design and the intended function of the design product as constituting its identity. It thus sees the starting point of design, such as problem, need or goal, as external to its medium. It is opposed by the formalist consideration which views the composition, or aesthetic form, as the essence of the design product. Formalism attributes to design the role of beautifying the appearances of useful objects in order to provide us with aesthetic environments rather than convenient or efficient ones. Therefore, formalism focuses more on the internal material properties of the design product itself than on external preconceived needs or goals. Internalist or mentalist versus externalist or materialist definitions of design: The internalist approach points to the mental contents of designers, such as intentions and concepts, as the starting point and essence of design. The

8  

Definitions of Design  

3.

4.

opposing externalist definitions point to the external product, its effects and uses, as the sole ontological substance and essence of design. Rationalist versus anti-rationalist definitions: The rationalist definitions are subsumed under internalist and intentionalist definitions, typifying design as relying on well-intended plans, whose products are carefully executed and used in line with these plans. According to the rationalist definitions, the products and uses are mere entailments of rational mental content. These definitions are challenged by anti-rationalist definitions, which try to dispel what they see as the rationalist illusions of the discipline. They claim that design as a creative discipline is not solely based on rational plans, but rather on aesthetic motivations or the spirit of the medium, on emotions or intuitions, and that this is mirrored in the difference between industrial and product design. Accordingly, the anti-rationalist definitions point to the range of uses, which are not preconceived but enabled products, conventions and eras, and by users themselves. Socially or politically oriented definitions: These are usually prescriptivenormative definitions, which first characterise design’s identity as conditioned by its context and, second, attribute design a social or political agency and commitment. As such, they see design as part and parcel of the organisation of the sensible and non-sensible environments and communities.

The differentiations between these various definitions are not always clear-cut and a few of the definitions overlap. All of them emanate from general philosophical theories about the nature of the human being, reality and culture.

1.2 OVER VARIETY OF DESIGN PRODUCTS Still, the project of defining design is far from linear. A search for the essence of design—of this ever-present but ever-changing group of objects or phenomena— often encounters two major problems: the first is the huge variety of different kinds and sub-categories of design products. The above-mentioned designers’ aspirations to widen the scope of design is just one of a few reasons for this variety. The essence of design, comprising two foundational elements of our being, the aesthetic and the functional, makes it “simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society,” as Gropius stated (Gropius 1970, 20). Being embedded in the various strata of daily life renders design diverse in character. The second difficulty which defining design has to cope with is a central polemic within the historicist approach to design, which correlates the field with the date of its inauguration, but has not reached a resolution with regard to this point in time. Simply put, the anti-essentialists who think that design is an historical movement rather than a fundamental human phenomenon have not decided when this movement began. With regard to the first challenge, one may propose that if design is so highly varied, then the concept of “design” may be what is called in the literature “an

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open concept,” one that may apply to almost every kind of object and whose extension is unbounded. Then again, open concepts not only lose their semantic charge, but are also consequently impossible to define. A parallel worry that “art” is an open concept was voiced by philosophers of art during the 1950s and the 1960s. Prominent among these was Morris Weitz who, in “The Role of Theory of Aesthetics,” dismissed the vast project of defining art, claiming that: aesthetic theory is a logically vain attempt to define what cannot be defined, to state the necessary and sufficient properties of that which has no necessary and sufficient properties, to conceive the concept of art as closed when its very use reveals and demands its openness. (Weitz 1956, 30)

Indeed, it has appeared that a few art movements, such as conceptual, earth or mail art, as well as the reappearance of readymade pieces, have transformed art to nonsensuous philosophical riddles planned to let go of artefactuality as a necessary property of art. Nevertheless, aesthetics did not abandon the project of defining art, and has continued to propose well-formulated and well-justified definitions of art. A similar line of thought, but with regard to design, is to be found in the literature, emphasising the difficulty of tracking down and formulating the core of the field, namely its essence, which is logically connected to the elusiveness of design boundaries. Already in 1971, a known proposal to renounce the project of defining design altogether and present instead an anti-rationalist proposition that “design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order” was offered by Victor Papanek, a designer, teacher and theoretician of design (Papanek 2011, 4). Papanek’s characterisation of design is as minimalist as it is all-inclusive. For him, not only “all men are designers,” but also: all that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing—by-itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child”. (Papanek 2011, 3)

Similarly, in 1995, Margolin and Buchanan, the editors of Discovering Design, clarified that the contributors “do not define the core of the field, nor do they attempt to set its boundaries” because “either effort would be premature for a subject as rich and complex as design” (Buchanan and Margolin 1995, xv). However, the difficulty in defining design alongside the fact that the aesthetic field is wide and heterogeneous, and the boundaries between it and the

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extra-aesthetic realm such as engineering, should not conceal the fact that we do know what design is. We use the concept of “design” quite clearly, we quite easily denote design products and the discipline of design is taught and conducted in its own institutions, firms and galleries. A corresponding claim was made by Jan Mukařovský, who acknowledges the difficulty in drawing boundaries, but calls for us not to give up on their definitions. In Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (1936), Mukařovský supports an anti-essentialist, conventionalist functionalism. Namely, he claims that function is never internally possessed by an object, but is attributed to it by the end users. However, at the same time, Mukařovský insists that there is a crucial difference between design and art within the aesthetic province and between engineering, which is subsumed under the extra-aesthetic group: the dividing line between the domain of the aesthetic function and that of extra aesthetic phenomena will not be entirely clear, since there are many gradations of the aesthetic function and it is rarely possible to determine the complete absence of even the weakest aesthetic residue. But it is possible to ascertain objectively—from certain symptoms—the presence of the aesthetic function in, e.g., matters of housing, dress, etc. (Mukařovský 1970, 4)

Thus, Mukařovský was one of the first to delineate this distinction, accrediting it to the “relative importance of the aesthetic function as compared to other functions” (Mukařovský 1970, 5). In architecture, for example, “buildings constructions as a whole presents us with a continuous series, from products with no aesthetic function all the way to work of art” (Mukařovský 1970, 6). Engineering is characterised by the “absence of aesthetic function,” while art and design are both in the realm of the aesthetics function, but “the difference is the subordination and the domination of the aesthetic function in the hierarchy of functions” (Mukařovský 1970, 8). In design, Mukařovský claims, the aesthetic function competes with the practical one and is often subordinated to it. In architecture, a rivalry emerges between the aesthetic function and “the protection against changes in weather, for example.” In art, the aesthetic function is the dominant one. We see that despite the unguarded boundaries between design and other disciplines, a characterisation of design, even a definition, is possible. Along these lines, we shall soon offer a few clear and well-articulated definitions of design divided into categories. 1.3 THE HISTORICIST CHALLENGE The second challenge faced by defining design is the historicist one. Historicism holds that history sheds a light on the way an idea has been revealed through time. It is often contended in the literature that in order to define design, one ought to denote the moment of its inauguration, given that the discipline of

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design, and its official name, is fairly recent. For example, in her Aesthetics of Design, which analyses the ontology of design, its nature and unique aesthetic qualities, the philosopher of design, Jane Forsey, argues that hers is a “working definition,” given that “design is an emergent twentieth-century phenomenon that depends on the means of mass production” (Forsey 2013, 23). The designer and theoretician Bruno Munari dates the birth of modern design to 1919, when Gropius founded the Bauhaus school. Gropius introduced what he labelled as a new type of education, science and technology, the vantage point of which was a universal understanding of human needs. Munari’s granting of this status to the Bauhaus is a somewhat functionalist move—given that Bauhaus saw design as motivated by needs rather than by the aesthetic forms of the material medium—though he himself supports a formalist view of design. “This first school of design,” Munari explains: did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one’s material life in and an ideal world to take moral refuge in. (Munari 1971, 27)

Yet another historicist proposition, frequently offered in literature, is that the historical intersection in which design was endowed with a self-standing status was the Industrial Revolution. For example, in his Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies, Victor Margolin dates what he dubs “design’s beginning” to “when it was conceived as an art of giving form to products for mass production” (Margolin 2002, 92). The internal relation between the outset of the Industrial Revolution, that is, a moment in history, with the property of being mass-produced, which is deemed necessary to design, renders this attribution a historicist one. A more radical historicism regarding design, which portrays design as an unstable discipline that is categorically re-transfigured time and again throughout history, is offered by the historian of design, Penny Sparke. Sparke’s historicist approach leads her to renounce the project of defining design altogether. In the second and third editions of Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present, Sparke states that: it is now much easier to understand that design had, and continues to have, no fixed definition or meanings nor one ideal path to follow. Rather, it is a constantly transforming concept, reflected in a set of practices, and influenced by a broad context of changing ideologies and discourses that have affected its shifting parameters.

Moreover, according to Sparke, a discussion of design should reflect “the high level of relativism, pragmatism and contextualisation that has determined the concept’s past and which will, undoubtedly, continue to affect its future.” Sparke

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also predicts that design (mass-produced or craft-based) will change its very nature and core throughout times, having been guided by economy and production, society, environmental conditions and ideologies, as well as by broader ideologies and discourses and economic, environmental and social conditions and crises outside its control. That is to say, according to radical historicism, such as Sparke’s, what we refer to by the concept of “design” may go through transformation up to disappearance over time. Therefore, she holds, having no rigid properties, essence or stable core, defining design is impossible (Sparke 2013, 9). However, we must wonder, has not design actually existed before the above-mentioned moments in time? Does it not possess a stable essence, revealing itself in all eras and shared by them and which can be extracted by analytic philosophy? It is necessary here to return to the fact that design is deeply embedded and omnipresent in our lives and environments. The theoretician of design and industrial designer, David Pye, characterises design in The Nature and Aesthetics of Design as the meeting point between art and science, their shared part in the realm of everydayness. Pye stresses design’s ubiquity as follows: if anyone thinks it is important to civilization that a common ground between art and science shall be found, then he had better look for it in front of his nose; for it is ten to one that he will see there something which had been designed… everyone is exposed to it all day long. Indeed, in towns there is hardly anything in sight except what has been designed. (Pye 1978, 15)

These claims are not uncommon, and given that even the majority of historicists admit to the fact that design is embedded and ubiquitous in our lives and environment, one may conclude that it is related to our nature and conduct in some stable way and probably possesses essential rigid properties. Historicism, then, does not seem plausible despite the attention given by theoreticians to the contemporary meaning of “design.” Moreover, and this is an intricate but significant argument, there are philosophers of design who deem mass production as leading to negation of design. An account of commercialism, or market-driven design, as a mode of negation of design and its pluralist and wide-ranging character, up to an including destruction, is presented in Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming: First, during the 1980s design became hyper-commercialized to such an extent that alternative roles for design were lost. Socially oriented designers such as Victor Papanek who were celebrated in the 1970s were no longer regarded as interesting; they were seen as out of sync with design’s potential to generate wealth and to provide a layer of designer gloss to every aspect of our daily lives. There was some good in this—design was embraced by big business and entered the mainstream but usually only in the most superficial way. Design

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became fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically unviable and therefore irrelevant. (Dunne and Raby 2013, 6–8)

This warning against the harmful effect of commercialism entails the possibility that design has an essence beyond mass production. According to this contention, given that mass production operates on an extra-design consideration of cost and profit, market-driven design that is innately involved with mass production is merely one genre of design—one of many. Therefore, a definition of design is not dependent on an historical moment, at least not the Industrial Revolution or the birth of commercialist design. 1.3.1 The Term “Design” One more factor which is supportive of the project of defining design is the following: the literature discloses pieces of discourse, sometimes full texts, concerning things that today would have been subsumed under the category of “design,” namely, functional things whose appearance is significant, but with no explicit use of this label. This is why some museums in Europe are called “museums of applied art” rather than “design museums.” We shall demonstrate shortly that this extends back all the way to antiquity, but let us start with modern examples. In What is Art? (1896), Leo Tolstoy classified “ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, buildings, monuments” under “artistic activities” (Tolstoy 1962, 11). In his “Essay in Aesthetics” (1909), taken from his collection of essays entitled Vision and Design, Roger Fry, a known formalist aesthetician, curator, artist and designer and the founder of Omega Workshops of design, used the expression “object created for use, for its fitness to actual life” to refer to the realm which encompasses what we today call “design” (R. Fry 1920, 19). The concept of “design” for Fry and his contemporaries still denoted the aesthetic arrangement of objects. Thus, by “emotional elements of design,” Fry refers to the formal properties of composition, such as “the rhythm of the line with which the forms are delineated”—mass, space, colour or light and shade— which allow an aesthetic object to be expressive (R. Fry 1920, 22). At the same time, the Omega Workshops, which operated between 1913 and 1919, aimed to apply the Post-Impressionist style to everyday functional objects, namely, design. As Roger Fry puts it in the preface to the 1914 catalogue, Omega’s aim is “working with the object of allowing free play to the delight in creation in the making of objects for common life”—meaning, design. That is to say, Munari’s historicist claim that “design came into being in 1919,” in addition to being inaccurate, overlooks the fact that the idea of design had been conceived of before the term itself was coined. Interestingly, even later on, the term “design” has not been well established in the literature. For example, in the canonical Principles of Art (1938), R.G. Collingwood, trying to distinguish the boundaries of what he named “proper

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art,” labelled as “craft” that art which is based on techne (and is, therefore, non-proper). At least part of the field of “craft,” Collingwood uses the term, is populated by design products, such as cars (Collingwood 1968, 15–17). Collingwood notes that theories that define all arts as techne-based, named by him “technological theories of art,” have been found since antiquity. A similar distinction, this time between “fine art” and “applied art,” as well as a proposition that “even in classical Greece there was only one word, ‘tekhne,’ for both kinds of art,” is presented by the philosopher of art and design, Herbert Read, in his Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (1935) (Read 1935, 9, spelling in original). This testifies to the fact that the idea of design predates the Industrial Revolution, and that even after the term had been coined, it was not always used in texts on design. So, perhaps it deserves a discussion which is ahistorical. What is more, Read holds that the twentieth century’s principles of mass production, which Forsey points to as the birth of design, were employed before this period. A salient example, Read argues, is the “useful wares” of the eighteenth-century English potter, Josiah Wedgwood. Building on a local pottery tradition, Wedgwood “in his own lifetime converted a peasant craft into an industrial manufacture,” and therefore should rightly be called a “rationalizer of industry; he was bent on eliminating waste, on improving processes, on creating a demand where it had not previously existed.” So much so that “his useful wares… are still with us, for we can hardly eat from a plate or drink from a cup that does not bear the impress of his practical genius” (Read 1935, 25, 26). We see, then, that the ideas of practical-aesthetic products, of design, of techne and of beauty, are not owned by a specific era. 1.4 THE FIRST DEFINITIONS OF DESIGN We shall propose that the design product possesses definitive traits which philosophy ought to explore and present. Supporting the project of defining design, one fact may suffice to address both the problem of variety and that of historicism: the idea of design has existed forever. Its expanding range of manifestations notwithstanding, a firm cluster of traits that are possessed by design can be found across eras. Being minimalist and based on common sense, Pye’s definition of design in his The Nature and Aesthetics of Design—that it “chooses that the things we use shall look as they do”—is a promising step in this direction. Pye, like others, rightly stresses that, as such, design “has a very much wider and more sustained impact than any other art” (Pye 1978, 15). Usefulness and aesthetics are, and have always been, two main pillars of human existence. Consequently, the idea, practice and ontology of design, of the group of artefacts that are both aesthetic and useful, carrying essential mutual and co-dependent relations between these properties, have been found in the literature since antiquity. Already in the first century BC, De Architectura, which was written by the Roman architect and civil engineer Marcus Vitruvius, presented the three

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the practical duty divides itself into two branches—acting and talking: acting, as to defend us from weather or violence; talking, as the duty of monuments or tombs, to record facts and express feelings; or of churches, temples, public edifices, treated as books of history, to tell such history clearly and forcibly.

Ruskin sums up by declaring that we require of any building: 1. 2. 3.

That it acts well, and do the things it was intended to do in the best way. That it speaks well, and say the things it was intended to say in the best words. That it looks well, and please us by its presence, whatever it has to do or say (Ruskin 2013, 35–36).

Vitruvius’s principles of function and aesthetics of architecture and design have also been commonly considered and used by twentieth-century aestheticians. Rudolf Arnheim, one of the most important aestheticians and theoreticians of the visual sphere and perception, used them in his comprehensive discussion of “the psychology of the creative eye” of visual perception and compositions and the relation between beauty and function in art and design. Arnheim draws on Vitruvius’s analysis in order to justify design choices to distort perspective, this time of buildings columns, in favour of beauty. “According to Vitruvius,” Arnheim reports: the Greeks increased the thickness of columns at the top in relation to that at the bottom in a ratio that increased with the height of the columns. ‘For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented to the beholder’. (Arnheim 2009, 274. See also, for example, Arnheim 1966, 198)

The similarity of approach and principles between the classic theory of Vitruvius and the ones formulated in the sixteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all of which are paradigmatic, allows us to assume, even to conclude, that design possesses an essence. Though the group of design products has yet to be demarcated, the idea of design, of daily and environmental objects which possess this special relationship between usefulness and aesthetic appearance, has been quite stable. Hence the philosophical, analytic project of defining design makes sense and is justified. 1.5 THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNALIST APPROACH TO DESIGN One historical-philosophical fact that had a bearing on the taxonomy of design ought to be acknowledged, despite our essentialist approach to design, which aims to reach the core nature of design across all of its historical phases. A shift

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in the discussion took place in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which is considered by quite a few theoreticians as marking the emergence of design along with the birth of mass production. Forsey, for example, claims in The Aesthetics of Design that “the emergence of design runs in tandem with developments in industry and the possibility of mass manufacture as well as the growth of market capitalism” (Forsey 2013, 15, fn.8, 59). One of the main ideas about design that emerged following the increase of mass production is that design is a mentalistintentionalist and rationalist discipline in its essence—that design is a matter of concepts rather than objects, of ideas rather than a material medium. Given that mass production recruits the machine for the external-material stratum of design, a clear, a few argue perfect, mental intent and plan should precede it as the necessary starting point of design, which is detached from the material, external medium of design. A theory which deems mass production as essential to design may assume an internalist approach to it. An introductory account of internalism and externalism will be followed by an account of the birth of the internalist theory of design as related to mass production. We shall later on argue that this relation also entails a rationalist theory of design. Mentalism or internalism, which is juxtaposed to externalism and is usually discussed using the philosophy of mind, holds that the human being’s main constitutive feature lies in mental contents, such as desires, beliefs, intentions or thoughts. Using a somewhat abbreviated formulation, one can suggest that internalism considers mental features as the ones that motivate actions in the world as well as an understanding of it, while externalism claims that it is the world, the external environment and its perception that constitutes the human being and that mental features are dependent on these. Contrary to externalism that characterises us as behavioural, even public, beings, internalism attributes a privileged status to mental contents over actions when classifying human situations and behaviours. For example, internalism would try to identify and disclose a speaker’s intention in order to determine the meaning of an expression or to judge the moral status of an agent’s act. For example, according to internalism, the meaning of the expression “the window is closed” is neither dependent on an external situation in reality nor does it refer to this, as the externalist will claim, but is determined by what the speaker intended it to be, for example, a complaint about the situation or an order to open the window. Whether a fatal car accident should be labelled as murder depends on the driver’s plans, namely mental elements, or the lack of them. Contrary to this, the externalist will label the act in relation to its own properties. Many externalists think that the appeal to mental contents is based on a false assumption about an independent, privileged mind, whose contents are clear and can be extracted. The mind, so the externalist believes, is a product of one’s environments and mental contents usually appear after contact with the external world. Many times, no clear mental contents are to be found, and there is definitely no linear causality between alleged preconceived intentions and actions and products. This distinction supplies a useful terminology for one of the central controversies in design discourse. Simply

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put, the internalist-externalist question about design will be: is design primarily a designer’s mental intention realised in an object or is design primarily an object which further affords not-necessarily-intended and post-production uses? What is more substantial in the identity of design: the designer’s mind or the product? It is in the internalist group of theories that we find those who define design as established in pre-product, independent mind contents. These will seek to discover the designer’s intention and plan in order to establish both the identity and the structure of the design product. Internalist definitions attribute prominence to the designer’s thought over the design product and its users. Affordance, unintentional or unplanned uses, various unforeseen effects or results are not part of the design according to internalist-mentalist theories. If a designer of a car unintentionally makes its engine more efficient, although improving efficiency has “never entered into his thinking,” then this is not part of his design work, as is argued by the internalist philosopher of design, Glenn Parsons in The Philosophy of Design (Parsons 2015, 10). An explicit mentalism is presented by the well-known cognitive scientist and philosopher of design, Donald Norman. Although Norman is critical of the “lack of concern and knowledge about how design affects the users of products” (Norman 1990, vi) and acknowledges design’s affordance, the guiding philosophy of his definition of design is one which focuses on the mental content of the designer, employing what he terms “mental models.” His general portrayal of the human being goes as follows: “mental models seem a pervasive property of humans. I believe that people form internal, mental models of themselves and of the things and people with whom they interact. These models provide predictive and explanatory power for understanding the interaction.” What is more, mental contents, “coupled with prior knowledge and understanding… function to guide much human behaviour” (Norman and Draper 1986, 46). This mentalist approach is applied to design by Norman. On his account, not only is the starting point of design a rationalist mental content, but this also has a privileged status over the final material product as its essence. Norman therefore asserts that “the most important part of a successful design is the underlying conceptual model. This is the hard part of design: formulating an appropriate conceptual model and then ensuring that everything else be consistent with it” (Norman 1999, 39). The mental content aims to fulfil a need and to plan the design product accordingly, so the user will easily read it through, detect the function of the design product and know how to use it. To explain these communicative relations between the designer and user, Norman endorses a mentalist model of communication or meaning of design. This model describes the transference of the mental content (the message) of the designer through a physical product in order for it to be received and understood as an internal content in the mind of the end user (or addressee of the message): There really are three different concepts to be considered: two mental, one physical. First, there is the conceptualization of the system held by the designer,

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second, there is the conceptual model constructed by the user and third, there is the physical image of the system from which the users develop their conceptual models. Both of the conceptual models are what have been called “mental models,” but to separate the several different meanings of that term, I refer to these two aspects by different terms. I call the conceptual model held by the designer the Design Model, and the conceptual model formed by the user the User’s Model. (Norman and Draper 1986, 47)

In the externalist group of theories, we find the ones which focus on external design products and the ontological material of design, as well as their postproduction uses which are attributed by the community of users. Mukařovský, for example, contends that the “transformation of old palaces into barracks” shifts their identity regardless of any preconceived intention (Mukařovský 1970, 3). The externalist definitions of design categorise the designer’s intentions and other mental contents as irrelevant to the ontological structure and recognition of the design product. What counts for externalist theories of design are the uses which occur post-production. As is well known, these frequently do not coalesce with the intended, preconceived function. This common discrepancy is a corollary of what the industrial designer and theoretician of design, David Pye, names “the fantasy of function” and an inadequate definition of function as “the activity proper to a thing.” Pye suggests shifting the focus from preconceived functions to the various and dynamic uses of the designed product. He proposes a definition of “function” formulated as follows: “what someone has provisionally decided that a device may reasonably be expected to do at present.” This definition disregards the mental intention of the designer in favour of the external choices of the user (Pye 1978, 14). Here is one of Pye’s examples: the purpose of a ship is any purpose imputed to it by any man. To the owner the purpose of the ship may be to make money. To the captain it may be to ply the seas. To the designer it may be to carry four thousand tons of cargo at ten knots… The purposes of things are the purposes of men and change according to who entertains them. (Pye 1978, 15–16)

More detail about this approach to design and its innate link to anti-rationalism in philosophy will be presented shortly and will be further outlined in the chapter entitled “Form and Function.” For a better understanding of the scale of theories which run between the pole of internalism (or mentalism) and the pole of externalism with regard to design, let us take a comparative look at the current manifestations of this scale. Parsons, as mentioned above, presents an internalist approach to design, claiming in his Philosophy of Design (2015) that “design is essentially a

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painting, Matisse beautifully illustrates the authority of the medium of painting, which leads, even determines, the progress of the composition, regardless of the artist’s preconceptions or plans. Observe the way in which, manifesting an externalist, materialist, philosophy of art, Matisse attributes to colour the authority of leading the creative process. One wonders if an equivalent authority can be applied to the medium of design. After all, it is also a creative and aesthetic discipline: The chief function of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my tones without a preconceived plan. If at first, and perhaps without my having been conscious of it, one tone has particularly seduced or caught me, more often than not once the picture is finished, I will notice that I have respected this tone while I progressively altered and transformed all the others. The expressive aspect of colour imposes itself on me in a purely instinctive way. (Matisse 1978, 29)

However, if we formulate a definition of design which is analogous to Matisse’s and which points to the medium of design as its starting point, mass production may not be compatible with this. Mass production imposes various considerations and conditions that are external to the medium of design and to the whole discipline, and must be conceived before execution, even before the onset of planning the design product. As remarked by Forsey, whose definition of design includes mass production as a necessary condition, a comprehensive analysis of design should consider the fact that “the creation of markets and the ways in which our choices can be, and are, coerced are equally relevant to understanding the complexities of the phenomenon that is contemporary design” (Forsey 2013, 15, fn8). This theory of design, contrary to externalist definitions, obviously excludes the devotion of the designer to the rules of the medium, the demands of the materials themselves and rightness of form. It excludes design methods such as draping in fashion design, or what is named “the direct expressiveness of surface modelling” by Roger Fry, one of the first curators and interpreters of Matisse, who applied the externalist-materialist theory to design, and expressed his worries about the price design paid owing to mass production in the catalogue of the Omega Workshop of design. According to Fry, the direct expressiveness of surface modelling was lost, for example, in pottery, as a result of “the application of scientific commercialism,” causing “our cups and saucers” to be “reduced by machine turning to a dead mechanical exactitude and uniformity” (The Omega Workshop, Trade Catalogue c. 1914, 10). The results of what Fry calls the “application of scientific commercialism” to design is explained well in The Routledge Companion to Design Research, which marks the rise of the internalist characterisation of the mind as related to mass production:

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The ability to produce, by machine, multiples of large and expensive objects greatly outside human skill and scale meant there was a need to be able to construct these objects in the mind, before committing machines (and their operators) to production. (Rodgers and Yee 2015, 10, my italics)

1.5.2 Internalism and Rationalist Definitions of Design Introducing the internalist, or mentalist, definition of design, we need to move further and identify the kind of mental content which motivates the design process. As stated above, the proposition that mass production is essential to design is internally related to the classification of design as rationality-based— when using “rationality,” we refer to the designer’s work (not the public of users). According to this classification, design does not merely originate in mental contents, but specifically in rational ones. Rationality is the ability to choose between alternatives in a justified way, and to exercise cognition, rather than be led by feelings, urges (aesthetic ones included) or external pressures prior to actions. Rationalist philosophy classifies this faculty as superior to others. Mass production requires the exercise of this ability in the form of a preconceived plan, and this plan needs to reach perfection long before production, owing to the high investment that is required for making the design product manufacturable and marketable. Consequently, mass-produced design is also detached from its execution. Design is “distinct from physical activity of building of making,” claims Parsons, a rationalist internalist philosopher of design who goes so far as to state that “even if the structure that he has planned is never actually built, the architect has nevertheless designed something” and that plans, even nonembodied ones, have a place in the history of architecture (Parsons 2015, 9). Such definitions usually leave room for neither the spirit of the medium nor the immersion in the power of composition or configuration, which is a post-production emergent property of the object. The focus on the fit of the preconceived plan to the demands of mass production must also disregard the affordance of the final product, namely its unpredictable range of uses. Just think about the very many uses a chair (which may never be sat on!) affords, and actually invites us to adopt: as a clothes hanger, makeshift ladder, shelf, exercise device, etc. But all of these impromptu uses, namely the space which the form or configuration affords, are external to the essence of the designed chair according to rationalism. The historian and theoretician of design Penny Sparke remarks on the detachment of the mental rational plan from material execution and the product in her Introduction to Design and Culture: The move from craft to mass production through the reorganization of labour and the use of machines resulted in a breakdown of the traditional process of the manufacture of goods: the design process became separated from the making stage. This fundamental separation, which meant that a product had to be

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planned in its entirety before it could be made, gave birth to the modern meaning of design and, subsequently, to the profession of designer. (Sparke 2003, 1)

Importantly, and as implied above, this approach takes place within a heated debate about the philosophy of design. The separation from the making and the medium, which necessitates a complete preconceived plan that comprises a few external-to-design parts, is considered by externalist theories of design as characterising only subcategories of design and as not essential to the whole design. As will be discussed later, a few externalists even hold that this view is based on a rationalist illusion that falsely portray a linear relation between plans and the use of the end product. Additionally, formalist philosophers of design, such as Roger Fry, denote the disadvantages of the medium of design which is forced into the rational process that mass production requires. In the catalogue of the Omega Workshop of design, Fry admits that “in many branches of design it would of course be wasteful to employ the designer for the actual execution” (The Omega Workshop, Trade Catalogue c. 1914, 4). However, Fry emphasises the significance of the maker’s enjoyment of making pot or cloths, which “finds expression in many ways; and those become increasingly apparent to you, you

Figure 1.2 Roger Fry, Druad Chair for Omega Workshops, 1913–1914.

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share his joy in creation.” The market-oriented design which is forced into economic rationality is only one kind of design, according to Fry. He argues that: the modern factory products were made almost entirely for gain, not other joy than that of money making entered into their creation. You may admire the skill which has been revealed in this, but it can communicate no disinterested delight. (The Omega Workshop, Trade Catalogue c. 1914, 3).

Indeed, no logical contradiction is found in the idea of the designer immersed in the material and committed to it, creating a piece which will be later on be destined for reproduction. This is exactly what happened with the tall cane seat chairs designed by Roger Fry, which were reproduced by Druad Ltd of Leicester (Figure 1.2). But then again, the definition of design as based on preconceived, rationality-based, and detached from the material plans is quite commonly held in the literature and in design schools. We shall elaborate on this in the next sub-chapter. 1.5.3. Instrumental Rationalism and Functionalism Provided that the classification of design as mass-produced is prevalent in the discourse, as well as the wish to distinguish it from art or even craft, then mainstream, current definitions of design are rationalist. These definitions characterise design as essentially based on rationality rather than on aesthetic motivations and ideology, expressive and creative inspirations and aspirations or intuitions. That is to say, according to rationalist definitions, design is founded on the logical ability to choose from a cluster of alternatives, or to make decisions, by a carefully chosen and reasoning-oriented mode, as well as to act according to justified reasons (i.e. make something not solely to satisfy the creator’s creativity, but to fulfil a broader functional need). This is not to say that rationalist definitions of design deem aesthetic drives as utterly external to design. However, if these drives appear, they are subjugated to reasoning and secondary to it. Moreover, the vantage point of rationalist theories is that design ought to solve problems and make our lives more comfortable, while formalist or aestheticist theories consider that design should make our lives beautiful. The former sees the human being as a user, for whom efficiency is significant; the latter see the human being as an aesthetician, for whom beautiful environments are significant for well-being. Interestingly, the literature of design tends to consider design as a discipline of reasoning more than of appearances. Indeed, the authors of the recent “Rationality in Design” note the rationalist tendency of the discourse of design as follows: It is a premise of much work done in the field of design methodology and engineering design itself that rationality plays a significant role in design processes, not only at the level of the organization of design processes, but also at the level of the design of products. The underlying idea is that many of the decisions that

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are made regarding design—regardless of whether they concern the set-up and execution of the design process or the object of design itself — can be justified on the basis of reasons (arguments). (Kroes et al. 2009, 566)

Collingwood, whose theory, published in 1938, serves as the foundation of the new rationalist definitions of design, formulates it clearly through defining craft as “the power to produce a preconceived result by means of consciously controlled and directed action” (Collingwood 1968, 15). By “craft,” Collingwood at least partially means design. One of Collingwood’s aims is to distinguish it from what he names proper art’s intuitive-expressive character, which at its authentic levels avoids all plans and trusts its own free progress. For Collingwood, art as an expressive discipline should be immune from recruitment for external goals, while autonomous and free from reasoning. Contrary to this, Collingwood’s later internalist-rationalist theory considers design to be an intentional discipline based on foreknowledge and mental contents such as needs, problems or aims, along with potential, carefully chosen methods, materials and mechanisms to realise them. Moreover, design develops through an inherently logical evolutionary process. The foreknowledge, Collingwood clarifies, ought to be precise: a designed table is not, could not be, based on vague plans about size and proportions. Collingwood, therefore, stresses that design “involves a distinction between planning and execution. The result to be obtained is preconceived or thought out before being arrived at” (Collingwood 1968, 16). Following that, we should be more accurate and emphasise that the kind of rationality found in the infrastructure of design is the one that is named in the philosophical discourse as “instrumental rationality” and sometimes “practical normativity” or “practical rationality.” Instrumental rationality is the kind that originates in conceptions of means and ends and “is about the normativity of following the means to our ends” (Raz 2017, 1) and “intentional actions” (Kroes et al. 2009, 342). A delineation of the process of instrumental rationality is supplied in The Routledge Companion to Design Research that presents the following steps of product design: It: (a) starts with a brief that identifies a problem to be solved; (b) results in the definition of a solution of a physical product and, as a result, includes a shape definition; (c) includes cognitive processes such as analysis (and evaluation), decision-making, synthesis (of needs, requirements, concepts, details, prototypes, and so on) and communication; (d) is iterative and requires reflection time; and (e) (both design and designing) is a part of a bigger whole and does not occur in isolation. (McKay in Rodgers and Yee 2015, 417)

Following the logic of these steps, we can see that instrumental rationality theories explain that the aspiration to effectively reach the intended or desired

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aim supplies the reason to choose one method over other possible ones. This makes them logically related to the function of the design piece. Therefore, Rudolf Carnap’s concept of “Rational reconstruction,” as outlined in “Rationality in Design,” proves fitting here as it delineates the most rational process and its stages towards fulfilling an aim or addressing a need. Thus: in a process of translation, specification and reduction, these needs are transformed into functional requirements and these again into design specifications… If the designed object meets all the specifications, it is supposed to be able to perform the desired function. Whether that is indeed the case depends on whether the list of design specifications adequately captures the functional requirements. (Kroes et al. 2009, 566)

Adding “function” to the rationalist definition of design, we may say that design emerges from a clarified aim, need or problem and proceeds with a corresponding, validated, well-justified and based-on-reasoning plan of a product, the function of which is supposed to fulfil the need. This approach is named “functionalism” and is based on functionalism in general philosophy: a theory in ontology which considers the function of the thing as its essence and the determinant of its identity. In aesthetics, functionalism is usually contrasted with formalism that, disregarding functionality as external to the creative work, classifies the aesthetic form as the essence of the work. This deep controversy will be further analysed in the chapter entitled “Form and Function.” Relevant to the current exposition is the claim that functionalism is the offspring of teleology, the main term of which is “telos,” the innate aim of a thing: its intended use, namely, function. Plato stresses this in Republic; Book X, in order to attribute a high quality of knowledge to the user of an object and prove that using it is superior to both imitating and making: “So the goodness, beauty and correctness of any manufactured object, living thing or action are entirely a question of use of which each of them was made, of for which it developed naturally?” Socrates responds that the user of an object is its best critic: A player of the pipes, for example, gives his views on the pipes to the maker of them, telling him which ones are any use for playing. He will instruct the maker what sort of pipes to make, and then the maker will be of use to him. (600 d, e., Plato 2000, 323)

While the mind detects the telos of the thing, the eye perceives its mere appearance, according to Plato. And this leads us directly to the internal relation between rationalism and functionalism. Functionalism replaces the concept of “telos” with “function” and is divided into radical functionalism, which holds that the function belongs to the object so to speak, and moderate functionalism that sees function as external to the object, assigned to it by the users

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within a context. Radical functionalism distinguishes between function, which is the predetermined purpose of the object, and use; more accurately, between a specific pre-production meant use and post-production not preconceived use, for example, the seatability of a chair versus using it as a clothes hanger. Interestingly, most of the current functionalist theories of design are committed to radical functionalism. As previously stated, it is closely related to rationalism and the demand for a complete, justified plan for the design object. A recent manifestation of radical functionalism with regard to design is to be found in Forsey’s Aesthetics of Design. Despite her classification of design as an aesthetic phenomenon first and foremost, Forsey ascribes an immanent function and functionality to design products. Each design product, she argues, is: meant to be used in a specific way: the planes flown, the shoes worn, the office chairs sat in. If this is the case, we can claim that a thing is not a work of design unless it is also functional, or, on the metaphysical approach, we can say that function is a necessary condition of design. (Forsey 2013, 30)

Moreover, design, according to Forsey, is quotidian; it belongs to the everyday, is mass-produced, not profound and not designed for contemplation, hence it is “mute” (not semantic). All these qualities are entailed by design’s functionality, demand rational creative process and require, so Forsey rightly contends, an aesthetic theory which is unique to design. A current rationalist functionalist definition of design which follows these parameters is put forward by Parsons, who adds the need to come up with a new solution to the detected problem and characterises design as “the intentional solution of a problem, by the creation of plans for a new sort of thing, where the plans would not be immediately seen, by a reasonable person, as an inadequate solution” (Parsons 2015, 11). Therefore, a time machine could never be a piece of design, according to Parsons, although a failed juicer, such as Philip Starck’s, can be. Parsons relates the rationalist intentionality to function: design possesses “a practical or utilitarian nature: the Designer creates items that have a practical function” (Parsons 2015, 22). Thus, design is distinguished from science. One more character of design which contributes to this distinction is the aesthetic one: design practice focuses “on what we might call the ‘surface’ of things” (Parsons 2015, 23). But the focus on appearances notwithstanding, design is crucially different from art, requiring its own problem-solving, functional-oriented cognition. The kind of cognition that underlies design is presented in Design Knowing and Learning: Cognition in Design Education (2001). In this work, design is defined as a cognitive discipline, the process of which follows paradigmatic rational procedures—from a rational mental content to its external embodiment. Design progresses from identification of need and problem definition to gathering information and ideas, modelling, feasibility analysis, evaluation by “comparing

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alternatives,” decision or selection of “one idea of solution among alternatives, communication of the solution to others and implementation,” that is, to “produce or construct a physical device, product of system” (Eastman and McCracken 2001, 40). While it is understood that what is called “design cognition” in Design Knowing is exclusive, it is claimed that “in analysing design cognition, it has been normal until relatively recently to use language and concepts from cognitive science studies of problem-solving behaviour.” That is to say, design cognition has been subsumed under the rational problem-solving set of academic areas, such as engineering. It has not received its own cognitive theory, for which we chose earlier the term “instrumental rationality” that focuses on the relations between ends and means, but ones that are appropriate to design: it has become clear that designing is not normal ‘problem solving.’ We therefore need to establish appropriate concepts for the analysis and discussion of design cognition. For example, designing involves ‘finding’ appropriate problems, as well as ‘solving’ them, and includes substantial activity in problem structuring and formulating, rather than merely accepting the ‘problem as given’. (Eastman and McCracken 2001, 80)

This line of thought presupposes that there is a hierarchy both of problems and of their solutions, of goals and methods of realising them. This hierarchy is naturally evaluated by normative and social theories of design as an ethically committed discipline. We shall present such theories shortly. A similar call for a design-oriented theory of cognition in line with a rationalist theory of design is voiced by Norman, who, as previously mentioned, specialises both in design and cognitive studies. Norman names the field that addresses the unique cognition of design “user-cantered design” or “usability design,” because it takes into account the cognitive relations between the designer and the user: the ability to relay the recognition of function through the product (Norman and Draper 1986). Norman’s approach is based on the idea that “design takes root in cognitive science—a combination of cognitive psychology, computer science, and engineering, analytical thought” (Norman 2004, 8–9). This cognition is applied to the functionality of design, proving Norman’s internalist view to be logically connected to functionalism: “a primary consideration in the design of a building or of an interface to a computer system is that it works, that it fulfils the purposes for which it was intended” (Norman and Draper 1986, 10). Within the internalist-mentalist framework, the visibility of the design object, according to Norman, ought to be totally subjugated to its predetermined function rather than to the material affordance. Design ought to convey its intended function and guide its user. A door, for example, is the carrier of the mental plan of its designer, namely, its function, which must be conveyed to the user: there is not much you can do to a door: you can open it or shut it. Suppose you are in an office building, walking down a corridor. You come to a door. In which

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direction does it open? Should you pull or push, on the left or the right? Maybe the door slides. If so, in which direction? I have seen doors that slide up into the ceiling. A door poses only two essential questions: In which direction does it move? On which side should one work it? The answers should be given by the design, without any need for words or symbols, certainly without any need for trial and error. (Norman 1990, 3)

1.6 EXTERNALIST AND MATERIALIST DEFINITIONS OF DESIGN Does Norman’s door indeed carry the designer’s mental content, namely, a plan of a predetermined specific function? Externalist or materialist theories of design would hold that the answer is “no.” It is rather the door’s own shaped material— “in-formed material,” as Flusser puts it—which has the power to afford many kinds of encounters with it (Flusser 1999, 36). Some of these encounters are

Figure 1.3 Jules Lavirotte, The Lavirotte Building, Paris, 1889–1901.

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not preconceived: doors can frequently be used as notice boards or assignments reminders, to display family photos, or its handle as coat or bag hangers. They can even be used as an expressive tool: by teenagers, shutting themselves in their rooms to convey their wish for autonomy, or an abruptly shut door in the middle of an argument, is a useful expressive symbol carrying a semantic charge. The mental content of the designer as well as the pre-conceptualised plan has no bearing in this space, an externalist theory would suggest. Last, the discourse should and does address the appearance of the door. For many, its aesthetic form is highly significant. The history of doors has demonstrated a variety of styles of door designs, a few of which are well composed, beautiful and even symbolic. A beautiful example is the erotically ornamented door of the canonical Art Nouveau apartment building which was designed between 1899 and 1901 by Jules Lavirotte in the VIIe arrondissement of Paris. It is framed with botanical ornaments, iron lizards, a woman’s head and sculptures of Adam and Eve (Figure 1.3). Thus, these uses may not be a constitutive part of the door’s identity, according to internalists and functionalists. However, according to the externalist philosophy of design, they are not less significant. While the internalist-rationalist thought that locates the starting point of design prior to the creation of the product seems obvious to many, it is opposed by externalist and materialist theories. These theories see the starting point of design in the object itself, inviting specific uses, but also, thanks to the power of its composition, affording many others which are dependent on communities of users and individuals. The externalist definitions of design are divided into functionalist, or more precisely, use-oriented ones, and formalist or aesthetic-oriented definitions. 1.6.1 Externalist User-Oriented Definitions A salient externalist definition of design is offered by Henry Dreyfuss, a well-known designer and one of the heralds of the twentieth-century explicit discourse on design. Although espousing moderate rationalism, Dreyfuss endorses a materialist approach to design and refers to the “final product” as the locus of design. He claims that design is achieved only within the external collaborative meeting between designers, engineers and customers. If we address the mental content of the designer, it is senseless without its embodiment in the medium. Contrary to the externalist belief, the steps of the design process do not originate in a precise and complete intentional mental content, argues Dreyfuss. Quite the opposite: these steps make it unmistakably clear, I think, that industrial design is not something that is superimposed upon a client and his products. Rather, it is a cooperative undertaking in which a group of partners work toward a common goal, each stimulating and supplementing the other.

We see, then, that as a designer and philosopher, Dreyfuss renounced the internalist idea of design as originating in a clear and complete mental content of

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a problem-solving idea or a concept of function. His portrayal of the origin of design is based in external dynamic conduct. Dreyfuss, therefore, proceeds by marking the significance of the collaboration between designers and engineers as follows: Of the partners, the engineer is the one with whom the industrial designer usually is most deeply involved. In our office we call the client’s engineer the industrial designer’s best friend and severest critic. The designer does the dreaming—and it’s rather practical dreaming—and the engineer makes the dreams come true. He brings to bear on them a particular skill the designer doesn’t have. The final product is a collaborative effort. (Dreyfuss 1974, 46)

Accordingly, Dreyfuss endows the user with a higher status than that of the designer in the “grand scheme” of design, namely the use of the materials rather than internal intentions. The final product belongs to the end users, Dreyfuss believes, and these are the product user encounters that make design what it is. An analogous externalist-materialist and use-oriented view is presented by the philosopher Vilem Flusser, whose emphasis, like Dreyfuss’s, is on the final product. Flusser’s prism is wider than Dreyfuss’s—it is our ontological sphere. Through a materialist mechanistic view, he sees design as the infrastructure of the artefactual or cultural segment of reality. As argued by Flusser in The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, design is the epitome of our nature as factory builders: “we belong to those kinds of anthropoids who manufacture something… ‘factory’ is the common human characteristic, what used to be referred to as human ‘dignity’” (Flusser 1999, 43). Looking at the human being and the discipline of design, Flusser portrays the sphere of design as constructed by materials, machines, productions and actions. Note how different his view is from the internalist-mentalist’s picture of design as a cluster of ideas and intentions and of human beings as constituted by their minds. Flusser’s materialism describes “human history as the history of manufacturing and everything else as mere footnotes, the following rough periods can be distinguished: hands, tools, machines, robots” (Flusser 1999, 44). Flusser thus classifies humans’ hands rather than their minds, as their main and constitutive organ. Manufacturing is born in the external world and achieves its progress there. It: means turning what is available in the environment to one’s own advantage, turning it into something manufactured, turning it over to use and thus turning it to account. These turning movements are carried out initially by hands, then by tools, machines and, finally, robots. (Flusser 1999, 44)

Flusser’s externalism extends even further, providing a radical characterisation of the relations between human beings’ actions and products. Humans are

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­

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­

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being so, wiring money in exchange for a product, even though this constitutes making a purchase, could not be considered a property of design. Sparke, it may be contended, takes externalism and design too far. Interrogating Sparke’s philosophy of design, we may remark that it makes no sense to exclude items that have never been purchased from the group of design products. Moreover, evaluative theories of design cannot include the market’s appeal in their judgement of a design product. Marketability has to do mainly with the effort of the market team. A wonderfully designed product can be poorly advertised and the other way around. Marketability is also sensitive to historical periods and habits, sometimes totally external to design. It seems appropriate to conclude this sub-chapter with the radical externalist and anti-rationalist theory of design put forward by the well-known and influential designer, and one may add theoretician of design, Bruce Mau. The internalist-rationalist description of design as following a well-planned, controlled, and well-controlled progress from rational intention and complete plan to a final suitable production is based on illusion, Mau maintains. While “traditionally, design was the pursuit of the single perfect—and permanent— solution, created by a single author,” design is no longer a linear and well-ordered problem-solving process as the rationalists submit. Rather, at least in the twenty-first century, design is a continuation of a chaotic, ever-changing world. In his Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work (2020), Mau explains that “in an era of Massive Change, the idea of getting to a definitive and permanent design solution is increasingly unrealistic.” Design internalises the external massive change of reality to its internal structure, becoming dynamic by itself—namely, assuming dynamic ontology. Hence, Mau adds, “when the world around us is constantly changing, we need a design strategy that is built to take advantage of new possibilities” (Mau 2020, 541). In the ever-changing new world, design ought to forgo the myths of perfection, of the design object’s stability, and of individual authorship in favour of inclusive collaborations of experts which Mau names “Renaissance teams.” In a 2021 interview entitled “Bruce Mau: Global Guru” for Miami Ad School’s Insighter ISeries, Mau attempts to refute both the definition of design as problem-solving and its matching characterisation as linear. This has a lot to do with what is named in philosophy as “atomism”—the claim that a thing can be characterised as distinct, autonomous and individuated while disregarding any system it may belong to. Applied to design, an atomistic approach aspires to characterise the design process, design object and its use as system independent. This philosophical method is what Mau strongly refutes in this eye-opening interview: Because of the way that we think about design, we extract the problem from the context and try to think about solving it as a discrete object, which is a falsehood. By not considering the kind of ecosystem implications, we create all kinds of chaos while we solve the problem that we’re interested in

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That is to say, design is always given in a context, and thus atomism ought to be replaced by a holistic theory of design that takes external conditions into account. Because of its dynamic and complex traits, context blocks our ability to predict what the design work will result in. The characterisation of design’s nature as necessarily determined by context, which is saturated with various kinds of challenges and ethical issues, leads to normative, social, definitions of design. Simply put, it leads to a definition that imposes imperatives on design, claiming what it ought to be and do rather than descriptively claiming what it is. These will be introduced in the next sub-chapter. 1.7 NORMATIVE SOCIAL DEFINITIONS OF DESIGN The designer Bruce Mau’s anti-atomistic, holistic-systematic approach, which labels the context of dynamic ontology, that is, cultural, economic, social and environmental ontology, as a necessary condition for the definition of design, is the epitome of normative viewpoints of design. What Mau calls “ecosystem implications” substitutes the singular, independent concept of function in the functionalist theories of design (Mau 2021). Shifting the focus from preconceived, singular functions or singular problem-solving to current dynamic reality in its entirety and its future entails a deliberation about the ethical and practical role of design—in Papanek’s words, it “demands high social and moral responsibility from the designer.” That is to say, this shift of focus onto moral responsibility entails a normative or prescriptive characterisation of definitions of design. The normative theories which are founded on the attribution of high, sometimes unpredicted, effects of design on its user, society and ontology also attributes ethical normativity to design. Naturally, in such a wide discipline as design, the range of these kinds of definitions stretches all the way from moderate ones, which assign design a relatively modest role, to radical ones which define design as a central player in the shaping of reality. The majority of normative definitions of design are functionalist. However, contrary to descriptive definitions such as those put forward by Forsey and Parsons that describe the functional essence of design, normative definitions aim to establish the desired, required and ethically appropriate function of design as related to reality. A moderate normative approach is to be found in Henry Dreyfuss’s aforementioned definitions, in the respect that these do prescribe norms as essential conditions of design, but maintain an optimist framework, contrary to, for example, Mau, Papanek, Tony Fry and Spark. Definitions from these latter writers betray a distrust both in design and its working sphere: the regressing environment. Dreyfuss, who rightfully received the title of “one of the founders of the industrial design profession,” speaks from the foundations of the discipline when presenting an imperative for design to offer a positive, enjoyable relationship between the design piece and its user. To achieve this and be “a successful performer in this new field,” the designer ought to “more than merely design things.” That is to say, like other normative theoreticians of design, Dreyfuss

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assumes an anti-atomistic, holistic approach that locates design as deeply embedded in its context. For him, the designer: is a businessman as well as a person who makes drawings and models. He is a keen observer of public taste, and he has painstakingly cultivated his own taste. He has an understanding of merchandising, how things are made, packed, distributed, and displayed. He accepts the responsibility of this position as liaison linking management, engineering, and the consumer and co-operates with all three. (Dreyfuss 1974, 5)

As a rationalist theoretician of design, Dreyfuss sees design as based on linearity which progresses from the “drive for something better, for more comfort and convenience” to conserving “a person’s time, effort, and nerves as well as prevent injury” (Dreyfuss 1974, 15, 21). According to Dreyfuss, industrial design was inaugurated with modern society, owing to its respect for comfortable lives and mass productions abilities. Dreyfuss’s approach was formulated in 1955 as follows: the insistent demand in the country in recent years for low-cost, mass-produced objects combining utility, comfort, and beauty. It is characteristic of restless, inquiring, never-satisfied Americans to seek something better than what they have. This driving aspiration has made possible the rise of the industrial … Industrial design is a means of making sure the machine creates attractive commodities that work better because they are designed to work better.

This, of course, is internally linked to mass marketing. “It is coincidental, but  equally important, that they sell better” is Dreyfuss’s addition (Dreyfuss 1974, 20). An analogous normative definition is offered by Victor Papanek who points to the socio-temporal trait of design, but, contrary to Dreyfuss, highlights the need for authenticity rather than hopes for future convenience and aesthetics. While Dreyfuss endorses functionalism, Papanek points to ideology as the starting point of design. As stated by Papanek, Design’s “telesis” (a version of the Greek term “telos,” discussed in 5.3), that is, “the deliberate, purposeful utilization of the processes of nature and society to obtain particular goals … must reflect the times and conditions that have given rise to it and must fit in with the general human socioeconomic order in which it is to operate” (Papanek 2011, 17). A fairly simple recent analysis of the “socioeconomic order”—the relations between design and reality with which Papanek is concerned—is supplied by an application of Actor-Network Theory to design, exemplifying it by a staircase design. Bruno Latour’s 2007 Actor-Network Theory draws our attention to the mutual influence between objects and social ties, proving design objects’ active

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agents in shaping everyday interactions and the space of their possibilities. It thereby joins attempts to dissolve the object-subject dichotomy that attributes passive postures to objects, making them dependent on their user-subjects for operation. Design-oriented Actor-Network Theory sees design objects and their environments as born simultaneously. To be precise, design generates its environments rather than merely joins them. It consequently possesses moral accountability. This position opposes assertions such as Norman’s in his essay “Affordance, Conventions, and Design” that “designers can invent new real and perceived affordances, but they cannot so readily change established social conventions” (Norman 1999, 42). Indeed, in “Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design,” Norman’s claims for the limits of design are refuted by relying on the known contention of Bruno Latour’s that objects impact decision-making, affect our behaviours and actions and shape the way we move in the world. According to Latour, “by so doing, they play an important role in mediating human relationships, even prescribing morality, ethics and politics” (Yaneva 2009, 277). In this framework, a daily use of a staircase on the way to an office situated on a university campus is compared to using an elevator in “shaping social conduct.” Different modes of communications take place in the elevator and on the staircase: the former is alienated, controlled and passive, and the second affords friendly autonomous stops and chats with other pedestrians, thanks to their “modes of distributing agency with the environment.” According to Yaneva: Designers have chosen between two ways of delegating action to their material surroundings: elevators and staircases, corridors and rooms, handrails and keys, walls and doors—of two ways of reassembling the social. If the morning trajectory of many university lecturers like myself is pleasurable, it is because many objects afford and facilitate our activities, obliging us to do certain things and forbidding us from doing others. By so doing, they make me reach my students in time, and more often in a good mood. (Yaneva 2009, 276)

Similarly, door locking designs in academic buildings, for example, access codes, takes part in regulating social relations between researchers, students, random visitors and colleagues (Yaneva 2009, 278). Indeed, realising the innate role of design in social orders inspired commentators such as Victor Margolin who calls for a materialist social, or historicist, approach to design, or better yet, a history that comprises accounts of design. Margolin finds the infrastructure of his theory in the thought of Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian of capitalism, socialism and industrialism, who in “Looking Forward: History and the Future” emphasises the significance of the internal relationship between the social and material aspects of history, under a holistic approach. (Margolin 2009, 95). Hobsbawm presents the social facets of human life as deeply embedded in their material environment. Margolin joins his call to

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develop models of a history of society that considers its complexity, dialectical character and the need to dissolve the distinction between theories and practices such as design. Margolin’s point is justified, given that though voices supporting a holistic approach to history have been heard, the material aspect of human history, namely the culture of artefacts, has been often omitted from it. This is indeed Margolin’s criticism of materialist historians in his significant essay “Design in History” (2009). While Hobsbawm rightly demands collaborations between different kinds of historical research, “in his account of the most interesting work in social history he makes no mention of material culture, design, architecture, or any of the arts. Granted that the essay ‘From Social History to the History of Society,’ where he outlines promising tendencies in social history research since the mid-1950s, was published in 1972, a few years before the Design History Society was founded in Britain and design history received its first strong impetus, his omission of material and cultural life as integral components of any social model is worth noting” (Margolin 2009, 95). Within the history of material culture, Margolin formulates, in The Politics of the Artificial, an explicit normative-ethical theory of design as a discipline that ought to “respond to the world situation in its largest sense” (Margolin 2002, 80). Design must take into account the external dynamic of reality—“a world situation that itself is in turmoil” (Margolin 2002, 79). In the light of this situation, “the old divisions of design practice now appear increasingly inadequate and ineffectual.” Therefore, Margolin joins calls such as Mau’s to forgo the picture of design as well ordered, isolated, linear and addressing clear problems in favour of realising that design should “deal with problems whose definitions, not to mention resolutions, have thus far eluded everyone” (Margolin 2002, 80). Marking the elusive problems and resolutions, Margolin applies the term “wicked problem” to design. This term had already been defined by the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in their influential “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” (1973) as badly formulated social problems, based on ill-ordered information, and too many conflicting interests and values among decision-makers, clients, institutes, etc. Rittel and Melvin demystify the industrial age: idea of planning, [that] in common with the idea of professionalism, was dominated by the pervasive idea of efficiency… Because it was fairly easy to get consensus on the nature of problems during the early industrial period, the task could be assigned to the technically skilled, who in turn could be trusted to accomplish the simplified end-in-view. (Rittel and Webber 1973, 158)

This was no longer the case, at least in the specific historical context of the 1970s. Problem-solving is substituted for the very realisation of the problem, the distinction between the observed condition and the desired condition and the action that will dissolve the gap between the two. Looking at society, it is

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clear that “planning problems are inherently wicked” (Rittel and Webber 1973, 160). Drawing on the analysis of wicked problems, joined by the related assertion that design is always located in a social context, Margolin submits that designers should move from nineteenth-century views of design to ones that assign design the role of shaping sustainable, ecological and cultural spheres. “This does not mean abandoning product design,” Margolin clarifies, “it means connecting it to a larger situation of production and use” (Margolin 2002, 79). A similar argument about the instability of design problems given in an unpredictable context, and alluding to “wicked problems,” is supplied by Penny Sparke in the third edition of An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Sparke 2013, 1). The idea of a functional, linear, problemsolving discipline of design, which was raised during the Industrial Revolution, followed by its relation to consumerist society, no longer fits practically and theoretically, Sparke clarifies, neither does the 1980s imperative “to create and reflect meaning in the context of everyday life.” She thus had to completely revise her 1980 original publication twice, in 2004 and 2013: Sitting down to rewrite the second edition, I had initially set out with the idea that I would simply add some new sections to accommodate the events of the intervening years. Very swiftly, however, I had realized that that was not going to be possible…Eight years later, yet more significant changes have occurred and the definition that design still had in 2004 is no longer valid. Thirteen years into the twenty-first century, such is the impact of the massive global economic, technological, social and cultural shifts that have occurred that design, and designers, can no longer see themselves as continuing either to be rooted in nineteenthcentury industrialization or in twentieth-century cultural modernism and mass consumption. Instead, design is currently looking for a role to play in a world in which debt is more of a reality than wealth, in which environmental disasters are part of daily life and advanced technologies have transformed social relations beyond recognition. That realignment is still taking place and, to date, it is difficult to know how it will pan out. (Sparke 2013, 1)

We see, then, three shared characteristics of this group of social-normative theories of design: a. b. c.

They define design as context-dependent. They classify this context as mainly social-ontological. They conclude from (a) and (b) that the unpredictable, disordered trait of this context leads design to be disordered as well, the problems of which, as well as their solutions, are not always well defined, but unstable.

One of the most pessimistic theories triggered by this line of thought—which is more distrustful than the ones formulated by Mau, Margolin and Sparke—is

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offered by Papanek. His radical normative definition comprises a clear ethical imperative for design, which is actually expressed in the chosen title of his distinguished book Design for the Real World. His imperative is that “design must become an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the true needs of men. It must be more research oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly designed objects and structures” (Papanek 2011 [1971], x). This statement explains why the full title of the book is Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Papanek claims that the internal link between design, mass production and marketing pushes design, especially industrial design, into a risky, even harmful, zone. Within this framework, the omnipotence and ubiquity of design in shaping tools, environments, society and personhood yields a moral accountability and constitutes the designer as a moral agent. Design, Papanek claims, must acknowledge the harsh ontological conditions of a reality overcrowded with manufactured objects. Already in the first, 1972, edition of his book, Papanek notes the non-natural but intense link between design and consumerism: between designing “electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns, and mink carpeting for bathrooms” and elaborate plans “to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people” (Papanek 2011, ix). Moreover: by designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed. (Papanek 2011, ix)

Yes, design, according to social normative theories, must inherently consider its results within a regressing reality. Some normative definitions even allow themselves to be speculative to a certain extent. “As all design to some extent is future oriented,” declare designers and theorists Dunne and Raby, express their interest “in positioning design speculation in relation to futurology, speculative culture… concerned with changing reality rather than simply describing it or maintaining it.” Thirty years after Papanek raised the critical element in design, Dunne and Raby, in their Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, think about critical design as a speculative work. They state that design should move between reality and the impossible and never affirm the existing reality. Design must take on “new design roles, contexts, and methods. It relates to ideas about progress—change for the better but, of course, better means different things to different people” (Dunne and Raby 2013, 3). Dunne and Raby term this futurist-speculative attitude “critical design,” which proves their theory to be deeply normative. They explain that: critical design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life. It

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was more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a methodology. Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo. (Dunne and Raby 2013, 34)

Critical design aspires to help the public to let go of the found-existing reality by opening the range of possibilities that: can be used to collectively define a preferable future for a given group of people: from companies, to cities, to societies. Designers should not define futures for everyone else but working with experts, including ethicists, political scientists, economists, and so on, generate futures that act as catalysts for public debate and discussion about the kinds of futures people really want. (Dunne and Raby 2013, 6)

Design can allow other disciplines to speculate about a better future, Dunne and Raby believe, it can provide insight, realise dreams and relate them to everyday lives. These collaborations, at all levels of society, while exploring alternative settings, is radical critical design, which may bring reality to be: more malleable and, although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening. And equally, factors that may lead to undesirable futures can be spotted early on and addressed or at least limited. (Dunne and Raby 2013, 6)

While Dunne and Raby do not try to predict the future but speculate about its possibilities, Bruce Mau and Tony Fry do predict the future and dread it will turn into what Dunne and Raby dub “undesirable future.” According to Mau, the main parameter of the current context of design is the growing size of the population. Mau claims: We have that population because we succeeded so often. We solved so many problems that we’re now 7.9 billion. Now we have a new class of problems that we’ve never had to solve before. It’s a new kind of order of magnitude.

The quantity crisis brings out the climate crisis, the food insecurity crisis, and the crisis of government. Mau states: Really for the first time in history, they’re all happening simultaneously. It’s not a sequential problem, it’s a simultaneous problem. That these are all happening at the same time. They’re all linking together and causing acceleration and new kinds of challenges. (“Bruce Mau, Global Guru,” 2021)

These simultaneous challenges may lead to “defuturing”—a term coined by Tony Fry, a prominent philosopher of design, in his Defuturing: A New Design

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Philosophy. Tony Fry, who formulated one of the most salient social ethical definitions of design, does assign design the role of predicting the future rather than merely speculating about its possibility, albeit in a dialectic manner. Fry’s imperative for design is to make the future possible by preventing the “defuturing” of it. Offering a radical prescription for design, which recruits design entirely to sustainability, leaving design no autonomy, commitment to the very medium of design or aesthetic goals, Tony Fry goes all the way to characterising design as essentially possessing political agency. Accordingly, Fry offers both descriptive and normative elements in his definition of design. The descriptive part defines design as follows: “design—the designer and designed objects, images, systems and things—shapes the form, operation, appearance and perceptions of the material world we occupy” (T. Fry 2020, 3). His normative definition assigns design a role in forming the infrastructure of sustainability and fighting “defuturing.” That is to say, design’s starting point and first condition is epistemological or of consciousness: it ought to hold an enduring cognisance of the unsustainable moment of the world of today, in which life is afflicted by growing risks as a result of sick ecology. This negation of the future world through self-destruction and the destruction of nature and our environments—“the essence of any material condition of unsustainability as it acts to take futures away from ourselves and other living species”—is not sufficiently conceded, and design ought to join the project to render it a form of public knowledge. Design’s second condition is ontological; it is required to join the prevention of material defuturing and the use of the world as a disposable tool or as material made to indulge us. Design ought to be what he calls “redirective,” finding ways to heal our auto-destructive essence and action. This “self-redirection,” Fry explains, is “a restructuring of habitus by design” and is “a profoundly political position” (T. Fry 2020, 47). As argued by Fry, design needs to move “out of its economic function and into a political frame.” An understanding of the political essence of design, according to Fry, is necessary to inaugurate both its transfiguration and the formulation of its philosophy, or better yet, ontology: this philosophy is here to be discovered—it is not formulated as a philosophical system, although it does draw heavily on the ontological tradition and demonstrates an ontological theory of the agency of design. The motive for doing this is not to complement existing design thinking but rather to confront and hopefully displace it. (Fry 2020, xxviii)

Drawing on Hegel’s dialectics, defuturing effectively recasts Hegel’s notion of the “negation of negation,” namely negating the negating of the future. As formidable as the problem is, if we do not truthfully and directly meet it, we negate our being. Thus, Fry’s externalist starting point is neither the medium of design nor the mental content of the designer, but rather the fact that the world has become

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unsustainable. He aligns the beginning of defuturing with the intensification of the force of industrial society over the past 50 years: There is a simple and vital question that needs to be posed immediately: in the face of the unsustainable state of the world, what can political activists and designers (including myriad other professionals who, knowingly or unknowingly, make design decisions) do? (Fry 2011, vii)

This question proves the insufficiency of the solutions that are offered by social, political, economic and technological sources. Fry’s own answer to his question is the combination of design and politics, or better yet, seeing design as a political agent: the transformation of design and of politics combining, for all agents of change, to become the means by which the moment and process of Sustainment (the overcoming of the unsustainable) is attained. For this to be realized design, designing and politics need to be thought about in a new way. (T. Fry 2011, viii)

One of the main new ways of thinking about design which is offered by Tony Fry is shifting from seeing design as a spatial practice to a temporal one (from designing in space to “designing in time”). This, Fry claims in his Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, requires a “return brief,” namely, “taking a brief and redirecting it toward sustainment” (T. Fry 2009, 59). One of the examples of designing in time that Fry presents is the award-winning brief submitted to “Boonah Two”—an international concept design competition for Building a Sustainable World: Life in the Balance—organised in 2007 by the Royal Institute of British Architects/USA. Re-planning the Australian town of Boonah was formed as follows: a fifty-year timeline was set, from which to ‘design from the future to the present’. Such designing-in-time generated a substantial research exercise of probabilities, like climate change impacts, social and environmental needs, population redistribution, technological change, and so on. In turn, this research informed the writing of a year-by-year scenario for the fifty years. From this, design tasks were designated to cope with the potential risks and problems identified. Crucially, these tasks were commanded by two imperatives: those things needing and able to be redirected; and, that which needed to be newly introduced. (T. Fry 2009, 62)

According to Fry, this very method of design will enable our humanity, as he claims in his Becoming Human by Design. If design is critically transfigured to “provide a redirective mode of engagement with defuturing technology,” it “can become a

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means for reclaiming agency” (T. Fry 2012, 19). This reclaiming of political agency by designers and design as a discipline is what Fry means by “new design philosophy.” Reaching the most radical functionalist normative philosophy of design is a good turning point to go all the way back to the other pole of thinking about design: design as an autonomous aesthetic creative practice devoted to its medium and its beauty. We shall turn to the formalist, aesthetic-oriented definitions of design in the next sub-chapter, which will be the final in “Definitions of Design.” 1.8 FORMALIST, AESTHETIC-ORIENTED DEFINITIONS OF DESIGN The opposite pole of the radical functionalist followed by social-normative and ethical definitions of design is populated by formalist and aestheticist definitions. The exposition of the social-normative theories in the former sub-chapter revealed that while they ascribed design a potential aptitude, this came with a heavy price, that is, considering the appearance of the design a low priority, up to omitting it from the definition of design altogether. As we saw in 1.1 above, the earliest thought about design aspired to add beauty to daily functional products, deeming their compositional qualities essential to design. Appearance, commitment to the medium, composition, formal relations between the elements, their materials and the product as a whole—the formalist or aestheticist theories consider these as the very fundamental elements of design, distinguishing it from engineering or technology. The human element motivating design according to formalism is twofold: advancement of personal freedom and self-fulfilment and the natural desire for beauty (Gal 2015, 50–57). Regarding the first, the formalist perception holds that beautiful environments—from everyday ones such as the design of useful tools, kitchens and living environments to transcendent ones such as institutional museums and their content—are crucial for personal freedom and self-fulfilment that are categorised as human natural rights by liberalist thought. Beyond the relative stability or unity of the function, for example, cups as drinking devices and cars as mobility tools, creative aesthetic forms and compositions offer optional ontological possibilities, various ways of seeing and transgressions of categories. Let us consider Andrea Branzi’s Scoiattolo, a stainless steel squirrel made from polished mirror and wood that sustains the nutcracker’s stable function by showing it forth within a figurative shape (2010, Figure 1.4). The very symbolic trait referring to a nut loving fellow creature (the squirrel) transgresses the given stable function towards other spheres. Michael Beitz’s Picnic Table disrupts the common shape of this kind of table, adding a useless but embedded expressive element that adds a dynamic ambience of roads and journeys. Simpler designs that offer various shapes and styles operate in this path of freedom of choice for the designer as well as for the user. According to the formalist view, these forms should not be addressed lightly by philosophy and practice. They open for their viewers or users windows with views to sights beyond the existing life and towards desired ones. This is well formulated by the theorist of

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design and industrial designer, David Pye, who declares in his The Nature and Aesthetics of Design: “the art of design, which chooses that the things we use shall look as they do, has a very much wider and more sustained impact than any other art” (Pye 1978, 11). The well-known Renault car designer Stephane Janin expressed this formalist idea in a lecture delivered in 2022 to industrial design students in Shenkar College. Janin clarified that beyond being moving objects, cars are also “architecture on wheels,” and thus received their identities through conventions or innovations and disruptions of forms (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.4 Andrea Branzi, Scoiattolo Nutcracker, 2010.

Figure 1.5 Stephane Janin, from a presentation to industrial design students in Shenkar College, 2022.

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The very possibility of a tool such as glass or plate to be embodied in various aesthetic forms and styles manifests freedom and allows heteronomous kind of choices by both the designer and the user. Pye accordingly asserts that: the form of designed things is decided by choice or else by chance; but it is never actually entailed by anything whatever. Nothing in the realm of design ever looks like that because it has got to be like that. (Pye 1978, 13)

The ability of functionality to offer the same space of choices and exemplify it and lure the public to spheres of free and critical thought is dubious, argue the formalists. The second motivation of design according to formalists is what Roger Fry, a central formalist philosopher and the founder of the design collective the Omega Workshops, names in the prospectus of the workshops “natural aesthetic craving.” Fry’s formalist definition of design classifies mass production as negating the nature of design, because it disarms design from its expressivity as well as from the depth of composition, and communicative abilities that run from the maker to the end user, leading to the “lamentable condition of the applied arts which affects our well-being at almost every moment of our lives” (R. Fry 1996, 198). Moreover, Fry contends that although pre-modern industrialism may have coalesced with design (though allowing only a second-best kind of beauty), mass production, and this is an important point, not only disregards natural aesthetic desires, but real daily needs as well. Fry formulates this assertion as follows: modern industrialism… has substituted the machine for the craftsman and the plagiarist for the artist. It has indeed effected a complete divorce between art and industry to the harm of both. The artist [namely, the applied art creator] has become a specialized and frequently a subsidized professional whose work has lost the vivifying contact with practical needs. (R. Fry 1996, 198)

Against the harms of mass production oppression, which necessitates a predetermined and complete plan that is detached from the medium, formalism defines design as committed to medium and accordingly free—exempt from external commitments as much as possible. Within the formalist framework, so Fry claims, the Omega Workshop designers can work with “much greater freedom and certainty…substituting whenever possible the directly expressive quality of the artist’s handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction…” (R. Fry 1996, 199). True to its nature, design exercises a sense of proportion and fitness and of invention. Thus, Fry explains, in furniture design, for example, “these elements which are the essential qualities of such design, can be utilized to create forms expressive of the needs of modern life with a new simplicity and directness” (R. Fry 1996, 199).

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Concerns regarding the conquering of art, craft and design by machinery are presented in the 1933 issue of the modernist British Magazine The Criterion by Arthur J. Penty. Penty’s concern is addressed by Herbert Read, a contemporary of Roger Fry and the philosopher of art and design and curator who examined the question of whether machine-produced objects could be aesthetic (Read 1935, 33). While Read labels mass production as but one formation of design and art, Penty, like Fry, identifies it as a negation of both. He accordingly points to a divide between people whose “ideal is speed and god is money” and the arts (design and craft included) whose “existence presupposes life lived in a more leisurely and contemplative fashion.” Claiming that mass production and industrialism detach these disciplines both from independence and beauty, Penty explains that “experience proves that none of the arts can stand up against machinery and mass production.” Through an exposition of the relationship between art and industrialism, Penty overturns the idea that mass production is aimed at preconceived ends to which the machine is recruited as means. For Penty, it is art that is involved in the big themes and goals of life, whereas machines deal with random basic productions: “art has to do with the ends of life, while industrialism is concerned with means” (Penty 1967 [1933], 368). In relation to considering the big goals of life, the formalist definition takes a step further, one which does respect the functionality of the design product, but at the same time regards it as a mere foundation above and beyond which the individuation of the design product is determined. What can be named “the individuation of design argument” runs as follows: though design products are functional or useful by nature, the actual space of design is the aesthetic space which is the characteristic that endows them with their identities as members of the group of design products as well as distinguishing between products. This space of design is noted by Herbert Read. Contrary to Fry and other radical formalists, Read welcomed the modern industrial elements of design, as well as functionalist thought, and trusted mass production to maintain aesthetic qualities. However, being a moderate formalist, Read also agreed that the metamotivation of design was beauty, pointing out that design was inaugurated with the introduction of form or shape to functional tools. Read elucidates this in his significant work Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (1935). Note that like Fry and Pye, Read related form or shape to choice, namely the exercise of personal freedom: Early man, we may assume, in making his implements was governed entirely by considerations of utility. A hammer had to have a blunt head, an arrow a sharp point, and so on. Form evolved in the direction of functional efficiency. But a moment arrives in the development of civilization when there is a choice between equally efficient objects of different shape. The moment that choice is made, an aesthetic judgement has operated. What are the motives that lead man to prefer one shape to another? (Read 1935, 15, our emphasis)

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Figure 1.6 Warring States Ancient Chinese Knife Coin, Handan City Museum, Hebei, China, by Gary Lee Todd, CC0 1.0.

Read argues that the motives are proportions, order or the ways the object is observed in the natural world under universal forms. One of his examples is a Chinese, Chou dynasty, ceremonial dagger-blade of jade, which is considered a precious material dated 1122–255 BC (see a similar item in Figure 1.6). No doubt, Read asserts, “the makers of these objects perceived the extraordinary aesthetic appeal of these functional forms, and for that reason made them with that care and sensibility which gives them an abstract and universal appeal” (Read 1935, 15). A similar inference about the aesthetic element of the design product being the actual space of design within the design product was made in the twenty-first century by Forsey in her Aesthetics of Design, using the example of wine glasses. Forsey maintains a sheer or rigid kind of functionalism, according to which function is predetermined and possessed by the object rather than attributed to it by users or conventions and which oversees the identity of its carrier as a member

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of a group, as illustrated by wine glasses. However, Forsey additionally claims that design is primarily an aesthetic realm and that “the formal elements of design, in fact, appear to be necessary to our identification and differentiation of objects,” namely, the identity of an object as a design product is determined by its aesthetic appearance. That is to say, the design product has two identities, the basic one and the design one. The motivation for the latter is the aesthetic creation of forms. This shows that Forsey, although she is a functionalist, understands that, like Read, the aesthetic element of the design product is the subject of judgement by the users: Two wine-glasses, for example, may be functionally identical: designed for—and successful in—holding and airing wine and delivering it to the palate. What else is to distinguish a Philippe Stark goblet from a generic one purchased at Walmart if not its formal elements (and, perhaps, the quality of its materials)? Once we have got the function of the wine-glass right, what need would we have to continue designing new models but for alterations in their form? The distinctive form of a Stark goblet is, in part, how we identify it as a different design from countless others, and also in part, I will eventually argue, how we appraise it as being any good. (Forsey 2013, 41–42)

Thus, among the functionalists, Forsey, although she adopts a metaphysical, radical functionalist approach, analyses design as an aesthetic phenomenon first and foremost. The history of design, she therefore claims, ought to be studied within the broader history of aesthetics, and as such, it deserves the status of “a legitimate object of aesthetic attention” (Forsey 2013, 4). Pye takes the individuation of design argument even further, almost entirely dismissing function from the definition of design, regarding it as a mere primary limitation on the work of the designer. Design, Pye claims, takes place mainly in the aesthetic useless stratum of the design product—namely, in the part that is not designed to be used: “Whenever humans design and make useful things they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and easily avoidable work it which contributes nothing to its usefulness” (Pye 1978, 13). A ceiling’s flatness has nothing to do with making the room warmer or quieter. Design usually involves “doing useless work on useful thing,” motivated by the desire for beauty and its significance, Pye clarifies. He writes, “If we did not behave after this pattern our life would indeed be poor, nasty and brutish” (Pye 1978, 13). We see then that the discourse about the aesthetic character of design exhibits both formalist definitions and functionalist theories. The former opposes functionalism, attributing superiority to the appearance, form or composition of the design product over its function, based on the claim that the role of design is to supply beauty to functional products and our environments. The latter notes that while design is motivated by external goals or a general problemsolving approach rather than by craving for beauty, considerations of appearance are essential in the plan of the product’s function and its identity. One of the features of design that Parsons, the rationalist-functionalist who defines design

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as a problem-solving discipline, presents, for example, is “a focus on what we might call the ‘surface’ of things” (Parsons 2015, 23). Parsons rightly brings to our attention the idea that the extension of the “surface” of design is wider than visible exteriors, covering also the “interactive dynamics of the object—the way the object is used and the way it responds to use.” The designer’s prism is actually one of the users, “and all and only those components or aspects of the object that figure in the user’s relation to the object are the province of the Designer” (Parsons 2015, 23). Thus, while Parsons presents a rationalist and internalist definition of design, labelling design a conceptualist discipline, these relations to the object could, at least partially, be subsumed under aesthetic encounters with the design product. It is with the product’s form, material, the intra-relations between the elements and ways of presentation and perception that the end user operates—all are aesthetic properties. Beyond ontology, which is the realm of definitions of design, a philosophical analysis of design ought to consider human nature in relation to such a longlived omnipresent phenomenon. The relevant question here is: are we indeed functionalist beings, interacting with our surroundings through use, striving for efficiency; or are we aestheticians, interacting with our surroundings through the creation and viewing of forms, flourishing by achieving well-arranged compositions? We shall focus first on functionalist, but aesthetic-oriented, definitions of design, before returning to a purely formalist definition to conclude this chapter. A functionalist but somewhat aesthetic-oriented theory of design is held by Dreyfuss. He agrees with definitions of industrial design conceived as “the application of taste and logic to the products of machinery.” However, he proceeds by claiming that “a machine-made commodity can be awkward or handy, ugly or beautiful” (Dreyfuss 1974, 22–23). Dreyfuss’s functionalism still recruits design’s aesthetic practice to direct the machine to produce “attractive commodities” that work well and sell better. Interestingly, this very role of design in mass production allows for a beautiful everyday environment. Hence, Dreyfuss does acknowledge the significance of aesthetic qualities of design but, in contrast to the formalists, attributes their realisation or accomplishment to mass production and the desire to sell better. Thus, Dreyfuss highlights the essence of the designer as a problem-solver and marketing agent, aiding the industry through the creation of evocative objects. Dreyfuss accordingly refutes the common critique about his contemporary Americans that, contrary to Europeans, “their worship of comfort and luxury, have so surrounded themselves with slick mechanization that their capacity to esteem the fine arts has become dulled or has disappeared entirely” (Dreyfuss 1974, 80). According to Dreyfuss, this is a misconception, which overlooks the influence of mass-produced, everyday aesthetics and applied arts. The subject of his argument is mass production as a pervading aesthetic genre: well-designed, mass-produced goods constitute a new American art form and are responsible for the creation of a new American culture. These products of

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the applied arts are a part of everyday American living and working, not merely museum pieces to be seen on a Sunday afternoon. Art and applied art lovers are motivated by the same impulse, a desire for beauty. (Dreyfuss 1974, 80–81)

It therefore makes sense that beyond his functionalist approach, Dreyfuss shares with the formalists the foundational claim that natural aesthetic tendencies and wishes are the central motivation of design. A recent aesthetic-oriented moderate functionalism is presented by the philosopher of design, Andy Hamilton, whose definition is also twofold, but contrary to Dreyfuss’s, does not tag selling better or consumerism as essential to design. Hamilton’s definition points to both functionality and aesthetic consideration as necessary conditions of design and to the combination of both as a sufficient condition. According to Hamilton, design “solves functional problems, and it improves the look or feel of the product through style, decoration, and embellishment. Both these elements are fundamentally involved, and hard to separate” (Hamilton 2011, 54). Conversely, though design belongs to a group of objects that were born from rational thought and planning, “problem-solving in design therefore has an ineliminable aesthetic component.” Additionally, Hamilton disputes the definitions that relate design to industry. He claims in his essay “The Aesthetics of Design” (2011) that the interpretation of “design,” according to which “design essentially involves response to a consumer,” is false. Even if the product is aimed at a consumer, this intention is irrelevant to its identity as design. What is essential to design, Hamilton claims, “is the duality of solving functional problems and improving the look or feel of the product through style, decoration, and embellishment” (Hamilton 2011, 58). Hamilton admits that studying design as a material-visual world of commodities may be informative, but should not come at the expense of design’s inherent aesthetic value. Indeed, “designer products can become classics because of their aesthetic appeal” (Hamilton 2011, 55). Hamilton’s examples are the Umbra wastepaper basket’s fluid shape and designer watches, such as Movado, which are no more accurate than a Timex, which costs much less, but is as functional. Sometimes, design products could be classics regardless of their functional shortcomings: the original Volkswagen Mini was a rust-bucket; Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses leaked because of their flat roofs… Problem solving may seem to be what James Dyson does with his designs for vacuum cleaners. However, I would argue that his concern is not simply to find solutions to functional problems, but to find elegant solutions—the elegance is not just added on but is intrinsic to how the problem is solved. (Hamilton 2011, 56)

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Movado watches and the Umbra basket gained their status as salient design objects thanks to their aesthetic qualities rather than being overly functional (Figure 1.7). Even the appreciation of the Dyson vacuum cleaner’s improved suction power is embedded in the fact that this advance was gained aesthetically. Hamilton therefore criticises the modernist functionalist approach to architecture and design as simply a kind of engineering with no necessary connection to aesthetic appearance or style. He writes: “What is distinctive of Dyson products is their synthesis of innovative invention and stylish design – Dyson is an inventor, and a designer. As consumer products, Dyson cleaners need to be stylish” (Hamilton 2011, 57). Hamilton’s criticism of the functionalists’ sharp distinction between function and the aesthetic qualities of design, emphasising their amalgamation, follows earlier criticism presented by one of the most important aestheticians of the twentieth century, Rudolf Arnheim. Arnheim formulated an anti-radical-functionalism stance and targeted his critique at “theorists who fully acknowledge the aesthetic aspect of the architect’s or designer’s task. However, they tend to think of beauty as an additional virtue of the useful object. Fitness is one thing, beauty is another” (Arnheim 1964, 32). Arnheim’s perception of design is complex. In his influential “From Function to Expression” (1964), Arnheim defines design as a resilient combination of form and its suitability to the object’s identity. However, he adds that design’s basic identity is not merely functional, but also expressive. Design is comprised of three co-dependent factors: fitness, beauty and expression. He writes: Beauty, I believe, is that property of form which makes expression pure and strong. Fitness… provides the theme for what a building or implement expresses. And no beauty of form can be conceived without reference to that theme of fitness. (Arnheim 1964, 40–41, fn.13)

Figure 1.7 Umbra Basket.

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The innate need for stylistic choices and expressivity cannot be disregarded even by radical functionalism, argues Arnheim. The examples he supplies to prove his point are eye-opening and relate to Pye’s definition of design. One of these examples is the sewing machine, the appearance of which does not carry an inherent relation to its mechanism: to conceal the mechanism of a sewing machine in a shell of straight-line L-shape may make the object safe, clean, storable, etc.; but it is also the expression of a mind that is not curious about how an implement operates ‘inside’ as long as it works. Nor does a reduction to simplest shape produce pure functionality.

Another is the products designed at the Bauhaus, that expressivity and style were their compositional force, as he notes in retrospective: “we discover by now a preference for elementary geometry, not derived from function but dictated by the character of its makers and more directly expressed perhaps in Feininger’s and Klee’s cubism or in Schlemmer’s Mechanical Ballet of human robots” (Arnheim 1964, 31) The formalist theories of design which were formulated by Arnheim and Pye met with similar contemporary opinions, proving that while the twentieth century saw a functionalist wave, formalism received its due status in the design discourse. A less known but nonetheless prototypical and informative definition of design was formulated by Victoria Ball in The Art of Interior Design: A Text in the Aesthetics of Interior Design (1960). At that date, Ball was a professor of design at Case Western Reserve University, where she chaired the interior design programme for 45 years. In this text, Ball presents a formalist, even aestheticist, theory of design based on the proposition that “the love of beauty is fundamental” (Ball 1960, 1). According to Ball, design ought to be dedicated “to the hard but rewarding task of making our surroundings more beautiful,” emanating from the desire for “attractive environments,” and leading to the consideration of compositions as significant and essential to design. Design’s problems are not ones of function or extra-design needs, but what Ball calls “the alignment of visual forces.” Accomplishing beauty is founded on a process of organisation, “which means selection and arrangement of materials in new form” (Ball 1960, 17, 4). Ball is aware of the idea that design requires the unique knowledge of the merchant or engineer. However, she claims, trained artistic sensitivities are the highest priority: How a building works is certainly important. We believe, however, that a structure cannot serve completely unless it is visually pleasing… An invitation to participate in the designing of an environment which one is purchasing is an invitation to grow in aesthetic stature through the creation of beauty. (Ball 1960, vii)

This leads Ball to an externalist-materialist definition of design—according to which design’s starting point is the medium, its materials and its rightness of

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organisation or “the significance of form” realised by the unity, intensity and vitality of its effect (Ball 1960, 13). At about the same time, a parallel definition of the designer as “a planner with an aesthetic sense” was formulated by the artist, designer and thinker Bruno Munari in his Design as Art (Munari 1971, 29). Design, Munari argues, is an ordinary area of beauty, connecting art, which is usually a remote discipline of beauty, to the daily lives of human beings. Munari draws on Walter Gropius’ definition which tries to bring art closer to functional realms, as had been the case before the delineation of the circle of fine arts, and to re-create a new kind of artist. Munari beautifully formulates the influential role of design in bringing beauty to the sphere of the everyday, namely, through its promotion of everyday aesthetics: The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. Instead of pictures for the drawing-room, electric gadgets for the kitchen. There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide. (Munari 1971, 25)

Munari moves towards a normative definition of design, calling on designers to educate the general public along these lines. Designers ought to help the public to abandon “preconceived notions of art and artists, notions picked up at schools where they condition you to think one way for the whole of your life,” and embrace the changes of perception design brings with it. Designers’ educational task is to relay the message of everyday aesthetics using simple terminology (Munari 1971, 26). This project will most likely “resolve our common aesthetic problems. Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beauty” (Munari 1971, 26). Munari’s specific wish for design to re-combine applied arts with fine art sends us right back to one of the heralds of formalism in design, whose message was precisely this—William Morris, the nineteenth-century Arts and Craft leader. Morris’s formalist theory, which together with Ruskin’s was one of the first to delineate the formalist principles of design, is also the right one to conclude our definitions of design chapter. Notice how influential Morris’s theory has always been, referred to in one way or another by most of the formalists. Morris pointed to the aesthetic infrastructure of our useful environments and objects, namely, design, as a basic human condition. His imperative is the following: to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it. Does not our subject look important enough

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now? I say that without these arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind. (Morris and Morris 2012, 5)

Indeed, Morris explicitly echoes John Ruskin’s theory of the “virtues of architecture,” which “must sanction the design of all truly great nations and times” formulated in his canonical Stones of Venice (Ruskin 2013, 32). In this work, Ruskin scrutinised Venice’s appreciation of beauty which is paradigmatic to Britain’s lack of it in the mid-nineteenth century. But Morris’s theory was formalist through and through. Trying to bring design to the fore, Morris’s formalist philosophy went against the differentiation between art and design. In his essay “The Lesser Arts” (1877), Morris calls for a dissolution of the then ongoing separation between fine arts and the useful arts, which was then named “decorative art.” Morris claims the gap between architecture, sculpture and painting on the one hand, and “those lesser so-called Decorative Arts” on the other, is harmful for both life and society. This quotation, which ends by pointing to the significance of design in our lives, provides a good conclusion for this chapter: It is only in latter times, and under the most intricate conditions of life, that they have fallen apart from one another; and I hold that, when they are so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while the greater, however they may be practiced for a while for Art by men of great minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by the lesser, unhelped by each other, are sure to lose their dignity of popular arts, and become nothing but dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp, or ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men. (Morris and Morris 2012, 2–3)

REFERENCES Arnheim, R. 1964. “From Function to Expression.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no. 1: 29–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/428136 Arnheim, R. 1966. Towards a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays by Arnheim, Rudolf. London: Faber & Faber. Arnheim, R. 2009. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye; the New Version (Expanded and rev. ed., with some new illustrations, [Nachdr.], 50th anniversary printing). Berkeley: University of California Press. Ball, V. (Kloss). 1960. The Art of Interior Design; a Text in the Aesthetics of Interior Design. New York: Macmillan. http://archive.org/details/artofinteriordes00ball “Bruce Mau, Global Guru.” 2021. Miami Ad School. Retrieved April 25, 2022, from https:// miamiadschool.com/event/bruce-mau-global-guru/ Buchanan, R. and V. Margolin. 1995. Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cecchetti, M. and S. Baker. 2011. “For Sensitive Skin: On the Transformation of Architecture into Design.” Annali d’Italianistica 29: 237–252. Collingwood, R. G. 1968. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dreyfuss, H. 1974. Designing for People. New York : Grossman Publishers. Dunne, A., and F. Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and social Dreaming. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Eastman, C. M., W. M. McCracken and Wendy C. Newstetter. 2001. Design Knowing and Learning: Cognition in Design Education. New York: Elsevier Science B.V. https:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9780080438689 Flusser, V. 1999. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion. Forsey, J. 2013. The Aesthetics of Design (1st edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fry, R. 1920. Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus. Fry, R. 1996. A Roger Fry Reader. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fry, T. 2009. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and new Practice (English ed). Oxford; New York: Berg. Fry, T. 2011. Design as Politics. Oxford; New York: Berg. https://doi.org/10.5040/978147429 3723?locatt=label:secondary_bloomsburyCollections Fry, T. 2012. Becoming Human by Design. London; New York: Berg. Fry, T. 2020. Defuturing: A new Design Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Gal, M. 2015. Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics. Bern: Peter Lang. Gropius, W. 1970. Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Collier Books. Kroes, P., M. Franssen, and L. Bucciarelli. 2009. “Rationality in Design.” In Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard, John Woods (eds.). Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences, 565–600. Amsterdam: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/ B978-0-444-51667-1.50025-2 Margolin, V. 2002. The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/ chicago/P/bo3623186.html Margolin, V. 2009. “Design in History.” Design Issues 25, no. 2: 94–105. Matisse, H. 1978. Matisse on Art. edited by J. D. Flam. New York: E. P. Dutton. Mau, B. 2020. Bruce Mau: MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in your Life and Work (Illustrated edition). London: Phaidon Press. Morris, W. and M. Morris. 2012. “The Lesser Arts [1877].” In The Collected Works of William Morris: With Introductions by his Daughter May Morris, 3–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139343145.003 Mukařovský, J. 1970. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Vol. 3). Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Contributions. Munari, B. 1971. Design as Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Norman, D. A. 1990. The Design of Everyday Things (1st Doubleday/Currency edition). New York: Doubleday. Norman, D. A. 1999. “Affordance, Conventions, and Design.” Interactions (May-June): 38–42. Norman, D. A. 2004. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Norman, D. A. and S. W. Draper, eds. 1986. User Centred System Design: New Perspectives on Human–Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Palladio, A. 2002. The Four Books on Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Papanek, V. 2011. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and social Change (2nd edition compl. rev., repr.). London: Thames and Hudson. Parsons, G. 2015. The Philosophy of Design. Cambridge: Polity Press. Plato, Ferrari, G. R. F., and T. Griffith. 2000. The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pye, D. 1978. The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold. http://archive.org/details/natureaesthetics0000pyed

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Raz, J. 2017. “The Myth of Instrumental Rationality.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1, no. 1: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v1i1.1 Read, H. 1935. Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. Rittel, H. W. J. and M. M. Webber. 1973. “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2: 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730 Rodgers, P. and J. Yee, eds. 2015. The Routledge Companion to Design Research. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Ruskin, J. 1891. The Complete Works of John Ruskin (Vol. 6). London: Reuwee, Wattley & Walsh. Ruskin, J. 2013. The Stones of Venice: The Foundations. New York; Cosimo, Inc. Sparke, P. 2003. Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ gao/9781884446054.article.T022395 Sparke, P. 2013. An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present (3rd edition). New York, London: Routledge. The Criterion: 1922–1939. 1967. London : Faber and Faber ; New York : Barnes & Noble. http://archive.org/details/criterion19221930013unse The Omega Workshop, trade catalogue c 1914. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://www. fulltable.com/vts/o/om/o.htm Tolstoy, L. 1962. What is Art? And Essays on Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weitz, M. 1956. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1: 27–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/427491 Yaneva, A. 2009. “Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design.” Design and Culture 1, no 3: 273–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2009.116 43291

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2.1 PHILOSOPHY ‘Should I design it to be functional,’ the students say, ‘or to be aesthetically pleasing?’ This is the most often heard, the most understandable, and yet the most mixed-up question in design today. ‘Do you want it to look good or to work?’ Barricades are erected between what are really just two of the many aspects of function. (Papanek 2011, 7)

This frequent class event, simply portrayed by the theorist, designer and teacher Victor Papanek in his important Design for the Real World, stands at the very centre of the discipline of design. It will not be too reductionist to argue that this discipline is founded on the two concepts that denote the main two elements of the design product: form and function. Moreover, the central issue in design discourse has always been, from antiquity all the way to the twenty-first century, the hierarchy and relations between form and function. On the one hand, the prestige of both function and form as the main two elements of design is established in the literature on design, as well as in practice and among the end users. On the other hand, design as a discipline faces deep, sometimes bitter, controversies, which revolve around the status of form and function both in the motivation of the discipline, as well as their relative relations in the design process, final product, and its effect and perception. This complexity is depicted by the prominent aesthetician and philosopher of the visual sphere, Rudolf Arnheim, in his essay “From Function to Expression.” In this text, Arnheim tries to refute radical functionalism with regard to design on account of over-simplicity and disregard for the dialectic nature of form and function in design: the aesthetical status of function and functionality in architecture and the other applied arts has been uncertain and uneasy. If an object is designed for a practical purpose, will this intention of the designer and the utility of the object further or hamper the artistic value of the product? Or is function aesthetically indifferent?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216230-3

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Arnheim’s own account of the matter is an exemplary illustration of the intricacy of theories about the relationship between form and function, attributing visual expressivity to function and thus manifesting the fusion between the two foundational elements: functionality, i.e., the fitness of an object for a non-aesthetic purpose, enters the realm of art by way of visual expression. To this end it will be necessary, first of all, to rehearse some of the views on the relations between the three concepts: fitness, beauty, expression. (Arnheim 1964, 29)

We shall see in the next historical sub-chapter that formalist modernism placed form at the top of the hierarchy. Functionalist modernism held that function is superior within the structure of the design product and so argued that form follows function and is subjugated to it, but at the same time it saw design as also motivated by aesthetic reasons, and argued that postmodernism entirely disrupted these relations. In this sub-chapter, we shall present the abstract philosophical analyses of the concepts of “form” and “function” in general and as related to design within the framework of the ontological structure of the design product and the whole discipline. 2.1.1 FORM The concepts of form and function in design emerge from general philosophical concepts. “Form” is the offspring of the idea of order which is already to be found in the Pythagorean account of the world as founded on mathematical order, dating from the sixth century BC. In aesthetics the idea of order served as the foundation of theories of beauty and rightness of structure. The concept of forms was further defined as the interrelations between the elements of a phenomenon and their relations with the phenomenon as a whole. In the literature form is also related to the material or the medium of a piece and its sensuous appearance. It is typically juxtaposed to content, where the content is considered the subject of the aboutness of the piece—what it is about—while the form is considered the way the subject is represented—how it is referred to. In design, the juxtaposition is, as stated, of form against function, but the structure is similar: the function is what the object is supposed to do; the form is how it is rendered.1 According to formalism in aesthetics, an artwork or design product gains aesthetic features through an aesthetically led arrangement, specifically by rendering the organisation of the piece as aesthetically determined or based on aesthetic considerations (Gal 2022b). This identifies the formal aesthetic properties as the relevant ones in the identity of the artwork or design product. The formalist Clive Bell, who addressed art and a few sub-discipline of design as given under the same extension, defined them as essentially based on aesthetically significant forms—forms that are not deployed for external, communicative

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or other aims, but that are arranged to be aesthetic. Bell’s canonical definition cannot be over-quoted. Note that Bell refers to “every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles,” as well as carpets and bowls in the following paragraph: What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible—significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form.” (Bell 1958, 8)

Bell argues that aesthetically sensitive people (viz. real artists), contrary to those who adopt a practical attitude, employ an abstract perception and see pure forms even in pieces of furniture and their relations to each other. These moments, in which a chair is not seen “as a means to physical well-being, nor as an object associated with the intimate life of a family… nor yet as a thing bound to the lives of hundreds of men and women…by a hundred subtleties,” are moments of “aesthetic vision” and “inspired emotions” (Bell 1958, 44). Thus, the formalist attitude to design is relatively abstract, disregarding the specificity of the use of an object. Victoria Ball, the designer and theorist of design, presents a similar proposition regarding the formal perception of the contents of rooms in The Art of Interior Design. Tables, rugs, lamps, the colour of walls are all arranged by designers “to form an ensemble,” Ball claims (Ball 1960, 13). In the eye of the designer, the functions of various tools are sometimes pushed back in favour of the general composition. Along these lines, Papanek points to this abstraction in the perception of design products as being based on the universal attraction to patterns, order and form: our delight in the order we find in frost flowers on a windowpane, in the hexagonal perfection of a honeycomb, in leaves, or in the architecture of a rose, reflects man’s preoccupation with pattern. We constantly try to understand our ever-changing highly complex existence by seeking order in it. (Papanek 2011, 4)

Papanek draws on the theory of form formulated by the prominent formalist philosopher of design William Morris, to stress our attraction to forms to explain the attraction to design. Design is in the infrastructure of our environment, emerging from the need to beautify useful things, which is realised through forms. Morris reminds us that “everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must

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be either beautiful or ugly,” which is determined by its accordance with nature. Morris adds that the aim of forms in design is to keep us alert, sensitive and perceptive. In his essay “The Lesser Art,” Morris defends the claim about the significance of design owing to its form, beautifully attaching the form of design to impressions of nature and to beauty. Well-formed design products, as artificial as they are, give us a sense of general (as opposed to particular) rightness, which is parallel to the sense we get from nature: Now it is one of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled senses in this matter: for this end are those wonders of intricate patterns interwoven, those strange forms invented, which men have so long delighted in: forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate nature, but in which the hand of the craftsman is guided to work in the way that she does, till the web, the cup, or the knife, look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint. (Morris and Morris 2012, 4–5)

2.1.2 FUNCTION Let us now shift our attention to the concept of “function.” This concept, or versions of it, has also been analysed since antiquity. It is the offspring of the Greek concept of “telos,” which means the purpose of a thing, the way it is supposed to function in a system, or its natural relation to an external purpose. Most importantly, from an ontological viewpoint, telos or function is defined by teleology as the cause of a thing’s existence, therefore its essence. If we take an epistemological viewpoint, to know a thing is to know its telos. Teleology is the research field of the purpose of things, and functionalism derives from it, allowing different definitions of function. In its naturalist version, teleology attributes purpose to artificial as well as natural things. In Phaedo, Socrates, on behalf of Plato, refers to telos as the “real cause” of a thing or “the cause of coming to be” (Plato et al. 2010, 93, 99b, 96, 101c). Accordingly, in Meno, Socrates defines knowledge, the recollection of form (of the Platonic concept of form, namely the idea or essence) as “reasoning out the cause” that is superior to “true opinion” (Plato et al. 2010, 37, 98a). In yet another teleological passage in The Republic (as mentioned in Chapter 1), Socrates refers to telos as “the use for which each was made, or grew naturally,” claiming that the users are superior to both the makers and the imitators of things, given that users can detect whether intended uses are fulfilled (Plato et al. 2000, 284, d). Aristotle defines “telos” in Physics as the aim or end for which a thing is made. Out of four causes defined by Aristotle, telos is the final cause, which is the ultimate condition a thing is supposed to reach: “the sake of which a thing has been constructed or has come to be.” Aristotle’s teleology of four causes is described in a relevant way for our discussion as follows:

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to give an account of a table, for instance, we must describe its matter—for the table is made out of something, usually wood; its form—for the table is not just any lump of wood, but wood with a certain shape; its moving cause—for the table was made by someone, the carpenter; and its final cause—for when the carpenter made the table he made it for a purpose, to provide a flat raised surface which can be used to write upon or eat at. (Lloyd and Lloyd 1970, 105).

It follows, then, that functionalism is the modern continuation of teleology—of the idea that the essence of a thing is its purpose or the way it is supposed to function. Like teleology, radical-natural functionalism draws on the idea of the “proper function” of natural things in science. This version is joined by naturalist philosophy regarding humans that characterises us as natural beings, to be analysed as part of nature and by a collaboration between philosophy and natural science. Other versions of functionalism could be radical, or realist, if they hold that function is a stable property which belongs to a thing and determines its identity; or moderate if they hold that function is unstable and attributed (and disattributed) as an external property by social conventions or even specific users. A central and often-addressed theory of proper function is formulated by Ruth Millikan, who, following both the natural sciences classification of the proper function of body organs and natural things and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later theory of meaning as the cluster of uses, offers a twofold idea: natural and etiological. A natural proper function of an organ or instinctive behaviour is: a function that its ancestors have performed that has helped account for the proliferation of the genes responsible for it, hence helped account for its own existence. But the definition of ’proper function‘ covers, univocally, the functions of many other items as well, including the functions of learned behaviours, reasoned behaviours, customs, language devices such as words and syntactic forms, and artifacts. (Millikan 1989, 289)

For example, hands and arms are usually used “as Nature intended,” that is, “for grasping, manipulating, pushing or pulling, etc. But a person can also use these members as matter upon which to draw, as subjects for physiological experimentation, as objects of aesthetic contemplation” (Millikan 1984, 2). Still, “The ‘functions’ of these natural devices are, roughly, the functions upon which their continued reproduction or survival has depended” (Millikan 1984, 3). Interestingly, Millikan applies this theory to artefacts. She attributes natural stability to the functions of artefacts and at the same time acknowledges that functions are also determined by the history of uses. A proper function of a tool, Millikan claims, is referred to as its intended type and purpose, which are distinct from its actual functions, what it eventually does or is good at doing and what the users intend it to do. But, like natural organs, the uses of artefacts that

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endured different uses along their history of uses—“that accord with a critical mass of cases of actual use, forming a centre of gravity… that survive incidents in which this stabilizing function fails to be performed, without extinction or change of function”—become proper functions as well (Millikan 1984, 4). Proper function has both stabilising and standardising features. Namely, there are stable deviations of uses, and there are standards of use which the users count on when fulfilling them. This is significant when it comes to functions of tools that require cooperation between end users, such as linguistic entities, but also uses of furniture, public benches, kitchen utensils, etc. Millikan thus suggests looking to the history of an item to determine its function rather than to its present properties or uses. A recent normative development of Millikan’s theory and a use of natural sciences definitions of function are offered by Anne Eaton in her “Artifacts and their Functions” (2020). Eaton offers a normative account of the proper function of artefacts, which she also names “forness.” According to Eaton, normativity provides the correct approach to analysing the concept of function, because functions are conceived and judged “in terms of performances that an artifact is supposed to achieve, even if it never achieves them” (Eaton 2020, 39). Eaton’s proposition is related to Valerie Hardcastle’s essay “On Normativity of Functions,” which points to clear and unequivocal relations between the functions of artefacts and the intentions of their makers. A microwave, as a paradigmatic example, is explicitly designed to heat food, and the best presenters of this function are the microwave engineers (Ariew et al. 2002, 144). Eaton therefore endorses a teleological view of function, or radical functionalism, that is more radical than Millikan’s proper function theory; Eaton characterises function as based on purpose or ends, which are the final cause for the existence of a thing. Function is classified by Eaton as stable because it oversees the classification of objects even if it has never been activated. To support her point, Eaton rightly refers to the archaeologist Ian Hodder, who reminds us that the names of “common artifacts—shoelace, nutcracker, hairbrush, windshield wiper, and so on” are those of their functions (Eaton 2020, 37). We see then that the concept of function as a stable and constitutive, almost natural, property of tools is quite prevalent. Moreover, to apply it to artefacts, radical or natural functionalism must include the designer’s preconceived intention as a necessary condition to the definition of function. It thus converts the naturalist ontological version of functionalism to intentionalism, which is formulated as follows: “X has function F if and only if the designer of X has intended that it perform F” (Parsons and Carlson, 2008, 64). However, radical intentionalist functionalism does not always follow natural sciences. A recent anti-naturalist, but intentionalist and radical, functionalism is presented by Jane Forsey in her Aesthetics of Design (2013). Contrary to Millikan and Eaton, Forsey strongly argues that function belongs only to the realm of artefacts. Like Millikan and Eaton, Forsey defines function as a stable property, which determines membership in a group of things. “While a tire may function as—or be used as—a swing, its function is not to be a swing, and if we define it by its

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function, we call it a tire, not a swing.” However, the very distinction between function and use, on which radical functionalism relies, excludes natural things from the realm of functionality, because though they could be used by us on a daily basis, no pre-intended purpose has constituted them: Almonds can nourish me, I can sit on a tree trunk or sleep in a cave, and in this sense almonds and caves are functional in that they can serve a function, or suit my purposes, or fulfil my needs for food and shelter. But we would be wrong to define these things in terms of their functions: except on some religious arguments from design, almonds and caves are simply part of nature, however useful they may be. (Forsey 2013, 30)

If naturalist functionalism is rejected, an alternative origin of function should be offered. One proposed origin is the intentions of the planner, designer or maker of an artefact. Norman clarifies this when he speaks about functionality: “a primary consideration in the design of a building or an interface to a computer system is that it works, that it fulfils the purposes for which it was intended” (Norman and Draer 1986, 10). Against naturalist functionalism, Forsey also endorses an intentionalist conception of function. Indeed, she claims that function belongs to the object and determines its basic identity. However, it originates in the preconceived intentions of its maker or designers for an artefact to fulfil a certain purpose—the functional product is meant to be used in a specific way: and this use is part of what it means to be that thing in the first place … An office chair is a thing meant to be sat on, and a shoe is a thing meant to be worn on the foot. (Forsey 2013, 31)

Given that design products are necessarily functional, according to Forsey, they originate in intentions. Going back to Aristotelian teleology (although she holds an anti-naturalist approach), Forsey presents a proper function theory (although not using this expression) of artefacts. She stresses that the identity of a hammer is its intended function, the purpose of hammering. It does not change with various uses. Therefore, using a rock or a pair of vice grips to drive a nail, she claims, carries no ontological effect. These items are not accepted as members of the group of hammers; hence, they do not change their original identities. Indeed, this approach can help us understand the plethora of functions emanating from the same product and designated by the many end users attached to it. For instance, a large Playmobil tractor can serve a child for imaginative play, his mother for a paper weight, and his father as a shovel to gather Lego pieces from the carpet. In a more complex manner, a product can offer primary, secondary and tertiary functions. Following the same line of thought, a smart watch can serve to measure physical activity and calorie intake, but it can also make us get out of bed to keep our score high or join a physical activity group of like-minded people.

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The intentionalist definition of function is not endorsed by philosophers who ascribe substantial significance to the fact that on many occasions, function is not fulfilled and is replaced by other, sometimes quite stable, uses. This fact sheds light on what design is beyond the preconceived plans of the designers, whose status is, therefore, lesser than that of the final products and their end users. An anti-intentionalist stance is presented by Glenn Parsons and Alan Carlson in their Functional Beauty in Contemporary Aesthetics Theory, which is one of the central books on the subject. Parsons and Carlson attribute naivety or oversimplification to intentionalism because it assumes a direct and linear link between the designer’s mental plan for the intended use of the product with the actual use, claiming that “unfortunately, not all artifact’s functions correspond to the intentions of designers in this way.” One of their examples is pipe cleaners that “were designed to clean smoking pipes, but today their function is to serve as a material for children’s crafts” (Parsons and Carlson 2008, 64). Parsons and Carlson assume that nowadays manufacturers of pipe cleaners themselves intend to give rise to this function. They emphasise that “in still other cases, it is the intentions of neither the designers nor the manufacturers, but the users of an artefact that seem to correspond to its function” (Parsons and Carlson 2008, 64). A typical example is Plaza Major in Madrid (Figure 2.1). While intended by Spanish Habsburg ruler Philip II (1556–1598) to function as a courtyard, it is referred to by the public today as a civic activities space.

Figure 2.1 Plaza Major, Madrid.

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Indeed, the prevalence of the repurpose or reuse phenomenon in design proves that anti-intentionalism regarding function is based on solid ground. Many architectural or environmental works, such as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (Figure 2.2), Tate Modern in London and the High Line Park in New York, have lost their original functions, a train station, a power bank and a railroad, respectively, to gain new ones. Rotary phones are converted to lamps and radios to vintage

Figure 2.2 La Gare d’Orsay, 1900, Musée d’Orsay, 2017.

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­

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refer to the designers, the process of design and the users. On the side of the end users, a thing may, almost always, serve numerous substantial distinct purposes. Forsey criticises Pye for not distinguishing between function and use. However, Pye does agree that there is an extremely basic function to the design product. Still, it neither determines most of its uses nor is it superior to the uses as an allegedly stable real property of the design object itself. Regarding design’s function, Pye reminds us that, on the one hand, things often do not work properly: aircraft fall out of the sky, and demand extremely high maintenance: our dinner table ought to be variable in size and height, removable altogether, impervious to scratches, self-cleaning, and having no legs. The motor car ought not to stop dead and no one in it be thrown forward, in the same instant that you press a button. (Pye 1978, 14)

Moreover, form is rarely fully decided by function, but rather by “choice or else by chance.” Pye emphasises that “whenever humans design and make a useful thing they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and easily avoidable work on it which contributes nothing to its usefulness” (Pye 1978, 13). According to Pye, the form is not entailed by anything and is not imposed on the designer, whose role is mainly choosing the appearance of useful things: …there are no imitations so close as to relieve him or the maker of responsibility for the appearance of what they have done. The ability of our devices to ‘work’ and get results depends much less exactly on their shape than we are apt to think. The limitations arise only in small part from the physical nature of the world, but in a very large measure from considerations of economy and of style. Both are matters purely of choice. All the works of man look as they do from his choice, and not from necessity. (Pye 1978, 14)

Rudolf Arnheim applies what could be named “the variety of forms argument” to natural functions as well. His theory therefore goes against naturalist functionalism of the kind proposed by Millikan and Eaton. Both human-made and natural objects, Arnheim argues, manifest the fact that the relations between function and form are not simple. He writes that “Function alone does not determine the shape” of artefacts and similarly “natural shape is not accounted for wholly or even essentially by function.” To support this claim, and in contrast to the naturalist functionalism definition of proper function, Arnheim reminds us that: there are hundreds of ways of being a tree, a fish, or a bird, and while, of course, each organism was formed by a set of determining conditions, there is no way

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of explaining the difference between an oak and a maple by reference to their present needs or function. (Arnheim 1964, 30)

We see, then, that according to anti-functionalism, if nature and sciences can serve as a model for artefacts, it is in order to refute the proper function theory that naturalist functionalism promotes. Both nature and the realm of artefacts are not as ontologically functionally organised as the functionalists submit. The critique of the functionalist concept of function in design, which is proposed by Petroski, Pye and Arnheim, brings forth both the significance of form and the complex relations between form and function. It thereby leads us directly to the next sub-chapter, which will outline different theories about these relations. Among these, the above-presented critique of the view of the functionalist idea of “form follows function” as too simplistic is quite prevalent. By and large, we can already conclude that radical functionalism, both natural and intentional, considers the discipline of design and its public as much more structured than it is argued by anti-functionalism. 2.1.3 FORM AND FUNCTION The uniqueness of design is the necessity of both rightness’s of form and functionality, as well as the relations between them which run on scale that goes from co-dependency and even complete fusion to distinct existence in the design product. In design schools and daily discourse, the concept of “function,” or “functionality,” is often perceived as simple or articulated with a well-outlined extension of its concept. As an element in the design product, many also see it as both substantial and stable. However, as we have outlined at the end of the last sub-chapter, function is a complex issue, and the idea of stable and clear function is challenged through three aspects that are related to form: a.

b.

The instability of function proposition: the exposition of unpredicted uses of design products, which are sometimes more prevalent or outstanding than the intended function. The variety of uses is usually enabled, even invited, by the form of the design products: the flat form of the seat of a chair affords using it as a table, ladder, or shelf. The two identities claim, which is presented in the first chapter: the claim that in addition to the labelling work of the function, which attributes a product to its primary group, what in actuality determines the identity of the product as design is its distinctive form or appearance within the group. Cars’ shapes and useless features such as fins determine their identities as design products, which are significant to many of their users. Unlike a roof fin used to case electronic parts, fake air vents are meant to emanate an air of sportiness, which typically does not fool anyone when used on heavy and slow family SUVs.

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c.

The variety of forms claim: the exposition of the various forms that are given by designers to the shared function, many of which are not function-dependent.

These assertions are logically interrelated, and hence will be presented concurrently. They are not endorsed by theoreticians who hold simple functionalist views of design such as Henri Dreyfuss. The designer Dreyfuss argues: never forgets that beauty is only skin-deep. For years in our office, we have kept before us the concept that what we are working on is going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some way used by people individually or en masse.

Dreyfuss’s theory of design evaluation corresponds to this view: if “people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient— or just plain happier—the designer has succeeded” (Dreyfuss 1974, 21–22). Accordingly, for Dreyfuss, the history of design is actually a history of functions rather than of forms. For him, while the public take for granted design’s occupation with exterior representation of a function, design has been interested with the function itself and the designer as problem-solver. Functionalism Some even take this argument further to warn us about design’s massive preoccupation with aesthetics. In Design Discourse, avowed functionalist industrial designer and teacher Dieter Rams calls for us to “omit the unimportant” in design, explaining that: the items should be designed in such a way that their function and attributes are directly understood […] The festival of colours and form and the entertainment of form sensations enlarges the world’s chaos. To outdo each other with new design sensations leads nowhere. (Rams 1989, 111)

Against this view, many design theoreticians prefer to understand the dialectic relations of form and appearance under the concepts of function and use. Unlike Dreyfuss, Petroski portrays the history of design as the progress of forms. His refutation of the “form follows function” functionalist characterisation of the structure of design argues that the forms of simple things, such as eating utensils, could and have evolved in various ways which are not necessitated by their functions. The form follows function argument, Petroski stresses, could not “serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do” (Petroski 1994, 20). In his book, the full title of which is The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are, Petroski presents thorough and

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illuminating research. One of his conclusions is that the form is autonomous and that we should focus on appearances. He states: Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating. (Petroski 1994, 20)

The electric facial razor is yet another example of stable function and suitable machinery (in circulation for more than 70 years now) that is endowed with various forms. In Design: Intelligence Made Visible, Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran inform us that the designer Dieter Rams confessed to having made “lastminute adjustments to a razor design because the almost finished product did not achieve the effect he had in mind. He did not admit to having styled it, but that was what he meant” (Bayley and Conran 2007, 51). Petroski’s argument advances even further to point to forms, thanks to their variety and possibilities, as having often accounted for functional development. He argues: “Whatever its intended function, an object’s form alone often suggests new and more imaginative forms, as the stick did the fork and the shell the spoon. It is no less the case with manufactured things” (Petroski 1994, 51). One of the paradigmatic examples of “almost limitless functions to which a single form can lead” that Petroski presents is the paper clip. Owing to its shape, this took on a great many uses, such as becoming “objects of more inwardly directed aggression by providing something for the fingers to twist grotesquely out of shape during phone calls, interviews, and meetings,” which provided ideas for further functional tools (Petroski 1994, 52). A similar “variety of forms” argument, which is anti-functionalist and use-oriented, is put forward by Adrian Forty in Objects of Desire. Analysing Montgomery Ward’s design of pocket knife and numerous designs, among them unnecessary gender-bound ones, which do not offer new ways of cutting, Forty asks, “how are we to explain the compulsion which gripped so many manufacturers to be so prolific with designs for their products?” (Forty 1986, 87). The answer is the power of form and the drive for appearances and compositions which characterise both creative disciplines such as design—“the desire of designers to express their ingenuity and artistic talent”—and their targeted public. What is more, like Petroski, Forty notes that the evolution of design products with various appearances brings out new needs, as well as new tools and inspirations for further design. This argument regarding the variety of forms could also be explained through a theory of function that exposes the intricate and complicated character of function itself. It is complemented by Papanek’s theory that defines function as a complex system consisting of six parts, one of which is aesthetics:

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Methods, tools, materials and processes. Uses as a tool and symbol. Telesis, which is a part of nature or society. Need and goal formation. Association, which is education and culture. Aesthetics, which includes gestalt structure, perception, as well as eidetic and bio-social conditions.

The function complex indicates feelings, intellectual contents, perception and intuitions. Papanek’s definition of form leads him, like Pye and others, to refute the predictability of the uses of artefacts and his arguments support the instability of function argument. See, for instance, Papanek’s description of the unpredictable, sometimes contradictory, ramifications of cars: No one foresaw that mass acceptance of the car would put the American bedroom on wheels, offering everyone a new place to copulate (and privacy from supervision by parents and spouses). Nobody expected the car to accelerate mobility, thereby creating the urban and exurban sprawl and the dormitory suburbs that strangle our larger cities; or to sanction the killing of 50,000 people per annum, brutalizing us and making it possible… in the middle forties, no one foresaw that, with the primary use function of the automobile solved, it would emerge as a combination status symbol and disposable, chrome-plated codpiece. But two greater ironies were to follow. In the early sixties, when people began to fly more and to rent standard cars at their destination, the businessman’s clients no longer saw the car he owned and therefore could not judge his style of life by it. (Papanek 2011, 14)

It is clear by now that proposing the relations between form and function are dialectical, multi-directional and complex is plausible and that quite a few design theories support this argument. For instance, in The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman points to the fact that business and industry have realised by now the significance of aesthetic products. On the one hand, he notes that many designers are solely committed to appearances. On the other hand, he refuses to overlook what he calls “usability and understandability.” Norman asks, “If a product can’t be used easily and safely, how valuable is its attractiveness?” He continues: “usable design and aesthetics should go hand in hand: aesthetics need not be sacrificed for usability, which can be designed-in from the first conceptualization of the product” (Norman 1990, our italics). Having aesthetics “designed-in” right from the very beginning of the design process, even at its mental content stage, is a good step towards embodying the dialectical essence of design. In real design, the function, problem-solving, and even the problem itself cannot be thought of distinctly, but as given through form and appearance. At the same time, the form ought not to be shaped as distinct from the tool, but as absorbed in the function.

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An intelligent and eye-opening proposal to explain the unique aesthetic appearance of design is supplied by functional beauty theory that draws on Immanuel Kant’s distinction between free and adherent or dependent beauty in the Critique of Judgment § 16.: When we judge free beauty (according to mere form) then our judgment of taste is pure. Here we presuppose no concept of any purpose for which the manifold is to serve the given object, and hence no concept [as to] what the object is [meant] to represent; our imagination is playing, as it were, while it contemplates the shape, and such a concept would only restrict its freedom. But the beauty of a human being (and, as kinds subordinate to a human being, the beauty of a man or woman or child), or the beauty of a horse or of a building (such as a church, palace, armoury, or summer-house) does presuppose the concept of the purpose that determines what the thing is [meant] to be, and hence a concept of its perfection, and so it is merely adherent beauty. (Kant, tr. Pluhar 1987, 230, § 16)

Despite holding that the design product is primarily functional, functional beauty theorists think that functionality in design carries aesthetic qualities by fitting its intended purpose and that this fit creates the aesthetic experience of the product. In other words, design is endowed with its own kind of aesthetic value and experience structured on the correlation with its function. This, no doubt, is an expansion of the predicate “aesthetic,” but it also returns to the Greek origin of “aesthesis” that was used until the twentieth century: the study of sensuality and sensual perception. Indeed, experiencing an efficient use of a tool could be subsumed under aesthetic experiences. But it is more than that. What is unique to design is the significance of the appearance of the function, its form so to say—the way the function is shown forth and given to the senses. Form could be highly complex, combining spatial and temporal relations between its elements, as well as between them, and the whole thing they are possessed by. Herbert Read was one of the first to support the idea of functional beauty in his The Hell with Culture (1941). Read argues that this kind of beauty is based on “fitness to function.” Where does beauty come in when we speak about production and society, he asks? Is a strong and comfortable chair a work of art as well, namely, is it aesthetic? Read’s answer is yes: if an object is made of appropriate materials to an appropriate design and perfectly fulfils its function, then we need not worry anymore about its aesthetic value: it is automatically a work of art. Fitness for function is the modern definition of the eternal quality we call beauty, and this fitness for function is the inevitable result of an economy directed to use and not to profit. (Read 2005, 17–18)

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Functional beauty or dependent beauty has been discussed by Forsey, Parsons and Carlson and Panos Paris and presented in a formal version as follows: “Functional Beauty (FB) = If an object, O, perceptually appears (looks) wellformed for its function(s) to competent judges, then O is (functionally) beautiful” (Paris 2020, 517). Forsey affirmatively claims, within a functionalist framework, that design is an aesthetic phenomenon and that, owing to its functionality, it possesses a unique kind of beauty that is based on fitness. One of Forsey’s main examples is that owing to its fitness to purpose, the Bialetti Moka Express, originally designed in 1933, is more beautiful than the newer Vev Vigano Itaca Oro, designed by Alessi and made of stainless steel” (Figure 2.3). Parsons and Carlson base their conception of functional beauty on the “‘internal’ relationship between function and aesthetic appreciation.” Features can be attractive because of their functionality: “It is in this sense that Functional Beauty, in our sense, emerges out of the function of the object” (Parsons and Carlson 2008, 123). To capture functional beauty, one needs to have knowledge of the function, and this “could mean understanding of the identity of an object’s function (what the object’s function is) or it could mean understanding of how, or in what way, the object performs its function” (Parsons and Carlson 2008, 94–95). This understanding may allow the experience of the function to be aesthetic. Thus, a phenomenology of functional beauty explains how the function shows up and is aesthetically perceived. Paris’s significant revised version of Parsons and Carlson’s adds that functional beauty is possessed by a well-formedfor-its-function design object, which also pleases “most competent judges in so far as it is experienced (in perception or contemplation)” (Paris 2020, 521, 528). Thus, Paris’s definition requires both a knowledge of the function and expertise.

Figure 2.3 Bialetti Moka Express, 1933.

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Paris marks that his argument supplies a sufficient rather than necessary condition to beauty. There are other forms of beauty. This point is significant because functional beauty theories are conditioned on proper or intended function alone, as well as on the intended functionality of the function. In other words, the functional category of function as the proper one is the locus of functional beauty and is relevant to the aesthetic features contained in it. But as we shall see now, function itself may possess other properties than functionality such as expressivity and visibility. This fact sheds doubt on the direction of relations between form and function that even the functional beauty theories are too reductive to cover. By contrast, a wider characterisation of function, as given by Arnheim, portrays the link between functionality and the aesthetic characteristics of a designed object through the idea of emotion to replace the thought of one track or one direction relations of entailment between function and form. Function is looser in character than was defined by functionalist theories. Arnheim mentions theories that were presented by Hannes Meyer, Louise Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Adolf Loos, but raises a concern that reductionism regarding the concept of function would be applied to functional beauty theories as well. While both kinds of functionalists attribute the function status as a premeditated rational content, Arnheim argues that “in this true generality, ‘function’ would be no distinguishing characteristic at all. Every object fitting to serve the wishes of its owner would be functional.” That is to say, while some functionalists hold that form emerges from function or “believed that by some happy correspondence beauty was produced when utility was intended,” Arnheim notes that function is aesthetically oriented: “to reduce function to physical fitness is not a functional decision but an act of character, that is, of personal or period style” (Arnheim 1964, 30, 31). The various properties of function will be the final issue considered in this sub-chapter. 2.1.3.1 Non-Functionality of Function Interestingly, although this matter is rarely presented in the literature, function could possess non-functional properties and could serve as subject matter or a precept within the designed product. Moreover, function may be subjugated to the appearance of the object rather than the other way round, and may thereby contribute to the visuality of the design product. Arnheim puts this well, claiming that function in design takes on visibility and expressivity and thus may serve the aesthetic appearance of an object. His assertion that function is analogous to the subject matter of artworks is followed by its application to design: function plays the same part in the aesthetics of the useful object as the subject matter does in painting and sculpture. The physical function is no more and no less foreign to the building or the vase as an aesthetic object than is the physical body of a person portrayed in a painting or statue. Function, far from being outside the aesthetic realm, is the very theme, the central subject matter of all applied art. (Arnheim 1964, 38)

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Arnheim’s original and enlightening theory of design draws attention to the possible demonstrative character of function which “enters the aesthetic realm by means of the expressive pattern of shape, colour, movement, etc. into which it is translated. Expression is based on the constellations of forces to be found in all percepts.” The dynamic properties of an object, taking part in its specific look, relays its expressivity. This is the way it works in design products, as beautifully expressed by Arnheim: In a functional-looking object, we may see the dynamics of pouring, soaring, containing, receiving, etc. We also see such “character traits” as flexibility, sturdiness, gracefulness, strength, etc., which, just as in a representational work of fine art, are intimately and totally related to the theme: the gracefulness of the spout consists in the graceful pouring it displays visually; the sturdiness of the Doric column consists in its supporting the roof sturdily. Expressive properties are adverbial, not adjectival. They apply to the behaviour of things, not to the things themselves. (Arnheim 1964, 38–39)

According to Arnheim, the appearance of the design product, what he calls the “functional look,” is inherent to it. It is often achieved by “translation of physical forces into visual language.” In his canonical Visual Thinking, Arnheim proves that thought and cognition take place in the visual and physical spheres more than in the mind (Arnheim 1969). These ideas have been picked up recently by theories of embodied cognition, which also attribute cognition to human physiognomy. It may lead us to understand that what Parsons and Carlson call “the knowledge of function” is embedded in different organs—think about riding a bike after a very long break. What allows the immediate familiarity with the functionality of the bike is not cognitive mental content, but a knowledge stored in our body, activated by our senses and their encounter with the saddle and handlebar. We sit, hold the handlebars, and just know! The account of the visuality of functions leads to the realisation that function could be a percept by itself, possessing its own sensuality or contributing to the whole appearance of the design project and its aesthetic experience. Realising this, other theoreticians of design gradually softened their functionalist stance. Norman, for example, conveys the significance of emotions contained in design products which is related to acknowledging the limits of functionalism. He informs us that, in his canonical The Design of Everyday Things (1980), he did not take emotions into account: “I addressed utility and usability, function and form, all in a logical, dispassionate way—even though I am infuriated by poorly designed objects. But now I’ve changed.” Norman explains this shift through scientific brain studies that reveal the interconnection between emotion and cognition. His point supports Arnheim’s theory of the expressivity of functions. A lovely example of the visibility of function, and our complex perception of it, is given by Arnheim’s comparison of two glasses, one is truncated and

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egg-shaped and the other is tulip-shaped with a wide-open top. With regard to the narrow one, though it may be easy to drink from, “visually the expression of containing prevails uncontested in the contour…until the convergence towards closure is suddenly cut by the opening.” The tulip shape of the other one expresses a “gesture of containing [which] turns gradually into that of opening and giving. What we see, in other words, is the expressive behaviour of a pattern of visual form” (Arnheim 1964, 36). Indeed, the idea that function is given to cognition alone is too reductionist. Too narrow also is the conservative dichotomy between form and function regarding their roles in the design product. Form may be useful and function may be sensuous, exciting, comforting or irritating, humoristic or gloomy. Grabbing a solid handle of a coffee machine, providing a good, sensuous experience to the holding hand and ease to the mind that trusts this tool, could be expressive of strength and solace. Roger Fry conveyed this very clearly by listing what he named the “emotional elements of design,” such as rhythm, mass, space, light and shade. These “are connected with essential conditions of our physical existence,” experienced as gestures and raised emotions (R. Fry 1920, 22–23). The juxtaposition of Stefan Zwicky’s “Grand Confort, Sans Confort, Dommage à Corbu” armchair, made of steel rebar and concrete (1980, Figure 2.4), and the Banana Chair “Zjedzony,” which is made of fabric (2005, Figure 2.5), makes it clear that the very different modes of seatability have their effect on the aesthetic experience of the design object. Functionality covers neither the nature of design nor the function itself. This is precisely what Norman has recently pointed out, arguing that scientists, as well as designers: now understand how important emotion is to everyday life, how valuable. Sure, utility and usability are important, but without fun and pleasure, joy and excite-

Figure 2.4 Stefan Zwicky Grand Confort, Sans Confort, Dommage à Corbu armchair, 1980.

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Figure 2.5 Banana Chair “Zjedzony,” Wam House, 2005.

ment, and yes, anxiety and anger, fear and rage, our lives would be incomplete. Along with emotions, there is one other point as well: aesthetics, attractiveness, and beauty. When I wrote The Design of Everyday Things, my intention was not to denigrate aesthetics or emotion. I simply wished to elevate usability to its proper place in the design world, alongside beauty and function. I thought that the topic of aesthetics was well-covered elsewhere, so I neglected it. The result has been well-deserved criticism from designers: ‘If we were to follow Norman’s prescription, our designs would all be usable—but they would also be ugly. (Norman 2004, 8)

2.1.3.2 Non-Formality of Form We are left with the question of whether appearance and expressivity, both of form and function, and their relations does indeed cover the realm of appearance in design. Having established the significance of these to the structure of the designed product and its visuality, it is time we shift attention to the nonformal properties of form, which carry a load and influence on their own, as the last part of this chapter. We know that design shows forth independent forms that are not directly attached to function, but rather chosen on account of style, taste, allusions and reference, or creativity of compositions. Nonetheless, other factors, sociological and psychological, may also determine the choices of form and appearances for design products. A few of these parameters are listed by Arnheim in the following account of the design product: Apart from its function, which is taken care of by the skill and imagination of its maker more or less successfully, the object is shaped by the character of producer and consumer. This character is complex and, in our particular civilization, quite unstable set of determinants, traditional preferences, indoctrinations, personal

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needs, an unsure sense of perceptual propriety, and conflicting social pressures and influences. The resulting steering force is capricious and unreliable. (Arnheim 1964, 31)

Yet another factor that joins the cluster of the determinants of the appearance of design is psycho-social—what may be called an “attachment to forms” and known shapes which is a strong factor in design (Gal 2022, 13). This phenomenon of deep relations to form is based on what is named in visual research, “visual storage.” Therefore, despite his functionalist standpoint, Dreyfuss acknowledges that this phenomenon, which he calls “survival of forms,” is frequently used by designers, “almost without exception.” The role of the public familiarity with canonical forms, and their status for us in design, is portrayed by Dreyfuss as follows: We deliberately incorporate into the product some remembered detail that will recall to the users a similar article put to similar use. People will more readily accept something new, we feel, if they recognize in it something out of the past. Most of us have a nostalgia for old things. Our senses quickly recognize and receive pleasure when a long-forgotten detail is brought back. It may be an old tune, a taste of old-fashioned pudding, the odour of a particular flower, the patina of an antique table, or, as in most cases, the remembrance of what something looked like. Somehow these recollections of the past give us comfort, security, and silent courage. By embodying a familiar pattern in an otherwise wholly new and possibly radical form, we can make the unusual acceptable to many people who would otherwise reject it. (Dreyfuss 1974, 57–58)

Dreyfuss’s examples of survived forms are the unnecessary numerals on analogue clocks and watches, which are easily read without them (even before we learn to identify numbers), electric toasters, coffee makers, typewriters and fountain pens whose forms are savoured because they are known and desirable. This phenomenon is very common in metaphorical designs, which employ known forms to reconstruct design objects, such as Shimon Levi’s 1935 Bauhaus building (Figure 2.6), which is formed like a ship (Gal 2020, 71–72). Dreyfuss further admits that design plays a role in the sphere of aesthetics, and shares with art its aesthetic qualities and its ability to develop aesthetic sensitivity in the public. Design, he claims, may even accelerate this as a result of its mass production. Even more than art, the influence of mass production on design is enormous. Streamline designers such as Raymond Loewy, Norman Bell Geddes and Dreyfuss are right to stress that, thanks to mass production, forms are widely introduced to the public: “This impact will be translated into an improvement in people’s taste when they go shopping. Unconsciously, a person’s contact with beauty quickens and heightens his perception and taste for all forms of art” (Dreyfuss 1974, 82). This proposition shows yet one more dialectical character of design, which is well related to the complex relations

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Figure 2.6 Shimon Levy’s Ship House, 1934–1935.

between form and function and fits the conclusion of this chapter. However, a few formalists hold that mass production is a negation of design as a discipline which is subsumed under the aesthetic realm. Not only the machinery shift of design is external to the discipline (and belongs to the sphere of industry), but also very heavy considerations that are external to design and quality of appearances, such as economical ones, are taken by the industry. However, as always with design, this very compromise has a positive effect on our everyday aesthetics and daily life—thanks to design, they are more beautiful. 2.2 FORM AND FUNCTION: HISTORY No design, no matter how common or seemingly insignificant, is without its adamant critics as well as its ardent admirers […] Nothing is perfect, if by perfect one means absolutely free of every flaw or shortcoming, even the drawback

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is that the seemingly insignificant cost of a packaging item is considered too expensive in the aggregate. Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them. (Petroski 2007, 7–8)

Imagine the first thing you see when opening the box of a fresh pizza just delivered to your house. Through the spicy clouds of mozzarella, basil and tomatoes, the white plastic edifice of the pizza saver holds vigil to prevent melted cheese from sticking to the cardboard box. However mundane, cheap and almost transparent this object is, a lot of thought has gone into its design, as design historian Henry Petroski illustrates: However viewed, the pizza-box platform presents a fine example of something designed to be very functional, but not something most of us would think to put on display in our windows – or something whose use would be at all apparent out of context. (Petroski 2007, 7–8)

Through this simple and mundane object, seemingly devoid of design, Petroski highlights a key dilemma in design theory. While functional and embedded in a sociocultural context, this object would not fulfil the aesthetic standards that would make it worthy for public display. As we have concluded, the main difference we carefully outline between art and design revolves around the definitions of function and usability. If art, at least from a modern perspective, is preoccupied with pure form, then design’s aesthetic is one that looks to communicate and reflect an action (Munari 2008, [1972]). Hence, while art strives for autonomy, it can be said that design aesthetics are to some extent in the service of other purposes. That is why design museums are still sometimes called “museum of applied arts” (Figure 2.7). Nowadays, in our post- or even post-postmodern era, when we speak about design, we take for granted that it is preoccupied with the exterior representation of a function—that is, we tend to think of design in terms of its occupation with aesthetics. However, the history of design has not always accepted this as truth. In its long and arduous journey, design has been interested first and foremost in function, leading to a classic definition of the designer as a problemsolver (Dreyfuss 2003, [1955]). As we shall see, the social sphere of design tried through various strategies to offer other interpretations of the almost automatic relationship between function and industry. These range from social design through inclusive design and up to sustainable design, all echoing ideas from Papanek’s classic book Design for the Real World (1972). Design as a discipline has a long and complex history regarding the definition and fulfilment of function. However, the most immediate conundrum is

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Figure 2.7 The Art Nouveau upper floor of the Wanewright Building, designed by Sullivan in Chicago, 1891.

the relation between form or aesthetics and function. In a way, this conundrum defines the transition from modernism to postmodernism and back to re-modernism as well as the ever-fashionable striving for minimalism, albeit devoid of the ideology embodied by avant-garde movements in the early 1920s. Before we tackle the issue of design evolution, let us consider a classic starting point for defining the relationship between form and function. In 1896, the American architect Louis Sullivan published an essay entitled “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” highlighting what would generate decades of theoretical and practical debates in all fields of architecture and design. Grounding his theory in various examples from biological species around the planet, Sullivan showed that nature “designs” each species according to its ecologic surroundings, prey and so on. For example, the shark is equipped with specially “designed” teeth and a sleek body in a perfect way to achieve its goal of survival. In other words, form follows function. Describing the design of the first skyscraper in Chicago, Sullivan continued to highlight the required features of the tall office building that led to its unique design—open work floors, light, entry points, windows and so forth. While this iconic building depicts a mixture of modernist and Art Nouveau styles, we can clearly see that its main function led the way to its form. Sullivan, who would design some of the first skyscrapers in Chicago, wanted to understand why objects look as they do. The answer, according to Sullivan, was inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Observing the animal kingdom, the biological structure of a shark, for example, clearly serves the animal’s survival. The shark, so it seems, was “designed” in order to fulfil its natural

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function: the shape of its body, the design of its teeth, its sleek outer skin are all a manifestation of efficiency in relation to its survival. As Sullivan says: All things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are, that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other. Unfailingly in nature these shapes express the inner life, the native quality, of the animal, tree, bird, fish, that they present to us; they are so characteristic, so recognizable, that we say simply, it is “natural” it should be so. (Sullivan 1896, 5)

We can therefore summarise Sullivan’s theory and relate it to the famous modern notion in design that considers it through the prism of “Form Follows Function.” This means that the design of an object stems from its function. Furthermore, a “good design” will be defined in parallel to a “good shark,” that is, in relation to the object’s ability to perform its named task most efficiently. To an extent, the intricate relationship between art and design, as well as that between the various design movements of the twentieth century, revolved around the dialogue between form and function. Thus, form follows function represents the modernist movement, just as function follows form represents the postmodernism movement. Setting aside the intricate relationship between art and design, it is sufficient to say that design deals mainly with objects that fulfil a specific function. However, what is this function? Who defines it? Can it change during the “life” and evolution of the designed object? If we consider design history through the lens of function, we can understand the various design ideologies in a different light. Designers and thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–1896), created the influential Arts and Crafts movement. Michael Thonet (1796–1871), in turn, simplified the assembly process in his famous No. 14 chair, which remains popular today. Although Morris’s neo-Gothic designs are far from frugal, his sociocultural agenda, under which the furniture at Morris and Co. was designed, should be considered so. There are similarities between Morris’s furniture and that of his German counterpart Michael Thonet. In both cases, the materials (mainly steam-bent wood), the aesthetics and the configuration were designed in such a manner as to create an affordable (owing to the small amount of parts and the fast and easy assembly of these objects) and long-lasting product (Lourie 2008). In fact, in the early 1850s (when young Morris was appalled by the residual Rococo halo he saw at the Crystal Palace), Thonet revolutionised furniture production, both economically and aesthetically, leading to a modern frugal design that would influence his ideological successors. The ingenuity of Thonet lay in his reducing the number of parts in each chair to its bare essential (legs, back rear unit, and seat), thus allowing for uniformity and flawless production, and assembly that highly influenced the product’s aesthetics. While some of his designs were lavish, in the same way as Morris’s neo-Gothic furniture, the essence of his

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design would serve as a catalyst for frugal design, as did Morris’s Marxist views regarding art and architecture. Famously, an important contribution to this topic was presented by Adolf Loos (1870–1933), highlighting the importance of minimalism in design. The Austrian architect concluded that ornament is highly destructive for three main reasons: it does not stem from its time or sociocultural context (just as a red frock tailcoat would not be suitable in a place where the standard is black); in addition, ornamentation adds a large number of professional work hours, which would have been better targeted elsewhere; finally, the added ornamentation, which serves no inherent function, adds to the product’s price, thus making it impossible to be purchased by the majority of the population (Loos 1998). Therefore, trying to define ornament via Loos’s approach will lead us to any addition to an object’s construction. Naturally, in hyper-capitalist reality, the concept of “excess” comes to mind (Figure 2.8). One movement that took this premise to its most refined manifestation was the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius (1883–1969), who founded the Bauhaus, followed Loos’s footsteps in two key ways. First, the School’s minimalistic approach towards design, which was considered not as a second cousin to Art, but rather as a functionalist discipline targeted at making people’s lives better. Second, the Bauhaus also strived towards creating affordable objects, which were still designed and constructed to the highest standard (Whitford 1984; Dearstyne 2014). The School’s newly manufactured objects, such as Marcel Breuer’s Cantilever Wassily Chair (Figure 2.9), would have sparked Loos’s interest and gained his enthusiastic approval. Just as we emphasised Loos’s

Figure 2.8 Michael Thonet Chair no. 14, fit to be presented in your local IKEA store.

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understanding of ornament, the Wassily chair is a breakthrough design in its ability to create a clear aesthetic from minimal geometric lines and cheap and usually mundane materials. Indeed, by 1922, Gropius’ Bauhaus was influenced by De Stijl designers, such as Gerrit Rietveld and the Constructivist AvantGarde. The latter’s focus on achieving maximal stylistic and utilitarian value through minimal means echoed the Bauhaus’ own focus on frugal functionalism and an industrial agenda. Entre parenthèses, although frugal in their aesthetics and design, Bauhaus objects were mainly targeted at upper-class and educated customers at the Bauhaus’ peak and have gained almost mythic proportions today (Schuldenfrei 2013). That is why there are no Bauhaus forks or easily moulded objects, but rather chess boards, teapot sets and the like. As with other hybrid products, the Bauhaus objects presented a frugal and modern appeal, but they rested on a familiar look. Again, rather than a proper revolution, this is another example of an aesthetic (and ideological) evolution. And, yet, Bauhaus’ social views were also apparent in other staff members, such as Klee and Kandinsky (Forgács 1995). These guidelines are quite apparent in Gropius’ own words: The Bauhaus, however, deliberately concentrated primarily on what has now become a work of paramount urgency: to avert mankind’s enslavement by the machine by giving its products a content of reality and significance, and so saving the home from mechanistic anarchy. This meant evolving goods specifically designed for mass production. Our object was to eliminate every drawback of the machine without sacrificing any one of its real advantages. We aimed at realizing standards of excellence, not creating transient novelties […] Our guiding principle was that artistic design is neither an intellectual, nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life. (Gropius 1965, 54, 89)

We can easily see the main functions of the Bauhaus design in two distinctive examples: the Bauhaus building in Dessau, designed by the School’s headmaster at the time, Walter Gropius, in 1925–1926, and the famous B33 Chair, designed by Hungarian Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer in 1927–1928. After the Bauhaus School left Weimar in favour of Dessau (Figure 2.10), the legendary headmaster Henry van de Velde left the school’s earlier design and architecture. The new campus in Dessau bolstered a new, innovative, minimalistic and highly functional style. Basing construction on cement, steel and glass brought various advantages: lower costs of production and maintenance, a relatively eternal style of basic geometric shapes and a meaningful design process targeted at the various daily functions of students and staff alike. For instance, the unparalleled number of windows allowed students to work and read in their studios or the library, enjoying longer hours of natural light and warmth. The chair manufactured by German brand Gebrüder Thonet A.G was made of chrome-plated tubular steel with a steel thread seat and a back covered

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with fabric. However, the construction of the chair is what brought fame to the industrial design department at the Bauhaus and Breuer himself. The chair’s configuration, called cantilever, heralded a new form, which, although based on a small quantity of material, nonetheless created a sturdy and durable object. Furthermore, this innovative yet simple configuration reduced (in the long run) production costs and the assembly line timeline. However, entre parenthèsis, we must remember that this minimalistic design and cheaper production ethos was not within the economic reach of much of Germany’s population at the time. In the postmodern era, design has come to mean a plethora of things. Its meanings can range from styling to the branding of an object. Such practices, for example, depict a whole narrative of identity. In the last century, we witnessed the rise (and, as we shall see, the fall) of star designers who used signature design as an extremely effective marketing tool to persuade people to consume products which, in many cases, were unnecessary. Generally, design is considered a relatively modern activity, originating in classical antiquity, further developing during the Industrial Revolution and firmly rooted in the history of art (Bürdek 2005). Contrary to mainstream thought, we subscribe to the idea that design is rooted in the essence of humankind, from the moment we became bipedal. Art, in this case, is seen as a spin-off of design in the Romantic era, which then developed to become an independent discipline. As modernism can be summarised by its motto “form follows function,” so postmodernism strove to question the correlation between the two words, as well as the meaning of each one separately. As theoreticians such as Lyotard

Figure 2.9 Marcel Breuer, Cantilever Wassily Chair.

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Figure 2.10 Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Building, 1925–1926.

and Jameson exemplified the crumbling of structure, boundaries, definitions and truth itself through art and architecture, so did these disciplines shift and change. In his famous comparison between Van Gogh and Warhol, Jameson (1991) showed the difference between modernism’s context relevance (a farmer’s pair of shoes) and the lack of context in Warhol’s fetishised multiplication of shoes (Figure 2.11). Following Marcel Duchamp’s drawing of a moustache on Mona Lisa’s upper lip, echoing the lack of hierarchy between mediums, designers quickly followed suit. In his project entitled “100 chairs in 100 days,” Italian Martino Gamper disassembled famous designers’ chairs and rebuilt these in his own fashion, echoing the approach that everything is raw material. The Memphis Group, in turn, introduced new colours and materials to the somewhat dreary design landscape of the early 1980s. However, from a theoretical point of view, it was the deconstructivist movement that challenged the very essence of modernity in architecture and design. According to Philip Johnson’s approach, deconstructivist architecture does not strive towards demolition or dissimilation, but rather towards offering a different option to tackle harmony, stability and unity. According to his definition: a deconstructivist architect is therefore not one who dismantles buildings, but one who locates the inherent dilemmas within buildings. The deconstructive architect puts the pure forms of the architectural tradition on the couch and identifies the

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Figure 2.11 One of Martino Gamper’s chairs.

symptoms of a repressed impurity. The impurity is drawn to the surface by a combination of gentle coaxing and violent torture: the form is interrogated. (Johnson and Wigley, 1988, 11)

In this manner, Derrida’s deconstruction is understood not as an act of destruction, but rather as one of destructuring. The essence of “shaking” the essence of a building or a product leads to the verification of its structure, inherent functions and redundancies. Wigley continues by suggesting we consider three complementary concepts, interwoven through practice: translation, architecture and deconstruction (understood as another form of architectural addition) (Wigley 1997). However, when replacing architecture with design in this equation, we have to address the relevance of the other two concepts. As we shall see, we shall discuss deconstruction (or semioclastics) as well as translation as modes of practical and theoretical hermeneutic possibilities, shifting the essence of design from actions of mediation to those of deeper interpretation. This important shift is viewed through the move from design as problem-solving to reframing the design situation itself. Therefore, while seemingly anarchic in nature, deconstructivist design, as well as postmodern design, all play along the intricate relationship between form

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and function, separating art from design. Indeed, in a now classic quotation, American designer Henry Dreyfuss describes the relationship between the designer and the end user: if the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed. If, on the other hand, people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient – or just plain happier – the designer has succeeded. (Dreyfuss 2003, 25–26)

However, when we take into consideration the intricate function of medical design objects, we see that reality is much more complex, as, even if the object is perfectly designed, moderately priced and easy to use, it could still be considered a failure. If the patient feels ashamed to use it or if it broadcasts a certain cultural image of himself, the object and the designer have failed. Therefore, we should reconsider the essence of the designed object’s function. Let us consider the main function of the designed object as a mode of communication and mediation between several layers. As an example, let us try to understand the design of the standard walker. Apart from it looking like a horrible contraption, the standard walker seems to fulfil its main function—which is to allow at-risk people to walk more safely. However, when delving into this object’s design, many questions rise to the surface. First, in many cases, the walker is too wide when entering an elevator. Second, not all walkers can be folded, rendering it very difficult to take them in cars and on buses. Last, from an aesthetic point of view, the design is horrendous. And setting aside the aesthetic (or lack of) features of the walker, from a communication point of view, this is a disaster. When looking at a person walking with the aid of a walker, we automatically think of a fragile, poor and disabled person. Furthermore, the essence of this object shouts out a lack of design; it is almost the bare bones of necessity materialised in metal and chrome. If we consider the walker’s function in a more intricate manner, a more interesting image will emerge. While the primary function of the object is indeed to provide material assistance to those who need it, a secondary function and perhaps an even more important one would be to communicate a different essence or even to empower the user. In other words, a secondary function of the walker would be to broadcast to the sociocultural environment of the user that he is not disabled or indeed using a medical device, but is rather a normative person walking around carrying a cool device. For that, the use of bright colours and varying materials (polymers as well as metals or even wood) would communicate a different image regarding the user and his immediate surroundings. While we may think of this approach as one that denies aesthetics, certain movements, which had a tremendous influence on design history, saw this as a premise in underlying design aesthetics. In this sense, a function, or indeed an intended action, has an aesthetic in and of itself. Design’s purpose in achieving the simplest, most efficient form to serve this function would conclude in a natural

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aesthetics, which would be seen until the end of the twentieth century as the ultimate aesthetic in design. However, this approach was not always the prevalent one in design. As we shall see, another approach, whose roots can be traced to the Romantic era, based its design ideology on the phrase: “function follows form.” This attitude frames the main preoccupation of design in aesthetics. Even more than that, its preliminary assumption is that if a design is good or pleasing, a function will be found for it, no matter how remote it is from fulfilling a specified action or goal. To put it in a contemporary context, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was known to say that the function of Apple designers is to make a consumer want an object that several seconds earlier he or she did not even know existed. These two approaches became the two nodes of the dialectics in design theory as to the relationship between form and function. This dialectic would later influence design approaches in the postmodern era and inspire an attitude that seeks to completely disregard the separation between form and function. 2.2.1 Object of Desire—Juicy Salif From a purely functional point of view, Philippe Starck’s famous Juicy Salif (Figure 2.12), designed in 1990 for Alessi, is a complete failure. The structure’s legs are too weak when applying pressure to squeeze a citrus fruit. In the original series, the patina was also not immune to the prolonged effects of natural acids. However, as we shall see, this expensive piece of design was not created to squeeze lemons, but rather to function as a conversation piece. As the main function of this object was to create a conversation, the other functions take secondary place. Turkle suggested the term “evocative object,” following Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. This theory posits that one of the functions of material objects is to broadcast to the user’s surroundings their social status and cultural preferences. In other words, when we choose to buy a certain shirt, it tells the world not only about our income, but also about our taste. In a way, Apple as a brand brought this approach to perfection. This well-known example of Philip Starck’s juicer is extremely interesting because it allows us to experience the “behind-the-scenes” or planning events of the various functions of the designed product. Starck’s explanation of the main function of his Juicy Salif was very simple (albeit its strength of persuasion rests on each person’s conviction): Sometimes you must choose why you design – in this case not to squeeze lemons, even though as a lemon squeezer it works. Sometimes you need some more humble service: on a certain night, the young couple, just married, invite the parents of the groom to dinner, and the groom and his father go to watch football on the TV. And for the first time the mother of the groom and the young bride are in the kitchen and there is a sort of malaise – the squeezer is made to start the conversation. (Lidwell and Manacsa 2009, 100)

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Figure 2.12 Philippe Starck, Juicy Salif, 1990.

However, when asked the same question, the CEO of Alessi suggested a different approach altogether, one that returns to the classic essence of the designed product’s function—its modus operandi: I cannot help thinking of Starck as the ‘designer terrible’ of our decade. He is a living example of my dream: design, real design, is always highly charged with innovation towards the word of manufacturing trade, bringing results that need no longer be justified solely on a technological or balance sheet level. A true work of design must move people, convey feelings, bring back memories, surprise, transgress. In sum, it has to be poetic. Design is one of the most apt poetic forms of expression of our day. And I know that this great visionary still has plenty of surprises up his sleeve. (Alessi 1998, 74)

As we can see, for the designer (Starck), the main function is styling and the ability of a designed product to function as a status symbol. For the manufacturer, however, interested in a material legacy of Italian kitchen utensils, the main function is use or at least a seemingly preliminary option for use. These seemingly opposed opinions rather complement each other, because, whereas the designer is focused by imaginative and creative powers, the manufacturer is focused on his definition of function, which is to sell products. So, indeed, what is the function of the designed product? Is it to show the world what we are worth, economically

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and culturally? Is it to broadcast meaning and mediate between different persons and surroundings? And isn’t a beautifully crafted object its own function?

NOTE 1.

As we shall see in the ‘Language of Design’ chapter, form in design is typically comprised of composition (configuration in 3D [three-dimensional] products), colour, shape, line, material, finish or texture and more.

REFERENCES Alessi, A. 1998. The Dream Factory: Alessi Since 1921. Cologne: Könemann. Ariew, A., R. Cummins and M. Perlman. 2002. Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arnheim, R. 1964. “From Function to Expression.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no. 1: 29–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/428136 Arnheim, R. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ball, V. (Kloss). 1960. The Art of interior Design; A Text in the Aesthetics of Interior Design. New York: Macmillan. http://archive.org/details/artofinteriordes00ball Bayley, S. and T. Conran. 2007. Design: Intelligence Made Visible (1st edition). Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books. Bell, C. 1958. Art. New York: Capricon Books. Bürdek, B. E. 2005. Design: History, Theory and Practice of Product Design. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Dearstyne, H. 2014. Inside the Bauhaus. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Dreyfuss, H. 1974. Designing for People. New York : Grossman Publishers. Dreyfuss, H. 2003 [1955]. Designing for People. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Eaton, A. W. 2020. “Artifacts and Their Functions.” In The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture, edited by I. Gaskell and S. Anne Carter, 34–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199341764.013.26 Forgács, É. 1995. The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics. Budapest: Central European University Press. Forsey, J. 2013. The Aesthetics of Design (1st edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forty, A. 1986. Objects of Desire. New York: Pantheon Books. Fry, R. 1920. Vision and Design. Chatto and Windus. Gal, M. 2022. “The Inauguration of Formalism: Aestheticism and the Productive Opacity Principle.“ Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 45, No. 2, Summer 2022, 20–30. Gal, M. 2022a. The Visuality of Metaphors. John Benjamins Publishing Company. https:// benjamins.com/catalog/cogls.00049.gal Gal, M. 2022b. Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics. London; New York: Bloomsbury Publication. Gropius, W. 1965. The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Vol. 21). Cambridge: MIT press. Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kant, I. and W. S. Pluhar. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co. Lidwell, W. and G. Manacsa. 2009. Deconstructing Product Design: Exploring the Form, Function, Usability, Sustainability, and Commercial Success of 100 Amazing Products. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers. Lloyd, G. E. R. 1970. Early Greek science: Thales to Aristotle. New York: Norton.

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Loos, A. 1998. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. Millikan, R. G. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Millikan, R. G. 1989. “In Defense of Proper Functions. Philosophy of Science 56, no. 2: 288–302. Morris, W. and M. Morris. 2012. “The Lesser Arts [1877].” In The Collected Works of William Morris: With Introductions by his Daughter May Morris, pp. 3–27. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139343145.003 Munari, B. 2008. Design as Art. London: Penguin UK. Norman, D. A. 1990. The Design of Everyday Things (1st Doubleday/Currency ed). New York: Doubleday. Norman, D. A. 2004. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Norman, D. A. and S. W. Draper, eds. 1986. User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human–Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Papanek, V. 2011. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (2nd. ed. compl. rev., repr). London: Thames and Hudson. Papanek, V. and R. B. Fuller. 1972. Design for the Real World. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Paris, P. 2020. “Functional Beauty, Pleasure, and Experience.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98, no. 3: 516–530. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2019.1640754 Parsons, G. and A. Carlson. 2008 Functional Beauty in Contemporary Aesthetic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199205240.001.0001/acprof-9780199205240-chapter-2 Petroski, H. 1994. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (Reprint edition). London: Vintage. Petroski, H. 2004. Small Things Considered: Why There is No Perfect Design. New York: Vintage. Plato, Ferrari, G. R. F. and T. Griffith. 2000. The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato, Sedley, D. N. and Plato. 2010. Meno and Phaedo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pye, D. 1978. The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold. http://archive.org/details/natureaesthetics0000pyed Read, H. 2005. To Hell With Culture and Other Essays on Art and Society (2nd edition). Florence: Taylor and Francis. Schuldenfrei, R. 2013. “The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object.” In Bauhaus Construct, edited by J. Saletnik and R. Schuldenfrei, 47–70. Abingdon: Routledge. Sullivan, L. 1896. The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered. Online version from https:// ia800200.us.archive.org/34/items/tallofficebuildi00sull/tallofficebuildi00sull.pdf Whitford, F. 1984. Bauhaus. London: Thames and Hudson. Wigley, M. 1997. Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire. 010 Publishers.

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When I want to relax, I read an essay by Engels. When I want to read something serious, I read Corto Maltese. (Umberto Eco)

In this famous quotation, the influential semiotician and thinker Umberto Eco refers to the narrative power of intelligent sequential art via the fictional character of Hugo Prat’s main protagonist, the infamous Corto Maltese, a sort of swashbuckling combination of James Bond and Indiana Jones, who roamed through various locations in the first part of the twentieth century. Indeed, as was illustrated in Scott McCloud’s important book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993), the visual universe surrounding us is built of various cornerstones embedded in an intricate code. This code is read by end users, and indeed everyone, through the intention presented by its creator. This visual code includes not only obvious visual outputs, such as road signs, logos, icons, emojis and letters, but also material manifestations such as an object configuration, materials (e.g. think of wood versus concrete), shapes, lines and more. Consider, just as a first example, the difference between these two red lights, both embedded in a specific sociocultural context and both alluding to specific meanings. While the Mini Cooper offers a link to the company’s British heritage (hence the Union Jack), a Haka stance is used in Wellington’s traffic light as a unique local expression of cultural heritage. In other words, before even delving into the complex world of design as language, we can agree on two key notions: first, design could be considered as an act of communication (and meaning-making); and second, design as well as its perception or use could be considered as acts of interpretation. Obviously, these two events occur in a two-directional joint effort by the designer and the design partners. Naturally, a break in this connection will result in either a misunderstanding (think of Japanese instructions of an AC in your hotel) or dysfunction (if the UX of a product was not designed in a good way). As our world is becoming more and more visual-material, so this system needs to become more coherent and decipherable for it to keep functioning towards its intended purpose (Figures 3.1 and 3.2).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216230-4

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Figure 3.1 Haka stance at a Wellington traffic light.

Consider a light switch that can go either up for turning on the light or down for off, the on/off button of an electrical kettle or the flush button of a toilet, which consists of two buttons: big for a long flush and small for a short one (Figure 3.3). It is quite clear that each pressing direction or the position of the button enables a light situation or the activation of the kettle. Even more clear is the reading of the flush button. But is it really reading? Does a design product refer to its function and hence have a semantic relation with it and a structure as a symbol? Do the flush buttons denote long or short flush and thereby lend themselves to some sort of interpretation of the symbolised function? Or do the buttons simply show themselves or even merely stand there possessed by their objects? Indeed, is haptic design part of a broader, classical, visual-material design language? We are aiming to study the idea of the design product as symbolic and meaningful and the wider idea of design as language. To this study the current chapter is devoted. It proves that, notwithstanding the prevalent use of “meaning” and “language” among designers the application of these terms to design by the public of users and viewers, and theoreticians, is not exempt from inaccuracies and difficulties. However, it does shed light on this discipline.

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Figure 3.2 A half of the Union Jack in the Mini Cooper’s back light.

Figure 3.3 Grohe Flush Button.

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3.1 SYMBOLIC OBJECTS The phenomenon of symbolic objects, that is, semantic, referential, meaningful or even expressive objects, is omnipresent in both natural and artefactual environments. The question of what differentiates mere objects from objects that signify and symbolise or that are expressive or meaningful and thus belong to some sort of material language is one of the most significant in aesthetics. It is quite clear that distinct from mere objects, there are objects that are found in our daily surroundings which possess the ability to speak to us, serving as symbols in visual-material languages, which, in turn, lend themselves to interpretations and enter hermeneutic circles. In “Ways of World Making,” Nelson Goodman, a prominent aesthetician, proves that every object can be transfigured into a symbol by implementing it in the right context. For example, a product that is located in the shop window symbolises its peers on the shelves (and may lose its symbolic function if moved back inside). The cake I point to in the bakery is an exemplifying symbol, serving as a sample of the cake I order for my daughter’s birthday, which will be baked on the day of the pick-up (Goodman 1978, 63–64). The human being does not find mere objects sufficient for a good life and well-being—so argues Roger Fry, the philosopher of art and design, artist and designer, in his “Art and Commerce.” While endorsing a formalist approach to design, which defines its form as its essence, Fry understands that design carries additional levels of significance. He accordingly portrays the common user of design products as follows: He can be clothed without art – but he has hardly ever consented to restrict himself to the merely needful in clothing. Personal vanity at once makes appeal to some kind of an artist – an embroiderer or a jeweller. He can be sheltered without art – but again he is not content merely to be sheltered; again he wishes to express to the outside world that sense of his own importance of which he has continually to remind other people. Therefore he calls in an artist to make his house more magnificent, more attractive to the eye than the mere satisfaction of the need for shelter would imply. (R. Fry and Goodwin 1998, 111)

In his canonical The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Arthur Danto claims that what differentiates artworks from mere things is artwork’s aboutness. Contrary to mere things, artworks are both things that exist in the world and are about it, namely they refer to it (Danto 1996). This positions art as analogous to language because words or sentences have their simple existence as readable or heard entities (let us leave aside the ontological status of mental contents in the shape of linguistic elements), but they also refer to something external to them—to a referent or the symbolised thing. Artworks sometimes do the same. As such, they do not just exist, but also, figuratively speaking, they adopt a distance from the world as symbols of it. Studying the nature of design in light

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of often-used terms such as “language,” “symbol” and “meaning,” we ought to find out if design products could have this twofold way of being: as things and symbols. As a quick reminder, function (see Chapter 2, “Form and Function”) has a crucial role in the difference between art and design, although both base their meaning on visual-material language systems. Using a primary formulation, ordinary language is defined as a system of symbols that humans acquire naturally and essentially in the form of a specified and commonly agreed linguistic system. The philosophical controversy about the characterisation of human beings as more visualist, sensuous, physical or behavioural than linguistic, or the other way around, has been thriving since antiquity. Philosophy and linguistic studies have always been conflicted regarding the question of whether language is thoroughly based on conventions or habits (Skinner 1957; Lewis 2011) or whether we all share a built-in universal grammar (Chomsky 1965). However, no theory refutes the fact that we are linguistic creatures. What semiotics added to this notion is the dual understanding that significant parts of a language are arbitrary in essence, but they are consensual in a certain social group in a specified cultural context. A symbol, the basic element of language, is a thing that owns a referent and refers to it, thus having semantic charge and meaning. No referent—no symbol (a significant note, given the frequent misuse of the term “symbol”)! Besides symbols, ordinary language owns vocabulary, syntax or grammar and pragmatic uses, and it is used by speakers and addressees. Philosophy of language offers numerous, sometimes opposing, theories regarding the way in which the meaning of a linguistic entity is established: by the customary semantic reference, its cluster of uses, the intention of the speaker or even by some sort of behavioural conduct with language. Design is not an ordinary language for sure, but there are other symbolic systems which are classified as sub-languages such as traffic signage, emojis, various kinds of media and, of course, art. To assess if design could be considered linguistic in some respect, let us reflect on the above-mentioned idea regarding the design product as function. The direction-bound power button or the flush button that is divided into differing segments is easier to classify as semantic than products with abstract functions. Opposite directions or button positions naturally refer to opposite/ binary situations of light-dark, on-off or short-long flush. Although, as will be discussed shortly, a few theories classify function as the referent of its carrier, it is more difficult to explain the possibility of reference and meaning in relation to abstractly presented functions, such as a chair’s purpose of being sat on or a handle’s purpose of serving as an opening device. The relation of a design product to its function is an intriguing topic for reflection and research (see the chapter entitled “Form and Function”). We know that function, the purpose or the intended specific use of a product is either preconceived by a designer or attributed and established post-production by a community of end users. But it is not clear whether the designed product refers to its function, namely, serves as its symbol along with the function as a referent, or whether the design product

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merely possesses its function—specifically whether a chair refers to seatability or merely possesses it. If the former is correct, then the design product serves as a symbol of its function and may have a semantic relation with it, thus the function could be considered as its meaning. If the latter, the design product is a mere meaningless thing. By “meaningless,” we do not mean “insignificant”— not at all. We mean that it does not carry symbolic relations to the function, but relations of possession, and does not refer to it. A thing could be meaningless (not referential), but very significant, useful and effective. We all use chairs, sometimes all day long. Or consider a main road—it is a mere thing rather than a symbol, but it is significant and frequently used by many people, as well as playing a substantial role in a city’s plan, order and conduct. Now, let us advance to attributes that are properties possessed by the design product such as social status, zeitgeist or emotions as possible referents of design products. If design objects have the ability to refer to these, we may classify at least a sub-group of design products as symbols. This is definitely the case in relation to metaphorical design products such as the “Zjedzony” Banana Chair, designed by Wam House in 2005, which is an image of a banana and expressive of humour (Figure 3.4), or the bookshelf-shaped Kamil Güleç Library of Karabuk University in Turkey (Figure 3.5) which opened in 2017. The library, which is a literal/material image of a bookshelf, refers to the books inside it and its own function as a library. It is also an allusion (a specific kind of symbolisation of referent which serves as a source and inspiration for the symbol) to “The Community Bookshelf,” which is the south wall of the parking garage of the 2004 Kansas City Public Library in the United States (Figure 3.6). These works

Figure 3.4 Zjedzony Banana Chair, Wam House, 2005.

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Figure 3.5 Kamil Güleç Library of Karabuk University, Turkey, 2017.

Figure 3.6 Central Library, Kansas City, 2004.

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are symbols, no doubt. However, it is not certain that the imagery they carry is natural to design, and possessed by them as design works, or even, whether the referential work coalesces with design or is actually foreign to it. The elements of the banana chair, borrowed from the shape of a banana, truly serve its function—the banana’s open peel is there to be sat and leaned on. But the Kansas City Library bookshelf was added to the library’s garage wall, hence is more of an ornament than a useful built-in element of the library’s garage. Indeed, these examples reveal the differentiation made by the famous architects Denis Scott Smith and Robert Venturi regarding decorated sheds and ducks, using Las Vegas as a reference (Scott Smith et al. 1977). While the former are ordinary architectural cubes fitted with a fanciful front (as on buildings on sets for Western films), the latter were designed as a unique shape from the start (as was Venturi’s own famous post office). Therefore, it is not clear whether the library refers to bookshelves and its own books as a design object or if the reference is executed by an externally attached symbol Then again, metaphorical chairs are not common in the history of chairs, but ornamentation in design has been and is still very common. It is commonly reported that modernist design opposed ornamentation. However, in his “The Fiction of Function” he refutes the characterisation of modernist design as committed to pure functionalism. A typical example he presents is the non-functional pin joints on Peter Behrens’s Turbine Factory (Figure 3.7), which are ornamental, so to speak, and metaphorical as well: Structural details may reveal their own function, but may also serve metaphorically: the great pin-joints of the arches of Peter Behrens’s Turbine Factory in Berlin, beautifully machined and displayed on pedestals just above street level, insist on their own objectness while suggesting themselves as the engines of their own structural system and cognate to those engines of another mechanical system fabricated within. (Anderson 1987, 22)

This brings us directly to the question of whether design is symbolic, referential and may have meaning. And if so, is conveying meaning natural to design or an external addition? In other words, can design be considered language? And albeit lacking a regular vocabulary and syntax, could it be replaced by other parts we have mentioned, such as shapes, lines, colour, material, texture and configuration/composition? The appropriate starting point of this discussion is the common characterisation of visual art as visual language. Different theories of the philosophy of art, germinated with the inception of the mimetic model of art, have described art as essentially symbolic and tried to track the source of its semantic qualities. This applies not only to the iconography of figurative art, but also to abstract works of art. Moreover, following general philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century, one can argue that aesthetics went through a linguistic

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Figure 3.7 Peter Behrens, Turbine Factory, Berlin, 1909.

and hermeneutic turn of its own during the 1960s. For example, Susan Langer claimed that artworks are presentational symbols (though not linguistic) that refer to mental forms, gaining their expressivity therefrom (Langer 1969). In his “Symbolism and Art” (1954), Morris Weitz endorsed what he called Langer’s “poetic language” theory of art. Weitz further argued that artworks even make “truth claims.” As implied above, Danto’s philosophy of art played a central role in the linguistic turn of aesthetics (Gal 2015, Ch. 7; Gal 2022). In his The Artworld, which changed the aesthetic sphere, Danto took an anti-formalist step by claiming that the meaning, the reference to theory and history, is the essence of art. Nelson Goodman took a step further in his Languages of Art and Ways of World Making and tried to prove all art is necessarily symbolic—even abstract-pure artwork exemplifies its artistic properties, thus referring to them (Goodman 1976, 1978, 78). In his “How Buildings Mean,” Goodman maintains that “A building is a work of art only insofar as it signifies, means, refers, symbolizes in some way”

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and “whether or not a building represents anything, it may exemplify or express certain properties” (Goodman 1985, 643, 645). The philosophy and theory of architecture are exceptional in aesthetics. It has been considered under the discipline of aesthetics owing to its internal connection to art, though a large part of it is subsumed under design, as well as taught in faculties of design (Fisher 2000). By contrast, though it is a ubiquitous ontological and aesthetic phenomenon that furnishes our world and a flourishing practical discipline that is broadly taught in academia, design has just begun to be analysed by philosophy. The linguistic turn in aesthetics was critically characterised by Joseph Margolis as “the doctrine that there are ‘languages of art,’ that works of fine art are to be construed somehow as utterances in a language” (Margolis 1974, 175). It was later beautifully analysed as a pre- and post-Wittgensteinian discipline by Garry Hagberg in his Art as Language (Hagberg 1998). Similarly, hermeneutic theoreticians led by Georg Gadamer started developing structures of meaning to decipher the complex dialogue between a text, its author and readers. Considering this turn in the philosophy of visual art, which shares with design the realm of aesthetic visual artefacts, it is justifiable to wonder whether design deserves a linguistic turn of its own. In one of the few books on the philosophy of design, The Aesthetics of Design, Jane Forsey claims that design dwells in the aesthetic sphere, but she does not support the analogy between art and design through the linguistic prism. Forsey argues that “contrasted with art, design is mute: it says nothing, and has no expressive content” (Forsey 2013, 177). According to Forsey, design is “not communicative,” because “the onus is on art, not craft and design, to say something original, to be meaningful or profound, to move us and to engage our interpretive abilities” (Forsey 2013, 66). Forsey’s words suggest that design is essentially non-linguistic, not semantic or referential, and consequently does not lend itself to interpretation. Then again, we can already conclude from the examples above that there are design products that manifest symbolic work on different levels or what Danto names “aboutness,” and could thereby be classified as vehicles of meaning. A proposition along this line of thought is given in Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice by the design theorist and past editor of Design Issues journal Richard Buchanan. Contrary to Forsey, Buchanan presents a possible reduction of the whole discipline of design communication: If one idea could be found central in design studies, it most likely would be communication. Directly or indirectly, this idea and its related themes have animated more discussion of design theory and practice than any other. I refer not only to graphic design, where communication is an obvious goal and where the concepts of classical rhetoric are now being applied with promising results, but also to the larger field of design, which ranges from industrial and product design to architecture and urban planning and for which there is no unifying theory of rhetoric. (Buchanan, 1995, 4)

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Thus, in the framework of the philosophy of design, whose main sources are rooted in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the analysis of the semantic character of design products is required for the discipline. Accordingly, theories of interpretation and hermeneutics of design are also required in order to add a deeper and broader layer to design’s practical and theoretical venues. A new discourse should be established by delineating the different possible views of design as language. It accordingly ought to consider whether design, being an essentially functional discipline intended for users, is a unique form of language, and if so, what are its exclusive linguistic properties. Apart from its theoretical innovation, this view follows our proposition that an academic design department needs to incorporate history, theory and practice rather than the popular segregation of these venues. Moving ahead in analysing the linguistic element of design products is based on the assertion that the range of semantic products is very wide. It runs from jewellery denoting marital status or position as well as expressing emotions such as Bettina Speckner’s gloomy Photographic Jewellery (Figure 3.8), to the metaphorical Frozen Peas Ice Cube Molds, designed by Alessandro Martorelli (Figure 3.9), that imitates peas and refers to them (Gal in Benedek and Nyíri 2019, 79–90), to iPhones manifesting an informal membership of a specific group

Figure 3.8 Bettina Speckner, Brooch, 2018.

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Figure 3.9 Alessandro Martorelli’s Frozen Peas ice cube mould design, 2014.

of users or even social status, to service design denoting and communicating its functions and its interaction with various end users to brutalist buildings. One may argue that materiality is the skeleton and backbone of our contemporary reality. To borrow Turkle’s concept put forward in her Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007), we are drawn to objects and manage our daily lives through their existence owing to their evocative nature. Analysing design as language goes beyond marketing and psychology of want to the symbolic roots of the evocation and form of life. Rancière sums it up as follows: “form of the object summed up the form of the process that produces it, the form of its use and the form of life that it expressed and that it contributed to enhance” (Rancière 2017, 608–609). 3.2 FUNCTION AS MESSAGE As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a central element in the idea of design products as symbols is the attribution of referentiality to the relations between the design object and its function. This idea has been entertained by a few theorists of design. Drawing on Paul Valery’s attribution of expressivity to buildings in his Eupalinos: or, the Architect, Jan Mukařovský claims that it is

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their functions that buildings express. He beautifully formulates this as follows in Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts: Architecture “speaks,” i.e. it imparts information, even if of a totally different type from information in literature or painting. Information contained in an architectonic work is closely connected with the practical function which the work implements. A building “means” its purpose, i.e. the acts and processes which are to be carried out within its confines (delimited and formed by its materials): “Here,” says the building, “merchants gather. Here judges judge. Here prisoners lament. Here lovers revel.” These business shops, courts and prisons speak eloquently whenever those who built them understood their purpose (Mukařovský 1970, 78)

The prominent design theorist Donald Norman extends this line of thought by establishing the reference to the function by the design product as an imperative. He presents a normative theory of design, stressing that the design object must be transparent about its proper function. Design, Norman declares, has psychological accountability towards its user. A bad design, for Norman, is one that does not lend itself to simple use according to its intended function. He remarks: With badly designed objects—constructed so as to lead to misunderstanding— faulty mental models, and poor feedback, no wonder people feel guilty when they have trouble using objects, especially when they perceive (even if incorrectly) that nobody else is having the same problems. (Norman 1990, 42)

By contrast, well-designed products symbolise their functions and are intelligible—they possess what Norman calls “visible clues to their operation.” Accordingly, poorly designed objects are classified by Norman as opaque symbols, whose interpretation is complicated. We see then that, for Norman, design products are symbolic by character, forming a visual language of functions. He thus replaces the concept of “use” with “understanding” and “interpreting.” A paradigmatic example of an ought-to-be-readable design object is a door, which illustrates “one of the most important principles of design: visibility.” Noting the common difficulties with using or actually reading doors, namely, receiving their messages, Norman explains the requirement of successful doors and pays attention to his presentation of doors as symbols of their functions: The correct parts must be visible, and they must convey the correct message. With doors that push, the designer must provide signals that naturally indicate where to push, these need not destroy the aesthetics. Put a vertical plate on the side to be pushed, nothing on the other. Or make the supporting pillars visible.

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The vertical plate and supporting pillars are natural signals, naturally interpreted. I call the use of natural signals natural design… (Norman 1990, 3)

We see this classification of functions as referents of design objects even in the writings of formalists such as Victor Papanek, who claim that design’s artefactuality stems from meaningfulness and that its meaning is based on function. But functionality alone will not relay the message, according to Papanek. Criticising the concept of “form follows function,” Papanek notes that pure functionalism actually obscures the functional meaning of the design product: the concept that what works well will of necessity look well has been the lame excuse for all the sterile, operating-room like furniture and implements of the twenties and thirties. A dining table of the period might have a top, wellproportioned in glistening white marble, the legs carefully nurtured for maximum strength with minimum materials in gleaming stainless steel. But the first reaction on encountering such a table is to lie down on it and have your appendix extracted. Nothing about the table says: ‘Dine off me.’ (Papanek 2011, 6)

Indeed, in his later writings, Norman informs us that his previous commitment to pure functionalism led to a narrow conception of design’s functionality and symbolic work. Pure functionalism will not suffice to explain the way design works and invites us to use it, namely, it speaks to us. Norman’s solution to this is not plausible, but is interesting. In The Design of Future Things, Norman’s focus shifts to a new analysis of affordance as a symbolic layer of design. “Affordance” notes the extension of the cluster of interactions with objects, mainly those to which the object invites us, beyond its intended function. This makes the idea of function as the referent of a design object slightly obscure because it is implausible to argue that a design object symbolises or refers to every single use of it, which may be quite random or personal. This is not how symbols work. However, Norman follows the argument presented in Semiotic Engineering by the informatics theorist Clarisse de Souza that “affordance is real communication between the designer and the user of a product” rather than simple relations between the user and the object (Norman 2007, 66). Design products, thought of as shared communications, bring a radical change in the philosophy of design, Norman claims: As I was writing The Design of Everyday Things, I pondered this question: when we encounter something new, most of the time we use it just fine, not even noticing that it is a unique experience. How do we do this? We encounter tens of thousands of different objects throughout our lives, yet in most cases, we know just what to do with them, without instruction, without any hesitation. When faced with a need, we are often capable of designing quite novel solutions; “hacks” they are sometimes called: folded paper under a table leg to

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stabilize the table, newspapers pasted over a window to block the sun. Years ago, as I pondered this question, I realized that the answer had to do with a form of implicit communication, a form of communication that today we call “affordances.” (Norman 2007, 66–67)

Norman borrows and applies to the visible properties of design products the term “affordance” which was coined by James J. Gibson in 1966 and further defined in his 1979 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception as the qualities an environment offers to its inhabitants. Visibility allows the design object to lend itself to use. For instance, it endows the chair with the ability of a chair to function as a seating tool, but also as a coat hanger or a ladder: “to discover and make use of affordances is one of the important ways that people function so well, even in novel situations when encountering novel objects” (Norman 2007, 68). Visibility is the power behind the guiding of behaviour by affordances. Usually, Norman claims, it “feels natural” to relate to objects, and design objects such as television and its buttons “sit there quietly, awaiting our activity.” This is not the case, though, with future design, which brings with it “autonomous, intelligent devices.” According to Norman: the objects of the future will pose problems that cannot be solved simply by making the affordances visible. Autonomous, intelligent machines pose particular challenges, in part, because the communication has to go both ways, from person to machine and from machine to person. (Norman 2007, 69)

Norman here misses two points. The first is that humanity has always faced design products that were hard to communicate with and exercised their powers on us. In some respects, we have always been what Norman himself dubs “servants to our machines” (Norman 2007). The second point is more important to our current discussion. Norman overlooks the nature of communication, message delivery and referential or symbolic work. While it is clear that design products are open to a wider range of uses than simply the one intended, it makes no sense to claim that a design object makes references to each use anew every time while serving as a symbol of it. Affordance actually proves that the meaning that a designer intended an object to deliver is frequently pushed aside in favour of various not-preconceived uses. As rightly asserted in The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design, “design is not the expression of a lone artist, but the result of commercial and societal processes” (Folkmann 2013, 29). Indeed, the object may invite us to various interactions, but not as a linguistic entity. Hence, the term “affordance,” while extremely significant in the philosophy of design, has no explanatory power regarding the study of the linguistic characteristics of design. However, Norman’s account opens a route to other kinds of meanings of design besides its function. This will be the focus of the next sub-chapter.

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3.3 DESIGN AND COMPLEX MEANINGS The fact that design products possess properties that are external to their function, influencing our ontology, culture and lives by various means, suggests that the meaning-bearing properties, as Danto names them, of the design product are diverse (Danto 2013, 38). Thinking about design as a vehicle of meaning characterises, for example, the phenomenon of objects whose expressivity, as modernists such as Walter Gropius and his interpreter Nikolaus Pevsner see it, stems from the symbolisation of functionalist aspects of the zeitgeist—or the practical needs of an era. For the modernist Roger Fry, the symbolic character of artefacts does not derive from their functionality, but from expressivity. Fry thus distinguishes between the artefact and what he calls the “opifact,” which “is any object made by man not for direct use but for the gratification of those special feelings and desires.” The “opifact,” Fry says, “is primarily an advertisement,” and has thus been used by societies for its expressivity: Societies of all kinds no less than individuals have recognised this fact. They behave, indeed, almost exactly like individuals in this respect. Big banking firms encase their offices in marble and load their doors with chased bronze… aiming at creating by suggestion a heightened sense of worth and importance in the minds of the people. We see, in fact, that advertisements in one form or another has been one of the greatest of social forces throughout human history. (R. Fry and Goodwin 1998, 113)

The idea that design is a visual and material language that plays a constitutive role in forming eras and societies is voiced also by the historian of design Penny Sparke. She asserts that owing to: the ideological values and messages it embodies and carries within it … it can communicate complex messages. In turn, these can be negotiated and transformed but they are difficult to ignore. In this sense, design is seen here as being part of the dynamic process through which culture is actually constructed, not merely reflected. (Sparke 2013, 4)

Certainly, we can conclude by now that the symbolic value of design objects might be unrelated to their functions. Function may even obstruct the symbolic function of a designed object while non-functional or even anti-functional elements show forth, as stated by Mukařovský in his Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts: Information contained in an architectonic work is, however, usually totally overshadowed and concealed by the practical function with which it is closely connected. It becomes visible only when the building pretends to a function

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other than the one it actually fulfils: an apartment building in the form of a palace, a factory which looks like a castle, etc. The assuming of an identity (palace, castle) becomes an actual communication to the perceiver. (Mukařovský 1970, 78)

An informative example of a design object assuming a non-functional meaning is the second-generation Prius, which was introduced to the automobile market in the 2000s and that gained a significant advantage over its hybrid competitor, the Honda Civic. The reason did not reside in the car’s technology or aesthetics, but rather in the social value of the idea of “going green.” While the Civic hybrid was indistinguishable from its mundane brethren (apart from the presence of a small sticker), the Prius was based on a whole new design, locating the highest point of the vehicle above the driver’s seat, which was also the top of a “triangle silhouette,” manifesting its difference from other Toyota models. In other words, owners of hybrid cars did not only want to know they did a good deed for the planet, but they also wanted to broadcast this publicly. Therefore, this generation of Prius served as a symbol of a milieu. Symbolising social groups and status is common in design. Interestingly, as the Prius became more popular and sales were high, it still had a bland and slow reputation, despite being economic and efficient, as with many other Toyota models. During the 2016 Super Bowl, using a new version of the car, a commercial depicted the Prius as the ultimate getaway car after robbing a bank—it was stealthy owing to its electric motor, fast when needed and reliable. Indeed, the robbers chose it out of lack of alternatives, because their classic American muscle car was towed prior to their leaving the bank with the cash. Thus, adding a bit of humour helped add another layer of meaning to this product. Mukařovský brings to our attention that: one of the themes in architecture is the symbolic effect of a work of architecture. The effect is particularly noticeable in those stages of development when a building, especially a public building, represents the ideology of the milieu from which it arose and which it serves, or when it represents its power and social importance, Note, for instance, the symbolic effect of the medieval castles and cathedrals, or the palatial buildings of the Renaissance and Baroque. (Mukařovský 1970, 78 fn.63)

Interestingly, the symbolisation of status may take place within the discipline of design and its hierarchy of ranks. A good example is Philipp Starck’s Masters Chair designed for Kartell in 2009 (Figure 3.10). Referring the outlines of three classic chairs in design history, the “7 Series” by Arne Jacobsen, the “Eiffel Chair” by Charles Eames and the “Tulip Armchair” by Eero Saarinen, Starck positions himself as the Master of the Masters, sharing the same DNA sequence along a specified design evolution. Furthermore, in his design, Starck uses the well-known technology of mould plastic injection to add another

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Figure 3.10 Philipp Starck, Masters Chair, 2009.

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Rancière’s presentation of the intricate nature of meaning in design raises the need for the discipline’s own theory of interpretation and its hermeneutic circles. The last point is crucial because designers who aspire to create meaningful products struggle between following a specific language, albeit one that is undefined in many cases, while trying not to make the users bored with familiar aesthetics. We can clearly see this pendulum motion in architecture, as its practitioners try to follow a unique and identified style (which is good for branding and business), yet struggle to keep up-to-date and contribute an innovative angle in every project (the creative angle). Thus, new and younger architects and designers imbue the existing language of the studio with a newly minted visual-material syntax, or in other words—slang. We shall, therefore, devote the next and last sub-chapter to hermeneutics. 3.4 DESIGN AND HERMENEUTICS In general, hermeneutics deals with the interpretation of text based on the discipline’s major contributors such as Herder, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Dilthey and, more recently, Gadamer and Ricœur. It is well known that a point of change in the view of hermeneutics was established with Heidegger’s (1927) concept of “being-there” (Dasein) (Heidegger 2007). In Heidegger’s view, a way to solve the interpretation paradox, that is, our inability to find the correct interpretation out of myriad possibilities, was not to exit the hermeneutic circle, but rather to base our interpretation on basic human understanding. The act of interpretation was described by Gadamer, in his famous “Hermeneutic Circle,” as a continuous dialogue between the writer, the text and the reader. Through this model, Gadamer highlights the movement between reader and writer, culminating in the creation of meaning via interpretation (Gadamer 2008). We can see a close correlation between this model and design in the complex choreography of the design partners striving to create a mutual meaning for a designed object. Gadamer followed Heidegger by claiming that an interpretation is the result of a dialogue between the past and the present. We wish to claim that design tries to function as an interpretation of a dialogue between the past and the future as well as between the designer and the user, as we can see throughout this volume. Contrary to other theorists, Gadamer saw an important relationship between hermeneutics and art. Indeed, the truth of art is highly important in Gadamer’s theory owing to its centrality in the process of creating a bond between interpretation and experience. Furthermore, following in Gadamer’s footsteps, we can surmise that hermeneutic interpretation lies in the translator’s ability to bring the text into the contextual meaning of his understanding (Schmidt 2016). In the context of design, therefore, the act of material production of meaning lies in the designer’s ability to re-contextualise a situation and reframe it by applying it to a newly designed object. While the designed object could be described as a material text, the “readers” of this object are myriad and each poses different challenges to the designer’s innovative interpretation.

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Gadamer’s principal innovation was the assertion of the universalism of hermeneutics, that is, understanding unlocks the self and the world, while creating a new relation between the two. Language, accordingly, is the horizon of hermeneutic ontology, or in Gadamer’s own words: “being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 2013, 490). Therefore, art or design is not situated in or for itself, but rather through the mediation of language. The essence of co-design methodology, for example, is based on the creation of a mutual language between designers and their design partners (Buur and Larsen 2010). In other words, the relation between visual-material representation, language and comprehensibility creates hermeneutic knowledge or understanding. Naturally, because Gadamer’s assumptions are relevant to all human experience, design falls within these wide margins (Gadamer 2013). This mediation is manifested in the world of design through the combination of visual-material semiotic language and interpretation. According to Gadamer, then a text (or a visual image or material object, for that matter) is always embedded in presuppositions. A classic example would be designers’ tendency to apply old attributes to new objects, allowing the users a liminal period of adjustment to new technologies—think of the gesture of turning a page on your iPad or Kindle rather than pressing an icon. Later, Stanley Fish added another brick to the hermeneutic construction, stressing that a single interpretation does not exist, but rather a special, flexible relation between a reader, a writer and a text, culminating in a unique vortex of understanding (Fish 2003). Ricœur continues this line of thought, claiming that interpretation is possible because human beings can communicate with each other; however, to achieve understanding, we must correlate between theory and practice. This is critical when dealing with design, owing to its various dimensions and key players. An obvious example would be the data emanating from our smartphones. When glancing at another person’s phone, one can tell their socio-economic status and fashion preferences, and when viewing the apps installed on the phone, other private preferences such as education, cultural preferences and much more become apparent. In other words, the technology a smartphone possesses is not only a gate to social relations, but also a material manifestation of culture. In his well-known On Translation, Ricœur warns us of the temptation to articulate an all-encompassing language, focusing instead on the act of translation in order to bridge between words and their material or visual representations (Ricœur 2006). The designer’s work, in other words, lies in the ability to embody sociocultural norms in material objects, which are then re-translated and interpreted by the end users (consider de Saussure’s classic signifier/signified duality). There is no perfect translation, claims Ricœur, which may result in a quality of bereavement. Yet, the major task of the translation is to bring the author to the reader and vice versa. In other words, Ricœur sees understanding as a process of interpretation, yet the real question is not should we interpret, but rather how should we interpret? Ricœur continues to distinguish between two strategies of interpretation: trust or distrust. In the first strategy, the interpreter takes meaning as it presents itself and unfolds along our understanding of it. Interpretation

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of distrust, on the contrary, assumes that meaning could be the by-product of a hidden genealogy. When dealing with design or architecture, then, understanding is derived from a process of interpretation and reception by all the design partners in a specific design situation. Ricœur describes the translator’s work as bringing the reader to the writer and the writer to the reader. In a way, the designer’s work is based on similar principles, harnessing function and aesthetics as a phenomenological attribute to stimulate experience, emotion and memory in order to create a new behaviour, use or experience. Ricœur continues to distinguish between two types of translation: a literal translation and a broader sense of the word, in which to translate is to understand. The following part of our proposition demonstrates the latter via designed medical objects. What we see as its innovative element, then, lies in the constricting grasp of designed objects’ explicit functionality contrary to artworks. Indeed, several of the functionalist definitions of art, formulated under analytic aesthetics, either refer to aesthetic evocation as the main function of artworks or to an object “being used as an artistic medium and thereby becomes part of the more complex object of art” (Dickie 1997, 87). While, as a branch of philosophy, dealing with the interpretation of texts and artworks is hardly new, it is almost non-existent when dealing with design. However, the theoretical and applied potential of linguistic aesthetics and hermeneutics to design is considerable. In fact, Schleiermacher’s definition of art could correlate with the broad range of contemporary design: “we call art […] every compound product in which we are aware of general rules, whose application cannot in the particular case be again brought under rules” (Bowie 2016, 46). If we endorse a functionalist definition of art, then just like art, design is a functional and aesthetic way of re-presenting our surrounding reality in daily activities. The common denominator between the two, however, is their foundational axiom of a structural language system. Furthermore, art, and more so design, involves the viewer or the user in participation and accruing a specific experience. Indeed, according to Gadamer, the essence of meaning reveals language as a “universal ontological structure […] the basic nature of everything toward which understanding can be directed” (Gadamer 2013, 490). The understanding of design as a structural system is a well-known view in architecture, yet not in design. While the notion of design as discourse is not new, as semioticians and design theoreticians such as Victor Margolin have outlined it in Design Discourse, the harnessing of hermeneutic knowledge to design discourse is still lacking (Margolin 1989). However, the abilities of design as a symbolic act either of interpretation or one that lends itself to be interpreted are wide and hold great potential for design theoreticians as well as for practitioners. Rather than seeing the discourse of design as a somewhat static system, seeing design as language follows the call for the designer to act as an active sociocultural agent, generating change through design, symbolising the agentic ability described by the anthropologist Alfred Gell in his Art and Agency (1998). This falls well within the praxis of hermeneutics, as presented by both Schleiermacher and Gadamer. As the former ascertains that praxis follows understanding and interpretation, the

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latter claims that the praxis of hermeneutics has been embedded in the essence of interpretation since the dawn of humankind, echoed in our understanding of language. Naturally, as an applied discipline, the importance of hermeneutics to design is significant. As in philosophical hermeneutics, its application lies in its ability to bring meaningful units or objects. By a material and visual interpretation brought into one’s sociocultural context, the designer relates to an existing structure to create new symbols (Schmidt 2016). The combination of design and hermeneutics can be illustrated through the classic concept of the hermeneutic circle. In a nutshell, this means the movement back and forth between the whole and its parts. The practice of design, accordingly, is the movement from a complete structure or configuration to its various parts. Another angle to this approach, from a linguistic point of view, would describe design as an act of innovative translation to an existing part of a structural language. Another fitting description would be what Dahlstrom terms “the hermeneutic quadrangle,” describing language as comprised of four elements—the author (or designer), the text (or object, in our case), the meaning (function and use of an object) and the audience (various end users) (Dahlstrom 2014). A few semioticians and linguists propose that meaning is created through a shared interpretation or a dialogue between the author and the reader. This complexity is especially relevant to the design process as a mediation between the designer’s approach and the needs of the end users (Ventura and Shvo 2017). In accordance with this view of meaning, analytic pragmatic theories of meaning as use may be considered here to render the characterisation of design as language complete. The transition from the designer as problem-solver to the designer as a hermeneutic interpreter reflects the current changes going through the discipline of design. Therefore, through design, interpretation-oriented prosthesis, for example, can alter the very definition of “impairment.” For instance, by changing the design situation1 via the redesigned prosthesis, the person’s body is redefined in relation to his or her immediate sociocultural surroundings. This shift holds considerable implications, both for the practice of design and for design pedagogy. As design practice changes vis-à-vis manufacturing through open code design and 3D printing, we see a growing awareness of the abundance of materiality in the Western world, contrary to the ever-growing socio-economic gap in developing countries. In such a global climate, designers need to broaden their definition of design outcomes to offer not only better immediate solutions, but also a redefinition of the world in which they operate. Norman’s formulation of this idea is clear, hence a fitting ending for this chapter: These objects are more than utilitarian. As art, they lighten up my day. Perhaps more important, each conveys a personal meaning: each has its own story. One reflects my past, my crusade against unusable objects. One reflects my future, my campaign for beauty. And the third represents a fascinating mixture of the functional and the charming. (Norman 2004, 4)

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meaning making through practice phenomenology

sentences hermenutic knowledge

the words semiotic meaning

the core (idoeology, values)

Figure 3.11 Model of MeaningMaking in Design.

Going back to the beginning of this chapter, we can obviously ascertain that design is indeed a visual-material language. However, we propose a more complex and interesting model that brings together all we have learned in this chapter (Figure 3.11). The meaning or interpretation of a designed product starts with a set of values or a defined ideology (the core essence of a system) which serves as the core of language. We then move to the “cornerstones” of the language represented by semiotic manifestations of design. Depending on our designed product—objects, apps, virtual maps, services, designed space, etc.—these elements can be identified using lines, shapes, materials, finishes and textures, configuration/composition, colours and technologies. These are easily identifiable and in some cases create an automatic response—such as the yellow/blue logo of Ikea or the yellow arches of McDonald’s raising the notion of ice cream or French fries in the minds of children throughout the world. The next layer uses interpretation or hermeneutic knowledge to harness these semiotic words into complex sentences, thus emanating meaning. For example, it is not only a symbol of a sport brand (Nike), but it symbolises success and improvement or community. The final layer uses phenomenological knowledge to imbue the previous layers with experiential meaning, harnessing the power of emotions, memories and subjective sensorial understanding. We can then use the other

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layers to add to the Nike meaning: that of gender equality and women’s power in a specific community. Thus, design practice is understood as a complex, intricate and ever-shifting linguistic interpretation mirroring and navigating our daily life. NOTE 1.

For Ventura’s definitions of “design situation” and “design hermeneutics,” see Bloomsbury Design Library website.

REFERENCES Anderson, S. 1987. “The Fiction of Function.” Assemblage 2: 19–31. https://doi. org/10.2307/3171086 Benedek, A. and K. Nyíri. 2019. Vision Fulfilled: The Victory of the pictorial Turn. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Bowie, A., 2016. The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, edited by Keane, N. & Lawn, C. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 45–53, 9. Buchanan, R. 1985. “Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice.” Design Issues 2, no. 1: 4–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511524. Buur, J., and Henry L. 2010. “The Quality of Conversations in Participatory Innovation.” CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts 6, no. 3: 121–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2010.533185. Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (50th edition). Cambridge: MIT Press. Dahlstrom, D. 2014. “Language and Meaning.” In Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, edited by Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander, 277–287. NY: Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9781315771854.ch21. Danto, A. C. 1996. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (7th printing.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Danto, A. C. 2013. What Art Is. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dickie, G. 1997. Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fish, S. E. 2003. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (12th printing.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fisher, S. 2000. “Architectural Notation and Computer Aided Design.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 3: 273–289. https://doi.org/10.2307/432110 Folkmann, M. N. 2013. The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. Cambridge: MIT Press. Forsey, J. 2013. The Aesthetics of Design (1st edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fry, R. and C. D. W. Goodwin. 1998. Art and the Market: Roger Fry on Commerce in Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gadamer, H.-G. 2013. Truth and Method (First paperback edition. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall). London; New York: Bloomsbury. Gadamer, H.-G. 2008. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gal, M. 2015. Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics. Bern: Peter Lang. Gal, M. 2022. “Danto and Dickie: Artworld and Institution.” In A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, edited by Lydia Goehr and Jonathan Gilmore, 273–280. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119154242.ch31 Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goodman, N. 1976. Languages of Art (2nd edition). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

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Goodman, N. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Goodman, N. 1985. “How Buildings Mean.” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4: 642–653. Hagberg, G. 1998. Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (Nachdr.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Heidegger, M. 2007. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Langer, S. K. 1969. Feeling and Form (1st edition). Stuttgart, Germany: Macmillan. Lewis, D. K. 2011. Convention: A Philosophical Study (Nachdr.). Oxford: Blackwell. Margolin, V., ed. 1989. Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/ bo3774738.html Margolis, J. 1974. “Art as Language.” The Monist 58, no. 2: 175–186. Mukařovský, J. 1970. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Vol. 3). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Michigan Slavic Contributions. Norman, D. A. 1990. The Design of Everyday Things (1st Doubleday/Currency ed). New York: Doubleday. Norman, D. A. 2004. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Norman, D. A. 2007. The Design of Future Things. New York: Basic Books. Papanek, V. 2011. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (2nd edition ­ compl. rev., repr). London: Thames and Hudson. Rancière, J. 2017. “Art, Life, Finality: The Metamorphoses of Beauty.” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 3: 597–616. https://doi.org/10.1086/691006 Ribeiro, A. C., ed. 2012. The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics. New York: Continuum. Ricœur, P. 2006. On Translation. London; New York: Routledge. Scott Brown Denis et al. 1977. Learning From Las Vegas the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge: MIT Press. Skinner, B. F. 1957. Verbal Behavior. New York : Appleton-Century-Crofts. Sparke, P. 2013. An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present (3rd edition). London; New York: Routledge. Turkle, S. 2007. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge: MIT press. Ventura, J. and G. Shvo. 2017. “Yellow as ‘Non-Black’: Prosthetics, Semiotics, Hermeneutics, Freedom and Function.” The Design Journal 20, no. 1: S4652–S4670. https://doi. org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352963 Weitz, M. 1954. “Symbolism and Art.” The Review of Metaphysics 7, no. 3: 466–481.

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4

Design between Theory and Practice1: Applied Theories of Design

As we have seen throughout this book, as a discipline combining function and aesthetics, evocative power and actual needs, design is situated in a unique position between theory and practice. The tensions and relations between theory and practice are a topic of extensive philosophical discussion. This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Immanuel Kant, William Morris, John Ruskin, Roger Fry, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Freire and many others. The question of the relationship between theory and practice is relevant to many fields of humanities and social sciences because it essentially looks to delineate and understand what is the relation between thought and action. Another interesting point to consider lies in the rather recent position designers have found themselves in, which is best considered through the prism of the concept of “meta-design”. As we have seen in previous chapters, the functional or utilitarian nature of design has followed humankind from its early stages of existence. However, as consumerist culture (from even as early as the Roman Empire) and the mass production brought forth by the Industrial Revolution were introduced, the role of the designer changed, as did that of the very discipline. Indeed, if we deviate from the well-defined place of the designer as a utilitarian problem-solver, what role will take its place? We view the act of design as an act of interpretation owing to its unique position, both in theory and through its extensive influence on our sociocultural sphere. By depicting the contemporary designer as a sociocultural interpreter and maker, practice needs the holistic and broad support of theory. Let us highlight the relevant key notions of theoretical knowledge. “Applied theory,” as we define it, could take one of two forms. First, developing innovative theories that would be used to promote and evolve design practice (through all its sub-disciplines). These could include practical semiotics, hermeneutics visà-vis design practice, theories of space, social ergonomics and more. Second, harnessing existing theories—from all academic disciplines, ranging from philosophy, through psychology, anthropology and others. For example, Freud’s classic theory of “the uncanny” (das unheimliche), which describes things that

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seem familiar but are not completely so, could be used to explain scary, almost real-looking dolls or robots. It could additionally lead to an innovative approach towards prosthetics design (Ventura 2015). Therefore, throughout this book, we wish to shift between these two perspectives, developing innovative applied theories, while not neglecting to base our assumptions on the sprawling theories of Vilem Flusser and other key thinkers and theoreticians. An informative way to begin is with Wolfgang Iser’s distinction between what he calls “hardcore theory” and “soft theory.” While the former focuses on making predictions (as in typical life sciences disciplines), the latter (popular amongst the humanities and social sciences) focuses rather on mapping. Iser describes the following crucial attributes to support this distinction: First of all, it actually “pieces together” observed data, elements drawn from different frameworks, and even combines presuppositions in order to gain access to the domain to be charted. This bricolage is adapted to what is scrutinized and augmented by new viewpoints when required […] art and literature can be assessed but not predicted, and one cannot even anticipate the multiple relationships they contain. Prediction aims ultimately at mastering something, whereas mapping strives to discern something [...] instead of moving toward a general principle, it starts out from a basic presupposition, which can be modified in view of observed data that are to be incorporated into the framework. (Iser 2006, 5)

Let us pause for a second on the concept of “bricolage,” which has various meanings across a plethora of disciplines. To paraphrase Levi Strauss’s famous concept, a “bricoleur” is a researcher who uses a plethora of tools found at their disposal, which are relevant and helpful for the task at hand. Indeed, design anthropology could be imagined as a toolbox from which the researcher takes out either a theoretical, empirical or applied tool, depending on the task at hand. As in empirical design research methodologies, a researcher can integrate between qualitative data, shadowing and material content analysis. The situation is the same in relation to design theory. A design theorist does not necessarily use Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, but rather a focus on one project, namely on the implementations of Foucauldian theories on ergonomics and the boundaries of the body. For example, physical ergonomics are a necessary element of the design practice aimed at designing for the body. Social ergonomics, however, is a development that stems from understanding theories dealing with the body politic from Foucault onwards. Another project might bring Pierre Bourdieu to the forefront when dealing with curation processes, but focusing on the political and critical elements of the curated space, while de Certeau and Bachelard will aid designers in designing a public space that enables a different shift in societal order. An experienced designer can develop a navigation app meant to aid travel in the fastest or safest way, a designer embedding social urban theory can consider paths that trigger

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memories or offer the possibility to become an urban flaneur. In other words, the beauty of design theory (applied or otherwise) is the ability to harness theoretical knowledge, written by others in various fields, or innovatively developed, and use it to better understand and practice design. In a nutshell, instead of reflecting on “what is design,” we focus on “what can design achieve,” “why do we need design” and “what kind of designers are relevant to a contemporary sociocultural context”? To answer these wicked problems, as are called in the literature on design, we must add to our elixir another crucial element which is values or ideology, on which we elaborate in other chapters in this volume. We believe that a central feature of design theory is to allow designers to understand as well as practice their craft as a form of visual or material interpretation. Using colour, material, configuration and technology, designers interpret the world, their reality and indeed the meeting point between people and their surroundings. A helpful starting point for this approach would be Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (2004) paradigmatic idea of the hermeneutic circle. According to Gadamer, our interpretation of reality is a combination of past and present, of pre-assumptions and prejudices, surfacing when reading a text, for example. Thus, the meeting point between writer and reader through the written page triggers a complex circulatory motion of acquiring new knowledge vis-à-vis existing knowledge. In the same manner, a designed product (be it 2D, 3D or virtual) triggers the same interpretive process. An interesting example would be the design brief. This begins as a general (in some cases, too general) description of the desired outcome. It then progresses to include a timeframe, target price, target population, desired experience, primary and secondary users, manufacturing technologies and so forth. To that, we might add the relation between a product and our body or cognitive abilities as well as the difference in use between various end users. Interestingly, there is a reversed temporal characteristic to classic hermeneutics versus design practice. While the former combines past and present, the latter is situated in the present while aiming at the future. This complex temporal point of view places designers in a somewhat perplexing position, affecting both theory and practice. In other words, we can surmise that: The practice of design, accordingly, is the movement from a complete structure or configuration and its various parts. Another angle to this approach, from a linguistic point of view, would describe design as an act of innovative translation to an existing part of a structural language. (Ventura and Shvo 2018, 182)

We can surmise, then, that the creative process as an action is an interesting case in point, as it often breaks the traditional framework of understanding the relationship between intention, thought and action. Hence creative endeavours are often discussed in relation to questions of agency, intention and free will. Consider the concept of the design brief meant to highlight the essence of a project mediating between designers, engineers, marketing experts, etc. The

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brief can be in some cases a lengthy document, while in others it consists of a few vague sentences. Yet, it is these functional and market-oriented boundaries that give this practice a unique creative freedom (Ventura and Ventura 2015). The creative process itself, from a theoretical and philosophical perspective, is deeply connected to human agency and the ability to bring about desired results. However, the creative practices have also a tendency to complicate assumptions about these. In the context of understanding design, the lack of a consistent design theory created a vacuum or a gap in knowledge that was unintentionally encouraged within design educational institutions and the history of their establishment. In addition, as we have seen throughout this volume, the dependency of design on the market and broader financial and industrial processes adds another layer of complexity. Traditionally, design studies drew their theoretical background from architectural theory, the history and theory of art and general aesthetics. However, design practitioners, educators and students often express frustration when required to refer to art histories and suppositions for the theoretical framework that delineates and defines the design practice. The direct relationship assumed between art and design in education is often questioned and criticised as the parallels that can be drawn between them are limited, and the question of comparing the two has been exhausted, particularly when considering that art theory draws on values that are very different to those of design. As we have seen in previous chapters, design is usually defined either by formalism, according to its shapes and style, or by the usefulness of the object in direct relation to its symbolic value. Art has gained its own share of formalist definitions, but many theories of art focus on its production of symbolic meaning through representation, expression or mimesis. As we saw in previous chapters, the question of expression and meaning-making in design are central to design definitions, but distinct from other disciplines considered under the umbrella of aesthetics. Under the logic of “Art for Art’s Sake” or of art as a conceptual, meaning-making apparatus, design cannot understand itself, for design, often, is about usability and function. The critique of design, its appreciation and understanding therefore require a consideration not only of its relations to the ideas that are examined through the traditional framework of teaching and learning design, but also an understanding of how design makes use of theory, directs theory and negotiates it on its own terms. Thus, while general aesthetics targeted at art gives design theory a much-needed starting point, it falls short owing to the unique nature of design. Even a functionalist philosophy of art endows art with a general function, such as forming a community or imparting aesthetic experience, disregarding specific functions or uses. Moreover, while architectural theory is also useful, this discipline’s approach towards the end users falls short of the needs of design theory, but from another angle. To address the question of the tensions and relationships between theory and practice within design as an independent and autonomous field, one needs to rethink the definitions and functions of both practice and theory within the

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creative process from the position of design. This position should consider the impact of social and political life on the understanding of design and its purposes being a discipline, whose practice and objects are deeply entangled with our daily routine. When thinking of design, we inevitably need to consider customers, end users, market fluctuation, production and all other such factors that are relevant to the evaluation of design. 4.1 DEFINITIONS OF THEORY AND PRACTICE To consider a new understanding of such relationships, this chapter will first consider linguistic and philosophical definitions of the words “theory” and “practice” and outline the main interest in understanding the relationship between the two. As a growing part of design, education tries to integrate the two, the implications of this relationship are highly important to practitioners and educators alike. Furthermore, the addition of theory to practice will help practitioners to ideate and delve deeper into the broader meanings of the designed world. Last, every end user purchasing a product will better understand this complex world that influences our every step. This is a very broad topic; therefore, it is not our intention to provide a full literature review that summarises the philosophical question of the relationship between thought and action. Rather, we shall seek to isolate a few trajectories that may enable design practitioners, coming from different industries and fields, to think in an active and critical way about the relationship between theory and practice in their own work and processes. A more elaborate map of ideas and scholars is provided at the end of this chapter for further research and reference. The second part of this chapter looks to redefine the values and relationships between theory and practice within the design process. It also looks at the limitations of disciplinary definitions in understanding the relationship between theory and practice in design. The third part of this chapter will discuss how such innovative conceptualisations of theory and practice in the field of design have contributed to the production of valuable knowledge and are currently leaving their own mark on educational systems, offering new methodologies for interdisciplinary research and its application on to day-to-day life. This section will also consider the history of design education and the ways in which design is perceived within the educational system. This forms an important part of contextualising the need for a theory of design and methodologies for the analysis and understanding of design objects from the prism of design, both as a conceptual process and as a practical endeavour. 4.1.1 Practice Practice, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is defined first as the task of carrying out or applying a plan (theory) to action, as in the axiom “practice what you preach.” It has a further interpretation that derives from the first one—one that refers to a habitual action that is repeated over and over until it

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becomes customary. This already relates to the second meaning of the word: to practice is to do something repeatedly for the purpose of achieving mastery over a specific skill or task. Entre parenthèsis, we might add that design falls under the definition of a profession as well, which entails a unique code, since “professions could be described as those occupations that typically require expert knowledge and are primarily concerned with helping others attain certain strategic goods that play a crucial role in their lives” (Gregor 1996; Guersenzvaig and Ventura 2023). This notion has immense ramifications for the ethics of design, which will be discussed in a future volume. Both the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary define practice in relation and opposition to theory, already marking the logical interdependence of these two terms. A fundamental distinction to be found also between thought, intention and action, along the essential relationship between them. This schism, which the various avant-garde design movements of the twentieth century tried to bridge, stands at the very heart of many problems of design as a discipline. Thus, the shift of focus from B-School approaches (such as IDEO) to the social sciences, bringing forth social approaches of design (social design, inclusive design, human-centred design etc.), also mirrors a theoretical shift. The dictionary definition further exposes the question of practice in relationship to life habits and customs. Hence, practice is established through repetition and reproduction. In this sense, it exposes a set of hierarchies between theory and practice, whereby theory precedes practice, as theory defines the desired outcome and practice is only about following up the blueprint of theory in order to reach a desired result. This kind of definition exposes some of the modern Western paradigm, especially the project of Enlightenment, for such definitions give primacy to theory over practice in the process of creation, alluding to the assumption that the knowledge of practice is already encapsulated within theory. Indeed, therein lies the assumption that practice is dependent on theory, on an intention and a goal. Looking at the histories of such philosophical discussions, the primacy of theory in traditional philosophical debates is parallel to the primacy of reason over any other human faculty, and as such it cannot take into full account the value of practice in and of itself. However, actions that have no deliberate or exact intention or goal are frequently milestones in creative processes. Furthermore, contrary to other more linear and rational modes of practice, such as medicine or engineering, design as an iterative and fluid practice needs to rest on a richer relationship to theory. Even considering the very roots of design—dating back to Homo Habilis or Homo Erectus—the search for specific shapes of materials led to evolving functions and modes of survival (Segal and Ventura 2019). Examining the etymology of the word, “practice” derives from the ancient Greek word praxis. Praxis and practice are often defined in slightly different terms. The use of a word such as “praxis” rather than “practice” in certain circles often looks to reference the history of the philosophical distinction of praxis in relation

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to the Aristotelian division of the creative process. Aristotle conceptualised three basic activities of humans in his Nicomachean Ethics: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making, in which activity is a means to an end) and praxis (doing, in which activity is an end in itself). Aristotle connects these to three types of knowledge: techne (craft and skill); episteme (theory), whose goal is the virtue of truth and scientific knowledge; and phronesis (judgement and excellence) whose goal is production and is essentially practical—the end goal of which being action. Aristotle further divides the knowledge deriving from praxis into the fields of economics, ethics and politics. Finally, praxis is considered one of the five virtues of human thought that complement and are derived from one other: sophia (wisdom), episteme (knowledge structures), phronesis (consideration or calculation), praxis (practice), techne (skill) and poiesis (transformation/catharsis). As we can see throughout this volume, the essence of design is closely related to all these attributes, yet it has a special connection to both praxis and techne, described at length in this book’s early chapters. In its position within Aristotelian thought, praxis already relates to the ability to apply a skill, or a mastery, that allows the translation of thought into phenomenon, but it is distinguished from techne, which is related to the capacity to accomplish a goal, something that is more to do with the use of tools than their invention. Considering Aristotle’s definitions, design can be easily examined through the realm of praxis via the production process, especially if we adopt the position that design is deeply related to the Industrial Revolution and mass production. However, in defining design, as we saw in previous chapters, design can very much fall under the category of “making” if we consider its relation to craft and expression. Furthermore, in many sub-disciplines, making and production are mixed through small-batch 3D printed objects, ranging from models, jewellery pieces to housing solutions. Design being the blueprint of a production process could also be seen and read as “theory” considering the dictionary definition of design. Already here in this short discussion, the question of the relationship between theory and practice in design is a multi-layered one—and one that needs to consider the relative perspective from which one attempts to understand design. Conversely, the design brief, discussed earlier, might be understood as one of the key textual-visual processes linking theory and practice. Using this logic, the process of design can be seen to have a relationship with each of these elements, to changing levels and extent, depending on the designer’s self-definition of their roles. However, considering the relationship between theory and practice through the lens of Aristotle, despite his antiquity, offers a detailed and varied understanding of the relationship between thought and action, more specifically when considering the creative act. Such a consideration of different aspects of the designer’s work may allow us to extend our thinking about design beyond the dichotomy of theory and practice and to investigate the design process as occupying several levels or dimensions of bringing thought into action.

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Philosophical discussions around theory and practice or thought and action are often concerned with political sciences and social dilemmas. Developed by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and others, these discussions often consider human agency and its locus within the relationship between thought and actions, theory and practice. These are relevant to Chapters 4, 5 and 6 in this book, which seek to analyse design from social and political perspectives. Indeed, as mentioned before, this connection has important ramifications, specifically when dealing with the socially oriented practices of design, as will be apparent in the chapters dealing with design and culture as well as the relation between design and ideology. Different design practices and practitioners may place more emphasis on certain aspects of their practice: some may resonate with the notion of transformation or catharsis as the ultimate goal of their practice, while others are interested in designing for action or interaction. For example, although classic mass production consumer products will deal with theory in a marginal way, speculative design and social design will lean heavily on respective theories of design, ranging from anthropology and psychology to philosophy and ethics. Such distinctions will also serve us as we move through the future chapters of this book. 4.2 THEORY, PRACTICE AND DISCIPLINARY TRADITIONS Modern distinctions between theory and practice are related to the project of Enlightenment and the formalisation of education during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such definitions are related to class, but also to vocation or discipline. Hence, distinctions between theory and practice and the definitions of their roles are deeply connected to disciplinary divisions in educational systems. Conversely, rather than offering an Aristotelian definition of theory and practice, we should examine such a relationship from the point of view of the Enlightenment and its support of rationalism (see Chapter 1.5.3, “Instrumental Rationalism and Functionalism”). To understand the construction of theory and practice, it is made manifest in the prevalent logic of design’s definition in practice—that is, design’s definition out of its contextualisation and development within specific institutions. We therefore suggest that Immanuel Kant was the first person to approach the definitions of theory and practice and their inherent relationship. A prominent German philosopher, Kant was one of the most influential thinkers associated with the project of Enlightenment from the eighteenth century onwards. Kant’s work deeply influenced the development of Western philosophical thought and the process of its secularisation. One could define his project as a philosopher as the examination of the human faculty of reason, to offer a comprehensive understanding of the human condition and its potential, beyond the religious paradigms that had governed Western thoughts for centuries. In his contemplation on reason, Kant was interested in the relationship between thought and action. In defence of his renowned and influential work

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“Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) and his moral philosophy, which were regarded as purely theoretical with no possibility of implementation in real life, Kant wrote the Critique of Practical Reason (1778). This was written to explain and analyse action, its ethical roots and the network of interests and considerations which brings it forth. However, as Wood write in his introduction to the 1997 edition of Kant’s book: his thorough critique of reason in its practical use goes beyond the specific issue raised by his critics and attempts to show not only the consistency between speculative and practical reason but their interdependence and mutual support. (Gregor 1996, 136)

For Kant, practical reason is the general human capacity to understand and pinpoint a motivation behind an action, according to which, through reflection and reasoning, one could arrive at an action. That is, it is the ability to contemplate action and its consequences. Put more simply, it is the ability to act according to reason. In this definition of practical reason, Kant already alludes to deliberation and intention as being at the core of such a capacity. The ability to act for Kant is related to individual agency, which is the human capacity for selfdetermination or will and personal autonomy—which is one of the main ideas of the Enlightenment. Our capacity for deliberative self-determination raises two sets of philosophical problems. First, there are questions about how deliberation can succeed in being practical in its result. What do we need to assume—both about agents and about the processes of reasoning they engage in—to make sense of the fact that deliberative reflection can directly give rise to action? Can we do justice to this dimension of practical reason while preserving the idea that practical deliberation is genuinely a form of reasoning? Second, there are large issues concerning the content of the standards that are brought to bear in practical reasoning. Which norms for the assessment of action are binding us as agents? Do these norms provide resources for critical reflection about our ends or are they exclusively instrumental? Under what conditions do moral norms yield valid standards for reasoning about action? Naturally, these two key points rest on the understanding of the designer as a social agent (Ventura 2012), meaning that agentic abilities, in Gell’s theory (1998), are manifested in the myriad decisions related to the design process. As we can see in the chapter dealing with ideology and design, these agentic abilities hold various implications from an ethical perspective, as well as from the actual relation between theory and practice, stemming from the very definition of the designer’s role in society. Action, intentionality and agency are also at the core of the eighteenthcentury empiricist David Hume’s consideration of the relationship between theory and practice. Hume, however, located agency and the ability to act in the human emotional capacity and habits. As we can see, such questions regarding the relationship between theory and practice are integrated with others revolv-

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ing around the locus of human agency and reasoning. Philosophical questions around this relationship circle such questions of agency and often try to locate the motivation and implications of action in its relationship to ideology. Furthermore, this intricate relationship also influences the debate presented at the start of this volume, relating to the discussion between formalism and functionalism. However, the discussion around practical reason, while looking at the relationship between thought and action, does not directly refer to the relationship practice—the repetition of action and the variety established through repetition—in the same way that identity creates difference. In Kant’s later work On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But it Won’t Work in Practice (1793), he attempts to further specify the relationship between theory and practice through examining the old saw: “that which may work in theory may not work in practice.” For Kant, this serves as a starting point for a discussion of the primacy of theory over practice, specifically looking at its application to different disciplines or sociopolitical categories. Here, Kant defines theory-seeking to create general frameworks to describe the principles that operate behind certain phenomena. In turn, phenomena mean not only human action but a wider scope of objects, agents and processes. Conversely, we need to consider that theory is a supposition, and according to this definition is never entirely certain of its truth. In other words, a theory is never finished or whole, as it is extendable ad infinitum. Therefore, at its core is an acknowledgement of observation as an accumulative act, whereby further “practical” things that are observed may reveal new phenomena or behaviour along the way and change the theory all together. This definition is very much aligned with scientific thought and Kant’s anchor in empirical reality. It pertains to a model of knowledge production that is specific to such disciplines that are measurable and quantifiable. If one considers design only in relation to its functionality and reproducibility, Kant’s definition might be enough. However, if one considers design as a creative practice—that is, a practice that also looks at aspects of aesthetics, pleasure and identity rather than universality—it is clear that the empirical model cannot help or encompass the problem of design theory. Furthermore, in relation to design, while there is not yet a single inherent and coherent theory, this approach is highly relevant. Therefore, we can claim that design theory is cumulative, iterative and flexible in its layered knowledge built on various adjacent disciplines. Notably, according to this definition, theoretical modelling is looking to describe phenomena, not to stabilise them. In practice, it is about the possibility of reproducing results in a controlled environment However, if discourses around theory and practice aim to help us reflect on the relationship between thought and action, then it is clear that in other fields, like social sciences, such a model or definition would not be operative. This is because the very assumption that humans have agency and freedom to act according to reasoning already contradicts the idea of a perfect theoretical model for society that is always stable and never changing. In other words, production and reproduction, action and reaction are difficult to model because there are too

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many unknown variables that could influence the result. Indeed, as Kant himself puts this in relation to social situations: This maxim […] does the greatest harm when it has to do with something moral (duties of virtue or duties of right). For here it is a matter of the canon of reason (in the practical), where the worth of practice rests entirely on its conformity with the theory underlying it, and all is lost if the empirical and hence contingent conditions of carrying out the law are made conditions of the law itself. (Kant et al. 1974)

Contrary to scientific methodology, Kant suggests that in ethics, theory should form the basis for practice. In the classic scientific method, one comes to a theory from the observation of phenomenon or what happens in practice so to speak. Theory, following this assumption, is then perceived as a result of a cumulative collection of data points reflecting the phenomenon observed. If the scientific theoretical method precedes observation and conditions it, then, as Kant suggests, the logic of scientific thought will defy itself. A deliberation on the result of observation can easily become a distortion of the results and interpretation of the phenomenon by the same faculty that is supposed to decipher it—reason. This is especially pertinent if one considers reason from a postmodern perspective as the sum of knowledge and preconceptions one may have on the said phenomenon. However, when coming to examine human behaviour for the purpose of establishing social order, the dynamics or relationship between theory and practice changes its directionality. In ethics, according to Kant, it is the idea, the model, the theory that comes to control and stabilise phenomenon. It functions as a set of guidelines, rules through which practice should be regulated. One could say it is the field most associated with the development of the notion of “practical reason.” Here, however, perhaps lies one of the main differences between theory and ideology. 4.3 OLD SAWS ARE REFLECTIONS OF PRACTICAL REASON Immanuel Kant’s works The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won’t Work in Practice (1793) are perhaps the first in modern history to analyse, dismantle and understand the relationship between theory and practice. Kant, of course, was also a philosopher of ethics and politics, and as his main interest was in morals, he theorised action in relation to motivation, impulse and practical knowledge so that an operative model of social behaviour would be considered when developing his political ethics. In The Old Saw he looks at a more systematic critique of how relationships between practice and theory shape different scholarly fields. Already we can see the discussion focusing on two different aspects—the first being the philosophy of action itself, while the second is related to scale

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and responsibility. Indeed, the second aspect is a critical analysis of the way in which practice and theory mutually influence each other in different disciplines (Kant separates empirical science and engineering from philosophy and morals in this regard). Kant mentions three levels to consider. In each, the relationship between theory and practice is slightly different: I divide this treatise according to the three different standpoints from which the worthy gentleman, who so boldly disparages theories and systems usually appraises his objects, and so in his three capacities: (1) as a private individual who is still a man of affairs, (2) as a statesman, (3) as a man of the world - (or citizen of the world generally) […] We shall therefore present the relation of theory to practice in three parts: first in morals generally (with a view to the well-being of every human being), second in politics (with reference to the well-being of states), third from a cosmopolitan perspective (with a view to the well-being of the human race as a whole and insofar as it is conceived as progressing toward its wellbeing in the series of generations of all future times). (Kant 1993, 280–281)

Before Kant breaks the relationship between theory and practice in relation to discipline, Kant looks at the agent, or the actor, as a means of telling apart the different possible connections that can exist between them. The question of the relationship between theory and practice becomes a question of power and also as a result, the delineation of power relations. And, as we shall see in the upcoming chapters, this is also very true in relation to design. What is unique about design, in this context, is that it offers a construct that stabilises human action—and from that perspective, acts as a theory-inpractice. As we have seen in the chapter dealing with ideology and ethics, the designer has a significant role in society, defining his or her role as an agentic influencer on our visual-material reality. As in other professions, then, design might mirror healthcare professionals, teachers or lawyers that follow a professional code depicting their agentic powers vis-à-vis their disciplinary modus operandi. This indeed is a direct manifestation of the need to exercise power or control. Therefore, we can use this division offered by Kant to locate what is called in design jargon “wicked problems” or lacunas relating to and stemming from the designer’s responsibility. The designer, if she is to be an agent, first needs to identify what kind of agent she seeks to be and how the extent of her influence can be calculated (see Guersenzvaig and Ventura 2023 for more detail). The larger the circle of influence, the more consideration one should take in examining the exact relationship between theory and practice. For the relationship stipulated between theory and practice can define the motivation of the design. We can understand, then, that the various outputs of design practice hold varying levels of responsibility. Art jewellery, for example, holds less influence on our communal life than service or urban design. The larger the circle of influence, the

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more political and social implications we need to consider before implementing a design idea into practice. Design as an action and in relation to daily activities is an interesting case. On the one hand, it is often a creation of an individual or a group of individuals and is often evaluated in relation to the creative agency of designers. However, if design, as we have discussed before, offers a trajectory for social behaviour and for the anchoring of practice—in the sense of habits or costumes in our day-to-day life—then the designer can also be conceived of as an active sociocultural interpreter, especially in relation to the construction of social identity and public space. Within a global context and the discourses around the consequences of mass production on the ability of the human species to survive, design already transforms to the realm of philosophy and can be seen to belong to the third order Kant denotes—that of cosmopolitan responsibility. Hence, we see that the relationship between theory and practice in the case of design does not fall under any distinct traditional category, and the agent of design—the designer—can occupy various positions within the circles of political influence and hover between disciplinary definitions of social sciences, exact science or the humanities. Contemporary design education accentuates, for example, the social and global responsibility of designers. As we shall see in the final chapter of this book “Design and Ideology,” the responsibility of the designer, or the area of practice that is relevant to design, is expanding. Often embedded within institutions dedicated to arts and humanities, designers are encouraged to think about the specific relationship between theory and practice in their work. The challenge in defining a definite hierarchy or directionality between practice and theory in the field of design stems from such vast variations in the definition of the designer as an agent and an actor, and also from it being a necessarily trans-disciplinary endeavour. This difficulty is further intensified owing to the very fluid nature of design, both in its purpose and goals, as well as in its methodologies. Therefore, jewellery design, aimed to offer unique objects to the few who are able to buy its outcomes, is based on craft and low-scale research methodologies. On the other hand, service or urban designers, aiming to influence the lives of millions, will refer to a different ethics code and implement varying research methods aimed at predicting the result of their intentions in everyday life. 4.3.1 Rethinking the Schism between Theory and Practice through the Design/Art/Technology Interdisciplinary Model Disciplinary divisions, as we know them today—art, science, humanities, social sciences, engineering, etc.—are a product of the formalisation of mass education and the adaptation of academic studies to the industrial model of production. However, the Enlightenment’s disciplinary models, which attempted to organise a new, secular or societal order in response to the rapid urbanisation processes that Western society saw at the beginning of the scientific, and later the Industrial Revolution, are closer to the intricate nature of design practice.

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Indeed, this difficulty is further enhanced by the history of design. While the first century following the Industrial Revolution saw design as a functional agent of industry aiding in the enhancement of sales, this changed after the Second World War. Over the past 70 years, as virtual and digital services and designed products have come to rule our lives, the professional locus of the designer has shifted to a liminal position between the academic and the material/industrial. The separation of theory and practice was meant to identify two different forms of agency in production processes, one which was academic, whose tools were virtual, and one which was practical whose tools were material. So that in each field of study and discipline, there were some who oversaw modelling and theorising, while others oversaw the implementation of such models. For example, philosophy, especially metaphysics and aesthetics, are the theoretical foundation of art practice; various communal sub-disciplines of social work, law and states’ affairs are based on ethics and political philosophy; science, or in its traditional philosophical definition, physics, stands at the basis of engineering practices and so on. Other new professions, such as psychology and anthropology, either developed from new theoretical fields and approaches or were quick to develop their own theoretical analysis and basis, because their products are virtual and their affiliation to industrial constructs are indirect. Design, which is a relatively modern term, as we have already seen, falls traditionally into the definition of practice. This means that traditionally speaking, design has been seen and understood as a pragmatic, material-based and technical occupation falling under the category of an applied profession, simply because it has developed in direct relationship to industries and their needs and, on the other hand, because of its association with art and creativity. Thus, contrary to its sister profession—architecture—which developed a large body of theory owing to its early beginning and sociocultural, political and religious significance—design theory was developed after realising other venues and relationships to industry were necessary. The distinction between theory and practice seems to lay its foundations in the same mundane consideration, and here the historical societal class division becomes apparent. We could think about this division from the point of view of devising social privilege in relation to constructs of power, in which knowledge and literacy are precursor to the division of labour. Thus, as was the case in art history, the major body of study in most design school canons revolved around Western visual-material products and major economic powers in the same geopolitical areas. Considering that formal education was available at that time only to very specific groups defined by their class, religion, gender and race, one can easily see that the divisions of labour and class are deeply connected to who has the provision over the theory, the knowledge of the reason behind the action. Traditionally, such skills as critical thinking, contemplation, reflection and reasoning were accessible to those in power and thus maintained societal power dynamics. Therefore, from a historical point of view, there were parts of society in charge of labour management and planning and others in charge of production

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and execution. Within any project as such, there were those who were in charge of the virtual aspects of ideas and those who were involved only in the realisation of these ideas. These divisions were very much transferred to the early educational systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were divided into vocational education on the one hand (i.e. practice-based training for those interested in finding occupation within industrial production lines, academic education and later managerial education), and on the other hand, theory-based learning for those who were interested in the creative and ideological aspects of human endeavour. Naturally, the designer can be placed in the position of a theoretician who hands a set of instructions and indications to producers. However, at the same time if the project of design does not pertain directly to questions of philosophy, it is rather theory—or theoretical considerations that are already integrated in the design work itself. Indeed, as we in Chapter 5, from while theoretical and ideological issues rose in the ranks of design movements of the early 1920s and 1930s, however, it was the second part of the twentieth century that brought a significant shift. Alongside subculture movements, raising the flag of gender and race equality, design thinkers such as Tomás Maldonado, Victor Papanek and later Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan raised critical theoretical questions regarding wicked problems ranging from the role of the designer in society to the discipline’s problematic influence on culture and economy. However, these were generally limited and targeted at practice, not on a philosophical sphere as we can see much later in the works of Glenn Parsons and Jane Forsey. Indeed, following this logic, we can understand that as the discipline shifted and broadened its influence to include urban design, interaction design, service design and the ramifications of personal security, AI, the meta-verse and more triggered a need for a broader and more complex design theory framework. Whether it be an object of design or a process, its role is to detail the creative process by translating theory into actions by giving instructions for making or reproducing an object or a relationship. From this perspective, the designer is a unique agent that must be able to hold both ends of this spectrum of the relationship between idea and action. This is also reflected when trying to define design in relation to traditional disciplinary fields. Furthermore, while at the early stages we could define a tendency towards theory for design, we can now add theory of design and by design. These can include background research, empirical research, data gathering and interpretation, reflective strategies, applied aesthetics and semiotics and ideation-triggering through critical theoretical thinking. 4.4 DESIGN AND ACADEMIA: DESIGN AS RESEARCH In the same way that the Industrial Revolution had shaped educational systems in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the introduction of complex machines, such as robots and electric assembly lines, required increasingly skilled workers, and engineering was born as a means of providing a mixture of

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practical and theoretical education. Similarly in the humanities, parallel divisions exist, which separate between art theory, art history and art practice. As artists do follow historical and theoretical studies in most higher education institutions, a heated debate around the necessity of theory for the practice of art or design themselves has been part of creative education for a while. The conflict is a historical one that derives exactly from such philosophical discussions as we have just engaged with—surrounding the right for creative agency and its place within societal structures. In its call for autonomy art requests to free the artist, the creative agency, from any prescriptive influences, and in the myth of Western culture, reinforced by the myth of modern art, creative agency is often sanctified and emphasised over ideology. As we have seen, the case of design is different in the discipline’s functional roots in the industry and the human need for survival. However, as the designer became a sophisticated and complex jack-of-all-trades, so did their education change, mirroring the industry’s needs and constraints. This schism or power struggle between theory and practice in relation to creative agency is still apparent in the structure of further and higher education. In major design institutions, degrees are often defined on an “either/or” basis, whereby research and knowledge are put on one side and creative practice and experimentation are put on the other—with only accidental, associative correspondence between fields. While as early as the Bauhaus, lectures were taught by a duo of lecturers—a theoretical one and a practical one—yet these are haphazard efforts based on valid economic reasoning allowing for two lecturers in the same classroom. Yet, as companies and design studios understand the necessity of research in the ever-growing non-classical areas—ranging from healthcare, through services to frontline technologies—design academies follow. The historical separation between traditional academia, the university and institutions dedicated to applied professions, or as they were called across Europe, Polytechnique colleges, is another way in which this schism between theory and practice is reflected in the way we understand and conceive of design. Indeed, even in the museum sphere, we can see that till this day in some countries a design museum is called “applied arts,” mirroring the relationship between the two. The place of design within the educational framework is significant to understanding the histories and theories of design as an autonomous field. It can also condition what design can do or ought to do, as it stipulates our imagination and understanding of design, it also locates design in between the practical disciplines of engineering and the creative discipline of philosophy and art. However, unlike traditional practical vocations, the theoretical basis for design was not immediately understood, and to a large extent we could say that it is not fully understood and accepted to this day. A pertaining argument still exists in design pedagogy circles as to how to educate designers. Somehow, maybe because of its apparent focus in aesthetics, its historical relationship to craft and applied arts and having no traditional theoretical affiliation of its own,

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designers received an educational basis drawing from art. This tendency, which is under debate in design departments and schools, tends to miss the point of design and its meaning altogether as also contended by Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin in their book Discovering Design: This separation (between theory and practice) is nowhere more evident than in the tendency to elevate special instances of production to the status of fine art, while dismissing the vast range of useful and often beautiful production as merely the result of vocational or commercial enterprise, unsuitable for serious study. The development of disciplines such as the history and philosophy of technology, material culture and cultural studies, signifies an effort to reassess the importance of things in cultural life. But the emphasis, even in these disciplines, is on the material products that result from design […] not the complex activity of designing. (Buchanan 1995, X–XI)

Here we can already understand that when speaking of design, there is a call to speak of a wider field than the field of the designed object itself, and that design, therefore, is left as a practice lacking serious theoretical engagement. The call for design theory arises from a need to better define the framework from which design stems and to underline the unspoken principles that are at its core. Other examples can be found in Margolin’s call for the development of “design studies,” as in the extensive body of work presented by Guy Julier, which creates almost single-handedly an autonomous design anthropology approach that is separated from its ancestral material culture father. Julier was one of the first to acknowledge the importance of design anthropology as a subdiscipline that integrated the meaning of sociocultural context in design practice along with its broader economic ramifications. A significant implication of this theory is that although material and visual culture hold important contributions for design theory, independent approaches such as design anthropology are no less crucial. Looking at the place of design theory today, we can outline three distinct approaches towards the relation between theory and practice: first, borrowing theoretical data from other disciplines, such as art history and material culture; second, developing design theory from former roots, such as the works of Parsons and Julier; and third, developing new theories specifically targeting designers, such as the works of Dunn and Raby and Margolin. Naturally, all three are crucial, but the third needs time and an extensive body of work triggered by fully pledged design theoreticians. 4.4.1 Scale of Creativity From previous discussions in this chapter, it is clear that what may be useful for design is its liminal and multifaceted definition from a trans-disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective. One of the more influential voices in the project of freeing design from its traditional affiliations is Vilem Flusser, who in 1993 wrote

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the important work “About the Word Design,” part of his collection of essays Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (2013). In this text, Flusser looks at the etymology of the word design in corroboration with other words such as craft, magic, trickster and deception. Parallel to a similar exploration (Wilson and Laoghaire 2001), the researchers find that the distinction between these words as delineating separate things is a recent invention and that, in fact, before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such words as art, deign, technology were used interchangeably, referring to the same phenomenon. The clear separation between art, design and technology seems more like a political division rather than an essential one. At least etymologically, indeed there is no significant difference between the meanings of art, engineering and design, and when one removes the traditional political separation2 of art and other creative fields—a possible, different perspective may arise imagining their relationship as different instances on a scale or as a spectrum. Interestingly, in Japanese the etymology of a “craftsperson” stems from the word “carpenter” (daiku), echoing the importance of practice (and wood as a cultural material) to that of social context. If we take Flusser’s understanding of design as a practice that fluctuates between art and technology, then we can understand that the scale is one of creative practices. But, interestingly, the core goal of creativity may be defined as a means of controlling, regulating, framing, understanding and intervening with the natural. This control can be interpreted as direct and material, as in the case of technology (the classic CCTV surveillance or Facebook/Google storing private information, etc.), while on the other hand of the scale, this control can allude to control over symbolic, psychological, and psycho-social levels, as arise in the question of art and certain instances of design. One end of the scale externalises control and the other end of the scale internalises it. One end looks at intervening the symbolic and imaginary orders of human experience, while the other end of the spectrum looks at intervening with the Real in the form if external structures within which energy and power are transitioning (Figure 4.1). A design, a piece of art or a piece of engineering could very well travel on this scale, depending on the creative product’s relationship to material and/or symbolic control. In this sense, for instance, we could place Philippe Starck’s juicer (Figure 4.2) on the symbolic end of design practice, as a design that conveys an interesting symbolic gesture but fails to fulfil its material function properly, while on the other side of the design scale, we could place an object such as the medical walker, an object which fulfils its material function however does not take into account the symbolic (and hence political and psychological) aspects of its use. When considering this scale, one can also bear in mind, that each of those instances on the scale of control—art, design and engineering—are media, in that they are means through which one communicates with the environment, either social or political (on the symbolic sphere) or natural (on the material sphere).

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Art

>>>>>>

Design

>>>>>>

Technology.

Symbolic / imaginary Control

Internal world

Material Control.

Practical Symbol

External world

Figure 4.1 Looking at the spectrum of art, design and technology through the trans-disciplinary lens.

Figure 4.2 Philip Starck, Juicy Salif lemon squeezer, designed in 1998, has been often criticised for lacking in functionality, and in many ways impractical, however, still considered an important conceptual design example.

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As media, Marshall McLuhan’s definition of hot versus cold media could be a seed for a fruitful discussion on the implications of each, while acknowledging to what extent each of these are lending themselves to interaction and response. A deeper dive into such suggestion will be offered in a forthcoming volume, which will focus more specifically on the relationship between design and digital technologies. For now, this scheme had been suggested in order to demonstrate and provide a point of departure for the discussion in this chapter, which takes such a trans-disciplinary approach to the relationship between theory and practice of design. The advantage of such a position, which looks at design on a spectrum or a scale of creative practice, allows us several trajectories in developing a discussion around the relationship between theory and practice in different design fields and their proximity to the symbolic, imaginary or the real. One could use this scale to understand better why design’s position in relation to theory and practice is unique, as it can serve both as an experimental platform for the development of empirical conception but also can function as a framework for action that is related to a theoretical, ideological, cultural, social or any other behavioural framework. As such, the condition of design allows one to produce knowledge in ways that are independent from the traditional academic, theoretical model. And, indeed, over the past three decades, design had become an important factor in generating trans-disciplinary research for its own ends in movements such as social design and co-design and in putting social research and action research at the centre of design practices that looks to construct their own ideological frameworks—in response to specific groups of people and their needs. It had also contributed to the production of knowledge by articulating design creative through diagrams and products of design that are in service to other disciplines and industries. This is generally known as “design thinking,” a field of design that looks at the theorisation of creative processes ideation, evaluation and production. As such design, in its ability to articulate theory through practical means and practice through theoretical means, contributes to our understanding of such human faculties as creativity, pure reason and practical reason. Although this model has been successful, it has various drawbacks when dealing with social and cultural layers of a design situation. Conversely, this is a part of the reason we prefer the overview of “design theory,” as it offers a broader spectrum and includes the practical and reflective-speculative and less practical aspects of design as a discipline. “Speculative thinking” is another mode of design thinking that has been particularly important in contemporary debates about the future of humanity. “Speculative thinking”—takes the aspect of design that allows the modelling of behaviours and interactions between material, human and nonhuman agents, and their projection into a practical future contemplated through design. Such thinking is important, especially when looking to solve such global issues as the climate crisis or the complex relationship with technology, and will be further discussed in our chapter on design in the post-human lens. Indeed,

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Figure 4.3 Between theory and practice map.

while this mode of thinking formulated by Dunne and Raby in their Design Noir and Speculative Everything (2001; 2013) offers reflective, creative and critical thinking through and for design, we opt to integrate this important venue with design theory. This integration will offer empirical-based practical research along with more reflexive and philosophical outputs on the central and less-trodden highways of design practice. Map of the relationships between design theory and practice is below (Figure 4.3). NOTES 1. 2.

This chapter was written with Lee Weinberg. When speaking of this separation as a political one, I mean that art was put on a higher pedestal in the course of the years as it was used as a symbolic representation and oftentimes used as a direct manifestation of power, whether it be religious, political or monetary. This is a perspective that begs an acknowledgement that there is a political interest in keeping art separate and autonomous—and that this political interest had maintained the symbolic screen between art and the everyday despite the efforts of Avant-Garde art movements to follow an opposite logic.

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REFERENCES Buchanan, R. A., ed. 1995. Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dunne, A. and F. Raby. 2001. Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Berlin/ Heidelberg: Springer Science & Business Media. Dunne, A. and F. Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press. Flusser, V. 2013. Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. New York: Reaktion Books. Gadamer, H. G. 2004. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gregor, Mary J. 1996. Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guersenzvaig, A. and J. Ventura. 2023. “Designing as self-enactment: responsibility and virtue in design.” Editors – TBD. Boca Raton FL: CRC Press (forthcoming). Iser, W. 2006. How To Do Theory. London: Blackwell. Kant, I. 1993. The Cambridge Edition of the works of Immanuel Kant, edited by P. Allen and W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel, E. B. Ashton and G. Miller. 1974. “[Introduction].” In On the Old Saw: That May Be Right in Theory But It Won’t Work in Practice, 39–44. University of Pennsylvania Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fj2nk. Segal, K. and Ventura, J. 2016. From Lucy to Bernini: Alternative Perceptions of Design. Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks. Ventura, J. 2012. “A Thing about Things: Ethnography and Anthropological Thought as an Applied Method in the World of Industrial Design.” PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem [in Hebrew], chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/ http://arad.mscc.huji.ac.il/dissertations/W/JMS/001732964.pdf. Ventura, J. 2015. “Uncanny Mechanics: Industrial Design and the Threatened Body.” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 2: 125–136. Ventura, J. and G. Shvo. 2018. “I Just Cut My Finger in a Ninja Fight: The Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Band-Aid.” Punctum 4, no. 1: 179–201. Ventura, J. and G. Ventura. 2015. “Exphrasis: Verbalizing Unexisting Objects in the World of Design.” Design and Culture 7, no. 2: 185–202. Wilson, Mick and Dún Laoghaire. 2001. “How Should We Speak About Art And Technology?” Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology 1, no. 1: 1–6.

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What exactly do we mean when we talk about the Olympic Games? The apparent referent is what “really” happens. That is to say, the Olympics are a gigantic spectacle of sport in which athletes from across the world compete; the markedly national, even patriotic, ritual of the parades by various national teams; the award ceremonies replete with flying flags and blaring anthems. But the hidden referent is the television show: the ensemble of representations of the athletic spectacle, filmed and broadcast by television in selections that, because the competition is international, appear unmarked by national bias. The Olympics then are doubly hidden: no one sees all of it and no one sees that they don’t see it. Every television viewer can have the illusion of seeing the (real) Olympics (Bourdieu 1998, 79). The city and the village are tools to produce anthropologies, to achieve social identification among the residents. For example, I become “I” in the village, thanks to a medicine bag and in the city thanks to an official identity card. For example, I identify myself in the village as a howling goat and in the city as a taxpayer. Village and city are structures through which people identify with something or identify themselves as something. Put another way, culture and civilisation are strategies for a generation of human individuals, and these strategies are constantly improving. This is a truism: village and city are factories of the masks with which people identify themselves. In the village, the masks are still material. In the city, they become increasingly immaterial and thus increasingly numerous. But this truism stops being one once it is recognised that nothing is hidden behind the masks and that they are really the dancers. Culture and civilisation are a masquerade, a Danse Macabre. There is no one who lays on a mask to identify themselves, but rather, these masks secrete those wearing them out of themselves (Flusser 2002, 174). Baudrillard was right to warn us that “You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you” (Baudrillard 1994, 29). 5.1 DESIGN, SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND POWER Why don’t you indulge yourself in a new, state-of-the-art Hoover vacuum cleaner or our newest GE washing machine? You will have time to bake your wonderful husband and lovely kids an apple pie when they return from their daily life.

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Though this is not an exact example, it is historically accurate (Hill 2002; McDonough and Egolf 2015). Designers, engineers and marketing experts linked innovative technology, leisure and style to mould and reshape family roles, gender norms and personal relations in post-World War Two America. As soldiers came back from the war and women who helped the war effort needed to evacuate these posts, design came to the rescue once more. Unfortunately, just like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” economic rebuilding of the US economy following the Great Depression, design served a complex target. Ads from the 1950s used technology and designed products to outline the new model of the “stay-at-home mom,” whose primary job is to take care of her family and keep her home clean. These newest inventions—the dishwasher, stove, electric iron, washing machine and more—were aimed at securing another consumer agent as well as anchoring women to their homes. Just as the 1930s design created a newly forged bond between the designer, the marketing expert and the consumer, so did design serve to recreate gender boundaries in the 1950s (see, e.g., the Hoover ad in Figure 5.1). As we shall see in the next part of this chapter, design is closely linked to our various identities. Moreover, owing to its vast reach which encapsulates almost Figure 5.1 Hoover ad from the 1950s.

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all our daily activities, design could be and generally is linked to various social institutions through which symbolic power and social norms and conventions are triggered and manifested. The intriguing dialogue between design and the body is addressed in other parts of this book, so we shall focus in the following pages on design and normative power, as well as design’s potential to propagate other possibilities. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Henry Dreyfuss’s Designing for People ushered in a new ergonomic era, in which designers think of and imagine their products being used by real people. However, at the heart of the matter stands a complex and potentially harmful concept of the “standard.” As the ethos of design is the manufacture and distribution of millions of products, a standard is necessary. Making the standard good is not easy, but it is possible (as proven by Dreyfuss). Making the standard fair and ethical, though, is a different operation altogether. Indeed, design for inclusivity and social design heralded a new age in which marginalised social groups were given attention in design, yet unfortunately this approach still has marginal influence. Let us delve deeper into the roots of the problem. Classic Marxist does not help us understand the significance and influence of the designer, since this incredibly influential position was understandably neglected in Marx’s power pyramid model. Still, Marx (1973 [1857], 706) did describe designed objects as “organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified”; however, it was his successors that truly understood the dangerous potential of design. Lukásc (1972) understood the volatile nature of the designed object and its ability to camouflage its production while seeming to miraculously manifest on the store’s shelves. The Frankfurt School thinkers (Marcuse 2007; Adorno 2020) raised the issue of popular culture and the attendant crumbling of intellect through defrosted and reheated values through contemporary media. However, as we saw, Marxist approaches throughout the practice of design were significant symbols of potential change. Either through the designer’s responsibility towards sustainability or social justice, the deeper links between post-Marxist theories and design practice were formulated rather late in the evolution of design history (Papanek 1971; Maldonado and Cullars 1991). Amidst these various post-Marxist theories, let us focus on two: Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, since their theories of embodied normative power and capital stand at the very heart of design and are highly relevant and significant in daily activities. Given that our focus is normative power, let us start with a brief juxtaposition between two classic approaches towards micro power. Famously, John Locke surmised that to contain balance and control in our society, the individual must relinquish their personal freedom to keep societal chaos at bay. Indeed, over the centuries, religions, political cultures and social norms and conventions outlined a sphere of expected behaviour from civilians. Yet, as some of the domineering socialisation agents grew in influence and sophistication, our personal freedom is further hindered and narrowed.

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Living in a reality that is over-designed and over-broadcasted, monitored through wearable technologies, CCTV, live streams and instantaneous social media updates, means our behaviour has never been so monitored. Recently, and contrary to the liberal theories of post-EU political thinkers, the power of the state has not diminished, but rather augmented its influence. As COVID-19 exploded across the world in successive pandemic waves, local and national boundaries were reaffirmed, excluding outsiders and cocooning societal order in a constant fear of contamination. As New Zealand closed its borders to incoming visitors, other countries such as China committed to a “zero-COVID” mentality, questioning the very foundation of personal freedom in favour of the local and national good. Worryingly, innovative tracking technologies that were developed to face these challenges rapidly became misused by governments, deployed to track opposition leaders instead of sick civilians. Indeed, the relation between designers and their ability to imbue our material surroundings with power, control and (hidden) violence are rapidly growing, rendering the link between normative power and design practice extremely important. A classic theory of normative power was presented by German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), reflecting the modernist utilitarian approach towards bureaucracy and large economic and government organisations (Clegg et al. 2006; Wharton 2015). Weber was one of the first theoreticians to describe the efficiency of the bureaucratic system so common in Western societies. This system works on several principles: efficiency, impersonal attention to the service user and a defined set of rules applicable to all (employees as well as service users). Another interesting facet of the classic bureaucratic system is its structure of power. According to Weber, this system can manifest in several ways: it is made known to all, seen and direct and legitimate; it is hierarchical and linear (stemming from the top downwards); and established through a well-documented system of rules and principles (Weber 2009; Styhre 2013). Before analysing how this mode of power operates in contemporary design, let us elaborate on the importance of legitimacy. Given that legitimate control is stronger than the alternative, Weber’s mode of control is legitimate by default: if you take part in a certain sociocultural system, you adhere to its set of rules and principles. For example, if you are hired as a graphic designer, you are obligated to follow the instructions of your superiors as long as they follow the definition of your position (naturally, making coffee or buying a Danish pastry for your boss does not fall within these limits). Hierarchical legitimate power means that, for example, if a governmental health minister ordains a decree that people must wear masks in crowded closed areas, a process of orders gets passed along to their subordinates all the way down to a manager of a shopping mall in a small city. In Figure 5.2, we can see two posters meant for distributing information for the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. While both signs entail a degree of power mandated on the individual, the left sign is a direct decree, while the right one signifies an embodied influence.

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Figure 5.2 Two types of messages designed as posters to trigger differing meanings.

However, when the government declares a rule dictating that only vaccinated children will be able to attend school, this is transformed into an example of manipulative, circular power, theorised in the works of French thinker Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Foucault’s entire oeuvre is beyond the scope of this chapter, but we shall focus on several of his key theoretical concepts and their relevance to design. Contrary to Weber’s legitimate, hierarchical and rational system of institutionalised power, Foucault’s (1980) circular model offers a different yet complementary approach. According to this approach, power is historically generated through social institutions, formulated into norms and conventions and imbued into our bodies as behaviours. As such, circular power does not have a point of origin, nor is it hierarchical, but rather influences us all. As it is not transparent, it is not overly legitimate, and instead rests on tactics of subversive influence and manipulation. As we have seen, changing gender power relations through designed appliances and advertisement is a classic Foucauldian (2012) move of negating options, that is, offering seemingly appropriate options, yet, in fact, navigating the individual into a specific choice. Pierre Bourdieu added another element to the “supervision by design” approach, articulated in his concept of “habitus.” While the concept of cultural capital is hardly new in sociological theory, Bourdieu (2020) developed this concept into several attributes: social capital acquired through objects (alluding to the individual’s taste and economic reach), through personal achievements of the acquisition of knowledge (for instance, an academic diploma granted by an Ivy League school) and—the most interesting of these—the embodied capital. Interestingly, all these are either mediated by or articulated using designed objects: for instance, the sense of what to wear, to which occasion, and how to materially and visually articulate one’s taste all resolve around a person’s habitus. Be it the pair of sneakers you purchase or the computer you work on, or your body posture and accent, this all mirrors the deeply rooted inequality embedded

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in a person’s upbringing and cultural capital. Indeed, the cultural field of design (Bourdieu 1993) is strictly surrounded by gatekeepers—curators, practitioners, blogs and site managers as well as educators—to hold and distribute a set of values and ideas. The understanding that a designer’s role is to serve the capitalist order (as introduced in Chapter 2) is a possibility, but it certainly is not the only or even the central one. Against these ideas of “supervision by design,” we might juxtapose another theoretical approach heralded by Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt and the Situationists International (SI), which altogether are known as “democratic design.” Contrary to Foucault’s well-known panopticon which stresses an embodied power propagated by hidden supervision agents (as in his classic analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s circular prison design), Habermas offered a view of what he called “the public sphere” (1991). As in the Agora of ancient Greece, the public sphere is a physical (and now a virtual) space in which individuals can propose views and opinions ungoverned by agencies of the state. Hannah Arendt (2013) built on Habermas’s concept, introducing the notion that the public sphere involved elements of authenticity and integrity, regrettably rapidly evaporating from our virtual existence through the mediation of Photoshop and Deep Fake technologies. However, as Pinker (2003) correctly surmised, urban design of the public square is a materialisation of the Emperor’s New Clothes: it is a venue in which citizens can expose their ruler’s “nudity,” so to speak. Public squares are a relatively safe and open space in which multitudes can demonstrate, protest and share opinions, originating historically in ancient Greece’s Agora or the Ekklesiasterion. Therefore, the design and use of a free and public space are critical elements in every society, as we can see in the mass demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011 (Figure 5.3) and in the Independence Square in Kiev in 2014 (Figure 5.4). Indeed, while Habermas’s concept of “democratic space” became well known, societies’ and governments’ modes of control and surveillance became more subversive and universal, as we can see in the credit surveillance system in China. In our age of Internet of Things (IoT), wearable technologies and biometric databases, other theories call for the attention of—if not immediate action by—citizens and designers. Indeed, as the Internet—conceived of as a purely democratic space—became another tool of surveillance via data harvesting of social media and search engine use, other solutions are needed. As “free” social networks mine and sell data to third parties for commercial use, flooding us with alarmingly relevant ads and commodifying our very identities, the virtual democratic space is rapidly dwindling. Google’s monthly report on our individual browsing histories, collecting data on the various online locations we visited in the last 30 days and its sale to third parties for marketing contributes to this shrinking of democracy in the virtual sphere. Let us consider two alternative theories, those of French thinkers Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) and Michel de Certeau (1925–1986). While de Certeau

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Figure 5.3 Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Arab Uprising protests of 2011.

(1998) focused on people’s routines and daily behaviour, Lefebvre (1991; 1996) called for a re-examination of urban design, city planning and architectural standards. De Certeau expressed the importance of private and individualistic changes of behaviour as a form of social protest. For instance, IKEA “hackers,” who by repurposing and/or upcycling IKEA products, seek to change the meaning and design of said products is a good example (Figure 5.5). Another example is navigating through the city not by the fastest route, but rather the more intimate, nostalgic or beautiful one. Lefebvre, differently, called for an urban revolution, in which will be professed the right to the city. By that, he meant every person living in a city will be entitled to a set of privileges. Resisting social or cultural seclusion, we as designers naturally need to ask various questions such as “which rights?”, “in what form?” and so on. Yet, these two thinkers present options for designers to propagate social exclusion and help create and maintain the next generation of democratic spaces that are relevant to contemporary social norms. As the protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo or countless other public squares show, their very design offers numerous individuals to legitimately express their opinions regarding the powers that be. Therefore, cleverly designed public

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Figure 5.4 Ukrainian revolution, Independence Square, Kiev, 2014.

Figure 5.5 IKEA hackers.

squares, as we can see throughout Europe and the Middle East, triggered social protests from Paris in 1789 until today. That is also at the heart of the debate regarding “net neutrality” or the struggle to keep the Internet free from capitalist grasp, since a common tactic of totalitarian and dictator rulers do is cut off their population from social media and independent internet sites.

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Let us examine these two approaches through several design projects, starting with an obvious example: Apple’s “closed garden” approach. German minimalist designer Dieter Rams once told an interviewer that the only difference between his design and Apple’s is the queue at their stores. Indeed, one of Rams’s famous “10 principles for good design” stands in contrast to contemporary design: “good design is honest.” Echoing Arendt’s notion introduced above, as designed objects become more shrouded in layer upon layer of marketing strategies and camouflaged in sociocultural norms, they are getting farther from being honest. While Apple might symbolise Max Weber’s approach to bureaucratic power—efficiency, impersonal attention to the service user and a set of rules applicable to all—it is, in fact, more akin to a classic Foucauldian system. Recall that according to Weber, legitimate control is stronger than the alternative, thus by default, if you take part in a certain sociocultural system, you adhere to its set of rules and principles. Apple is clearly defined and legitimated by the very notion of capitalist consumerism. However, as the late CEO of the company Steve Jobs once said, their designers’ job is to create an urgent need to buy a product that the consumer did not even know existed before. The products designed around this ability are called “evocative objects” (Turkle 2011). However, it is Apple’s tendency to change their design rules and, in fact, obligate loyal consumers to buy a set of accessories to be able to operate their new products is what mirrors Foucault’s theory of power. Take, for example, their innovative earpiece only compatible with their devices. By designing this product, Apple designers, in fact, created a new protocol, making earlier and older versions of Apple’s headsets irrelevant and compelling consumers to spend more money in buying a new set of accessories. On the other hand, alternative systems based on Android or open code design, for example, fall within the scope of Arendt’s or Habermas’s call for democratic design. Another example of “supervision by design” in practice can be seen in the sophisticated evolution of gated communities and luxury complexes in urban centres. Counter to the migration to the suburbs in the US in the second half of the twentieth century, city centres are now seen to offer cleaner and safer environments. Coupled with the skyrocketing prices of real estate, the very essence of urban communities has been redesigned. Interestingly, and in parallel to Foucault’s theories, luxury complexes evolved from clear-cut gated communities (embodying Weber’s legitimate theory of power) to gateless skyrises sprouting up in most urban centres. While private and closed residences have been a part of our lives for many years, contemporary designs shroud these with a layer of designed barriers almost transparent to pedestrians, making us believe these barriers are almost inexistent. In the Israeli context, luxury buildings in Tel Aviv’s centre (heralded in 2021 as the most expensive city in the world) are neither surrounded by walls nor camouflaged or situated in enclaves, but stand sideby-side to other buildings. Yet, they use very sophisticated systems of design planning and aesthetics to ward off pedestrians. By using very slight elevations

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and differentiating materials that accentuate the difference between private and public spaces, designers are excluding the city inhabitants and creating closed communities through design instead of actual fences (Yacobi et al. 2016). Just as Foucault described, our body automatically identifies and responds to a shift in walking angle, a change in pavement materials or aesthetic, thus returning us to our designated space. Furthermore, as stipulated by municipal law, developers must preserve a percentage of the land for public use. But by using these design tactics, they can elicit a subconscious response from pedestrians, preventing them from feeling comfortable entering these lofty domains. This new and dangerous venue of design renders again the designer as part of the problem—an agent of embedding new behaviours, to use Foucault’s theories—instead of a part of the solution. Following Papanek’s influential book Design for the Real World (1972), Victor Margolin (2002) urged designers to think not of finding answers to the question of design, but rather to rephrase their questions altogether. For instance, although classic design practice urged designers to redefine known questions, resulting in an abundance of (unnecessary) redesigned or improved objects, Margolin urges designers to ask whether these objects are needed in the first place. In other words, the question designers should ask is “why design?” rather than “how to design?” As we can see throughout this book, the roles of theory in design are not only to trigger innovation and broaden the scope of the designer’s knowledge, but act as a moral compass too, compelling designers to face thorny questions and ethical dilemmas. Indeed, the schism between the two schoolmasters of the famous Ulm School of Design in the mid-1960s originated from disagreements on the role of the designer. While modernist and functionalist Max Bill called for a designer that will primarily serve as a mediator of the forces of production and marketing, Argentinian socialist Tomas Maldonado stressed the importance of a different direction. Influenced by the Frankfurt School thinkers, Maldonado’s (1991) concept of the designer echoed the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) design curator Paula Antonelli’s call for designers to become the era’s material philosophers. In his famous essay on the political ramifications of comfort, Maldonado suggested that design’s political involvement has yet to be realised (Maldonado and Cullars 1991). In a theoretical answer to Marx’s neglect of the power of designed objects, Maldonado claimed that while comfort robs us of our innate nature to rebel against injustice, designed objects also create and maintain sociocultural norms, resulting in gender-oriented design and controlled public spaces. Maldonado’s call for action may redefine the role of the designer altogether. Rather than serving the global commodity market, the designer can and should work towards re-engaging the social sphere and communal involvement in our material surroundings. By shifting the designer’s work from what Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1998) described as “an educated carpenter” into what Alfred Gell termed “agentic abilities” (1998), the designer strays from an agent of imbuing design with power and control to a social agent who can enable social change (Ventura 2014).

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Figure 5.6 A Situationist advertisement, Paris, 1960s.

However, by choosing to wear a specific shirt or even walk a specific route through the city, we can express our private choice, thus echoing the other approach of “democratic design.” In the same vein as Debord’s (1992) “society of the spectacle,” in which our societal existence is mediated by images and visual representations, this approach holds potential for designers. In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of architects, artists and thinkers called the Situationists International started questioning our relation to urban environment (see Figure 5.6). To do so, they took out the asphalt from a street and asked people to look at the real, natural state of their neighbourhood. In another campaign of theirs, marketing advertisements were switched to guerrilla messaging (Bunyard 2017). But a theory most interestingly relevant to design is that of Michel de Certeau (1984). A key concept of de Certeau lies in a reframing of Walter Benjamin’s (1999) flâneur (originating with French poet Charles Baudelaire) or the “dandy” that walks and relates to his city in a completely subjective manner. Interestingly, in his The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau offered a modus operandi for the urban pedestrian to conduct mundane acts of subjective rebellion through minute activities and choices (de Certeau 1984). For instance, by using navigation apps, a person can opt to navigate a city not through the shortest or fastest route, but the one subjectively most memorable or beautiful for them. Fortunately, in the past decade, design activism has started to influence urban planning and the very relationship between residents and their city. Projects ranging from opening urban areas for the use of artists, designers or resident

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groups for free in an interim period before developers destroy and rebuild new buildings for the wealthy to pianos situated throughout urban surroundings for the use of all symbolises a slow yet positive change. Innovative approaches making use of placemaking tactics encourage citizens to take hold of their urban surroundings and conduct suitable changes for themselves, mirroring Arendt’s and Habermas’s suggestions. Even minor projects, such as Volkswagen’s “piano stairs”1 or Improve in Toronto,2 start by shifting people’s mood vis-à-vis modern drudgery. While these offer an encouraging glimmer of resistance, designers still need to propel and actively create a more significant shift from “supervision by design” to a more democratic urban setting. 5.2 DESIGN AND SOCIAL IDENTITY Even if all the bright intellects who ever lived were to agree to ponder this one theme, they would never sufficiently express their surprise at this fog in the human mind. Men do not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms; but they allow others to encroach on their lives – why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives. You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. (Seneca 1997, 4) By “Skin-ego” I am referring to a mental image used by the child’s Ego during its early stages of development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, based on its experience of the surface of the body. This corresponds to the moment when the psychical Ego differentiates itself from the bodily Ego in operative terms but remains mixed up with it in figurative terms. (Anzieu 2016, 43)

5.2.1 Design and Identity Theory Almost 2,000 years separate these key quotations by Seneca and Anzieu. While the first is a philosopher and the second a psychoanalyst, both span the depth of human identity. In the last two decades, theories of identity have flourished in the social sciences and the humanities. These range from identity formation through to the cultural fluidity or rigidity of personal identity and various traits of national or a-national identity. Although theories of identity are extremely relevant to design—given our identity is formed by and mirrored by our visualmaterial world—a meaningful dialogue between identity and design has yet to be significantly articulated. The topic of identity in general is not only highly complex and broad, involving a deep dive into both sociology and psychology, but as such we do also not wish to venture into this theoretical landmine. However, given its importance to the broader elements of theoretical knowledge of design, we

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shall raise three issues concerning directly to design practice: design and gender, design and social belonging and design and national identity. First, let us start with a brief outline of the concept of identity. Without elaborating too greatly on the definition of identity, suffice it to note several key attributes: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Identity always involves an institutionalised attribute versus a personalised one. In other words, the way a person describes themselves differs considerably to the way a social organisation does. For instance, our identity card might provide information as to our marital state but gives no details about our happiness in said relationship. Identity is changing and evolving. While in every part of our lives we “have” an identity, it is never quite the same. We stay “children” as long as our parents are alive (or even after), but we change our “student” identity to a professional identity. As such, each identity we possess is related to identity partners: other family members, students, professionals, teachers, bosses, etc. Following the first attribute, we can surmise that we do not have a single identity, but rather a set of identities, each elaborate and complex. When we are children, we are also siblings, friends, students, etc. As we move through life, we trade some of our identities with others, but rarely possess a single identity (at least in a Western context). Identity can be manifested as a flexible or rigid entity according to our sociocultural context. The classic anthropological concept of “group-grid” (Douglas 2013) helps articulate the difference between different societies in relation to norms and conventions as well as their ability to accept change and influence from outside the group’s boundaries. Regarding identity, the more rigid, conservative and strict a social group, so will the boundaries of an individual potential identities. Identity involves a manner of “choosing a side” or an “us versus them” mentality. The manner in which various groups present themselves causes us to identify ourselves as belonging to one or the other. Put another way, while our own team triggers feelings of commitment and loyalty (“one of us”), the other triggers feelings of “the other.” When identification with a team meets social constructs like race, immigration or social status, a purple-and-gold Los Angeles Lakers jersey can result in conflict when confronted with the green uniform of the Boston Celtics. The most poignant attribute of identity to design is the idea that our identity must actively be maintained in a series of daily activities. Thus, our gender identity is maintained through an almost endless array of material and visual choices, like hairstyles, makeup and fashion choices. As such, design can and perhaps should serve as a trigger for challenging social norms and articulating alternatives. It is no coincidence, then, that the various subculture groups of the second half of the twentieth century built their image

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using fashion and accessories: the Mods and scooters or Punk groups with leather jackets and Doc Martens’ boots are just two examples. While identity theories vary in their focus on political involvement (e.g. Althusser), an individual’s history (Freud and his successors) or a reliance on the other (as in symbolic interaction) designed products—whether physical or virtual—hold significant sway. To demonstrate this notion, we shall introduce two key identity formation theories developed by Erik Erikson and James Marcia, respectively. In the eight stages of psychological development, Erikson (1993) highlights the child’s central conflict vis-à-vis a desired outcome. In the adolescence stage, for instance, teenagers shift between identity and role confusion, so fashion as well as other bodily exploration is key in that period. James Marcia (Marcia et al. 1993) continued to stress the importance of crises in adolescents’ lives and their role triggering a reflective process of identity formation. The third stage, out of eight, described by Marcia is called “the moratorium,” in which the adolescent explores their identity boundaries devoid of any premeditated conditions or constraints. As we shall see, these identity explorations are often mediated and expressed through designed products, particularly fashion, style or other cultural signifiers. In addition to the classic socialisation agents identified by sociologists— parents, peers, educational systems and the media—we can add design, especially in this age of social media. An “unboxing” YouTube video or a TikTok social event wields significant influence over consumption patterns, fashion trends or social norms. In this way, design has immense influence on our personal and social identity. As such, we can extend Schachter and Ventura’s (2008) concept of “identity agent” to describe not only an individual’s social relations, but designers or brands as well. As identity encompasses an array of various elements—some of which are presented at length in other chapters, such as status in “Design and Consumption,” “Design and the Body”)—we focus on gender, nationality and on social institutions in this chapter. 5.2.2 Design and Gender Norms One element of a person’s set of identities can be perceived either as flexible or rigid, depending on their sociocultural surroundings. In both cases, our identity needs constant active maintenance, performed in many cases through design. As we have seen, design fulfils a central role in the affirmation and introduction of normative behaviour in society. One of the ways in which design takes part in this endeavour is through the perpetuation of conservative or “normative” gender identities and roles. Gender is a range of social characteristics that define male and female identities, their roles in society and differences between them. In contemporary society, gender identity is typically perceived in a binary way (although a non-binary definition of gender is gaining more visibility). Traditional gendered thinking is inherently cisgendered: it is expected that gender identity should

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correlate to birth sex, expressed through material objects and normative behaviour. That being said, gender can be more flexible, containing a vast range of expressions and identities. Resisting and challenging gender roles, identities and stereotypes are one of the characteristics of a pluralistic and open society as a whole. Indeed, following the classic model of Murphy and Elwood (1998), the various agents of socialisation induce us to navigate our own identity and express it through designed products. Although parents and peers may exert a greater influence when we are young, digital platforms may offer more flexibility as we mature. Design can either help reinforce gender norms or challenge them. But most designs are always in dialogue with gender definitions and expectations, whether consciously so or not. Throughout design history, objects are by-products of subtle or obvious sociocultural processes: take a doctor’s white lab coat or the binary acculturation of the female gender with pink and the male gender with blue, for instance. Following Barthes’s interpretation, when a cultural symbol becomes a part of the social norm, it is transformed into a myth. The correlation of the colour pink with the female gender is notable because it is a clear product of industrial- and consumption-related processes (Paoletti 2012). The design strategy of changing a product’s colour to pink in a bid to appeal to women is lazy and misguided, but widespread (see Sparke 1995). Rather than conduct meaningful, in-depth ergonomic and social research to design products which take different needs or barriers to accessibility into account, brands have simply released pink chef’s knives, power tools and computing equipment. This strategy has been criticised as early as 1955, when Henry Dreyfuss described gender-related differences in design ergonomics (though not necessarily from an ethical or egalitarian stance). As described in Chapter 4 “Design Between Practice and Theory,” both Papanek and Maldonado’s approaches to design theory would be critical of this design strategy which claims to be mindful of the female end user. Toy design has been extensively debated as an example of the ways in which design participates in the creation and reinforcement of cultural norms and power structures. Gendered design is an attitude that results in a separation between toys “for boys” and toys “for girls.” On the surface, this may seem harmless or naïve, but gendered toys tend to strengthen stereotypical and narrow gender roles: figurines marketed at boys are usually blue, war- or action-themed and centred on professions. Conversely, figurines marketed to girls are pink, focused on the domestic sphere and centred around care, beauty and fashion. This difference is readily apparent in the case of Playmobil Figures: the packaging for toys marketed to boys is a “masculine” grey or blue and that of the girls’ is various hues of pinks and purples. The figurines themselves are also gendered: while the ones marketed at boys are bolstering traditionally “masculine” roles and many are equipped with various weapons, the toys intended for girls are presented in “supporting” or traditionally “feminine” roles (see Figure 5.7). These designs forge dangerous norms and perpetuate a hierarchical power-structured designation that

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Figure 5.7 Playmobil figures for boys and for girls.

limits the ways boys and girls can imagine their identities, abilities and possibilities in the world. Thus, in the simple act of buying a specifically designed toy, we are already taking part in a power system that defines what the spaces, interests and activities are expected from different genders. The development of the Barbie doll over time is an example how gendered design can be explicitly embodied. Launched in 1959, Barbie dolls propagated normative behaviour, beliefs and aspirations regarding family structure, consumer culture and aspirations and redefined the desired feminine body. From a physiological point of view, a Barbie doll’s proportions are not even remotely similar to that of the average woman. Emphasising a narrow waist, petite feet and overly Western white features, Barbie dolls normalised a new and unachievable physique. This plastic icon swept across the world, influencing young women’s self-esteem, body image and sexuality (Rogers 2000). Recently, Mattel—the manufacturer and distributor of Barbie dolls—launched a “socially sensitive” line of dolls. However, this was a missed opportunity: dolls were described as “petite,” ‘tall” or ‘curvy,” thus marking them out as exceptions to a norm, and a Barbie doll described as “disabled” had a Barbie doll’s conventionally unnatural body, just sitting on a wheelchair. Another blunder was a Barbie figurine that featured similar eyebrows to artist Frida Kahlo’s. Reminiscent of de Certeau’s (2011) call on consumers to revolt through daily activities, social networks serve as an interesting platform to offer alterna-

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tives. A popular Instagram account with the username “hijarbie” follows the fictionalised life of a non-white Barbie doll wearing a hijab, along with “friends” of various races and religions. As we have seen in previous chapters, the body has become a battleground for sociocultural control and imposing norms and conventions. The taut, young, smooth and slender body has become a universal aspiration, changing our relationships with food and exercise. Technological aids that quantify and monitor our every activity are entering the body limits. Indeed, Barbie dolls are an example of the docile body and more importantly, a reframing of the standardised body (Lock 1993). As an alternative, Lammily Dolls offer a “normal” body (Figure 5.8), designed around “healthy” proportions of height and weight and “normal” physical attributes. Children can buy adhesive birth marks, pimples and a wheelchair as accessories for the doll. Unfortunately, forms of gender-biased design are not limited to childhood. Gendered stereotypes are also reinforced in designed objects for adult consumers, as the example of Dove soap shows. As a consumer product, soap is generally associated with the domestic space and themes of care and hygiene, and therefore with typical notions of “femininity.” Dove launched a soap targeted at men, which was cut into a square shape with sharp lines and was sold

Figure 5.8 Barbie versus Lammily.

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in dark-coloured packaging. Accordingly, regular Dove soap is associated with femininity, given its softer design and occasionally being packaged in pink- or pastel-coloured boxes. Another example of this gendered bias at work can be seen in the design of Coca-Cola products. It is well known that Coke Zero was designed as a lower-calorie product targeted specifically at men, because Diet Coke (another lower-calorie offering) has long been associated with female consumers. As a result, Coke Zero’s typography choices as well as celebrity sponsors chosen for the drink (the James Bond or “007” character, the ultimate “macho man”) all suggest a clear presentation of masculinity, designed to appeal to men. This shows us how stressful navigating or challenging gender roles and stereotypes in a strictly gendered society can be; our “masculinity” could be undermined just in the simple act of buying a soap or a product in pink packaging. It is a clear example of what is termed “lazy semiotics,” whereas instead of socially or culturally relevant interpretations, designers simply juggle stigmatised symbolism and metaphors. Thus, men continue to be appealed to through hues of whiskey, the metallic glint of a firearm and glistening motor oil. Design, therefore, helps us follow society’s gendered expectations, allowing men to perform masculinity while still buying soap. “Masculinity,” as defined by social norms, is thus continually protected, which preserves the societal power structures that define which aspects of life are accessible to women and which are not. Designers tend to follow these classic gendered “lazy semiotics” (Goffman 1979) in perfume advertisements: men’s perfume is depicted in dark, foreboding and urban landscapes, whilst women’s perfume is floral in scent and presented in greenery or on beaches. Gendered design is also used by corporations to create the illusion of a product specifically designed for women that can be sold at a higher price, even if the products are actually identical. This objectionable practice is known as the “pink tax” and has been thoroughly criticised in the media. The SEAT car manufacturer launched the “Mii” car model targeted at women: it is offered in pink with a Cosmopolitan badge, a bigger inner makeup mirror and gear pedals that are compatible with heels. On the other side of the coin, the design of the bra and Chanel’s women’s suit are two examples of how design can bring about change in terms of gender roles. The first bra was patented in the US by Mary Phelps Jacob in 1914, but since its integration into society was a process that took many years, we can consider the invention of the bra in the context of the women’s liberation movement. The origins of this process can be traced back to the Victorian dress reform movement of the late nineteenth century (Farrell-Beck and Gau 2002). The “dress reformists” were mainly middle-class women, active also in the first wave of feminism that protested for the women’s vote and women’s education. Their concept of “rational dress” called for the corset—an undergarment considered unhealthy as it limited women’s ability to freely move (Shin 2009)—to no longer

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be the standard. Replacing the corset with more comfortable items such as the bra can be symbolically and practically seen as a step towards women’s liberation. Indeed, thinking of the end user as the primary focus of a design process is one of the central signs of contemporary design. (Interestingly, half a century later, female activists promoted burning or throwing away bras, considering them to be a symbol of the male oppression of women, through their sexualisation, domination and ownership of women’s bodies.) The reforms in clothing design were also accompanied by the determination to encourage women to engage in athletic activities and ride bicycles—a practice that was not considered decent for women at the time. The use of the bicycle as vehicle allowed women more freedom of movement, not being dependant on carriages or cars, and helped develop physical strength and self-esteem. Not only clothing reform, but also encouraging female ownership of existing products such as the bicycle had pivotal roles in feminist movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Another interesting case to consider is that of Chanel’s women’s suits. Just as the bra was making its successful incursion as replacement of the corset during the First World War, French fashion designer Coco Chanel designed a suit for women. Suits were usually worn only by men, and they symbolised their status as modern professionals and businessmen. Furthermore, for the previous 200 years, women had been forbidden to wear trousers in France. In fact, in 1972, former French Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie—then a député—entered the National Assembly wearing trousers. When stopped and questioned by a bailiff, she exclaimed, “If my trousers are bothering you, I’ll take them off as soon as possible!” (Clark 2014). By designing a suit for women, Chanel not only challenged gender stereotypes, but also gender roles. Professional women could wear the suit, made from soft, flexible materials, and feel encouraged to enter the world of work, at that time dominated by men. Some would say that the mere creation of the design served as a signal for women that from now on it is acceptable for them to pursue their professional aspirations. In fact, so important was Chanel’s influence on French culture, Roland Barthes (2013, 99) wrote: If today you open a history of our literature, you should find there the name of a new classical author: Coco Chanel. Chanel does not write with paper and ink (except in her leisure time), but with material, with forms and with colours; however, this does not stop her being commonly attributed with the authority and the panache of a writer of the classical age: elegant like Racine, Jansenist like Pascal (whom she quotes), philosophical like La Rochefoucauld (whom she imitates by delivering her own maxims to the public), sensitive like Madame de Sevigny and, finally, rebellious like the ‘Grande Mademoiselle’ whose nickname and function she borrows (see for example her recent declarations of war on fashion designers). Chanel, it is said, keeps fashion on the edge of barbarism all the more to overwhelm it with all the values of the classical order: reason,

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nature, permanence, the desire to charm and not to surprise; people are pleased to see Chanel in the pages of the Figaro newspaper where she occupies, alongside Cocteau, the fringes of polite culture.

A more aesthetic and symbolic aspect of gender and design is the idea that certain shapes, forms and colours are connected in society with femininity and masculinity. Cultural conventions notwithstanding, rounder, softer, circular shapes are interpreted as feminine or erotic, while sharper, squarer, hard-edged and phallic shapes are associated in our society with masculinity (as indeed we saw above with the different shapes of Dove soaps). Of course, these shapes have a correlation with the shapes of the male and female sexual organs—or, at least, with the way they are perceived and understood in society. What is essential is that design can play with these shapes and forms. It can create stereotypical designs pandering to gender differentiation, but also is able to produce challenging products, such as the famously androgynous lemon squeezer designed by Phillipe-Starck which combines phallic shapes with softer “feminine” lines to create an “alien-like,” mixed-gender product.3 The Boeing 737 Cowling Chair, designed by Fallen Furniture and made out of the engine of a Boeing 737 airplane, is made from metal (once belonging to a phallic-shaped, masculine-coded object like the airplane), but was transformed into an inviting circular shape, thus bringing to mind qualities associated with a vagina. This design can be interpreted both as symbolising the desire of the male to be wrapped in and “devoured by” an all-encompassing female sexual organ, and as representing the tension between the vagina as something strong and powerful yet still being confined to the limits of the domestic sphere. Two additional design projects also illustrate the potential of designers acting as agents of change to influence and shift normative power. The Grace Wristband (Figure 5.9), designed by Peter Astbury in 2017, is an interesting example of aesthetics to serving a social function of reframing a specific design situation (see Dotan and Ventura 2018). The primary function of this bracelet is to regulate and alleviate hot flushes among menopausal women. However, its design aesthetic is key. Instead of designing this product as a medical or healthcare device, which normally deploys a visual-material language of plastic with hues of greens, purples and blues, the designer shifted the language to that of high-end jewellery. The metal encasing, the leather strap, along with golds and whites, renders this object with a different core value altogether. Another project challenged the embodied norms of sitting positions among men and women. In a thought-provoking twist on the classical Greek Klismos chair aimed to enforce a “modest” sitting position on women, designer Laila Laurel created in 2019 an “opposite” chair. The chair instead enforced a “modest” sitting position on men, aiming to bring awareness to men of their tendency to sit in what is termed a “manspreading” position (see Figure 5.10). Allowing women to sit how they will, this chair raises questions regarding gender role and the importance of design interpretation.

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Figure 5.9 Grace Wristband by Peter Astbury.

Figure 5.10 “Manspreading chair” by Laila Laurel.

In sum, we can see that designs, shapes and colours are charged with gender significance, and therefore have power to reinforce conservative gender thinking, as well as to challenge gender roles. Consequently, they can be exceptionally evocative, defying the limits of gender and the way we perceive and define ourselves and others through aesthetic suggestion.

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5.2.3 Design and Racial Norms I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time that I walk out of the chalet. The children who shout Niger! have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me. They are brimming with good humour and the more daring swell with pride when I stop to speak with them. Just the same, there are days when I cannot pause and smile, when I have no heart to play with them; when, indeed, I mutter sourly to myself, exactly as I muttered on the streets of a city these children have never seen, when I was no bigger than these children are now: Your mother was a nigger. Joyce is right about history being a nightmare – but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. (James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” 1951)4

Baldwin’s harrowing description of race discrimination is even more jarring when its ramifications go unnoticed by those European children who meet for the first time a person that looks different than themselves. Anthropologist Jonathan Marks (2017) argues that racial categories are, in fact, cultural constructs masquerading as biology. White, Black and other categories are simply a way by which hegemonic culture defines and categorises differences between human beings. In that sense, race is not just a matter of skin colour, but of various traits that identify a person. Psychologist Jefferson Fish contends that race is culturally constructed and defined by such characteristics as accent, which vocabulary the person uses, their social class, how they dress, their profession, the neighbourhood they live in and other characteristics that surpass mere skin colour or genetics. In fact, there is no biological proof of human races as a biological phenomenon. Therefore, we can say that for centuries, the concept of race has been, and continues to be, used as a category of segregation and justification of the domination of one social group over another. Moreover, sometimes race can function as a category that some people can choose for themselves, one that carries significant political and cultural meanings. As in other layers of identity, we all actively maintain our racial identity, just as any other one of our many identities. In that context, because design has a central part in forging our culture, it would be logical to claim that design also takes a central role in producing perceptions of race and the values that stem from it. From a semiotic-interpretive perspective, the Band-Aid is as good an example as they get. Designed as early as 1921, the Band-Aid is one of various seemingly transparent daily objects that evolved in a somewhat stagnant manner (Petrosky 2013). However, in almost 100 years of existence, the Band-Aid was offered to White consumers, with an utter neglect of other skin tones. Only in the last decade (Figure 5.11), other manufacturers started offering an array of newly designed Band-Aids mirroring various skin colours. Through this approach, as in other examples we have out-

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Figure 5.11 Band-Aid for various skin colours.

lined, designers took an ethical stance and practiced their craft as value-oriented interpreters, not only suppliers of professional efficiency (Ventura and Shvo 2018). Other examples show the racial bias inherent in design as a practice, which mirrors the production of other sociocultural outputs such as race. When the spaceship Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972, a gold plaque was attached to its outer hull to communicate with any potential alien intelligent life form. The gold plaque showed a diagram of our solar system describing the distance from Earth to the Sun, the most common element in space (hydrogen) and a drawing of a nude man and a nude woman. As we can see, this diagram raises several questions in relation to graphic design. First, the man and woman are clearly depicted as having typically white facial features and probably blonde hair, although the diagram is monochrome. Second, the relation between the position of the pair puts the man in an active and central role. Third, while the man’s genitals are clearly depicted, the woman has undergone a quick process of censorship by NASA. Last, their positioning and outline echoes a Western perception of ideal beauty, resonating with classical principles of corporal description, an aesthetic reminiscent of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man or classical ancient Greek or Roman sculpture (Figure 5.12). This kind of seemingly naïve design strengthens the ideological stance that the universal and “natural” being is the (cisgendered, slim and able-bodied)

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Figure 5.12 Voyager Pioneer plaque.

white male, while other identities are not universal, and occupy lower positions in a clearly defined hierarchical power structure. Designing a plaque like this, aiming to represent the universal human being, is an act that is rife with power relations and unconsciously entrenching a racial hierarchy. Unfortunately, these biased assumptions dictated design’s approach towards women, disabled people and excluded communities, as we have seen in previous chapters. As in other manifestations of normative power, this kind of hierarchical classification happens all the time in culture, making these active decisions seem natural, apolitical and a part of the larger capitalist ecosystem. In order to broaden this example, we could focus on the iconography of Jesus Christ throughout the history of art. Although a person of colour—given that he was Middle Eastern and a Semitic Jew—he has been depicted in Western society as a white, blond male, his appearance is likely to have more in common with the Arab community (subjected to political and media demonisation in contemporary times) than with a Western European white male. Among Christians, Jesus is considered a symbol and image of purity, goodness and power, and so portraying him as white can be seen as a distortion of history that reinforces very specific ideological connotations. Namely, ideas of purity and charity are culturally connected with white people and other racial representations are used to signify the “diverse,” the “exotic,” the “flavoured” or the

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“primitive.” To paraphrase philosopher Frantz Fanon (2008), in Western societies, non-whiteness is perceived as an abnormality and as wrongness. We can see this at play in the transformation of the popular character of Smurfette in The Smurfs. In an appalling episode almost befitting Der Stürmer, the evil Gargamel creates a black-haired female Smurf to help him spy on (Figure 5.13), trick and capture the Smurfs. After betraying her fellow Smurfs, Smurfette goes through a “rehabilitation” process whereby she finds her “true nature.” Being reborn as a new believer, she is redeemed and typecast as blonde and Western, complete with a lacy hem dress and high heels. The concept of “whitening” is substantially connected with design and the way it helps forge racial categories. “Whitening” is the conscious or unconscious adoption of characteristics that are culturally identified with whiteness as a way to gain symbolic value in a society that positions whiteness as the highest category in social hierarchy. Usually, characteristics related to whiteness are connected, for example, with certain clothing or hairstyles, but also with a specific vocabulary, accent, educational level and more. These behavioural, social, cultural, physical and designed characteristics are not inherently or substantially related to being white, but they are culturally constructed that way. In other cases, Black culture is appropriated by white mainstream as well as designers and global brands (Gilroy 1993), just as with Run DMC and Adidas. Designers, in presenting a “highly valued” person in our society, have often (consciously or unconsciously) attributed “positive” characteristics (well educated, clean, intellectual, moral etc.) with whiteness. This tendency leaves a person of colour “captive” in their racial-cultural category, since “whitening” one’s appearance, language or accent can be

Figure 5.13 Smurfette before and after.

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interpreted as disaffection with their racial categorisation and its attendant cultural and social meanings. A clear example of such “whitening” relates to the politics of hair: in order to gain access to and acceptance in white-dominated spaces such as the workplace or higher education, Black women have chemically straightened or otherwise altered or hidden their natural hair. Sociocultural movements such as “Black is Beautiful” founded in the 1960s (Ford 2015; Taylor 2016; Baird 2021) have stood in opposition to the association of whiteness with beauty, elegance and cleanliness; encouraging Black people to acknowledge and celebrate Blackness as beautiful. Later political movements such as Black Lives Matter, in challenging this hierarchical categorisation of race, contend that it is not simply a matter of aesthetics, but creates the misconception that whiteness should be more highly valued. What could be understood as simply choices of style in design, in fact, forms part of a structure of discrimination and racism that devalues and endangers human lives. Nike hopped on this speeding train and design every year a line of Black History Month sneakers. Last, I address how the architectural design of space creates racial categorisations and social myths. In 1933, Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre5 published his highly influential book The Masters and the Slaves (2022), whose literal translation from Portuguese is “The big house and the slave quarters.” Freyre theorised the origins of the Brazilian nation as related to mestiçagem or miscegenation: reproduction between people of different racial or ethnic groups. Freyre claimed that Brazilians are a product of the interrelations between white slave masters and settlers, enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples—not only in a literal sense, but also in a racial and cultural one. For Freyre, these interrelations are positive, and Brazilian culture is the epitome of interracial and intercultural relationships. In contrast to the racial segregation of the Antebellum US, Freyre claims that interracial reproduction was not taboo in Brazil, given the structure and design of sugar plantations in Brazil’s colonial era. Freyre sees the physical proximity of the “big house” (where the masters lived) with the slaves’ quarters as generative of a proximity and intimacy between them; indeed, Freyre even points to a shared recreational space in the form of a common courtyard as further evidence for this. Although many atrocities were committed against enslaved people in Brazil, Freyre ignores this, and sees in this design of plantation spaces the origins of a complex and even utopian relationship between masters and slaves that gave birth to the Brazilian nation. Of course, these ideas were used and continue to be used in Brazil to distort racial discrimination or negate it altogether. This denial is strengthened by Freyre’s racial mythology of unproblematic miscegenation, which disconnects social differences from racial discrimination. Interestingly, some modern Brazilian architecture still preserves this idea of the distribution of space originating in the sugar plantations. In large houses and some apartments owned by middle- or upper-class families, there is often a “servant’s quarters,” where people employed as live-in housekeepers live alongside their employers. Live-in housekeepers often form an intimate, familiar

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relationship with the family while being unable to access the advantages of social class as other cohabitants/family members do. Designers hold immense influence over our environment, which goes hand-in-hand with ideology, values and relations of power. In Israel (Yacobi et al. 2016), we see how designers and architects help Israelis dominate the public sphere, often destroying it to construct ever-growing private enclaves. Aside from expanding gentrification, design helps urban planners camouflage these violent acts under a thin yet glamorous veneer intended to placate and soothe activists. While private and closed residences have been a part of our lives for many years, contemporary designs shroud these with a layer of almost transparent barriers, making us believe these barriers are almost non-existent. By using very slight elevations and different materials that subtly accentuate the difference between private and public spaces, designers are excluding the city’s inhabitants and creating closed communities. Class differences and hierarchies of power and control are perpetuated by design instead of actual fences. This new and dangerous approach to design renders the designer as part of a complex system who can, while trying to innovate and resist norms, can still act as part of them. To use Foucault’s (1980) theories of circular power, the designer acts as an agent of embedding new behaviours and can therefore be seen as a part of the problem instead of as a part of the solution. 5.2.4 National, Ethnic and Group Identity and Design While the issue of white European or American designers helping indigenous communities in a post-colonial manner reshape their visual-material surrounding is highly important, it does fall a bit outside of the scope of this volume. National identity is a crucial part of the debate linking identity with the sociocultural attributes of design. To do so, we must identify and define the concept of “nation.” A nation can be defined as a group of people who share the same culture, language or ethnicity and reside in the same country or territory. Nationalism, in the words of Smith (1996, 447), is “an ideological movement that seeks to achieve and maintain autonomy, unity, and identity for a population that is deemed by some of its members as constituting a nation.” Smith (1991; 2013) continues to stress that a nation’s foundations are built upon a symbolic system, invented traditions and collective memory. Therefore, a nation’s history is rich with visual imagery that celebrates an individual’s actions (consider, for instance, individuals performing heroic deeds), leaders, monarchs or collective national symbolism. Symbols that “work” do not disappear from history, but rather shift or shed their meaning in favour of another—just as the “fasces” symbol was adopted by the Fascist Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini from his Roman predecessors. Indeed, in this example, an ancient Roman symbol was transformed into a political one, linked to a context-laden sociopolitical group. While visual depictions of individuals and social groups can be traced across thousands of years, its modern equivalent—graphic design—is very different. Design relates to social identity in two clear ways: design serves as a unique

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identity trait that reinforces belonging; and design serves as a unique identity trait that distinguishes and highlights the “Other” via ideology. For instance, the Third Reich of Nazi Germany used the pink triangle as a symbol for the imprisonment of homosexuals in concentration camps. In a controversial move intended to “correct” the past, Nike used in 2018 the same symbol in limited edition designs for Pride Month (Figure 5.14). As every novice semiotician will know, colour along with configuration (or layout in graphic design terms), materials, and texture all contribute to the interpretation of a designed product. This becomes even more accentuated when we consider design and nationalism. We associate an ultramarine blue with the medieval and early modern periods, a rich purple with the Roman Empire and blue, red, and white with the American stars and stripes (Blaszczyk 2012). Some colours are so symbolic and meaning-laden that they attain specific meanings rooted in a specific sociocultural context, such as the symbol of the ovarian cancer day. These unique colours are manifested in our contemporary version of Levi-Strauss’s (1971) understanding of totemism. Design helps express and define an individual’s affiliation to a certain community, group or social class. Furthermore, it helps us define which group we do not belong to: imagine wearing a Brazil national team soccer jersey in a match against Argentina. For this reason, The Netherlands’ women’s national soccer team designed a different logo to their male counterparts’ (see Figure 5.15). Similarly, in the 2019 women’s soccer World Cup, Nike launched national kits designed for women (Figure 5.16). Contrary to the monochrome and tight-fitting tops worn by the men’s team, which accentuated muscle definition in a manner resembling comic superheroes, women’s kits were looser in fit—which offered an improved range of motion and comfort—and had innovative designs, experimenting with colour, material, pattern and style.6 A person can express their identities and affiliations through their choice of clothing, hairstyle, symbols and designed products. NBA (the U.S. National Basketball Association) kits demonstrate the point further: special edition jerseys

Figure 5.14 Nike sneakers depicting the pink triangle.

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Figure 5.15 The Netherlands lion was transformed into a lioness.

Figure 5.16 US women’s soccer football uniform.

have included the team’s name written in Chinese to celebrate the Chinese New Year, some shirts praised the Washington Wizards as the US capital or have added “support the troops” wording to the jersey (see Figures 5.17–5.19). In this way, sports uniform design can signal a player, team or nation’s political values. Sports uniform design can also unite national and consumption identities. In an interesting shift, in 2017 the NBA allowed corporate sponsors to feature

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Figure 5.17 The 2022 Washington Wizards Capitol Edition jersey.

Figure 5.18 The San Antonio Spurs’ “support the troops” jersey.

on the players’ jerseys: prime advertising real estate. Thus, teams sought out commercial partners that mirrored a key feature or value of their team. In an interesting reflection of urban identity and history in corporate branding, the NBA took a different path. Since tire company Goodyear was founded in Ohio, the Cleveland Cavaliers began a commercial brand deal with them. The San

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Figure 5.19 The 2021 NBA jerseys of the Cleveland Cavaliers (L) and the Golden State Warriors (R).

Francisco-located Golden State Warriors’ link to Silicon Valley was reflected in a sponsorship with e-commerce giant Rakuten. National flags, national sports clothing and national symbols create a sense of unity and membership. Although design might reveal something about a certain group identity and its characteristics, in our global and interconnected digital world, affiliations and identity have become complicated. We can have several contradictory identities in one same space, identities can change meaning or have transnational meaning. For instance, fans from all over the world identify with FC Barcelona and wear the football club’s symbols. For those native to the city of Barcelona, wearing an FC Barcelona uniform (Figure 5.20) could have nationalistic connotations of pride, resistance, group identity and belonging, whereas for global fans, the uniform may simply connote elegance, success, ability or teamwork. In a capitalist context, design has a tendency, when in the hands of marketing experts, to annihilate or hide ideology under a façade of trendy colouring, textures or symbols. For instance, many are ignorant of the deep-rooted political and cultural rivalry between Madrid and Barcelona, expressed through Barcelona FC’s use of red and yellow—colours of the autonomous Catalonian flag—on their jersey. Dick Hebdige (2013), a Birmingham School scholar, has argued that this political rivalry, ascendant in the Franco era wars of the 1930s, was subsumed by the transformation of red and yellow into global marketing tool. Another example is the leather jackets of the punk movement or the red, green and yellow colouring of the Rastafari movement that avoid any political or local meaning. Black identity and heritage has also been mediated through sports uniform design. As part of the NBA League’s efforts to promote Black History Month, various designs were commissioned; none more effective, both in terms of commercial success and cultural influence through social media, than Nike’s special edition Black History Month sneakers (Figure 5.21). On the sneakers, African

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Figure 5.20 In a fascinating amalgam of national history, corporate capitalism and global care NGOs, FC Barcelona is a semiotic example of the first order.

Figure 5.21 Nike Kyrie Irving celebrating Black heritage.

patterns were included to acknowledge the African heritage of African American athletes. Following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and other Black Americans, players wore specially designed jerseys in which Black Lives Matter slogans ranging from “Equality,” “I Can’t Breathe,” “Say Her Name” and more were added, joining the call for racial justice and social change in the USA (Figure 5.22).7 The complexity of national identity is also in the way national designs themselves are being produced by a range of ethnic and racial groups of the same. For example, British design includes the designer Onkar Singh Kular, son of Asian immigrants to Yorkshire; Macedonian-born Marjan Pejoski, famous for the swan dress he designed for Björk; and Israeli-born furniture designer Ron Arad. The concept of “Britishness” and of national identity in design may arguably have become an archaic and outdated term. We can see this complexity play out in the Olympic Games apparel design: each national team tries to harness

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Figure 5.22 Black Lives Matter slogans on specially designed jerseys.

the marketing power of native yet globally recognised designers and brands; for example, British fashion designer Stella McCartney’s apparel collection (Figure 5.23) has global appeal. That being said, designers have also reflected aesthetics and themes traditionally associated with their nationality. American brand Ralph Lauren designed the US’s uniforms (Figure 5.24) along a militaristic theme, the Italian team’s sponsor Giorgio Armani symbolises luxurious panache associated with Italian fashion and the French national design by Lacoste mirrors traditional French elegant style. The capitalist world economy, based on migration and constant intercultural global exchange, has created designs that challenge a “pure” or fixed understanding of nationality or regionality. It has resulted in multicultural, transnational and diverse designs that reflect the people’s experiences in today’s world at the

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Figure 5.23 The 2021 UK Olympic team uniforms.

Figure 5.24 The 2021 US Olympic Team apparel by Ralph Lauren.

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intersection and collision of different communities. Following Appadurai’s (1990) theory of globalisation, the major layers of global connection are ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape and ideoscape. Indeed, design participates in all these layers because technology, economy, media and race or ethnicity groupings all influence the intricate relations between the global and the local. Since ideas influence deeper and broader than the rest, ideologies—in design as in other layers of sociocultural reality—are of paramount importance. 5.2.4.1 Design and Corporate Identity In our global, capitalist world, corporations create an identity for themselves. This curated image—comprised by the logo, the products, the colours, the advertisements and marketing campaigns—aim to reflect the brand’s values and “personality.” Today, it can seem as though a person is more defined by their choice of smartphone operating system (“are you and Apple or an Android person?”) than their voting preferences. By buying a brand’s products, individuals not only consume the goods or services, but associate themselves with a certain corporation, its values and its identity reflected by and through their designs. Some corporations, such as Apple or Coca-Cola, create a strong sense of community and identity through design. This means that choosing a product today also means choosing a certain set of values to identify with and associating oneself with a community that also chooses those products and values. Brands and their consumer followings generate a sense of personal identity through affiliation. We can trace back the origins of corporate identity in religious and military organisations, as we have seen in the examples of Christianity, and Greek and Egyptian armies. These kinds of imagined communities (Anderson 2006) create a sense of belonging, which can become even more pronounced when brands hire social media influencers or launch guerrilla marketing campaigns. In a parallel way, online reselling websites (for sneakers and other luxury or special edition goods) create a sense of belonging and act as an arena where brand loyalty can be articulated and entrenched. In this sense, in today’s world, corporate identity became a new way of creating communities and identities akin to national or regional identities. As a way to capitalise on this, brands use design in an intricate way to offer products with a newly minted personalised look, encouraging consumers’ personal style choices to add value. Nike, for example, offers—for an added cost—a personalised sneaker under the “Nike by you” campaign. The consumer can create personalised sneakers, with the added value of having been designed by an up-and-coming designer, to ensure that a similar pair will not appear on their neighbour’s feet. Sometimes, though, the difference between a national and a corporate identity is blurred. National or regional identities can be constituted by corporate identities and corporate identities can express national identities. The quintessential British public telephone kiosk, used since 1936, has become a distinctive icon of British identity, widely used on travel posters and tourism publicity

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campaigns. The decision to modernise their design generated an astonishing outburst of public outrage. British Telecom has since commissioned several redesigns of their modernised kiosks but without ever entirely mollifying resentment at the removal of a familiar and distinctive element of the cultural landscape. Modern automobiles similarly present an interesting example of the imbrication of brand and national identities. German car manufacturers such as Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes-Benz have become synonymous with the phrase “German engineering,” a signifier of quality, intelligent design and German practicality. The French Citroën DS, charmingly depicted by Roland Barthes as a mechanical déesse (goddess), however went on a different path accentuating their material manifestation of French style, which continued in their innovative sub-brand DS. Through design, this innovative approach helped imbue this model and later, this sub-brand with Frenchness, embodied and materialised through style, lines and contours to the extent that Citroen added Roland Barthes’s famous description of the déesse in his book Mythologies (1957). However, as multinational tech companies become more involved in the latest generations of electric and driverless vehicles, car brands become either a-national or transnational: Tesla, Rivian and lately the resurrection of the nearmythological Land Rover Defender by the multinational company Ineos. Mergers and acquisitions in the car industry also complicate the association between brand and national identity. Lamborghini, for example, manufacturer of “supercars” that emanate the very essence of Italian style, is currently owned by German brand Audi. Does that erase its “Italianness?” Has its “Italianness” been reduced to a marketing tool? The same goes for South Korean car manufacturer Kia, whose current head designer is German and whose cars are manufactured and assembled throughout the world. Does the transnational nature of capitalist production render the association between national and brand identities obsolete? The Danish toy manufacturer giant LEGO saved itself from bankruptcy over the past two decades by collaborating with other global brands such as Disney, Marvel and DC Comics. These collaborations have been commercially smart—the Batman and Star Wars LEGO sets have been highly successful—and the recent addition of a Beatles-themed set to the toy empire suggests that LEGO places itself as a global culture provider (Figure 5.25), not only a commercial leader in toy design and manufacture. Moreover, through its sub-brand LEGO Ideas, the company opens a call for ideas from enthusiasts around the world, some of which are selected for manufacture and distribution. Therefore, apart from its global influence and reality shows showcasing the job of LEGO designer’s ad, the ultimate dream job, LEGO, just as Google or Wikipedia, helps or endangers cultural knowledge through its consumer-oriented system of hierarchical priorities. Are corporate identities replacing national identities? Are we creating new types of communities and associations? Are national identities exploited and exported as “products” to be consumed? Every day we create and recreate our

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Figure 5.25 Beatles LEGO set.

identities through the products we consume, more so through our digital—and soon to be virtual—identities. These products give us a sense of who we are and what our values are. Corporate identities, created through design, are adding new levels of complexity and ramifications to the ways we express our identities and associate with communities, nations and groups. Now more than ever, designers must take a stand and propose a clearly defined value system that will dictate a healthier material and visual environment for all. 5.3 DESIGN, RELIGION AND POLITICAL CULTURE British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1987) defines a social institution as a social structure which is central in each society and is based on a common ideology, which are professed through norms, conventions and daily behaviour. As such, design is naturally influenced by and, in turn, influences social institutions, among which higher education institutions (HEIs), law enforcement agencies, religion and political culture are key. Another common attribute between social institutions and design is their shared tendency to propagate ideas and value systems through metaphors. Be these “cleanliness,” “strength,” “gender equality” or “we see you,” litmus paper for the influence of social institutions is the extent to which these metaphors infiltrate society, for instance, if they enter the

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lexicon as slang or vernacular phrases. As we have seen in previous chapters, the public sphere as well as individuals are influenced by designers in the production of space (Lefebvre 1991). Furthermore, each design school—and indeed each designer’s value system—creates ripples that affects future generations of designers, as well as economic and social agendas and strategies on the national and international levels. In this section, we present three examples in which the relation between design and political culture, as well as religion, will manifest. As we know, religion is imbued with material objects, from music instruments through to ritual objects and textiles. Amulets, for instance, used throughout various religions, use letters or textual fragments or through the use of organic materials such as plants and beads (Popper-Giveon et al. 2014). Indeed, in some social groups, institutionalised religion serves as a central social institution, as in others popular religions take precedence. However, we present several examples in which this relation will highlight more complex nuances. As we expanded our understanding of embodiment and various relationship models between the individual and design in previous chapters, we shift to a macro-level analysis, highlighting several layers of interaction between design and social institutions, chiefly religion and political culture. 5.3.1 The Cross and Pisces While the cross has become one of the most iconic and influential symbols throughout history in architecture, art and visual culture, its use and design was not a simple and straightforward matter. Historically, the choice of the cross as a religious symbol was not a coincidental one. This famous graphic representation embodies a central concept in graphic design: the simpler the design, the more memorable and widely used it becomes (Eskilson 2012). Furthermore, this graphic decision achieved two other goals in the process: the visual separation of Christianity from Judaism (following a key principle in identity theory: define oneself in relation to one of several competing social groups), as well as the centrality of Christ in the newly founded Christian cosmology. Historical evidence exists to suggest that the post and beam icon was associated with Christianity not as an exclusive icon representing and expressing this belief system, but rather as a means of signing on the forehead as a talisman against the power and influence of demons (Tertullian, De Corona 3; Cyprian” Testimonies” 11–21/22; lactanius, Divinea Institutions 4. 27). In fact, the cross was just a part of many other symbols that were used by early Christians. For instance, the most prominent symbol used was the Ichthys (Figure 5.26), the fish, which was, in fact, a representation of an acrostic derived from the first letters the Greek words Iesous Christos Theou Hyios Soter meaning “Jesus Christ, son of God, Saviour” (Augustine 1998). Other symbols were created by combining Greek letters to create patterns. From a design point of view, the result of the deliberations in Nicaea together with the epiphany of Constantine was that Christianity had gone through a

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Figure 5.26 Early Christian Pisces symbol.

­

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Figure 5.27 The classic ladderback Shake rocking chair.

preparation for the morrow. In a design sense, one cannot but admire the Shakers for their frugal use of materials as well as their clever use of joinery techniques and almost Japanese reverence of the wood and attitude towards designed objects’ uses. Indeed, the Shakers used local materials, appreciating their physical traits and natural beauty. Thus, walnut, oak and ash were used for strong and easily assembled furniture, and hemp and wool for strong, durable and easily cleaned clothes. Among their many contributions to modern design, we can find the reclining chair and the ladder-back chair, amongst others. Since cleanliness was close to godliness according to Shaker belief, furniture had to be easily cleaned, light enough to move around when dusting, not gather dust and, of course, be highly functional (Andrews and Andrews 1964; Kassay 1980). Aside from the ladderback functionality that allows the chair to be hung on a peg while cleaning the floor, this frugal design is also economical in wood use and stronger than other chair configurations. The rocking chair, in turn, was used for knitting and for a hard-earned rest from the day’s hardships. Among others, these two iconic chairs influenced various leading designers, especially so in Scandinavia, as would attest the famous work of Danish designer Auto Wenger (Becksvoort and Sheldon 2000).

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5.3.1.2 The Hoplites versus the Marianu Setting aside religion, the State holds significant sway as a key social institute in many social groups and nations throughout history. As we know, in the battlefield, we find a plethora of technology, innovation and design. Interestingly, this site also mirrors political culture as well as social norms and societal structure. For example, the Second World War saw the demise of the cavalry, once a leading social marker of noble birth and aristocracy, fortune and pedigree. However, new technologies, such as the tank, rifles and airplanes, rendered the cavalry obsolete. As these new technologies created a common denominator upon the battlefield, the need for equality rose after the war’s end. Thus, the welfare state emerged as one of the many social transformations in the wake of the Second World War. Returning to ancient Greece and Egypt, we can clearly see the embodiment of political culture and social structure in warfare. As Egypt has a relatively flat terrain, the innovative design of the chariot gave Egyptian troops an instant advantage over their political rivals. The importance of the chariot within the military mechanism brought about an elite warrior class of heroes called the Maryannu. In Egyptian paintings, they are shown riding with the king, connoting high status and privilege. The Maryannu became associated with chariots and warfare, symbolising fighting ability and strength. Given their elevated status and prestige, Maryannu served not only as chariot warriors but as high-level messengers as well (Manassa 2013). Furthermore, the close relationship between the Maryannu and the king meant that he also supplied

Figure 5.28 Greek Hoplites.

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most of their expensive chariot gear (Drews 1993) and granted them estates in exchange for their military service. The infantry, however, had lower status: they were conscripted or volunteered and worked for pay without any privileges. While these chariot warriors reflect the Egyptian physical terrain as well as its elite political structure, the Greek infantry present the opposite. The efficacy of the hoplite phalanx cannot be questioned. The political principle that all fighting men were equal and dependent on each other gave rise to new fighting techniques and weaponry. Although supporting forces were used (such as archers, sling shots and cavalry), the hoplite units formed the bulk of the Greek forces (Sage 1996). This useful force utilised three designs invented by the Greeks: a large shield, a very long and in some cases doubleedged spear and plate armour. The shield, roughly one metre in diameter, was attached to the arm by a double grip, spreading the weight (about 16 pounds) more efficiently. The design of the shield demonstrates the structure of ancient Greek armed forces since it left the individual soldier vulnerable on his flank, which was protected by his neighbour’s shield (Figure 5.28). The shield was meant to function effectively as part of a larger military unit, such as a phalanx (Viggiano and Van Wees 2013). Thus, equality was embedded through the design of weaponry as well as fighting techniques, contrary to the hierarchical Egyptian model. In the mid-fifth century BC, the Athenian state offered salaries to soldiers, making it easier for a larger social group to participate in civic activities and military service. The elite hoplites, however, were still expected to arm and train themselves, defining a clear boundary between the social classes (Segal and Ventura 2016). In a more critical look at this phenomenon, Elsaesser’s (2016) concept of self-exoticism is instructive. Self-exoticism refers to the presentation and definition of one’s own identity in accordance with others’ exoticised expectations of it. In this sense, the “Brazilianness” expressed by the designs of the Campana brothers reflects the exotic and stereotypical expectations of what “Brazilianness” is or should be in foreign eyes (Figure 5.29). As we have seen in the previous subsection, corporate identities operate sometimes as alternatives to national identities creating subcultures, values and senses of belonging in new and complex ways. In our globalised world, we are learning to create new types of communities and affiliations that are not geographically dependant. Interestingly for us, these new communities’ values are often created and expressed by design. In this way, corporate identities, created through design, are adding new ramifications and levels of complexity to the ways we express our identities and associate with communities, nations and groups. On the other side of the coin, national cultures are being exploited and exported as designed (exotic, “flavoured”) products to be consumed, whether or not they have a clear connection to the native country that they supposedly originate from. Every day, we create and recreate our identity through the products we interact with. These products give us a sense of who we are and what our values are. The new world economy based on

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Figure 5.29 The Campana brothers’ Cangaço furniture is based on Brazilian bandits’ clothing.

migration and constant intercultural global exchange has created designs that challenge a “pure” or fixed understanding of nationality or regionality and created multicultural, transnational and diverse designs that reflect the quality of people’s experiences in today’s world as an intersection and collision of different values and communities. In this context, the question of nationality is becoming more and more complex, to the extent that it might even have become an archaic term that we still desperately strive to hold on to. We should at least be open to the notion that “Nationality” is today a term that might have lost its original conservative significance.

NOTES 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SByymar3bds. 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t71cexWzvM. 3. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Zitronenpresse_JuicySalif.jpg. http://i.vimeocdn.com/video/481752305_1280x720.jpg. 4. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/eng2150fall2020quintana/files/2020/09/Baldwin_ Stranger-in-the-Village.pdf 5. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2LLA0oWIAEB6pr.jpg. 6. https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2019/apr/09/female-footballersown-kits-world-cup-2019. 7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/07/30/nba-social-justicejerseys-names-messages/.

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REFERENCES Adorno, T. 2020. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Abingdon: Routledge. Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso Books. Andrews, E. D. and F. Andrews. 1964. Shaker Furniture: The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Anzieu, D. 2016. The Skin-Ego. London: Karnac Books. Arendt, H. 2013. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baird, M. L. 2021. “‘Making Black More Beautiful’: Black Women and the Cosmetics Industry in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” Gender & History 33, no. 2: 557–574. Barthes, R. 2013. The Language of Fashion. London: Bloomsbury. Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan press. Becksvoort, C. and J. Sheldon. 2000. The Shaker Legacy: Perspectives on an Enduring Furniture Style. Newton, CT: Taunton Press. Benjamin, W. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blaszczyk, R. L. 2012. The Color Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1998. On Television. New York: The New Press. Bourdieu, P. 2020. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Bunyard, T. 2017. Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory. Leiden: Brill. Clark, H. 2014. “Coco Chanel.” In Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things, edited by G. Lees-Maffei, 214–17. London: Bloomsbury. Clegg, S. R., D. Courpasson, and N. Phillips. 2006. Power and Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. De Certeau, M. and Pierre M. 1998. The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking. Vol. 2. Berkeley, CA: University of Minnesota Press. Debord, G. 1992. Society of the Spectacle and Other Films. London: Rebel Press. Dotan, G. and J. Ventura. 2018. Reframing the Situation: Design for Life—Thinking beyond Inclusive Design. The International Journal of Design in Society 12, no. 3: 1–27. Douglas, M. 2013. Essays on the Sociology of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge. Drews, R. 1993. The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe Ca. 1200 B.C. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Elsaesser, T. 2016. “The Global Author: Control, Creative Constraints, and Performative Self-Contradiction.” In The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, edited by Seung-hoon Jeong, Jeremi Szaniawski, 21–42. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Erikson, E. H. 1993. Childhood and Society. New York: WW Norton & Company. Fanon, F. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. Farrell-Beck, J. and C. Gau. 2002. Uplift: The Bra in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Flusser, V. 2002. Writings. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Ford, T. C. 2015. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books. Foucault, M. 1979. Power, Truth, Strategy. New York: Prometheus Books.

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Foucault, M. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. 2012. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Freyre, G. 2022. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Giddens, A. 1987. Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Goffman, E. 1979. Gender Advertisements. New York: Macmillan International Higher Education. Habermas, J. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hebdige, D. 2013. Subculture. Abingdon: Routledge. Hill, Daniel Delis. 2002. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900–1999. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Kassay, J. 1980. The Book of Shaker Furniture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. 1996. Writings on Cities. London: Blackwell. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1971. Totemism. New York: Beacon Press. Lock, M. 1993. “Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22, no. 1: 133–155. Loos, A. 1998. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. Lukásc, G. 1972. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Maldonado, T. and J. Cullars. 1991. “The Idea of Comfort.” Design Issues 8, no. 1: 35–43. Manassa, C. 2013. Imagining the Past: Historical Fiction in New Kingdom Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcia, J. E., A. S. Waterman, D. M. Matteson, S. L. Archer and J. Orlofsky, eds. 1993. Ego Identity: A Handbook for Psychosocial Research. New York: Springer Verlag. Marcuse, H. 2007. Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Abingdon: Routledge. Margolin, V. and S. Margolin. 2002. “A ‘Social Model’ of Design: Issues of Practice and Research.” Design Issues 8, no. 4: 24–30. Marks, J. 2017. Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History. Abingdon: Routledge. Marx, K. 1973 [1857]. Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McDonough, J. and K. Egolf. 2015. The Advertising Age Encyclopaedia of Advertising. Abingdon: Routledge. Murphy, P. and J. Elwood. 1998. “Gendered Experiences, Choices and Achievement— Exploring the Links.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 2, no. 2: 95–118. Paoletti, J. B. 2012. Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Papanek, V. 1971. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Petroski, H. 2013. Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design. New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press. Pinker, S. 2003. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. London: Penguin UK. Popper-Giveon, A., A. Abu-Rabia, and J. Ventura. 2014. “From White Stone to Blue Bead: Materialized Beliefs and Sacred Beads among the Bedouin in Israel.” Material Religion 10, no. 2, 132–153.

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Rogers, M. F. 2000. Barbie Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sage, M. 1996. Warfare in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Schachter, E. P. and J. Ventura. 2008. “Identity Agents: Parents as Active and Reflective Participants in their Children’s Identity Formation.” Journal of Research on Adolescence 18, no. 3: 449–476. Segal, K. and J. Ventura. 2016. From Lucy to Bernini: New Perspectives in Design. Champaign, IL: Common Ground. Seneca. 1997. On the Shortness of Life. London: Penguin. Shin, K. W. K. 2009. The Origins and Evolution of the Bra. Newcastle: University of Northumbria. Smith, A. D. 1991. “The Nation: Invented, Imagined, Reconstructed?” Millennium 20, no. 3: 353–368. Smith, A. D. 1996. “Culture, Community and Territory, the Politics of Ethnicity and Nationalism.” International Affairs 72, no. 3: 445–458. Smith, A. D. 2013. Nationalism and Modernism. Abingdon: Routledge. Sparke, P. 1995. As Long As It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. New York: Harper Collins and Pandora Press. Styhre, A. 2007. The Innovative Bureaucracy: Bureaucracy in an Age of Fluidity. Abingdon: Routledge. Styhre, A. 2013. A Social Theory of Innovation. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Taylor, P. C. 2016. Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. London: John Wiley & Sons. Turkle, S. 2011. Evocative Objects: Things We Think with. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ventura, J. 2014. “Applied Anthropology, Design and Architecture.” In: Applied Anthropology, edited by H. Goldberg and C. Bram. Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute [In Hebrew]. Ventura, J. and G. Shvo. 2018. “I Just Cut My Finger in a Ninja Fight: The Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Band-Aid,” Punctum 4, no. 1: 179–201. Viggiano, G. and H. Van Wees. 2013. “The Arms, Armour and Iconography of Early Greek Hoplite Warfare.” In Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece, edited by K. Donald and G. Viggiano, 57–73. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weber, M. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. London and New York: Penguin. Weber, M. 2009. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Abingdon: Routledge. Wharton, A. 2015. Working in America Continuity, Conflict, and Change in a New Economic Era. Abingdon: Routledge. Yacobi, H., J. Ventura and S. Danzig. 2016. “Walls, Enclaves and the (Counter) Politics of Design.” Journal of Urban Design 21, no. 4: 481–494.

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6.1 HISTORICAL REVIEW: THE DESIGN TRIUMVIRATE—CLIENT, END-USER AND DESIGNER The world of product design stands on the shoulders of a triumvirate of players (Figure 6.1): the designer, who mediates between the needs of the end user and the constraints and restrictions of the client. Naturally, each facet of this intricate triumvirate slows facilitation between them. In fact, as we can see throughout this volume, design history could be seen through this design triumvirate. While, in the early stages of material history, the “designer” (as such) provided an array of material solutions to their community that stemmed from their ever-shifting

Figure 6.1 The Ford Motor assembly plant in La Boca, Buenos Aires, 1921.

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needs, in the following millennia this description changed. As architects such as Palladio made a stellar career out of catering to the rich and the powerful, the Romantic era took matters into extreme. As such, Romanticist design reflects the chasm between the race towards function and minimalism (debated by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century) and the individual genius of the designer. This latter dynamic culminated in the rise of the “starchitect” and their designer colleagues, and so the path of narrative design served mainly the corporations’ bank accounts and marketing experts. From the second half of the twentieth century, however, the end user took centre stage, resulting in tension between the social design strategies and narrative design that still exists today. To better understand this important shift, let us consider at length these three agents and try to understand who they are and what defines them. 6.2 THE DESIGNER Placing to one side the theoretical debate between the necessity and allure of design illustrated in the classic Aristotle-Plato dialogue (see Ventura and Ventura 2015), let us consider American design Henry Dreyfuss’s description of the designer’s role: We bear in mind that the object being worked on is going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some other way used by people individually or en masse. When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient – or just plain happier – by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded. We all know that a machine-made commodity can be awkward or handy, ugly or beautiful. Industrial design is a means of making sure the machine creates attractive commodities that work better because they are designed to work better. It is coincidental, but equally important, that they sell better. (Dreyfuss 2003 [1955], 42)

Although Dreyfuss’s view echoes the previous model of the designer as a “captain of industry,” this quotation shows the necessity of thinking of the differing needs and constraints of the end user. This view correlates with the modern view of global or universal ergonomics heralded by the innovative approach of Le Corbusier in his living machine. Nevertheless, throughout design history, complementary views influenced the role of the designer, as we can see in Italian designer Bruno Munari’s (2008 [1971], 25) concise description: “he is a planner with an aesthetic sense.” The intricate nature of design is reflected in the very origins of the word design. Interestingly, the Hebrew words for design stem from the material manifestation of false gods. The word’s etymology is Latinate, referring us back to the

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original verb that defines this agent: to designate, meaning, giving certain objects a certain designation or specific function or role. Flusser (1999) elegantly frames the essence of the word as describing the practice of designers as “de-sign.” However, the term “design” and the character behind it—“the designer”— were not designated as separate from craftsmanship until the modern era. That is, throughout the history of humanity, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and until the Industrial Revolution, design was merely regarded as an inseparable part of the work of the craftsman, which included both the “designation” of an object to a certain purpose and its decoration for aesthetic purposes. However, as we have seen in Chapter 2 “Form and Function,” the meaning and use of the term “function” rapidly changed from mere necessity through the redefinition of the term as central to design by the Modernist movement and to the dissolution of the term in the postmodern era. Throughout the twentieth century, various social, economic and political processes changed the foundation and meaning of “designers” and their role in industry. Naturally, as we shall see at length, the rise of consumer culture deeply influenced the way we perceive design, reflected in our current material preferences. The second Industrial Revolution, the spread of electricity and the invention of the Fordist production line that gave rise to “mass production” transformed the nature of craftsmanship and, in a way, created what we now term “design.” The invention of a mechanical production line meant that the process of planning or designating an object was gradually separated from the process of its production (Stearns 2021). The product’s “plan” itself needed to translate the “how to” of craft so that workers with no extraordinary skills and/or machines could easily perform it. Hence, the “brief”—the design—became the central work of those who used to manually produce designated objects in the past. The possibility of mechanically reproducing objects stimulated a great shift in cultural understandings of objects, craft and design. To understand this shift further, I outline Walter Benjamin’s theory articulated in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2008 [1936]) and assess its applicability to design. In this essay, Benjamin rethinks the meaning of authentic and original artwork in the context of the rise of photography and cinema. For Benjamin, the ability to mechanically produce an image means the loss of the “aura”—the allure of authenticity of the artwork. This “aura” stems from a unique encounter between a viewer and an original artwork. The touch of the artist’s hand is what enables this aura. While the mechanical reproduction of images, Benjamin claims, secularises the artwork, turning it into a political vehicle rather than an object of ritual. A benefit of technological innovation, however, is the democratisation of culture, a change witnessed in the advent of Google Art and similar ventures. This debate relates to an ethos of the creator as genius: design being generated by an almost magical sphere of creativity. Building on the Plato-Aristotle discourse focusing on the dishonesty of artists, the “genius debate” can be better understood through the opposing ideas of Immanuel Kant (1987 [1790])

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and Marcel Duchamp (1957). While the former describes art as the sublime and stemming from its creator’s genius, the latter views the process of art as a dialogue between the creator and the viewer. Naturally, while we focus on design rather than art, the romanticised aura surrounding the designer has given rise to both the star designer and narrative design. These developments have deepened the chasm between function and design and the designer’s social agency. Design and art, as we have seen, are inherently different. Although we could speak of the “aura” of a uniquely crafted piece of furniture, for example, it would be difficult to imagine a shift from ritual to politics in the same manner as art underwent. However, there is a certain relationship between design and identity: if in the past an object was uniquely made according to the user’s taste and measured by that, a personalised relation between the object and the user was formed based on the user’s identity and cultural world. What happens then with the introduction of mass production? While, in some cases, the allure of the brand took over, transforming the designer to a brand of their own, in others mass production led to mass customisation. In his now-classic essay, Georg Simmel (2002 [1903]) highlighted the crucial role of fashion in broadcasting to the urban surrounding our unique identity. As global brands became the norm, designed objects became a vista of material and visual uniqueness, hence the popularity of mass customised objects, such as Nike ID (see Figure 6.2). Naturally, given the limits of the production floor, mass customisation is, in fact, neither unique nor customised, but rather leans on marketing to delegate a part of the design process to the consumer, wrapping it up with an inflated price tag.

Figure 6.2 The customisable platform of Nike ID.

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It would be obvious to claim that “identity” in this sense was lost, as objects were no longer unique to their users. More provocative, however, is the claim that the designed object required its end user to fit itself to a standardised model. Indeed, fashion and trends have always had such a requirement, but the introduction of mass production, with design at its centre, changed the political dynamic of forging identities and gave more power and visibility to the norm. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) eloquently described it as the common need to feel and look different. The consumer-oriented drive for individualisation—albeit fake in result—has been firmly placed in the hands of designers and marketing experts. Let us consider several other examples to illustrate the point. After the Second World War, along with the growing influence of marketing and advertisement and focus on the allure of brands and branding, the designer took centre stage. American designer Raymond Loewy (1893–1986) was among the first to harness the power of design in his redesign of Lucky Strike’s cigarette packaging (Figure 6.3). Thinking of an empty pack of cigarettes thrown on the pavement and blown by the wind, Lowey designed a larger logo and placed the firm’s brand on both sides of the pack, making the wind a free advertiser of the brand (Tretiack 1999; Bayley 2002). Design, in the context of mass production, meant that it became tightly linked with technological innovation. However, as advertisement became one of the major dynamics of design from Loewy’s perspective (Figure 6.4 represents one of his classic design projects), the support of new technologies can only go as far as the end user’s ability to tolerate the innovation. Indeed, Loewy

Figure 6.3 Lucky Strike packet designed by Raymond Loewy.

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Figure 6.4 Loewy in front of a locomotive designed by his team.

expressed the difficulty of bridging the user’s desire, cost-effectiveness and novelty in the innovative world of industrial design, claiming that: There seems to be for each individual product a critical area at which the consumer’s desire for novelty reaches what I might call the shock-zone. At that point the urge to buy reaches a plateau, and sometimes evolves into a resistance to buying. (Loewy 2003 [1951], 155)

From his understanding of the end user’s needs and constraints came Loewy’s MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) principle, encapsulating our inherent fear of innovative technologies. This fear can be bridged through interim designed products that aid and facilitate the acceptance of new inventions. Through MAYA, we can understand Google’s Glass project which failed due to a massive jump in AR technology, which end users were not ready for. Contrarily, the Toyota Prius hybrid car was a success, since it allowed for people to adjust to the notion of a car that you still need to fill with petrol rather than plug in an electric socket. 6.3 THE END USER Rapid changes in technology can, contrary to common sense, hinder and interfere with the designer’s influence on the market. In some cases, innovative technologies therefore need a hybrid or mediator object or service to facilitate the transition to the next stage of technological evolution. Levi-Strauss proposed the title of “hybrid” agents that serve to mediate and link opposing binary couples in the structuralist theoretical outline (Turner 2009 1995). The yellow light, for example, serves to mediate between green and red lights in traffic lights. In a parallel way, designers have retained a “turning” gesture to turn pages in e-book

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readers in order to facilitate the shift from paper to electronic books. In industrial design, German designer Peter Behrens (1868–1940) designed the first electric kettles to look like their predecessors to give end users a period of adjustment (Figure 6.5). We can see a similar approach in the mediating presence of hybrid cars, which stand between petrol engine and electric cars in their evolution. Prior to the fourth industrial revolution—which we can call the multimedia or digital revolution—approaches to new technologies were more sceptical. In the industrial era, machines were perceived as having the capacity to dominate over humans, at least in the production line, and new innovations were treated with suspicion. Charlie Chaplin’s famous film Modern Times (1936) demonstrates such anxieties in a most vivid way, particularly in the scene where a machine feeds him lunch. Technologically enhanced contemporary factories, however, have created other problems, such as a diminutive number of highly educated workers. The idea of a “user” has also dramatically shifted and changed. In the industrial era, which began in the nineteen century, the user was seen as a merely passive agent in the design process: a receiver of goods who is instructed what to do through the design of the object itself. Indeed, ergonomics were a “non-issue” until the mid-1950s, and the manufacturer’s main concern was his

Figure 6.5 Peter Behrens electric kettle, 1909.

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competitors. As we shall see in the next chapters, this approach would change. However, in the conventional design triumvirate introduced above, we should consider the user as a “quiet receiver” rather than an active participant in the design process. Design in this sense allows us to rethink of the very definitions of “object” and “subject” as discussed in the first chapter. From this assumption it was concluded that the central role of the designer is to identify and define problems to solve them through design (Bell 2006). Furthermore, as investigated in the last chapter, our social relations are becoming increasingly defined by and through the mediation of objects and interfaces. In this “post-social” society (Knorr Cetina 2001), the influence of designers and designed products are more important. However, if a subject can be defined, at least from a linguistic point of view, as the agent doing an action upon an object—the object being the passive component in this relationship and the subject the active one—what happens when it is the user who is instructed what to do by the object? What happens to the traditional passive/active relation? Who or what is the object at stake? Postmodern theories of design place these questions at the foreground. But, presently, we shall consider the last member of the design triumvirate, the client. 6.4 THE CLIENT As outlined above, designers mediate the needs of the end users and those of the entrepreneurs or manufacturers, that is, the client. In a nutshell, we can differentiate between what is termed “in-house” design (a design studio working as a part of a larger firm, such as Nike’s Academy of Design or Apple’s lead designer Jonathan Ive who designed the iconic Apple iMac in Figure 6.6) and a classic design studio which provides freelance design services, like car design studio Pininfarina (Figure 6.7). In the nineteenth century, as designers were yet to be defined as we do today, and thinkers such as Karl Marx (1976 [1867]) did not recognise them as an inherent part of the capitalist cycle. In this classic Marxist view, the owners of the means of production answer a material need of a specific market. Lukásc (1968), however, builds on the classic Marxist approach by introducing an almost magical interpretation of the modern designed object. Engulfed in an enticing romantic allure, designed objects can seem as though they miraculously appeared in a nearby store at the mall. Little thought is given to the actual labour, packaging or transportation of the object in acts of consumption. When we think of design, we almost immediately imagine the glamorous aspect of the design profession based on the image of “star designers.” This understanding of design means objects created by celebrity designers imbues the product and indeed the brand with a layer of allure. When examining the theory of design, we come to understand that not all design—in fact, most design—conform to such an image and that the overt branding of an individual designer is a marketing strategy.

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Figure 6.6 Apple’s iMac designed by Jonathan Ive.

Figure 6.7 Alfa Romeo’s Pininfarina Spider.

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In fact, the major point of relation between the three agents of the design triumvirate is the design brief. During the classic design process, the client gives the design team a brief in which the product is broadly outlined, along with a budget frame and market overview. In this brief, the design team translates and interprets the client’s needs and constraints according to their mode of thinking and outline the product’s relation to the end user. Ryd (2004) stresses the brief’s importance as a crucial interpretative process, defining the professional relationship between client and designer. She notes that a carefully planned project, based on a detailed and precise brief, can mean the failure or success of a project. We can describe the process of transforming the textual outline of the design project into a 3D material object as the central act of interpretation conducted by the designer (Ventura and Ventura 2015). As an example of this translation process, we can turn to the research conducted by Tomes et al. (1998). During their research, Tomes et al. observed the design process in a graphic design studio and designers’ translation abilities. Using qualitative research methods, the researchers found that the designers’ main tool is their ability to translate textual concepts and meanings into visual data and vice versa. According to the researchers, a vast database of visual imagery is a crucial element in every graphic designer’s arsenal. 6.5 TOWARDS POST-FORDISM AND THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: FORDISM, GLOBALISATION AND DESIGN The Ford Motor Company’s influence on modern material culture, design, marketing and consumerism cannot be underestimated. Notwithstanding Fordism’s disadvantages, Henry Ford was a visionary, transforming the assembly line and shipping and distributing strategies, and ushering in the normalisation of the products’ uniformity. Following economic, social and political shifts in the second half of the twentieth century, the global market changed. A significant shift stemming from global manufacturing and new technologies has been the transition from national brands to “a-national” and global brands (Mendes and Rees-Roberts 2015). Renault, for example, historically a proud French brand, is now partly owned by Nissan, a Japanese brand. Moreover, while Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley, it has Research and Development (R&D) facilities across the world. While we all presume (and usually rightfully so) that the objects we use were produced in China, the rest of the process is shrouded in a thick smokescreen of global and local structures. The intricate socio-economic and political issue of globalism is beyond this subsection’s scope, but a few key aspects of it are necessary to rethink the process of design. In the following pages, we reflect on the way in which the rise of multinational and transnational corporations have changed the relationship between the main players of the design world and how these are related to changing modes of production. IKEA, for example, as one of the first truly global brands of design (alongside Singer), developed a homogenised yet locally adjustable catalogue of

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products and services. Furthermore, the need for cheap shipping and packaging (flat pack, in IKEA’s terminology) dictated much of this global brand’s identity (Dahlvig 2011). In the decades since Roland Barthes’s (1972) epic description of the Citroën DS as the culmination of material imagination and French national identity, things have changed. Let us take, for example, the car firm Alfa Romeo. While every car enthusiast will identify the brand as a solely Italian manufacturer, the reality is more complex. Currently, it is owned by Fiat-Chrysler who also owns the allAmerican firm, Jeep. So, to what extent can we think of Alfa Romeo as Italian? And what would make a design “Italian” in the first place? That being said, even if the car is not owned by an Italian firm or not produced solely in Italy, its design has Italian roots. So here, one can finally make some sense of this international model of design branding (Figure 6.8). However, what about companies founded in the era of the demise of the “national” corporation, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook? Are these American? Are companies founded in Israel, such as Mobileye, SanDisk, Waze and WhatsApp, Israeli? The advent of the Internet and rise of the “information age” can be seen as catalysts of a process that began the third Industrial Revolution: a globalisation of trade and a facilitation of global labour divisions in the context of commercial regulations being eased. All these together have shifted the cards on national identity in terms of the traditional aesthetic roots of design (Saito 2017). The nineteenth century saw both the European Industrial Revolution and the standardisation of time, distance and weight, which gave rise to new standards in planning, engineering, design and production. Building on the “father of

Figure 6.8 Philippe Starck, Louis Ghost Chair. This chair is made by Kartell, an Italian-based company loved by all design enthusiasts. It was designed by a French designer living in NY and manufactured in China. It is a modern Baroque (local) turned into a minimalistic plastic chair (global) sold all over the world.

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management” Francis Winslow Taylor’s theory, Henry Ford invented an efficient assembly line methodology that would influence the market for almost a century. With the entry of a high number of uneducated or undereducated workers into the labour market, the Fordist model split the assembly line into specified stations, in which each labourer conducted a single action. In operationalising founding principles of efficiency, time management, allocation of actions and repeating actions, there was no need to train or upskill workers. The Fordist model was an important precursor in broader processes of globalisation, since it enabled the separation of the production process from the design process and allowed manufacturing processes to be exported to geographical areas where labour was cheaper, and hence, production was more cost-effective. As manufacturing technologies advanced, so did the needs and voices of the workers, leading to what is termed the post-Fordist era (Jürgens et al. 1993). Such processes gave rise to a new theoretical dialectic that aims to estimate and evaluate globalisation’s influence on politics and cultural heritage. One side of this dialectic sees globalisation as a gradual transfer of a harmonious benefaction across the world, where old attachments to nationality are gradually being erased. The other side of this dialectic emphasised this process’ power-related roots, widening and deepening the already expansive gap between the rich and the poor (Bauman 1998). Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1979) theory of the global system exemplifies the latter, foregrounding the wealth gap in his analysis of China as the global manufacturing hub. According to his theory, “core” states (mainly Western and/or former colonising states) exploit periphery and semi-periphery states, traditionally located in the relative East and South of the globe. Daniel Bell describes this change in terms of a shift towards a division of labour between what would be termed the “service industries” and “production industries,” a division that facilitated the rise of “mega-brands” and, later, as we shall see, “mega-brands” of data and digital services (Pratt 2008). In fact, the post-Fordist industrial era is characterised by growing levels of education and expertise amongst the workforce. Modern automobile factories demonstrate this shift: there are highly educated and highly specialised yet small labour forces who are aided by mechanised robots. The implications of this, as we have seen in the Alfa Romeo example, reach further than the global industrialised economy. Globalised trends of design have resulted in the effacement of local traditions of craftsmanship and production that embody different aesthetic values. This loss of local identity in design practices is oftentimes termed “cultural colonialisation,” a process in which Western aesthetic and ethical values are reinforced in a system of power governed by the logic of capitalist markets and consumerist culture. We see this play out clearly in the world of design. Well-known contemporary designers are mainly from the core states (think of a single known African designer, apart from Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye). The same rule applies when dealing with production: while many Western products are

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Figure 6.9 Fire Station at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, designed by Zaha Hadid in 1993.

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Figure 6.10 Japanese or American Minimalism? (Fukasawa on the left, Hecht on the right.)

while it is not sure they will know he is French, moreover, when the brands he designs for are mainly Italian or German. 6.6 POST-FORDISM AND THE RISE OF KNOWLEDGE What comes to mind when you imagine a factory? Is it a dimly lit hall full of smoke, grease and sweaty blue-clothed workers? In fact, if you watch a manufacturing video of BMW production factory (Figure 6.11), you will be amazed. Spotlessly clean, efficient and eerily beautiful. Curiously, there is no trace of human activity since the space is dominated by highly sophisticated machines. This shift symbolises the important change from the Fordism to the postFordism era in the context of the rise of knowledge-based industries, resulting in a skeleton crew of highly specialised and educated personnel operating in a state-of-the-art mechanised factory. This shift means a further separation between the world of design and the world of production and a deepening gap in divisions of labour. Returning to the design process, we need to consider design partners who work alongside the designer, client and end user. Two of these are crucial here: engineers and the production factory. Material engineers, smart materials, bio-mimicry and new production strategies have influenced the collaborations among designers and indeed have implications on the design process itself. The most profound shift in the Fordist to the post-Fordist era was the rising power of knowledge as a cultural and economic assessment common denominator (Leadbeater 2000). If in the past production and industry were the main tools in assessing economic growth and prosperity, the new post-Fordist model, embedded in globalised industrialisation, has meant that the core indicator for value

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Figure 6.11 BMW i8 factory.

is now the know-how rather than the doing. Knowledge and information have become central in defining cultural and social capital. Old mines and factories in the West have been converted into new upscale areas of living for those working in the creative and service industries, while new giant factories were built in India and in China. Western corporations invested in virtual aspects of production and the intellectual aspect of designing and managing design firms. A new term, “cognitive capitalism,” came to describe the new internal politics of an industry based on virtual values of production based on human-only capabilities such as creativity and resourcefulness. Keeping in mind that shifts in production modes continuously occur, we can consider the vast political changes new technologies (such as the invention of the 3D printer) can bring, creating possibilities for production to no longer be dependent on any factory circumstances or a humanised production line. Indeed, as we can in fashion design (see Figure 6.12) and small-scale architecture, 3D produced products can offer previously impossible options, ranging from speed of production to innovative fabrics and more effective and cheaper production. Currently, a semi-professional 3D printer can be purchased for less than USD 1,000 (Figure 6.13). This rapidly growing phenomenon will change the inherent disciplinary relationship between the manufacturer and the end user

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Figure 6.12 The 3D printed dress for burlesque dancer Dita von Teese, designed by Michael Schmidt and architect Francis Bitonti.

Figure 6.13 Toy company Mattel’s 3D printer Thingmaker.

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and, consequently, the role of the designer: designers may act as a supplier of ideas and ideology, not only as a link between the user and the manufacturer. Furthermore, designed products will not be produced generically, but rather locally and on demand. The designer will be able to be more attentive to user needs regardless of the manufacturer’s interests. This innovative technology coupled with crowdfunding strategies (such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo) would be a game changer for designers, allowing them to bypass the traditional production process and providers. Yet, alongside these mass technological changes, a new understanding arose in the discipline of design, shifting the focus on the needs and constraints of the end user. This shift, originating in the mid-1950s and echoed in the work of both American Henry Dreyfuss and Ulm-based Argentinian Tomas Maldonado, restates the importance of human-centred design or, as it would later be called, social design. 6.6.1 The New-Era: Participatory Design and Open Code Design As we have seen, various changes, both globally and in the world of design, have led to redefining the relationship between the designer and the end user. Since Henry Dreyfuss’s seminal book Designing for People (1955), various design ideologies have been posited, such as people-centred design. Three such ideologies emerged during the 1980s and 1990s: co-design, participatory design and empathic design. Instead of designing for people, these theories of design saw designers start designing with people. While working for and with the end users (or design partners), this agenda took a step forwards. Open code design features in the works of designer Ronen Kadushin and of Enzo Mari, who gave furniture drafts which users then built for themselves. Designers have also urged the end users to use their design for free, hence altering the manufacturing process profoundly. Through this strategy, known as open design, current users will learn to build or even invent their own material languages based on their specific needs. In ethnographic research, the validity and reliability of a research can be assessed by the researcher sharing their results and conclusions with research partners and soliciting their perspective on her work (Morse et al. 2002). In a similar fashion, designers share their thoughts and insights with the end users and vice versa in what is now termed co-design. Co-design can result in a close relationship between the designer and the end user, ranging from workshops to gather users’ feedback (Sperschneider and Bagger 2003; Steen et al. 2007; Sanders and Stappers 2008) to a longer and deeper co-operation (Westerlund et al. 2003). Designers using this approach view users as experts who hold important and relevant knowledge to the design process. Creating a meaningful connection between designers and end users will strengthen ethical and social design rather than “design-art” or design for “the 1%.” Design is influenced by economic, political, social and cultural changes. The 2008 financial crisis resulted in new forms of frugal design in a similar manner to the market crash of 1929. FDR’s “New Deal” in response to the 1929 crisis was,

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in fact, the paramount catalyst for a new area of design dedicated to industrial products and the consumer. A key fiscal principle of FDR’s New Deal was that spending would bring back prosperity: public spending and minimum wages for workers would bolster spending power. In turn, it became important to design dependable and desirable mass-produced products for the expanding consumer market (Segal and Ventura 2016). Consumerism also heralded the rise and normalisation of new technologies in what became known as the “machine age.” The 1929 economic crisis’ resultant pessimism was tempered by a growing belief in the power of design to bring about a fundamental change in the economy and society as a whole. Contemporary designer and one of the fathers of the “streamlined” style Norman Bel Geddes spoke of the hope for a brighter future by implementing design: Never before, in an economic crisis, has there been such an aroused consciousness on the part of the community at large and within industry itself. Complacency has vanished. A new horizon appears. A horizon that will inspire the next phase in the evolution of the age. We are entering an era which, notably, shall be characterized by Design in four specific phases: Design in social structure to insure the organization of people, work, and leisure. Design in machines that shall improve working conditions by eliminating drudgery. Design in all objects of daily use that shall make them economical, durable, convenient and congenial to everyone. Design in the arts, painting, sculpture, music, literature and architecture that shall inspire the new era. (Geddes 1932, 4)

In the vein of French architect Le Corbusier’s (1887–1965) attempt to define what he called “the living machine” (Corbusier 2013 [1923]), designers also wrestled with the idea of universal standards of designing objects. Although Dreyfuss spearheaded designers’ efforts to understand the needs of the user, he nevertheless did so from a marketing-oriented approach. In other words, Dreyfuss’s, much like Le Corbusier in architecture, “Joe and Josephine” were adopted as universal standards of man and woman (Figure 6.14), in turn imposing ergonomic and physiological constraints on the work of designers (Segal and Ventura 2016). In fact, the catchphrase “average Joe” originates in Dreyfuss’s drawings. Naturally, when thinking of global physiological differences, universalising the white body is highly problematic. The broader focus on the end user, however, was a step in the right direction. From the 1960s until now, political and economic changes were mirrored in design philosophy and agendas. One such shift was the focus at the end of the 1980s to what was later defined as “inclusive design.” According to this approach, instead of excluding minoritised social groups such as disabled persons, the designer designs for the margins and mainstream design will follow (Clarkson et al. 2013). This should result in design outputs that not only meet

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Figure 6.14 Dreyfuss’s Joe and Josephine, the beginning of standardised ergonomics.

the needs of “extreme” users in the design process, but are also attractive and usable to mainstream society as well. The OXO peeler (Figure 6.15) is a classic example of this approach. Rather than design a specific kitchen utensil targeted at arthritis patients, this peeler became a household favourite, camouflaging the intended users’ discomfort in a specially designed shell comfortable for all. Arthritis patients find the ribbed and thicker handle much easier to use, and other users enjoy this product since it is better designed than the available alternatives, as the ribbed design prevents slippage while handling vegetables. Indeed, the OXO peeler, as the epitome of inclusive design, exemplifies how the standard user is the disabled user, not the healthy “average Joe.” More recently, Knight and Bichard (2011) have described inclusive design as a design ideology that incorporates multiple methods to achieve inclusive outcomes that meet the needs of not only a physically diverse population but also a culturally diverse one. However, while inclusive design is certainly an important concept, recently the term has been criticised. A central criticism is that a designer cannot include every representative user in the design process, and consequently, designers may be catering to one user’s needs at the expense of another’s. This will often result in design that meets “special needs” as opposed to comprehensive “inclusive” design (Bichard 2015). In a current reframing of empowerment through design, design theoreticians called for broadening the scope of inclusive design, relating also to political issues as well as sociocultural ideologies (Ventura and Bichard 2016).

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Figure 6.15 The OXO peeler originated thanks to the needs of arthritis patients.

The most current agenda in design strives not only to facilitate the life of the user, but also empower them to an elevated, healthier self. Rather than focusing on designing a product, this current approach deals with redefining the design situation. As such, designers take into consideration not only the product, but the various users (e.g. medical staff, patients and family members) and their sociocultural surroundings. For instance, the user of a prosthetic leg is not the only end user: the physiotherapist, the patient’s family and the surrounding sociocultural milieu all influence the aesthetics of this medical product. In such an approach, then, the designer is both a material facilitator or mediator and a cultural agent creating material interpretations of specific situations (Ventura and Shvo 2017). Key to this approach to design are the theories of American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) and German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). While the former (Geertz 1973) asserted that actions—and, indeed, rituals—should be addressed as texts to be interpreted by anthropologists, the second presented a much broader approach. Geertz described every cultural interaction as a text which the anthropologist needs to decipher and interpret. Gadamer’s main theoretical innovation was his assertion of the universalism of hermeneutics, that is, understanding unlocks the self and the world while creating a new relation between the two. Language, accordingly, is the horizon of hermeneutic ontology (Gander 2015), or in Gadamer’s own words: “being that can be understood is language” (2013, 490). Therefore, art or design is not situated in or for itself, but rather through the mediation of language. In other words, the relations between visual-material representation, language and comprehensibility create hermeneutic knowledge or understanding. Since Gadamer’s assumptions encompass all human experience (Gadamer 1996), design falls within his theory’s scope.

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Figure 6.16 Prosthetic leg cover in the colours of Marvel Iron Man’s armour.

This mediation is manifested in the world of (medical) design through the combination of visual-material semiotic language and interpretation. A prosthetic leg cover designed by UNYQ, a company that produces custom-made prosthetic wears with emphasis on style (see Figure 6.16), reflects a wider cultural context than the “mere” product. Mimicking Marvel’s Iron Man, the cover’s design takes into consideration the product and user’s sociocultural environment, so that the user will not only function but enjoy positive reactions to the prosthetic. Therefore, a shift from the mere function or necessity to elaborate design is underway. While the example of the prosthetic leg cover focuses on the emotions of the disabled user, other designed physical enhancements can actually change how the user interacts with the world. These include bio-designed eyes that possess thermal imaging properties or biologic prosthetics that are stronger and sturdier than physical limbs. REFERENCES Barthes, R. 1972. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bauman, Z. 1998. On glocalization: Or globalization for some, localization for some ­others. Thesis Eleven 54, no. 1: 37–49. Bauman, Z. 2013. Liquid Modernity. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Bayley, S. 2002. The Lucky Strike Packet by Raymond Loewy. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag. Bel Geddes, N. 1932. Horizons. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

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Bichard, J. 2015. Extending Architectural Affordance: The Case of the Publicly Accessible Toilet. PhD thesis. Accessed via: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1467131/ Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge,  MA: Harvard University Press. Clarkson, P. J., R. Coleman, S. Keates and C. Lebbon. 2013. Inclusive Design: Design for the Whole Population. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media. Corbusier, L. 2013 [1923]. Towards a New Architecture. Courier Corporation. Dahlvig, A. 2011. The IKEA Edge: Building Global Growth and Social Good at the World’s Most Iconic Home Store. New York: McGraw Hill. Dreyfuss, H. 2003. Designing for People. New York: Skyhorse Publishing Inc. Duchamp, M. 1957. The Creative Act. Online at chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://web.archive.org/web/20180421174858id_/http://www. cathystone.com/Duchamp_Creative%20Act.pdf Flusser, V. 1999. Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. New York: Reaktion Books. Gadamer, H. G. 1996. The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gadamer, H. G. 2013. Truth and Method. London: Bloomsbury. Gander, H. H. 2015. “Gadamer: The Universality of Hermeneutics.” In The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, edited by J. Malpas and H. H. Gander, 137–148. London: Routledge. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Vol. 5019). New York: Basic Books. Jürgens, U., Malsch, T., and Dohse, K. 1993. Breaking from Taylorism: Changing forms of work in the automobile industry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Knight, G. and J. A. Bichard. 2011. Publicly Accessible Toilets: An Inclusive Design Guide. London: Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art. Knorr Cetina, K. 2001. “Postsocial Relations:  Theorizing Sociality in a Postsocial Environment.” In Handbook of Social Theory, edited by G. Ritzer and B. Smart, 520537. London: Sage Publications. Leadbeater, C. 2000. Living on Thin Air: The New Economy. London: Penguin. Loewy, R. 2003 [1951]. “The MAYA Stage.” In The Industrial Design Reader, edited by Carma Gorman, 155–159. New York: Allworth Press. Lukásc, G. 1968. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Mertin Press. Lury, C. 1996. Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Marx, K. 1976[1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. Mendes, S. and Rees-Roberts, N. 2015. “New French Luxury: Art, Fashion and the Re-Invention of a National Brand.” Luxury 2, no. 3: 53–69. Morse, J., Barrette, M., Mayan, M., Olson, K., and Spiers, J. 2002. Verification Strategies for Establishing Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research. International Journal for Qualitative Methods, 1, 13–22. Munari, B. 2008. Design as Art. London: Penguin UK. Pratt, A. C. 2008. “Innovation and Creativity.” In The Sage Companion to the City, edited by P. Hubbard, 266–297. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Ryd, N. 2004. “The Design Brief as Carrier of Client Information during the Construction Process.” Design Studies 25, no. 3: 231–249. Saito, Y. 2017. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sanders, E. B. N. and Stappers, P. J. 2008. Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. Co-design 4, no. 1: 5–18.

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Segal, K. and J. Ventura. 2016. From Lucy to Bernini: New Perspectives in Design. Champaign, IL: Common Ground. Simmel, G. 2012. “The metropolis and mental life.” In The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by J. Lin and C. Mele, 37–45. Abingdon: Routledge. Sperschneider, W. and Bagger, K. 2003. Ethnographic Fieldwork under Industrial Constraints: Toward Design-in-Context. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 15, no. 1: 41–50. Stearns, P. N. 2020. The Industrial Revolution in World History. Abingdon: Routledge. Steen, M., Kuijt-Evers, L., and Klok, J. (2007, July). Early user involvement in research and design projects–A review of methods and practices. In 23rd EGOS colloquium 5, no. 7: 1–21. Tomes, A., Oates, C. and Armstrong, P. 1998. “Talking Design: Negotiating the Verbal-Visual Translation.” Design Studies 19: 127–142. Tretiack, P. 1999. Raymond Loewy and Streamlined Design. Palm Beach, FL: Universe/ Vendome. Turner, T. S. 2009. “The Crisis of Late Structuralism. Perspectives and Animism: Rethinking Culture, Nature, Spirit and Bodiliness.” Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 7, no. 1: 1. Ventura, J. and G. Ventura. 2015. “Exphrasis: Verbalizing Un-existing Objects in the World of Design.” Design and Culture 7, no. 2: 185–202. Ventura, J. and J. A. Bichard. 2016. “Design Anthropology or Anthropological Design? Towards ‘Social Design’.” International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation 5, no. 3–4: 222–234. Wallerstein, I. 1979.  The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westerlund, B., Lindqvist, S., Mackay, W., and Sundblad, Y. 2003, April. Co-design methods for designing with and for families. In Proceedings of the 5th European Academy of Design Conference. Barcelona, Spain. Williams, R. 2000. “Advertising: The Magic System.” Advertising & Society Review 1, no. 1, 320–336.

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7

Design, Ecologies and the Body

The term “design ecologies” stems from theories of “social ecology,” an academic field that strives to understand human activity not in relation to individual occurrences, but to systemic changes in which such occurrences appear. Conceiving of human activity as an ecology allows us to approach human behaviour from a wide-angle perspective that complicates existing models of the study of psychology, sociology and anthropology. The following chapter brings us closer to understanding how design fits into such modes of thought, in what ways it participates and what role it plays within such ecologies. This chapter considers the unique relationship between design and the body, which, for us, encapsulates the relationship design holds with our most intimate space: our biological habitat. In examining the relationship between design and the body, we can better understand how design functions within social and cultural ecologies. 7.1 SHIFTS TOWARDS CONTEMPORARY DESIGN-THINKING As we have seen in previous chapters, the early twentieth century gave rise to various ways of thinking about design that were predominantly centred upon the designed artefact as the object of design, and often even as its definition. These approaches to design focused on the object’s aesthetics in relation to style, within its political meaning vis-à-vis economic, political and social ideologies. Following the devastating effects of the Second World War, new changes in the nation-state’s responsibility towards its citizens, coupled with the profound sociopolitical shifts of the 1950s and 1960s, resulted in an array of different attitudes towards design. From the postmodern politics of design groups such as Memphis and Archizoom, who used the essence of colour and shape to challenge their contemporary norms and conventions through redefining configuration and function of design to the social agenda of the Ulm School, design faced an important change (Radice 1995). Although these groups contributed to the evolution of design, their political influence could be questioned. During this period, Danish co-design as well as the rising ergonomic principles of Henry Dreyfuss nudged the discipline towards a better account of the social roots of design practice. This part of the chapter explores the evolution from market-

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216230-8

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oriented design of the early twentieth century to contemporary design strategies focusing on the “end user.” 7.1.1 Historical Shifts: Social Design Strategies The First and Second World Wars had tremendous social influence, not only because of their devastating consequences but also because new forms of technologically enhanced warfare reflected and, at times, even created a new social order. We can very generally speak of radical changes in a few fields. First, technological innovation that germinated in the First World War continued evolving, resulting in faster military aircraft and more devastating weaponry in the Second World War. “Body count” gained a new meaning: these two wars had killed millions of people, mostly young men, which directly affected social structures. Moreover, unlike in other wars, where troops’ chances of dying in the battlefield were very much dependent on their military rank, these two wars led to an equalisation of one’s possibilities of being killed. Second, cultural changes which embraced economic efficiency, influenced by the industrial revolutions of the time, transformed strategies of war: an escalating quantity of individuals on the battlefield included civilians. The efficiency of concentration camps is an epitome of this new culture of war, within which the ability to differentiate between the war front and its “rear,” so to speak, deteriorated. Such differentiations were made based on geographical location and national affiliation in the First World War, and then changed again in the Second World War to encompass ideological affiliations and racial categorisations. When speaking of concentration camps, we must remember that these are social structures that do not belong only to the Third Reich—taken to their most extreme form in “death camps”—but were very much a common tactic used to manage human populations categorised as “Others.” Concentration camps were built in the Soviet Union and by the British and the French in South Africa and in the Middle East, respectively. In fact, these structures are still very much part of our social landscape to this day as a means of controlling large groups of “others.” Third, new communication technologies were used as technologies of warfare, assisting both in the dissemination of propaganda and in the bureaucratic control of armies, victims and populations. Data and information collection became crucial to the war effort, gradually becoming anchored not only in the territory fought in/for, but also in an increasingly visible virtual realm of direct ideological representation. These changes, leading to the rise of various modes of warfare, influenced design and industrial innovation as well as diverting attention away from the designed object and towards the design-induced interaction of humans, both with their technologies and with each other. 7.1.2 In the Beginning There Was War During the Second World War, the most advanced American bomber, the B17 Flying Fortress, started to crash repeatedly either upon landing or take-off. Naturally, the clear and immediate suspect would have been the pilots’ lack of

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concentration or technical flying skills. However, the US Air Force asked social psychologist Alphonse Chapanis (1917–2002) to investigate and understand what was going wrong in this beacon of modern technology. Chapanis conducted what would be termed today “shadowing,” that is, carefully observing end users (the pilots, in this case) while asking them questions regarding their work. In doing so, he identified the problem when he found that the landing gear and flap shafts were similarly designed, resulting in the pilots confusing the two. His immediate solution was to redesign the handles of the two shafts. He did so according to semiotic symbols that would correspond with their function: the landing gear was shaped as a wheel while the flap shaft was shaped as a triangle. This not only solved the pilots’ poor performance, but is, in fact, to this day, the aviation standard in every aircraft (see Figure 7.1). This simple adjustment of the gear by Chapanis started a revolution in understanding different facets of technological innovation. If the engineered innovative aspect of technology was at the centre before, now it became clear that unless such innovation can communicate with end users’ habits and needs it will not function as expected. Inadvertently, Chapanis embarked on a journey to explore the role of design and its importance in human professional and practical performance, changing the product according to the end users’ needs (Ventura and Shahar 2018). This might be one of the first instances where design was thought of in relation to a wider context that considered a variety of human factors, central to maximising the potential of technological innovation. Chapanis,

Figure 7.1 B17 Flying Fortress’ throttles.

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hence, will be considered the father of what we now call “user-interface design” and one of the first to define the field of ergonomics. In truth, despite Chapanis being heralded as the approach’s father, such considerations were always at the background of design-thinking. A well-known maxim in the jargon of design pedagogics refers to the cupping of both hands to drink water as the first instance of design. While this example does not point to the actual development of an external practical object, it points to a moment of enlightenment, figuratively speaking, where one understands that an object could perform a task better than the human body. It is a formative moment in understanding design in relation to bodily functions and their possible improvement. However, when considering the evolution of functional objects not only as improving but also extending our bodily functions, the starting point could be a bit farther away. Of course, when the axe was designed in the Palaeolithic era, ergonomics would not be mentioned as such by its makers; but this does not mean that the interaction between objects and the user’s body were not considered: the axe’s main points of design are its hefting ability and the balance between the shaft and the stone head. In this sense, it is a material manifestation of three innovative technologies: the premeditated derogation of the axe head, the act of choosing a suitable wooden handle and, most importantly, the use of a leather string to latch the two pieces together at the right point so as to maximise momentum in relation to the end user’s bodily gesture. The inventors of the Palaeolithic axe are not the only examples of user-centred design before the Industrial Revolution. The famous Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) called for the attention of road planners to focus on the importance of flora along the way. According to Palladio, an intelligent use of vegetation along the road will create a soothing environment for walkers, lessening their fatigue (Palladio 2002 [1570]). Palladio not only acknowledged the user as part of a technological device that needs to work efficiently through the interaction between man and design, but already understood that design is a means of changing conditions for the flavour and “heat” of social interactions. 7.2 DESIGNING FOR PEOPLE Counter to the shift of design to mean simply the “draft” or blueprint of mass-produced objects during the Industrial Revolution, a self-conscious and continuous effort to understand the physical, psychological and social needs and constraints of end users as a crowd arose. The main point of innovation since the second half of the twentieth century lay in the definition of end users as such, their categorical separation from the “client” or the design producer that led to systematic and well-calculated considerations of end users and their possible involvement in the design process. The title of American designer Henry Dreyfuss’s book Designing for People (2003 [1955]) summarises the immensely important shift from designing for the market to designing for people.

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By the mid-1960s, personal conflict between the Ulm School’s two major figures, German architect and designer Max Bill (1908–1994) and Argentinian designer Tomás Maldonado (b. 1922), came to stand for a major rift between two design ideologies (Betts 2004). While Bill symbolised a classic industry-oriented approach (see Figure 7.2), viewing the designer as a necessary agent of the market, Maldonado proposed a different path. Based on his socialist agenda, the Argentinian designer opted for shifting the School’s focus from an economic-industrial approach to a social one. This shift included a revitalisation of the School’s curriculum and the introduction of courses in sociology, psychology and political science. This shift would evolve into various design strategies starting in the 1960s, developed extensively throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the umbrella of “social design,” that is, design that acknowledges and seeks to influence social interaction in one way or another while taking the well-being of the user into account. These strategies range from “user-centred design” to “inclusive design” and “social design.” 7.2.1 Inclusive Design One of the growing theoretical trends that followed the two World Wars grew out of post-colonial discourses and the theorisation of the “Other” as a term to reveal long-term cultural and social processes that lead to violence. The intellectual inclusion of the “Other” in the telling and shaping of histories, archives, social memory, social imagination and public space became central to contemporary post-colonial and postmodern thinking—and design was no exception to

Figure 7.2 The Ulm stool, designed by Max Bill, Hans Gugelot and Paul Hildinger, 1955.

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this. In fact, it can very much be seen as one of the conductors of change in this field, which is not only theoretical but also visual and visible. Inclusive design stems from the assumption that every design decision would include some end users and exclude others. A good example of this is the design of scissors: the direction of the blade and the composition of the handle is normally designed for the majority of users, in this case, right-handed people. Left-handed people, on the other hand, are excluded from using this object as efficiently. Such exclusion is oftentimes transparent because it takes “normality” to be the default way for thinking about users. However, by including “extreme” or “other” users in the process of design-thinking, design can become such that it is also good for the mainstream user. To put it simply, inclusive design is a design practice based on the assertion “innovate for the extreme, design for the mainstream” or, in other words, “design for the excluded and the rest will follow” (Coleman et al. 2007). Such assertions stress that inclusive design should be user-centred and demonstrate an awareness of the larger population, especially those who are ageing. On a practical level, inclusive design aims to be functional, usable, desirable and viable. Designed objects that include “extremes” and are desired by the wider population means that excluded social groups could potentially feel empowered by good, well-crafted and even evocative objects. In an early work in inclusive design, Coleman et al. (2003, 13) defined inclusive design as a process in which “extreme users,” usually perceived as marginalised social groups, are socially included. While inclusive design looks at functionality, in many cases its emancipatory tool is, in fact, its aesthetic. Inclusive design uses aesthetics as a lever that shifts the balance of power and, in turn, changes social stigma. One contemporary instance of how inclusive designs work in practice is the slide flip-flops. This design was mainly associated in the past with poor taste or style, usually that of immigrants, especially when worn with socks. Since 2013, however, and coinciding with a growing awareness of migration to Europe, “immigrants’ styles” such as slide flip-flops with socks or any sandal with a sock—which would have previously been considered a sartorial catastrophe— became a trendy, up-to-date look that persists even today. Whether this is an instance of a self-aware “inclusive” move in design or a simple shift of perception is yet to be revealed, but it does demonstrate a path by which a changing fashion can render a previously excluded group of people a central part of the culture into which they attempt to assimilate. Hence, the importance design as a field has in the integration of marginalised social groups could not be overstated. As such, Bichard and Knight (2011) recently described inclusive design as a design philosophy that incorporates multiple methods to achieve inclusive outcomes that meet the needs not only of a physically diverse population but also a culturally diverse one. Nevertheless, inclusive design principles have been criticised, resulting in a search for a wider definition (Ventura and Bichard 2017). While inclusive design triggered social- and ethical-oriented design, it is still focused on industry and

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lacks a deeper agentic ethical tendency. The same goes for “human-centred” design which lost its edge owing to the rising standard of designing for people and not because of the market or marketing agents. However, as one of the centrepieces of social design strategies, the importance of inclusivity in design could not be exaggerated. Recently, its principle use has shifted from dealing mainly with the physically disabled to the mentally ill and to sociocultural issues, such as immigration and violence. 7.2.2 Empathic Design Gunn and Donovan (2012, 1) rightfully claim that a central resemblance between anthropology and design is their shared ability to interpret daily activities. Indeed, a relationship between design and anthropology is readily apparent, given the theoretical basis that design draws on for inspiration—as already investigated in Chapter 3. Empathic design essentially means that the emotional sphere of the user should be considered, not only pure functionality or efficiency of use, and that this consideration should be achieved through actual involvement with and observation of the users (Leonard-Barton 1994). This perspective led to the development of various design methodologies based on understanding the user’s world first-hand. In this approach, the designer strives to understand the constraints and difficulties faced by an individual and then create a product that will effectively counteract these (McDonagh 2008). Empathic design uses strategies borrowed from the field of anthropology to achieve its goals. Empathic design processes start by careful observation of a community or an institutional framework to identify the challenges such a community may be facing. Such designers work in teams which include several other professions, such as engineers, sociologists, anthropologists or other experts of the human conditions and factors. They rely on knowledge exchange between all the stakeholders, since the process involves a variety of information that is collected and analysed: facial expressions, body language, mundane conversations, group dynamics and so forth. Respectively, one of cornerstones of empathic design lies in the basic contemporary anthropological concept of understanding a situation through the “native’s” point of view, devoid of judgement and with empathy towards their reality. As designers, we often find ourselves needing to design elements that comprise complex social and personal settings, like, for instance, design for social and healthcare situations. In designing for unfamiliar situations, empathy is in dire need. The growing discussion relating to the ideology and politics of design adds another layer of complexity to this design strategy. As we shall see in the chapter dedicated to design and ideology, a clearly defined set of values enables designers to define their role in society and use their agentic ability to trigger a change in various layers of our reality. Although empathic design has similarities with inclusive design, its main advantage is its treatment of end users as design partners; hence, it also shared similarities with co-design.

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7.2.3 Co-Design Co-design, an abbreviation of what was termed “participatory design” or “co-operative design,” originated at the end of the 1960s in Denmark and influenced various design methodologies from industrial design to urban design. This strategy seeks to create a balance between designers and end users within the design process itself. Embedding ethnographic research in design practice led to the understanding that design could be based not only on data gathered about end users, but also on the direct involvement of all stakeholders—partners, owners, customers, end users, etc.—in the design process. When architects found that working with residents throughout the development of built environments created better results, designers from other fields hopped on the same train. In broadening the scope of users’ involvement, this method doesn’t merely take into consideration the users’ constraints and beliefs, but also calls for their active involvement in the design process as potential partners identifying their challenges and optimising possible solutions. For designers who work with such strategies, a crucial element of the process is to identify and work with future users of the design at stake to predict the efficiency of the solution it offers (Brandt et al. 2010). Co-design strategies often result in a close relationship between designers and end users, ranging from workshops organised by designers targeted at gathering users’ feedback (Sperschneider and Bagger 2003; Steen 2007; Sanders and Stappers 2008) to a lengthier and more in-depth co-operation, whereby end users are part of testing and improving the designed product (Westerlund et al. 2003). Naturally, the designer is the professional player in these situations and the one deciding on the process and end result, so it is perhaps not a fully democratic or emancipatory tool. However, a close and open dialogue with the various design partners has proven to result in better designed products. Of course, each of those design-thinking methods could be combined with another, so that co-design may use empathic design and inclusive design strategies, for example. Oftentimes, using such means of understanding what design does and for whom results in finalised products that are notably more suitable to actual life scenarios. The cultural critique of design, introduced in Chapters 4–7, could well be a complementary element in better understanding co-design dynamics and considering the difference in perspectives between designers and end users. Such a reflexive attitude towards social aspects of design and the way one thinks of design may widen the circle of stakeholders that are included and considered in the design process while understanding the social complexities in which they are embedded. Hence, this chapter will conclude with exploring an approach that sees design as part of a social ecology. Before we turn to understanding design from this perspective, let us consider one central aspect of design, because any such movement towards a growing awareness to the relationship between design and the social realm must first pass through one profound dilemma: the relationship between design and the body.

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7.3 DESIGN AND THE BODY The Social Contract (1762) opens with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s well-known saying: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau 1998, [1762] 5). In a way, Rousseau’s seminal work encompasses a history of sociopolitical theories dealing with the intricate relations between the notion of “the individual” and their entanglement in society. Indeed, these ideas were already apparent in Aristotle’s Politics (2013 [fourth century BC]) and have been a recurring theme in political thought since. Aristotle though was perhaps the first political philosopher to highlight the essential difference between humans and the rest of nature’s animals. In his mind, this had to do with man’s ability to participate in constructing and changing the political and social institutions in which he is embedded in to arrive at a just society. Subsequently, we say “man is a social animal.” This proverb is normally used to accentuate the interactive and social nature of humans; however, just like Aristotle’s idea, it also points to the fact that prior to being social and capable of participating in complex social constructs, we are first and foremost animals, dependent and controlled by forces beyond our pure intellectual world, forces we call “bodily needs.” As such, this maxim points to the definition of man as a combination of physiological traits and societal imprints. If design, as Vilém Flusser (2013, 17) suggests, is a means through which to deceive nature and tame it, then the first instance of nature we encounter—the closest one, the one that puts us in most jeopardy as humans—is our own body. Our body is a constant reminder of our inability to control the very basic facts of life and death, and it is our body that needs most design-assisted protection and subversion to articulate our sociocultural nature. Hence, a constant tension exists in the philosophy of design: between our definition as “social” and our definition as “bodies.” Indeed, a vast number of design examples, especially from the field of fashion and medical design, illustrate this very conundrum of how to control and design the body. This tension between our animalistic nature and our desire to be part of a social construct has been examined by psychologists and sociologists, such as Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim. In their writings, they theorised that social norms were a way to control our baser needs. Freud, for example, based much of his psychoanalytical theory on the need to observe and understand repressed sexual and bestial needs belonging to the Id. He defined the Id as the animalistic layer of the human psyche, the one connected to survival and reproduction. According to Freud (1923), the expression of the Id is necessary if one seeks a psychologically healthy and harmonised way of life. Freud went on to criticise the oppression of sexual needs in religious and traditional societies, demonstrating how such oppression is directed by social and religious norms. Emile Durkheim (1975) echoed a similar attitude in his perception of the individual’s self as a melting pot of personal needs and societal norms. However, for Durkheim, social norms and their attendant oppression of certain needs are

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a prerequisite in enabling society as a whole to exist. Inner friction—a derivative of self-oppression, in his view—is necessary to prevent and control interpersonal conflicts, which otherwise would bring social chaos. The bestial needs or “the animal part in us” are usually represented in our social imaginaries by “the body,” imagined as a separate and almost opposite part of our rational and intelligent nature. In many ways, the body (and with it our instincts of survival and reproduction) is seen in certain opposition to human virtues. To be virtuous, we must be able to restrain our body, which is often seen as out of our direct control. Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), a philosopher, formulated an in-depth theorisation of our anxiety-ridden relationship with the uncontrolled urges of our body—what he termed the “open body.” The “open body” starts and ends with its orifices; the points where the boundaries between the external and the internal blur and hence the point at which any separation between the self—as a closed object— and the environment is thrown into question. These strategic points in our body have always been those who required most control (see Figure 7.3): the ones that break the boundaries between human and nature and between nature and culture and point to the weakness of any form of societal design. Bakhtin analyses these in light of various cultural carnivalesque revelries to acknowledge the failure of control and design; for instance, the grotesque as a form of necessary expression reflecting the tensions between the self as a social construct and the self as inseparable from nature. In this sense, design could be seen as the opposite of grotesque, as the expression of the normative element and as the construct through which one looks to control the body directly or indirectly. The list of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, poets and artists that have referred to this conundrum is vast. In a way, it is a central issue of the human condition. However, the common denominator is the fundamental understanding that the various societal norms and constructs in which we are embedded do not only shape our psyche and ways of thinking

Figure 7.3 Left: Illustration of how corsets would change the shape of internal organs, a well-known example of how the body is changed and designed according to social imaginaries and ideologies. Right: Chastity belts, like this seventeenthcentury example (Wellcome Collection, London), is another well-known example of how designed objects were used in controlling orfices.

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and behaving, but also shape and change our body. In this way, it becomes clear that without the shaping and redesigning of the body, no culture and no social order can survive. Posture, modes of speaking, hiding bodily functions, camouflaging bodily odours, walking, sitting, eating in a certain manner and so on have always been the symptoms of virtuous behaviour and the prerequisites for being “cultured” or “civilised” (at least from a Western-centric perspective). Indeed, as we can see throughout this volume, designed products, both virtual and physical, play a crucial role in this socialisation process. If we consider the objects that we use on a daily basis, we can observe that many of them were designed to assist us in controlling animalistic behaviours and our body’s gestures and tendencies. 7.3.1 Design as the Point of Conflict in Disciplining the Body There are numerous examples confirming the above view. Norbert Elias (1978), for instance, was an anthropologist who examined various etiquette manuals printed throughout the Middle Ages. In his research, he found a close relationship between the evolution of table manners and the evolution of cutlery and tableware. This “civilising process,” to use his term, was a means of placing violence at a distance from our daily social routine and interactions. Distance from violence, in this sense, also means a distance from the conditions of survival. Taking eating as an example, consider the difference between sitting around a leg of venison turning over an open fire and a thinly cut slice of fillet on a decorated porcelain plate (Figure 7.4). Similarly, we evolved from eating with our bare hands to eating with the assistance of a knife or a dagger, to using a four-toothed fork and knife (Petroski 1992). Standards of quality evaluation in the food industry, such as the Michelin star system, for example, are deeply entangled with the design of our food, both in the way it is being served to us and its texture and consistency. There is a great cultural pleasure in receiving a well-designed dish whose aesthetics, in terms of both appearance and all other sensual stimuli, takes us far away from the violence embedded in this act of survival. Another good example of disciplining the body is the ritualistic court manners developed in high society in France and England. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature, for example, treats the body in many ways as a traitor, who submits to the innermost bestial passions of the cultured human. For example, Racine (1677), known as the French Shakespeare, describes Phaedra’s ambivalent position in relation to her body’s bestial needs in the opening stanza of his play whose title bears the same name: PHAEDRA We have gone far enough. Stay, dear Oenone; Strength fails me, and I needs must rest awhile. My eyes are dazzled with this glaring light So long unseen, my trembling knees refuse

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Figure 7.4 Victorian dining etiquette.

Support. Ah me! OENONE Would Heaven that our tears Might bring relief! PHAEDRA Ah, how these cumbrous gauds, These veils oppress me! What officious hand Has tied these knots, and gather’d o’er my brow These clustering coils? How all conspires to add To my distress! OENONE What is one moment wish’d, The next, is irksome. Did you not just now, Sick of inaction, bid us deck you out, And, with your former energy recall’d, Desire to go abroad, and see the light Of day once more? You see it, and would fain Be hidden from the sunshine that you sought. PHAEDRA Thou glorious author of a hapless race,

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Whose daughter ‘twas my mother’s boast to be, Who well may’st blush to see me in such plight, For the last time I come to look on thee, O Sun! (Racine 2008, act 1 scene 3)

Here, Phaedra, who had fallen in love with Hippolytus, her lost son (in a twist similar to that of Oedipus), admits her failure to control her body’s urges to Oenone, her nurse and confidante. These urges—blushing, hot flushes, knees failing—expose her desire and love. Her complaints are against those jewels and those garments that hide her body and torture her in her attempt to restrain herself. The struggle between her emotions, her body and the objects she is asked to wear is an allegory for her inner struggle between the beast in her (Phaedra is after all the daughter of the Minotaur) and the cultured and highly moral individual she is, who, in her role as queen, is supposed to embody social order. Finally, Phaedra chooses suicide: death as the final means of controlling her body and facing the shame and atrocity of her helpless situation. The re-enactment of this ancient Greek myth in the seventeenth century exemplifies the rise of moral attitudes towards the body and its desires as well as the conflict at the base of societal order. It also reflects the role design plays in these politics, both in terms of objects that help contain and hide the body and behavioural and linguistic manners that can contain emotion. Further developments of such discipline evolved extensively in Victorian England, where the design of clothes and furniture were very much imbued with an ideology of modesty and severity. 7.3.2 How Should We Analyse the Disciplined Body? In their now-classic essay, anthropologists Scheper-Hughes and Mead (1987) sought to analyse Western conditioning surrounding the conceptualisation of the body and our relationship with it. For Scheper-Hughes and Mead, any form of anthropological analysis tainted with ideological assumptions about how bodies should or should not express itself creates a professional conflict, whereby a real and distant understanding of cultural rituals and structures is not possible. To navigate this, they suggest a “deconstruction of received concepts about the body.” To do so, the authors offer three perspectives from which to understand the entity of the body: (1) as a phenomenally experienced individual or a bodyself; (2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society and culture; and (3) as a body politic, an artefact of social and political control (Scheper-Hughes and Mead 1987, 6). This theorisation of the physical body is almost self-explanatory, and in our context, understanding the other two perspectives is crucial. The social body reflects norms and conventions (as Elias eloquently described) and the body politic reflects power relations and constraints long embedded in the social order. Their theorisation provides us with a theoretical lens through which to examine design and understand how those three aspects of our body perception are

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embodied not only in designed objects but also in design as a long process of altering the body. In this way, we can also understand the perspective different theoreticians take in relation to the designed body. As we have seen in previous chapters, Michel Foucault was one philosopher that theorised power relations as seemingly automatic gestures and modes of behaviour we tend to take for granted, that is, he was most interested in defining the social body. In his understanding of the intricate relation between power and knowledge (1980), Foucault extended the sites in which the disciplined body, as well as circular power, was present to various vistas of daily life. Consider first how a woman could feel uncomfortable walking alone at night in a short dress, and second, how a prosthetic leg mimics a biological leg and therefore changes the way its user walks. Both scenarios would result in a person changing their behaviour according to the ruling social perceptions, despite the difference in choice each has in abiding to the unspoken rules of how a body should be expressed. Hence, power constructs are internalised and enforced via selfconscious bodily gestures. Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu’s term “habitus” (1977) provides a deeper analysis of body politic, as it foregrounds the relationship between fields of production and their gatekeepers as well as our learned behaviours situated within specific sociocultural contexts. For Bourdieu, the habitus is the way through which political and cultural capital come into play in the habits, skills and dispositions that we possess as a result of our life experiences. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital can express itself in three main ways: as embodied cultural capital, like, for example, in the case of a person’s accent and idiom; objectified cultural capital, like, for example, purchasing from a luxury clothing brand or a piece of fine art; and last, institutionalised cultural capital, as in one’s accomplishments and valued experiences recognised in certain societal organisations. For Bourdieu, however, the habitus exemplified the means through which social class is detected and preserved and also the means through which social mobility is controlled. Gatsby’s character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby (1913), is a wonderful example of that. Gatsby’s awkwardness and inability to fully associate himself with higher social classes to which he wanted to belong stemmed from his inability to adopt the habitus of this social class. His unnatural behaviour was immediately detected in social encounters and arouses suspicion and dismay. “Old sport” was his signature term of endearment; only he could not recognise that its days are long gone and that he is repeating a term that was no longer in accordance with social norms. Despite his overwhelming wealth, Gatsby simply didn’t have the cultural capital required to win his love interest back. The habitus, therefore, is a “tour de force” dynamic in which social behaviour and physical movement reflects cultural capital. It is a dynamic supported by objects and therefore very much related to the politics of design, but those objects are in many ways only a means through which to demonstrate other innate social capabilities. If you are served

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an elegant meal at a three-star Michelin restaurant but are unaware of the table manners, gestures and jargon that should be used in such a scenario, you are less likely to appreciate the meal as a social privilege. On the contrary, the meal will expose the real cultural capital you possess. 7.3.3 Body Politic and Design Thinking about the ways in which designed objects interact and influence our bodies opens up space to theorise how such realisations are already embedded in the history of design and how design practice may correspond with an awareness of its role in disciplining the body. To do so, we shall turn to Emile Durkheim’s nephew Marcel Mauss. Although not critical in nature and surpassing the weight of physicality in our daily physical movements, Mauss (1973) highlighted the importance of the sociocultural context in our every move. The way we walk, eat, sit and hold utensils are all, for Mauss, learnt movements, implemented through education. In his article titled Techniques of the Body, Mauss explores the ways in which we learn how to use our bodies and are educated about bodily functions and gestures by mapping an array of gestures and behaviours conducted every second across the world. For example, parents educate children how to swim, how to walk in different circumstances, how to use a fork and knife and not place their elbows on the table while eating. For Mauss, techniques of the body are categorised and vary among universal social groups which exist in every society. Those are determined by age, gender, efficiency and modes of training, and the exact division of these would be culture-specific. But, if we think further about how our bodies move throughout the day, we come to realise how many of our movements are assisted and, in many instances, conducted by the objects we use. Consider a simple object, like a pair of earphones for a mobile phone. While their primary function is to converse in phone calls and to listen to music, their presence influences a variety of gestures in comparison to those that we expressed when speaking on the phone without earphones. Our gaze, our available hand movements, what we are able to do while conversing on the phone, the contexts in which it is acceptable to conduct conversations, etc. are all influenced by the use of earphones. Mauss highlights the variations in eating, sleeping, sitting, running, walking, etc. and albeit indirectly, he demonstrates how these actions are mediated and constructed by design. For example, let’s read the way he contemplates the simple task of resting or digesting food: Rest can be perfect rest or a mere suspension of activity: lying down, sitting, squatting, etc. Try squatting. You will realize the torture that a Moroccan meal, for example, eaten according to all the rituals, would cause you. The way of sitting down is fundamental. You can distinguish squatting mankind and sitting mankind. And, in the latter, people with benches and people without benches and daises; people with chairs and people without chairs. Wooden chairs sup-

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ported by crouching figures are widespread, curiously enough, in all the regions at fifteen degrees of latitude North and along the Equator in both continents. There are people who have tables and people who do not. (Mauss 1973, 81)

As we can see above, not only do cultural norms affect design, but designed objects help in maintaining and further stabilising cultural norms by changing the ways our bodies behave. In a way, designed furniture, as he describes, is a means of expressing and enforcing body politic. Such habitual objects and prescribed gesture change completely our relationship to physical processes like digestion and rest. It is striking to realise how one single gesture—the way we sit to eat our dinner—embodies so many of our cultural habits, including our eating habits and our conception of food. In the same way our sitting, lying or crouching changes the way we digest in accordance to the type of food we eat, it also reflects on our gastro politics: the politics constructed around our eating rituals. Mauss had indeed identified a parallel between the body and instruments in use, as he writes in the same article: “The body is man’s first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body” (Mauss 1973, 75). While one can detect in Mauss’s approach a clear distinction between the human psyche and the body, as if the body is an instrument of the mind, he nonetheless acknowledged that a full understanding of the techniques of the body is not possible without taking into account what he terms the total man. By the total man, Mauss refers to the man not only as an individual psyche controlling an individual machine—the body—but as a system situated within sociological contexts. Although Mauss did not explicitly include objects as determining, transmitting and conserving certain techniques of the body, we can extend Mauss’s theory to consider the central position of designed objects in the life of the modern Western man. Such sociological contexts are in many ways framed and defined by the objects our bodies learn to use in very particular ways. Consequently, we can draw a line between Mauss and Marshall McLuhan, who would in his renowned text Understanding Media (1994 [1964]), define technology as an extension of the human body. Chapter 7 of this book delves deeper into these connections as we explore design as a medium. We can conclude this argument for now by saying that our body reflects our social context, and, naturally, objects are an extension of this intricate physical-material continuous existence. 7.4 ERGONOMICS, SOCIAL ERGONOMICS AND THE CASE OF EYEGLASSES Now, one can ask, why would such a detailed understanding of the relationship between design and the body is necessary in understanding current shifts in design-thinking? Well, when putting these complex relationships in situ and

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considering the designer’s work, we can see that the relationship between an object and its end user is very much related to the body and the sociocultural expectations of the body’s performance. Designers always need to take into consideration the various ways with which the user’s body interacts with designed objects to enhance both the body and the task at hand. Furthermore, since the Industrial Revolution, designers have also needed to find ways of working not with the body of an individual, but with the body as a generalised and abstract entity. Tailoring a suit, a chair, or a utensil to the specific needs of a client (who is also an end user) brings with it challenges which are quite different to a world where the end user is not a singular specific individual, but the sum of all potential users. Simply because, to use Mauss’s model, the category of efficiency, according to which a culture may evolve a technique of the body, changes its focus, from the efficiency of an object to perform the task of extending an individual body to the efficiency of the object’s process of production. That is, designers need to take into account, as a prime condition, the environment in which the object is produced, the time and labour it takes to produce it and the efficient use of raw materials. One theoretician that approached this task of understanding how to think of the body in this way is Henry Dreyfuss, whose revolutionary standardisation of ergonomic features is still used by design students almost 50 years after its first publication. By ergonomics we mean the various ways in which the designed object interacts with the user’s body, its needs, its constructs and its features. A common example of ergonomics is the imprint of the negative shape of fingers onto a lever to make the grip easier and more stable or the design of a chair, whose back imitates the shape of the spine in order to support the seater properly. However, ergonomics, as much as it is user-centred, is faced with the challenge of producing shapes that are not moulded according to one specific body. Following Le Corbusier’s development of the “Machine for living” which proposes a standardised, modular structure that will allow a flexible, efficient and simple method to design the built environment, Dreyfuss in his book Designing for People outlined a standard of physiological features the designer needs to follow when addressing this intricate relation between the designed object and the user’s body. Published in 1967, Dreyfuss’s Measure of Man presented the various angles, widths, lengths and girth of our limbs, heralding a uniformity of design measurement embodied in his theoretical “models” Joe and Josephine (Figure 7.5). In a market economy that is based on efficiency and growth, such standardised forms of ergonomics also look to correspond with production technologies and processes. For this reason, we must keep in mind how such designed objects that are ergonomically constructed in relation to “standard” size and features are also, inevitably, disciplining the body. Every such object conveys a bodily restriction through the (dis)allowance of certain sizes, the confinement of posture and/or the movement possible within a designed environment.

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Figure 7.5 The 2017 Kickstarter-funded Measure of Man by Henry Dreyfuss.

One common example is the standardised size and shape of clothes. Fashion design, conforming to the demands of mass industrial production, abandoned tailoring which constructed pieces to the size and fit of a specific individual in order to adopt an approximate model that would imperfectly suit a large amount of people. In this way, the fashion industry has restricted to a certain extent the sizes and shapes that are socially acceptable. At the same time, an exact or tailored fit is largely something of the past; textile design’s innovations are focused on inventing fabrics that could take the shape and the size of differing body types without damaging the design, such as elastic. It can be no coincidence that dieting crazes and unrealistic beauty ideals arose at the same time as the Industrial Revolution, and it is difficult to ignore the influence of the fashion industry, up until this day, over our self-image and our expectations from the size, shape and behaviour of our body as a “good hanger” for mass-produced clothes. In analysing objects that are designed in accordance with standardised measurements, we can see how designing for a modelled body—as Dreyfuss or Le Corbusier suggested—also means designing certain social behaviours and

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norms. The use of objects in a manner different from its intended use, for example, a larger-sized person wearing a crop top, can result in restrictive emotional implications such as shame, guilt, stigma and the like. Indeed, such modernist claims to standardisation also came with a rejection of all that is surplus in design, in many ways leaving no room for the flexible adjustment of design to specific individual expression. Le Corbusier, in attempting to solve the riddle of flexible and efficient living, also contested the use of decoration as he states: “The Engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony” (1986, 1). Similarly, his contemporary Adolf Loos wrote in Ornament and Crime: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use […] ornament is wasted manpower and therefore wasted health. It has always been like this. But today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital. (Le Corbusier 1986, 30–33)

These are just two instances of the zeal in which modern theories of art and design sought to strip aesthetics to its naked and most essential forms. Naturally, and curiously, such theories correspond with the rise of capitalism, objectivism and communism, dominant ideologies that would govern Western thought for decades to come. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the purist and modernist ethos started to crumble, when a growing awareness of the social implications of designed objects changed the face of design and its definition of ergonomics. Common to modernist critique of the twentieth century, a fear of the mass loss of individuality was articulated, since massproduced objects could not be expressive in the same way that tailor-made objects were. Moreover, the separation of different agents of the design process meant their alienation from the social conditions of production. The primacy of production over social relations would eventually lead to a “society of the spectacle,” a term Guy Debord (2002) coined in his eponymous and now-renowned 1968 work. In Marginal Notes on Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, philosopher Giorgio Agamben explains Debord’s reflection on society as “not only aimed at the expropriation of productive activity, but also and above all at the alienation of language itself, of the linguistic and communicative nature of human being…” (Agamben 1968, 8; 2000). Agamben reflected the fear that lies at the base of Debord’s thought and early postmodern cultural critiques: the elimination of language means the elimination of expression and individuality and the production of a global, normalised and unified identity.

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7.4.1 Social Ergonomics Although the importance of ergonomics to the practice of design cannot be contested, since the 1970s, design theoreticians started outlining the influence of sociocultural attributes on the use of designed objects. Emotions, cognitive abilities, memories, shame and stigma influence the use of objects, and as we have seen above, designed objects are very much part of our sociocultural unwritten book of conduct. To express the indirect relationship between design and the sociocultural realm through the body, the term social ergonomics is used. Social ergonomics, very much like ergonomics, refers to the way in which a design may correspond with certain sociocultural contexts and attempt to offer tools to adjust or reframe them. It is a term that acknowledges the relationship between our bodies and our social and cultural behaviours, both of which are mediated through design. Specifically, designers and theoreticians noted that Dreyfuss’s model human and ergonomics based on a standardised body were created in relation to racial and cultural norms and therefore generating design biased towards one type of human. Considering the above discussion on the relationship between a body’s habitus and the concept of a “civilised” or “virtuous” individual, the exclusion of certain body types from a standardised or a cultured body has an intimate relationship with racial and gender mythologies. In this juxtaposition between society and the body or between “culture” and “nature,” two categories of humans became connected with the “non-standard” body: women and people racialised as non-white. Women have continuously been represented in a manner that associated them with forces of nature needing to be cultivated and controlled. Just as we saw Phaedra tormented by her inner struggle between her position in society and her bestial needs and emotions, so were all women portrayed as creatures in conflict between emotion and rationality. At the same time, male characters in the same myths are depicted by their virtue and cold rationality. Later, the seventeenth century saw the conceptualisation and rise of “hysteria” used to describe an extreme emotional state of agitation. Hysteria is directly related to the Greek word husterikos, meaning “of the womb,” discursively fusing any form of irrational or exaggerated emotional torment to the mere physiognomy of women. In both science and literature, women were presented as if they had no choice but to exist in a constant battle with the heated emotional atmosphere of their existence, and therefore needed controlling. And their male counterparts were, of course, courteous enough to assist them with that. Blackness or Indigeneity conveyed a much more deeply complicated meaning, with a whole set of cultural and visual associations that reinforced a similar prejudice in white minds. Late Renaissance travel journals, for example, extremely popular since white men’s “discovery” of the so-called “New Worlds” in the early modern era, were particularly fond of describing with zeal and amazement the life and manners of “primitive peoples.” The work of John Mandeville, for example, who skilfully blended fact and fiction, represented

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Indigenous people as exotic creatures, different in essence to white Europeans, and characterised mainly by their nakedness and apparent lack of culture. Recall Bakhtin and his notion of the open body in relation to the grotesque: there isn’t a better example that paints this shock of the colonial encounter for Western man, especially when confronting Indigenous peoples’ different relationship with their bodies: theirs were fully exposed and treated with openness. Indigenous design of garments, clothes and covers had a completely different function— often in complete opposition to the white European’s compulsion to control and cover orifices or other sensitive areas. Theirs was a body that expressed itself in ecstasy of movement and rhythm with no regret or shame. Similarly, Jean De-Léry, a well-known sixteenth-century missionary who published his travel journals in France, wrote of the “strange” and “uncultured” behaviours of the peoples of the Amazon, including cannibalism which was emphasised to establish the bestial character of those “uncivilised” people (De Lery 1993). Even if Michel de Montaigne (de Montaigne 2021) would greatly criticise his work two years later, the image of the Black “Other” did not change in essence in his conceptualisation of the bon sauvage (the noble savage). Montaigne defended the image De-Léry created of Indigenous people, yet offered an interpretation that admired the “savage’s” harmonious relationship to nature, not yet corrupted and exhausted by cultural or colonialist paradigms. However marked Montaigne’s initial resistance to De-Léry’s description may be or his emphasis of the virtues of “savagery,” he too envisions Indigenous peoples as wild, untamed and therefore primitive and uncultured. Their character is always placed in opposition to culture, to norm and to civilised society. The body of the Black “Other” fed the West with myths and legends, and as history progressed, works by fine artists such as Paul Gaugin in the nineteenth century or Pablo Picasso in the twentieth century depicted eroticised imagery of Black women as passionate, bestial and animal-like in opposition in any sense to the realm of “culture.” If being a woman already meant that “nature” or the body enforces its will on one’s behaviour or culture (given the dominant ideology of women as driven by emotional and non-rational urges), then being a Black woman meant an identity that was almost non-human. Most certainly, in the realm of white culture, Black women came to represent a figure that is outside of the social order and norm and therefore very much ignored in design models. Awareness of the problematic depiction of “Others” throughout history was articulated in post-colonial theories and postmodern critiques of culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As these ideas became generally accepted, design theoreticians and analysts raised concerns that forms of standardised body that stemmed from such perceptions were also part of a colonial gaze or equation. Hence, standardised models for design proposed in the early twentieth century by Dreyfuss, Le Corbusier and others are currently treated with suspicion and interpreted as avoidance or a fearful reaction against the “Other.” The “Other” had become the term which embodies every kind of divergence from the “norm,” while the norm exposed itself as a distorted reality,

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in which the default image of a human being was depicted and controlled by a small minority: white, heterosexual, Western, Christian, middle-class and ablebodied men. The anthology Architecture of Fear (Ellin 1997), for example, is dedicated to the examination of how urban planning and architecture culture is shaped by a constant preoccupation with fear of different forms of “Other.” Architecture of Fear analysed public urban design hostile to homeless people, gated communities that exclude people on the basis of race and class, zoning regulations based on religion and race, as examples of the unseen borders conducting every aspect of our social environments, including our cyberspace. For this anthology’s authors, not only are designed environments shaped by fear, but are perpetuating this fear by constructing physical environments that exclude or are hostile to the bodily presence of “Others.” Hence, in this context, all models that seek to define, maintain and guard what is “normal” are complex examples of the reciprocal relationship between design and the body politic. An approach to mitigate such problematic design must provide an increasing awareness to the social implications of ergonomics and enhance design practices that take ergonomics to mean designs that also consider different forms of social, cultural and bodily behaviours. Other publications, especially in urban design, provide the basis for understanding design as a social space for interaction and the reinforcement of power constructs. Henri Lefevre (The Production of Space, 1991 [1974]), followed by Manuel Castell (The Rise of the Network Society, 1996), demonstrated the ways in which society is reflected through its urban design and at the same time shaped by it. For both authors, social class and divisions of social time, work, leisure and entertainment are all expressed by the urban landscape while governing ideologies use the shaping of the urban landscape as a strategic tool in moulding and maintaining social norms. The ability of an individual to express themselves in a diverse set of forms requires the constant restructuring of the public space. Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life (1984), a work discussed in Chapter 4, can also be read from this perspective: one’s choice of alternative walking routes within the city is understood as a subversive tactic the “common man” must use to resist such strategic use of design as power (see Figure 7.6). 7.4.2 Case Study—Eyeglasses Understanding “ergonomics” in relation to the body and social relations and the phenomenological attribute of design is more obvious in urban design, but these dynamics can also be seen at play in the case of eyeglasses design. During the twentieth century, as we have seen, theorists from various disciplines began to view the body as a socialised site mirroring norms and conventions. Eyeglasses, a seemingly innocent instrument of design, penetrate the social body to change our very physiognomy.

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Figure 7.6 hostiledesign. com is a website documenting the works of design activist groups who took upon themsleves to mark instances of design in public space that are hostile to certain types of “Others.” Their use of the “design crime” sticker may be seen as a form of “tactic,” in Certeau’s terms, to resist the systems of power that are reflected and reinforced through the design of the public space.

Eyeglasses show the ways in which sociocultural contexts influence designed objects in two main ways. First, glasses are perhaps one of the only objects that throughout the history of its development radically changed its context from a medical object to a fashion accessory. Today, most opticians offer professional optometrists to provide prescription lenses and adjust the pair to the face, yet the actual frame is not a medical choice, but a fashion one. When buying a pair of glasses today, you go to the mall or an accessory store, not a doctor’s office or a hospital—but this has not always been the case. Very few objects have transformed in this way; however, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is plausible to assume that many other objects will be placed on the threshold of design and medicine soon enough, hence an analysis of eyeglasses is a useful way of anticipating our future behaviours around similar objects. Second, despite being a very common object, we seldom think about the complex and intricate ergonomic solutions used in designing eyeglasses. Among the various artefacts we wear or carry on our body, eyeglasses are one the most

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complex, and cannot be hidden underneath a garment or inside a case: they are literally straight in your face, often the first thing we notice when looking at people wearing them. In other words, eyeglasses are a prominent feature mediating—physically and socially—between us and our surroundings. The case of glasses was further complicated since it is composed of two types of ergonomics: physiologic ergonomics and sociocultural ergonomics. Designing eyeglasses, from a physiological angle, is a high-stakes activity since they are the first thing we acknowledge on a person’s face, and they have three major points of friction with the body: the nose and behind each ear. Those three points are the most sensitive areas of our bodies as the orifices from which subtle impressions of the world come into our perception’s play: sound, smell and light. From a sensual point of view, too, the face is tremendously sensitive to environmental differences in pressure and temperature. Eyeglasses are imposing continuous contact with these three points and pressures them, since it is an object that literally needs to take grip of our faces and hold on to it if it is to be efficient in remaining stable, resisting forces of gravity in regular day-to-day use. To put it simply, eyeglasses are not a convenient object to wear. This maybe one of the reasons that throughout their history, there have been a number of attempts to tackle practical issues of how to design eyeglasses. There were two competing models: one was the “eyeglasses,” a term used to describe a pair of lenses (sometimes only one lens), held in front of the eyes, usually for short-term use; and the second is the “spectacles,” a term used to describe two lenses attached to the face with strings, chains or at the temples, and the design we commonly use today. Perfected only by the late eighteenth century, with an ergonomically designed bridge to fit both sides of the nose and curved, thin temples to grip the face behind the ears with minimum pressure and contact, the designed spectacles were to become popular only in the middle of the twentieth century. It is surprising that spectacles became popularised only 150 years later, despite being the more efficient way of wearing glasses over a long period of time and as part of an active daily routine. One further site of friction wearing eyeglasses is not a literal or physical one, but virtual in a sense: eyeglasses appear in our field of vision, while at the same time we see through this same object that practically stands between us and the appearance of the world. This means that the ergonomic relationship in the case of eyeglasses is in contact not only with the external layers of our body—the skin, the face and the visible organs—but it is also internal, as it literally changes and conditions our frame of accessible perceptions. Things like shape, colour and material have direct consequences on both the object’s direct efficiency and on our perception of the world. For example, a dark or light frame will change the sense of contraction one feels when wearing eyeglasses. Furthermore, glasses do not only frame the wearer’s perception, but, in fact, change the individual’s social relation to the world. Lenses block or reflect to a certain extent other people’s gaze into the wearer’s eyes, creating a distance of a

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sort. Despite this distance (or maybe because of it), from a sociocultural perspective, eyeglasses fluctuate between being an object imbued with mystery and a cause of suspicion to being a social symbol of literacy, power and knowledge. In other words, using non-prescription frames to look smarter is hardly a new phenomenon (Ventura and Shvo 2016). When glasses were first introduced at the end of the thirteenth century, they were designed for brief use only and thus had no contact with the user’s temples; instead, they were equipped with a handle or simply rested on the wearer’s nose. At that time, people treated eyeglasses with suspicion and even fear. As Vasco Ronchi, one of the most prominent historians of optics and vision, remarks in his book Optics: The Science of Vision: When the invention (of eyeglasses) was made known to the philosophers, it was examined by the standards of the prevailing theories and decisively rejected […] eyeglasses were transparent, to be sure, but they caused refraction and deformation […] the aim of vision is to know the truth; eyeglasses make figures look bigger or smaller than they would be seen with the naked eye, nearer or farther away, at times distorted, inverted or colored; hence they do not make the truth known; they deceive and are not to be used for serious purposes. (Ronchi 1957, 32)

Given that philosophers and scientists of the time relied on sight as man’s doorway to truth, they were suspicious of any invention that distorts it, believing such inventions to be a form of blasphemy. If we return to Flusser’s search of design’s meaning in the etymology of the word, we recall that at this point in time, “design” was still a word that came from the same semantic field as “trickstery” and “deceit.” The philosophers of the time came from a Neoplatonic perspective, and therefore were not strangers to Plato’s suspicious and often negative attitude towards art and design practices that could easily distract and distort pure and direct perception. At the same time, the science of optics was still premature and no one truly understood how lenses worked. In this context, it is easy to understand why eyeglasses were not seen as a medical or practical tool but were put in the same category of other entertaining optical devices. In fact, the invention of eyeglasses, as we know them, is imbued with such mystery that it has been impossible to locate one person directly responsible for their inception (see Figure 7.7). One possible reason for this ambiguity may be related exactly to the scepticism of early Renaissance mathematicians and philosophers, who were reluctant to seriously understand lenses as an integral part of optics. According to Ranchi’s description, artisans continued to explore the design of lenses through a process thinking through making—and eventually optical devices, as the glasses were used even before science knew how to fully explain their operation (Ibid. p. 38). Interestingly, it seems that eyeglasses—like many other optical devices throughout history—were not developed by scientists but

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Figure 7.7 There is a debate as to whether eyeglasses were first invented in the West by artisans or whether the invention may have travelled from the Eastern side of the earth, China and India. Adi Sankaracharya (509–477 BC), one of India’s most renowned scholars, is known to have used eyeglasses to support him while reading. The image on the upper left corner is what scholars presume his eyeglasses looked like—very similar to the much older nose crushers you can see on the image on the lower right corner. These are German Type 2 rivet spectacles (Nietbrille) dated from 1350 to 1400. Leaving the question of who came first aside, one can see that the newer model is a design that takes ergonomics into account, with its curved centres to clamp better on the bridge of the nose. In the left image, you can see how such spectacles would be worn. This is considered to be the first painting from Northern Europe depicting a person wearing eyeglasses. The “Glasses Apostle” painting is attributed to Conard von Soest, Brillenpostel (tempra on wood, 1403).

by artisans: artists and designers. So, although we tend to think of eyeglasses as a medical device, they were actually an object of curiosity first, which then appeared in the hands of makers, a development that assists us in understanding how this object could have shifted its cultural contexts so rapidly and with such ease. From their very inception, eyeglasses were not conceived as relating to disability, but were seen as enhancing, distorting and allowing an array of surplus abilities. In relation to this, another possible reason for the preliminary suspicion of eyeglasses (especially in the form of “spectacles”) is the central and frequent position they take at the centre of one’s face, mediating direct eye contact. The 2013 release of Google Glass and the turmoil around its near-total social rejection shows how, in contemporary times, this mediation is still fear-inducing. If we think about it, both devices share common attributes: they are both pieces of technology that interfere with perception by changing, adding or

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distorting information related to the interaction between its wearer and the environment. Moreover, this information, distortion or addition is only accessible to device’s user, who seems to be somehow hiding behind it. The added abilities that the device bestows the user with, together with the fact that they provide a certain cover, create a power relation whereby the wearer of the device has an advantage of sorts over their counterpart. If the Google Glass was to be introduced as a medical device, would we still act with the same level of violence against it? The social ergonomics of eyeglasses show how the context within which we consume a commodity changes much of our relationship to it and the social relations that are created around it. This has profound ramifications on an object’s reincarnations over time, as we shall see. 7.4.2.1 The Rise and Fall of Eyeglasses as a Class Symbol Eyeglasses became increasingly popular between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially among those who needed to read handwritten manuscripts and whose vision had deteriorated over time. In the Middle Ages and at the height of the Renaissance, most members of society were unable to read, and presumably less likely to need such devices. Those who did need eyeglasses were usually members of the clergy, scholars and people who were considered intelligent and of high spiritual tenure by society. Edward Rosen (1956), in his article The Invention of Eyeglasses, traces the origins of eyeglasses, and indeed, it is clear to see that their use centred mainly around clergy and politicians. This explains how, over time, the social and cultural perception of eyeglasses shifted. Treated with suspicion at the beginning, their increased specialised use meant they became a symbol of experience, wisdom and social advancement, so much so that it led to a trend of wearing non-corrective eyeglasses as a sign of intelligence. The Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza (1401–1466), for example, ordered himself a dozen pairs of non-corrective eyeglasses as a sign of his literacy and intelligence. Eyeglasses peaked in popularity during the fifteenth century for several sociocultural reasons. First, the increasing literacy levels and a widening middle class catalysed by the growing free market of the time. Second, the invention of the printing press in 1439 would dramatically change the cultural atmosphere around reading, as it became a popular form of entertainment and an activity of great social importance. The common design of eyeglasses during that time was “pince-nez” (a French term): nose pinchers or nose crushers. They kept balance on the face by literally pinching the bridge of the nose. They were therefore fit for longer use, but still mainly for the purpose of correcting hypermetropia (short-sightedness); corrective lenses for myopia (far-sightedness) would only be invented in the sixteenth century. The ultimate ascendancy of nose pinchers would also spell their temporary point of decline. The device’s extensive popularity meant that it lost the air of

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for women and monocles for men. Interestingly, if any design did have a flashy comeback, it was the nose pinchers, which became increasingly popular again during the time. It is only in the early twentieth century that spectacles regained their status. Harsh, cheap frame designs, popular amongst university students in the 1910s and 1920s, marked a new generation of up-beat intellectuals, and eyeglasses became once more a symbol of education. This time, rather than old-age wisdom, it was the witty, vivacious and fresh type of wisdom, one that is imbued with youthful innocence and nerdy naivety. Still, in the 1930s and 1940s, more popular designs attempted to improve transparent eyeglasses, and these were fashionably considered as a “necessary evil” for those who needed them. They were received with ambiguity at best, with design attitudes fluctuating between the two poles in correlation with spectacles’ use in cinema and popular media to depict certain characters. The 1939 “Harlequin Frame,” designed by Altina Sander, would be a game changer for eyeglass design. She may not have known to use the term, but we can certainly consider her as the first spectacle designer to take social ergonomics into account. In response to the compromised position of women wearing glasses, she intentionally developed a design that would give a completely new social context and meaning to the device. The design, which was inspired by carnival masks, was intentionally conceived to transform the suspicious device into a fashionable, witty and sexy accessory. It is interesting to think of the history of eyeglasses in relation to Bakhtin’s understanding of the open body and his analysis of carnival, whose nature inherently means an oscillation between its expression and its control. The playfulness and intended meaning of this design testified to Sander’s sensitivity to our social relationship with design, as she offered women a way of reintroducing themselves within the context of their social relation to the world, and inherently, also changed their relationship to their own bodies and abilities. Eyeglasses were still mysterious, but no longer seen as a suspicious device that afforded its users certain surplus optical abilities; rather, its conscious design as a mask and an element of playful control allowed the wearer to take on an air of mystery. Since the “cat-eye” design gained in popularity (Figure 7.8), the general trend had become to accept spectacles as a necessary, sometimes even central, fashion accessory. Indeed, in the mid-1950s, it was no longer eyeglasses or spectacles, but “eyewear” that everybody was talking about. A huge variety of designs came to market: eyewear for evening, for work, for day-to-night wear. High-end designers and fashion houses such as Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel began to design eyewear collections. As we have seen, eyeglasses, spectacles and other vision aids have had a very vibrant and eventful social life, perhaps owing to their ambiguous position between a fashion accessory and a medical device. One the one hand, eyeglasses and monocles are often used in traditional portraiture to depict and accentuate an individual’s scholarly abilities and class. They are consciously used

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Figure 7.8 Left: An example for an advertisment for the Harelequin Eyeglasses style, popular in the 1950s “as seen in Vogue.” Right: Look magazine with an illustration of the Harelquin design and its iconic stance.

as a playful hide-and-seek icon of power, mystery and privileged knowledge. In recent years, eyeglasses are once more called upon to make a social statement with the construction of the “geek chic” image, where cheap heavy frames of eyeglasses with no lenses at all are sold purely as a fashion accessory. The “geek chic” look is quite different from early uses of glasses as fashion accessory, as it is not looking to project wisdom, experience or intelligence. Today, eyewear, like many fashion items, is a means of producing part of a packaged identity that comes with a curated taste in music, literature, film and TV. However, the mechanism is quite similar: one treats eyeglasses as expressions of character and identity—as objects of self-image design—rather than mere optical devices. This aspect of eyeglasses as a “designed” object, that is, saturated with meaning and conveying identity and style, can be even better understood if we examine them in relation to other objects that function as “enhancers” of sensory perception and communication, such as hearing aids or speaking aids. The social experience of people who use hearing or speaking aid is distinctly different to that of those wearing eyeglasses. Whereas eyeglasses have become an

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almost obligatory fashion accessory in certain professional milieus, those who are hard-of-hearing or speech-impaired are viewed as suffering from a disability or from a physical or medical problem. In fact, eyeglasses, while invented to assist with a certain disability, have become an object that testifies to an inherent capability: we do not think of short-sightedness as a disability. To put it plainly, those who wear eyeglasses do not need to declare it as a disability when filling in most bureaucratic forms, whereas other disabilities must be declared. It is interesting to note that while all these instruments seem to answer essentially similar needs, they have different social meanings, and one could argue, this has much to do with design. In concluding this chapter about design and the body, we end with a note to the thinker, as we have mainly examined our relationship with healthy bodies, and the history and relationship design creates with our physical manifestation. However, some thought-provoking theories arising from the backdrop of all these shifts in design thinking consider our relationship with the disabled body as the pinnacle of contemporary design, because it is at the threshold of our limits and capabilities that design strives. We examine these in our next chapter, as we consider design and the body from a technological and post-humanist perspective. REFERENCES Agamben, G. 1968. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. 2000. Marginal Notes on Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 73–91. Aristotle. 2013 edition. Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bakhtin, M. 1984. Rabelais and his world. Vol. 341. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Betts, P. 2004. The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bichard, J. A. and G. Knight. 2011. Publicly Accessible Toilets: An Inclusive Design Guide. London: Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandt, E., T. Binder, L. Malmborg and T. Sokoler. 2010, November. “Communities of Everyday Practice and Situated Elderliness as an Approach to Co-Design for Senior Interaction.” In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction, 400–403. Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I (Information Age Series). London: Blackwell. Coleman, R., C. Lebbon, J. Clarkson and S. Keates. 2003. Inclusive Design: From Margins to Mainstream. New York: Springer. Corbusier, L. 1986. Towards a New Architecture. North Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation. Debord, G. 2002. The Society of The Spectacle. Canberra: Treason Press. De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: California University Press. De Lery, J. 1993. History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Montaigne, M. E. 2021. The Complete Essays. London: Penguin Classics. Dreyfuss, H. 1967. The Measure of Man: Human Factors in Design. New York: Whitney Library of Design.

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Dreyfuss, H. 2003. Designing for People. New York: Skyhorse Publishing Inc. Durkheim, É. 1975. Définition du Fait Moral. Durkheim, Textes, 2, 257–288. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Elias, N. 1978. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. New York: Pantheon Press. Ellin, N. 1997. Architecture of Fear. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Flusser, V. 2013. Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. New York: Reaktion Books. Freud, S. 1923. The Ego and the Id. Standard Edition (Vol. 19), 12–66. London: Hogarth Press. Gunn, W. and J. Donovan 2012. Design Anthropology: An Introduction. Design and Anthropology, 1–16. London: Ashgate. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Leonard-Barton, D. 1994. Empathic Design and Experimental Modeling: Explorations into Really New Products. Report-Marketing Science Institute Cambridge Massachusetts, 94–124. Loos, A. 1997. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought. Translation Series). New York: Adrian Press Maldonado, T. 2001. “Taking Eyeglasses Seriously.” Design Issues 17, no. 4: 32–43. Mauss, M. 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2, no. 1: 70–88. McDonagh, D. 2008. “Do it Until it Hurts! Empathic Design Research.” Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal 2, no. 3: 103–110. McLuhan, M. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT press. Palladio, A. 2002. The Four Books on Architecture. Cambridge: MIT University Press. Petroski, H. 1992. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are. New York: Vintage Press. Racine, J. B. 2008. Phaedra The Project Gutenberg EBOOK PHAEDRA. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1977/1977-h/1977-h.htm Radice, B. 1995. Memphis: Research, Experiences, Results, Failures, and Successes of New Design. New York: Rizzoli International Publications. Ronchi, V. 1957. Optics: The Science of Vision. New York: Courier Corporation. Rousseau, J. J. 1998. The Social Contract. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Rosen, E. 1956. “The Invention of Eyeglasses.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 11, no. 1: 13–46. Sanders, E. B. N. and Stappers, P. J. 2008. “Co-Creation and the New Landscapes of Design.” Co-Design 4, no. 1: 5–18. Scheper-Hughes, N. and M. Lock 1987. The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1, no. 1: 6–41. Sperschneider, W. and Bagger, K. 2003. “Ethnographic Fieldwork Under Industrial Constraints: Toward Design-in-Context.” International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 15, no. 1: 41–50. Steen, M. 2013. “Co-Design as a Process of Joint Inquiry and Imagination.” Design Issues 29, no. 2: 16–28. Ventura, J. and J. A. Bichard. 2017. “Design Anthropology or Anthropological Design? Towards ‘Social Design’.” International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation 5, no. 3–4: 222–234. Ventura, J. and D. Shahar. 2018. Inclusive Design. Bloomsbury Design Library. https:// www.bloomsburyvisualarts.com/encyclopedia-chapter?docid=b-9781472596161& tocid=b-9781472596161-BED-ONLINE-007&st=ventura Ventura, J. and G. Shvo. 2016. “Breaking the Language of Design: Semioclastics in the World of Industrial Design.” International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation 4, nos. 3–4: 222–233. Westerlund, B., S. Lindqvist and Y. Sundblad. 2003, September. Co-Designing with and for Families. In Proceedings of the Conference COST269, User Aspects of ICTs: Good| Bad| Irrelevant, 290–294.

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In any case, everyone knows this: the routines of survival are indifferent to any Good you might care to mention. Every pursuit of interest has success as its only source of legitimacy. On the other hand…if some radical political engagement proves incompatible with every immediate principle of interest – then I find myself compelled to measure life, my life as a socialized human animal, against something other than itself. And this above all when, beyond the joyful or enthusiastic clarity of the seizing, it becomes a matter of finding out if, and how, I am to continue along the path of vital disorganization, thereby granting to this primordial disorganization a secondary and paradoxical organization, that very organization which we have called ‘ethical consistency. (Badiou 2013, 60)

In its presentation of a general ethical viewpoint, the above quotation from Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil will be shortly revealed as being closely relevant to ethical thought about design and its relation to ideology. Badiou, a prominent philosopher of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sheds light on a poignant moment in which we are compelled to “measure life.” This refers to a philosophical-ethical moment in which we take a step back from life to reflect on it rather than merely living it. If a “clarity of the seizing” is reached, we may detect the often hidden ideology that motivates society, political fields, material spheres and environments that constitute our personhoods and conduct. These elements, which may be quite messy, are forced into some order—referred to here as “ethical consistency”—by the dominant forces that comprise the consensus and status quo. Badiou attempts to reveal the hidden dominant ideologies of the consensus, namely the ordinary sphere of conventional interests and knowledge. These constitutive ideologies are often unnoticed by us—they are “the law of the not-known”—or they are passively accepted. But in one’s life, the “ethics of a truth,” as Badiou calls it, may grant the individual their own involvement in constituting their identity and personhood regardless of the dominant forces of society (Badiou 2013, 44, 46). This may lead such an individual to unveil the mainstream hidden ideology of society and perhaps even to rebel against it. Badiou explains that emancipatory projects expose a truth “against dominant opinions” and force an end to consensus. Dominant opinions, he reminds

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216230-9

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us, “always work for the benefit of some rather than all. These privileged few certainly benefit from their position, their capital, their control of the media, and so on” (Badiou 2013, 32). No doubt the reader could attach elements of design to every single parameter that is hitherto mentioned: consensus, dominant powers and opinions, measuring life, identities, personal reflections, ideologies, both explicit and hidden, and emancipatory projects. Every one of these examples dwells in design or is often effected by it. Design by its very nature, then, ought to be reflective, because, as the well-known design philosopher Victor Papanek warns us in his celebrated Design for the Real World, design has become a corporal force in the mass production and consumption society. In so becoming, design affirms the ideology that motivates it while neglecting real human needs and assisting the oppression of emancipatory projects of design and constitutions of individual reflections and identities: Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected. The economic, psychological, spiritual, social, technological, and intellectual needs of a human being are usually more difficult and less profitable to satisfy than the carefully engineered and manipulated “wants” inculcated by fad and fashion. (Papanek 2011, 15)

Analysing dominant ideologies and opinions that argue against emancipatory projects and personal revelation of ethical truth is pertinent to design because it is an omnipresent, highly influential and an expanding phenomenon. Design may affirm or maintain consensual social and political orders or alternatively disrupt them and offer critical thought and corresponding ethically motivated artefacts and ontological spheres. In Integrated Systems, Design and Technology, Fathi et al. (2010) describe a moment of emerging ideology in a young person through the framework of an informal thought experiment. In this, the author as a young person imagines two allegedly different kinds of things that he can do with money: (1) to indulge himself with luxuries and the cultural accoutrements of Western culture or (2) to taking over a fellaheen village using Western design: If you were given a million pounds, what would you do with them? A question they were always asking us when we were young, one that would start our imagination roaming and set us daydreaming. I had two possible answers: one, to buy a yacht, hire an orchestra, and sail round the world with my friends listening to Bach, Schumann, and Brahms; the other, to build a village where the fellaheen would follow the way of life that I would like them to. (Fathi et al. 2010, 10)

At first glance, it seems that the first choice is ethically inferior, but if we look more closely, the other choice seems authoritarian by forcing a dominant ideology on an Arab society of fellaheen.

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Ideology in design, so it seems, can be quite elusive. In an “Introduction to Ethics” class for design students, given by the first author of this volume at Shenkar College in 2023, a few of the students realised that designing for the rich may cause others to become poorer simply by widening the gap between the two different economically positioned groups of people. Seeing design as possessing this power is entailed by endorsing a definition of poverty as relative—which preconsiders humans as social beings, whose personal identities are determined by comparisons and relations with others within a social system. According to this theory, personal identity is not atomically constituted. One may become poor despite no change having occurred in their material conditions, but merely because others have become richer and own things that are beyond one’s reach. Simply put, if my neighbour builds next to my house a much bigger house than mine, my own house, which has been considered of medium size up to that point, becomes a tiny house and I become economically inferior to my neighbour because my identity and socioeconomic status are now lower in the chain of ranks. If we accept, then, for instance, that designing highly expensive jewellery makes what may be called “non-customers” poor and even helpless, the social status system is affirmed and may even help to widen its gaps. Thus, the very concept of ideology and what we call “value-oriented design” is more elusive than the philosophical framework of ethics in general. As we have seen, design has evolved and progressed from an industrial background that aimed at aiding and augmenting consumer culture. As such, alongside marketing, design stands at the forefront of a cluster of professions that are potentially harmful to our present and future. However, apart from shifting our practice to social design, some solutions have been presented by designers throughout the history of design. The Cradle to Cradle® certification of products, for instance, is an attempt to create a global standard for design products regarding safety, circularity and responsibility, in order to guarantee a positive impact on both people and the planet. It was presented as a means by which to re-integrate objects with ideology by giving them an extensive “life-span, thus augmenting their sustainability” (Braungart and McDonough 2009). Another applied ideological framework would involve encouraging designers to draw their own red lines, whereby they refused to contribute to certain fields, such as pornography, tobacco consumption, or products that rely on harmful working conditions for their producers or manufacturers. Although they are useful, these frameworks remain subjective and rely on the designers’ own ethical code of professional conduct. We suggest another possibility of value-oriented professional responsibility by which designers follow a good design practice, that is, offering good products, and abide by their ethical modus operandi. Examples of ideology in design are difficult to define owing to the varied and broad possibilities of this approach—from visual communication campaigns for non-profits, through to sustainable solutions for furniture, to the transformation of urban spaces from car-oriented to human-oriented spaces. However, let us consider here an example of ideologically laden design, which is this time

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provided by the very shape of the design product. Consider a rectangular dining table or meeting room in an office that allows for a hierarchy-oriented sitting, thus maintaining the established consensus of social order. Now, consider a round table or Neil Morris’s Cloud Table (Ameboid Table, Figure 8.1) from 1947, which was designed in light of the new modernist customs of gathering together in living rooms for social occasions. The rectangular table may have been intentionally designed to sustain a chain of rank or it may have been designed with no conscious cognisance of this—it was designed this way because that is the common form that tables take. The Cloud Table, by contrast, possesses “no clear order, with no chain of ranks embodied by its sitting arrangement, making the gathering around it informal,” and thus “shapes social ontology, which may in turn entail fresh concepts of hierarchies and modes of life” (Gal 2022, 148). It seems clear then that design may be either intentionally or unconsciously motivated by ideology; it may by saturated with the dominant opinions and consensual ideology of the day, indifferent to it or rebelling against it. For example, turning to sustainability as a value system is fairly easy, and was defined by the UN and other agencies as a necessary means by which to reduce the damage caused by design. However, other ideological venues present more complex dilemmas for designers. Jewellery or haute couture, for instance, serves mainly the rich and powerful 1% and presents little contribution for our society. But, among art jewellery designers, we find interesting political opinions and forms of protest. For instance, Israeli jewellery designer Anat Golan presented in the work designed for her graduate studies a reinterpretation of Israeli militarism and its all-encompassing stance over local daily

Figure 8.1 Neil Morris’s Cloud Table, 1947.

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life and creativity (Figure 8.2, 2022). A necklace, made by fusing various military unit badges from the Israeli Defence Forces, demonstrates this hold over both citizens and designers. Another necklace, which is political in nature, addresses the question of boundaries and the very definitions of Israel’s borders. The modernist functionalist Austrian architect and theorist Adolf Loos famously claimed that a designer is simply an “educated carpenter” (Loos, 2019), but, as the challenges faced by designers grow, so does their potential to influence social-cultural material and visual culture. We argue that designers might take on roles as mediators, creating a fruitful dialogue between the various industry stakeholders and design partners. Their influence might also be felt through their innovative roles as visual-material philosophers or interpreters of our daily lives. These factors were discussed in earlier chapters, and we wish to focus here on another twofold option, namely designers’ commitment to values that motivate the creative process and their ability to function as agents of significant social change. However, while noticeably important and globally relevant, such roles in shaping culture demand a firmly defined ideology or set of values, which help the designer to navigate the muddy waters of the wicked problems of design. As such values are based on global, intricate and non-binary questions, designers must rely on their own set of key values. Let us consider then what might seem the easy part—attempting to define what “ideology” means. Figure 8.2 Anat Golan, graduate work, 2022.

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The term “ideology” (idéologie) was coined in 1796 by the French philosopher of enlightenment Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who founded the school of philosophy of Idéologie. The first referent of the concept was “the science of ideas,” which followed the Greek and later uses of the term. de Tracy described this to his colleagues as the “knowledge of effects practical consequences.” The aim of coining “ideology” was “to establish a sound ‘theory of the moral and political sciences’” that would serve as the primary science, because “all of the others would spring from ‘ideology’” (Kennedy 1979, 355). The term has been analysed extensively in literature relating to ethics, politics and law. It is well known that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formulated a materialist notion of ideology. For them, ideology was not “the science of ideas.” Rather, it was the material-external reality, means and systems of production that create ideologies. Ideology in that respect is a negative word that is shaped by the ruling stratum, which is itself characterised by the elements of alienation and exploitation that underlie that stratum. Their followers, philosophers and sociologists of the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School formulated in the first half of the twentieth century a critical theory of modernism, the capitalist economy, society and mass culture. They opposed the separation of knowledge and action and saw ideology as related to practice rather than to detached theories (see this debate also in Chapter 4, “Design between Theory and Practice”). Clearly, the newer interpretation of the concept of “ideology,” whereby ideas are attached to practice and actions, is the most relevant to design. A more current version of ideology that relates to actions and serves as a critique of mass society is relevant to an analysis of the link between design and ideology as well. In End of Ideology, Daniel Bell criticises modernist society, politics and economy. Associating ideology with actions and ethical responsibility, Bell follows the prominent German economist and sociologist Max Weber in his well-known “Politics as a Vocation” from 1919 “where he posed the polarities of the ‘ethics of responsibility’” and the “‘ethics of ultimate ends’ as the modes of action that any political activist has to confront” (D. Bell 1988, 416). Indeed, Weber exposed the internal relationships between politics and the ability to control the sphere of power—the “relationship in which people rule over other people,” which is represented by the state (Weber 2004, 34). But politics, and ruling, endorsing or defying ideologies, dwells in other strata besides the state. Although this was not foreseen by Marx, design is one of them. Many values-motivated disciplines and practices can bring about social changes. We can better understand this through Daniel Bell’s description of the ideology-oriented change in what he calls “the mass society” and capitalist ideology of consumerism: the change from a society once geared to frugal saving and now impelled to spend dizzily; the breakup of family capitalism, with the consequent impact on corporate structure and political power; the centralization of decision making, politically, in the state, and economically, in a group of large corporate bodies;

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the rise of status and symbol groups replacing interest groups—these indicate the new social forms are in the making and with them still greater changes in the complexion of life under mass society. (D. Bell 1988, 38)

The substantial changes that are noted here are caused by various factors. There is no doubt that design is one such factor, given its role in the mass production industry, culture and society as well as in globalisation and mass society—and given the supposition by many that it is essentially mass-produced (see Chapter 1). As such, design can help to “increase the living standards of the majority of people and at the same time maintain or raise cultural level.” Design can and ought to endorse humanistic values and it should also be aware of the hidden dominant ideologies of whom Badiou describes as the “privileged few” (Badiou 2013, 32). Such awareness might be what enables design to shift into a caring discipline. An even newer materialist (somewhat neo-Marxist) theory of ideology is suggested by Terry Eagleton, one of the main critics of postmodernism and its dismissal of objectivity and universal ethics, in his Ideology: An Introduction. Let us consider how extremely relevant Eagleton’s parameters of ideology are to design as a profession that combines theory and practice: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A focus on the materialistic side of generating ideas, beliefs and values in society. The overall set of beliefs and ideas symbolising the experience and conditions of a specific social group. A specific discourse in a field in which key struggles are conducted relating to the overall reproduction of power in a social group. Serving and justifying sectorial interests. Relating to ideas and beliefs that legitimise the ruling party. Considering belief not necessarily as a product of interest, but of the social structure (Eagleton 2007, 1–2).

Ideology then involves elements of social stratification, beliefs, values and interests. However, as we have seen, from a historical perspective, ideology has not been part of the designer’s purview until fairly recently. Let us now relate the concept of ideology directly to design. How can a design product be driven by ideology or help to shape it? A good answer is that design is already part of the social order and its rules, conventions and ideologies. This answer is provided by the philosopher Jacques Rancière (2000) in his innovative and influential The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, in which he calls to dissolve the distinction between politics and aesthetics and promote equality and the defiance of elitism and authorities. The social order, according to Rancière, is determined by what he calls the “distribution of the sensible,” in which design takes an integral part. Design, as an aesthetic sensorial discipline, has a share in shaping our lives in the collaborative

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sensible order, which is the political space. The political space, Rancière claims, is constructed mainly by reciprocal interchanges between the various creative sensible disciplines, such as art and design, and the way in which they are organised in the community. For instance, the groundwork for the shift towards abstract visual art was laid “in the ways in which typography, posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced.” Painting’s return to its own flat medium: is implicated in an overall vision of a new human being lodged in new structures, surrounded by different objects. Its flatness is linked to the flatness of pages, posters, and tapestries. It is the flatness of an interface. Moreover, its antirepresentative ‘purity’ is inscribed in a context where pure art and decorative art are intertwined, a context that straight away gives it a political signification. (Rancière 2006, 16)

The hierarchy of the organisation of the sensible space is actually a sociopolitical order. Thus, Rancière explains, the flat interface in art and graphic design, for instance, is political, in that it shapes politics that are “inherent in the logic of representation.” In painting or graphic design: the egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces, the elevation of artisans’ art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art into the decor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution of sensory experience was overturned. (Rancière 2006, 16–17)

There is no doubt that every single sub-discipline of design is a player in the distribution of the sensory and its experiences: design contributes to the sensory through jewellery and accessories, clothes and fashion, furniture and designed machines, graphic design and textile. Let us exemplify this by reference to an ideologically loaded piece of cloth that contributed to the reorganisation of the sensible order and that stands at the centre of heated controversy—the burkini swimwear (Figure 8.3). The burkini, a blend of a burka and bikini both in form and name or tag, was designed by Aheda Zanetti, a Lebanese-born Australian. Following the move of the burkini into Europe in 2015, it was reported in the news that “in France’s beaches and swimming pools, there’s a war about how women dress” (Taylor 2016). The burkini brought to the relatively body positive public zone a religious ideology of female cover, in the form of full-body, head-covering swimsuits. It therefore defied secularism with a new visuality or sensible order. On the one hand, we find in the literature an opposition to the banning of the burkini: “perhaps the sight of a woman in a burkini surfing the waves is a powerful image that challenges the Western colonial and oriental stereotypes or the lenses that have so constantly been used to attack Muslim women” (Sana Tayyen 2017, 113). On the other hand, it was claimed that the burkini is directly linked to the fundamentalist imperative

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Figure 8.3 Burqini swimsuit.

for women to be unseen. As such, it is a symbol of the oppression of women, both in oppressive states such as Iran and in democratic states in which women belonging to some groups do not truly dare to choose their wardrobes owing to the risk of being outcast from their communities. This is, it was claimed, the price of the politics of identity ideology. “The burkini is not a new range of swimwear, a fashion. It is the expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women” was the explanation given by French Premier Manuel Valls for his support of the ban. The claim was that beaches should be ideology-neutral: that “beaches must be free of wardrobe associated with religion and politics” (Valls 2016). This is but one example of design playing a current role in the ideologies clash, as it appears in the order of the sensuous sphere, between universalist ethics ideology and postmodern identity politics. However, the phenomenon of design as an ideological factor in the infrastructure of the social, visual and economical order is far from novel. Nike’s commercial version of the burkini adds another layer to this mix through its appropriation by consumer culture, brand identity and evocative objects, imbuing this adobe with a hue of the right object for the up-to-date connoisseur. But, since there is no news under the sun, let us go back to pre-modern and modern examples of ideology-motivated and motivating design. 8.1 IDEOLOGIES IN DESIGN: PRE-MODERN AND MODERN EXAMPLES In its pre-modern era, design was focused on survival and finding material solutions to aid the populace in their daily struggles. Graphic design emerged in the Middle Ages as a functional method to identify military units, according to their

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allegiance. In other words, need dictated action, devoid of ethics, values or ideology. During the nineteenth century when early avant-garde groups, such as the Pre-Raphaelites or the Arts and Crafts movement (Donovan 2014) were founded in Britain, their values influenced the essence of design. Whereas the former protested the stagnant norms of contemporary Art, the latter formed a practicebased manifesto against the ills of modern technology and machinery. Although the Arts and Crafts movement had a significant influence on design, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that design movements began promoting specified values and ideology through designed products, with one interesting exception. In 1787, pottery industrialist Josiah Wedgewood contributed an interesting addition to the abolitionist movement. Using his knowledge and access to industry, Wedgwood designed a medallion carrying the motto “am I not a man and a brother” (Figure 8.4) and distributed these for free to attendees at abolitionist rallies (Hunt 2023). In one of the earliest examples of (what would now be called industrial) design coupled with ideology, Wedgewood took the time and effort, coupled with the expertise of his best modeller, to design an object with the sole function of distributing an idea. The archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London show that a few years later, the medallion, which was carried as a brooch or perhaps used as a wall ornament, spread by the thousands as a fashion accessory. Thus, design served to spread values and help a political call for social justice. Through what Eagleton calls “the materialistic side of generating ideas, beliefs, and values in society,” design supported what Badiou calls “emancipatory project.” Returning to the muddy trenches of the First World War, as in the previous century, designers faced a new type of global change, this time triggered by nationality and the destructive potential of technology (Figure 8.5). As innovative ideas turned into horrific weaponry that included tanks, aeroplanes, artillery, sniper rifles and machine guns, designers and artists witnessed the horrors of the trenches. The mass graves and millions of fallen soldiers and civilians had a

Figure 8.4 Josiah Wedgwood, Anti-Slavery Medallion, 1787.

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deep impact on design in the years following the Armistice. As nationality had served as a catalyst to this madness, designers searched for an a-national visualmaterial language. Manifested in type, architecture, designed objects or visual language, designers identified and articulated their values through their craft. Through the international language of architecture, modernism turned to function and inspiration that was driven by technology (Crouch 1999; Davies 2017). Design movements such as De Stijl (1917–1931) and the Bauhaus (1919–1933) turned to international typefaces, universal shapes and primary colours (Troy 1986; Whitford 1984). In addition, the Bauhaus integrated into its curriculum a set of defined values, such as the significance of the dialogue between art and design, social implications and humanism (Figure 8.6). Other movements throughout the first part of the twentieth century turned to other paths of ideology, such as constructivism, integral socialism and industry.

Figure 8.5 First World War British recruitment poster.

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Figure 8.6 Dessau-Törten Housing Estate affordable housing project, designed by Walter Gropius, 1926–1928.

As we have mentioned, in the same period a completely different ideologic approach was triggered by the Great Depression. During the 1930s, bolstered by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, consumerism was heralded as the great saviour of the Western economy. In its turn, design took its rightful place as the harbinger of materialised desire manifested in new technologies and materials. Influencing gender roles, leisure practices and even family structure and social structure, consumerism helped to create a somewhat false equation between design and the desire to buy new “stuff.” As designers became helpers to the manufacturing industry, design’s main ideology in this period, although untitled, was to bolster sales while working closely with marketing experts. Contrary to the ideology-laden movements mentioned earlier, Art Deco(ratif) and the Streamline echoed this focus on style and desirability rather than on values and social justice. By the end of this period, and in contrast to his famous Modernist predecessors Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy, designer Henry Dreyfuss, as mentioned earlier, shifted the focus of design practice from the industry to the people, as is beautifully reported in Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit (Flinchum 1997). However, although its importance cannot be overstated, Dreyfuss’s book Designing for People (1955) still had a strong bond to the designer’s main counterpart—the manufacturer. Such a bond leant support to a somewhat simplistic functionalist approach to design.

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Figure 8.7 Hoover Iron, 1948.

8.2 AFTER-MODERN IDEOLOGIES IN THEORY The social protests that swept the USA and Europe from the end of the 1950s to the 1970s introduced new layers of ideology to popular discourse (Figure 8.7). However, despite being central to broad cultural debates, these ideologies took time to influence design practice. In architecture, movements such as Archigram offered a new and futuristic look at humanity’s habitation of urban space. Moving cities and intricate technological mainframes altered our understanding of the intricate relationships between people and urban systems, as described in the eye-opening Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Sadler 2005). In Italy, avant-garde design movements challenged the way in which produced objects were manifested in our daily life. During the 1960s, Archizoom and Superstudio, spearheaded by designer Andrea Brazzi and others, questioned the essence of design and flexibility, urban structure, minimalism, postmodernism and the influence of colour and materials on daily consumer products (Coles and Rossi 2013; see an example of minimalist table design in Figure 8.8). However, while playfully articulated and intriguing in its influence on later design practice, these movements were a noticeable jumpstart to design ideology, which was articulated in three key publications. In 1971, Victor Papanek published a highly influential book titled Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. In this book, Papanek challenges the role of the

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Figure 8.8 Quaderna table by Zanotta, 1970.

designer, formulating the imperative to ask not “how to design,” but rather “why design?” In his most famous quotation, Papanek claims that: There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhine-stone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before… if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed… As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial ‘toys for adults’, killing machines with gleaming tailfins, and ‘sexed up’ shrouds for toasters, telephones, and computers, it … is about time that design as we have come to know it, should cease to exist. (Papanek 1971, 9–10)

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Taking an innovative approach, Papanek bravely addressed the destructive influences of design on ecology, local communities and developing countries. He criticised Western civilisation’s glorification of an endless process of consumption that resulted in mass waste. His criticism was aimed at the designers for also neglecting their social obligations while securing their jobs with industrial brands. Unfortunately, his call for universal principles, humanistic involvement and a redefinition of the designer’s role in society took a long time to reach fruition. Papanek’s canonical book was also one of the first to blatantly address the harms caused by design and the marketing of global firms to the environment, health and communities. His critical words on an architectural collaborating on a project of segregation in cities run as follows: “‘urban renewal’ and ‘slum clearance’ projects have verticalized ghettos into monolithic high-rises that have had enormously damaging social consequences for people forced to live in them.” These projects’ harmful results are irreversible, as are those of the food industry, “the self-assertive greed of corporations” that covered the USA and the world with junk food shops that the design discipline joined by supplying logos, printing the designs of end products and producing the interior design of the stores. “The societal and social consequences are clear,” Papanek explicitly asserts and specifies: a destabilization of the family, new eating patterns that frequently result in obesity and dietary deficiencies, a debasement of the human palate forced to find the lowest common denominator, and finally a ready acceptance for horrendous garishness and visual pollution. (Papanek 2011, 25)

A similar account of design’s hidden ideologies of consumerism and a call for design to adopt a critical and humanistic ideology was supplied during the same period by the headmaster of the Ulm School (see Chapters 1 and 5), Tomas Maldonado. He attempted to invigorate his students’ sense of criticism through social sciences and guest lectures by scholars from the Frankfurt School. In his important book Design, Nature and Revolution: Towards a Critical Ecology (1972), he offered a radical view of the future of design practice (interestingly, the American edition diluted the original Italian title—Design as Revolution). In a systematic and methodical way, Maldonado removes the designed veils from various venues in our daily lives, ranging from urban planning through architecture to industrial and graphic design. Unlike Papanek, Maldonado was highly influenced by Marxist theories, which can be seen beneath the surface of his important text. Beginning with a focus on ecology, Maldonado bravely calls for designers not to ignore important issues (what Buchanan will go on to call “wicked problems”), nor to succumb to desperation, but rather to act. In a poignant passage, Maldonado tells us: In the future, design and planning must assume the responsibility for transforming what is today barely virtual into something real. In that way design and

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planning would become the guiding factor of the Revolution; in fact, it would itself be the Revolution. Despite all this we find ourselves asking what, in this context, are the necessary requisites for changing design into revolution; which we are the existing or future power structures that must delegate to the planners the responsibility for radically transforming, in an operation of worldwide dimensions, all the technical structures of the human environment. (Maldonado 1972, 28–29)

In a short essay that Maldonado later wrote, titled “The Idea of Comfort,” he continues the rich post-Marxist approach that links well-designed products, comfort and political complacency. His target is the ideology of comfort by design, as embodied by the likes of the Frankfurt School thinkers as well as Bell, Papanek and others. Maldonado exposes the hidden ideologies that motivate design following the modern version of the industrial revolution and the exponential growth of mass culture, production and society. Maldonado claims that: the progressive diffusion of comfort to the masses was not accidental. There is no doubt that it has played, from the beginning, a fundamental role in the task of controlling the social fabric of the nascent capitalist society, in its most hidden recesses, comfort is a scheme for social control. (Maldonado and Cullars 1991, 35)

Building on these two important texts, Victor Margolin advanced in his influential book The Politics of the Artificial the critical view of design with a practical imperative, calling for the involvement of design in the development of solution to the social and political challenges of mass society (Margolin 2002). By reuniting and changing their focus, designers have the will and potential to influence industrial magnates and, as a result, to bring forth global change in relation to consumption, ecology and social equilibrium. In “Design, the Future and the Human Spirit,” Margolin claims that because design and designers are situated in a temporal position, inhabiting as they do the present and also working towards a future, for them to create a meaningful change, designers need professional, practical and theoretical autonomy (Margolin 2007). Because designers need to set themselves, subjectively and independently, a value-oriented professional red line, Margolin proposes what he designates “a social model of design.” He calls for the discipline of design to change from a “market model” to a socially oriented model, motivated by the ideology of equality and humanism. Contrary to the market model’s focus on profit, the social model should focus on satisfying human needs—not those of the average consumer, but rather those of the “people with low-incomes or special needs such as those due to age, health, or disability” (Margolin and Margolin 2002, 3). From a historical perspective, design ideology is related to significant and influential design movements; contemporary design theoreticians replace this concept with what we term “design values.” Viewed as a core system of beliefs

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and norms, design values are deeply rooted in a sociocultural context and are strongly related to design practice. As such, inclusive design shaped design values during the 1990s, and recent forays into various definitions of social design or cultural-vernacular design do the same (see Chapters 1.7 and 2C). These ideas promote a reformulation of the definition of design as, in essence, a reflective discipline. This refers to design whose terminology and motivation comprise humanistic ideology as an immanent feature in its infrastructure rather than to a discipline that receives its critique from external sources. This is called in the literature “critical design,” and it will be addressed in the next section. 8.3 CRITICAL DESIGN: DESIGN AS A CARING PROFESSION In his recent analysis of Rancière’s theory of design, Lohtaja offers the following definition of critical design: For design to be critical in itself, one may say, it must be internally related, combined with more accurately, with critical theory. Common to these different approaches labelled as critical theory is that theoretical practice ought not only to reflect or explain society but aim to reveal, criticize, and change the dominant forms of oppressive power structures and hidden ideological frameworks that maintain the status quo. Critical design, in turn, thinks this in relation to design practices contesting power relations, values, and societal norms and hierarchies: to design is to make a critical, projective, and reflexive argument on the construction and delamination of the current state of things and how the world can be thought otherwise throughout design provocations. (Lohtaja 2021, 307)

Three main properties of critical design that are mentioned here render it a political discipline: 1. 2. 3.

Having a critical theory embedded in design as an internal property, namely, a combination, or even an amalgamation, between theory and practice. Having the critical element not as a mere representation of reality, but rather as an active part in configuring reality. Setting design as a visionary discipline that offers ideas or even regulations for a better world.

The visionary aspect of critical design is well formulated in Dunne and Raby’s Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming published in 2013. In this important book, design is defined to be as theoretical as practical and to be essentially normative (see Chapter 1.6). Here, the term “critical design” is defined as an opposition to “affirmative design.” Dunne and Raby inform us that this idea arose out of the ideological vacuous nature of design and technology, which more accurately refers to an absence of reflective ideology and “un-critical

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drive” behind technology and design. Technology and design, they claim, have always been characterised as “good and capable of solving any problem,” but they serve as an affirmation and reinforcement of the status quo—which we learned above is usually maintained by the privileged dominant forces. Dunne and Raby’s definition of “critical design” then encompasses “speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life” (Dunne and Raby 2013, 34). Such proposals could include various socially and politically oriented sub-classes of designs, such as “participatory design, co-design, design-activism, feminist design, and, more recently, socially responsive and transition design” (Lohtaja 2021, 306). All of these genres of design place humanistic ideology at their core. “To do this, we need more pluralism in design, not of style but of ideology and values,” it is claimed by Dunne and Raby (2013, 9). They dispel what is called “design’s optimism” for collaborating with mass production while ignoring its consequences and affirming the given as good regardless of its problems—that is to say, design that blindly embodies hidden dominant ideologies and refrains from adopting ethical ones: Design’s inherent optimism offers no alternative, but it is becoming clear that many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the: only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. Although essential most of the time, design’s inbuilt optimism can greatly complicate things, first, as a form of denial that the problems we face are more serious than they appear, and second, by channelling energy and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there. (Dunne and Raby 2013, 1)

Dunne and Raby go on to argue that: The spectrum of conceptual design is broad. Each area of design has its own form and is used in different ways. At one end it is very close to conceptual art and is about pure ideas, often to do with the medium itself. Much applied art, ceramics, furniture, and device art, for example, sit here. At the other end of the spectrum conceptual design means a parallel space of speculation that uses hypothetical or, more accurately, fictional products to explore possible technological futures. (Dunne and Raby 2013, 14)

The ideological source for critical design was William Morris’s oeuvre, given that he “was the first to create critical design objects in the way we understand them today, that is, embodying ideals and values intentionally at odds with those of his own time” (Dunne and Raby 2013, 17). The authors remind us that from the beginning of the twentieth century, conceptualism in furniture design was

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endorsed by the Bauhaus’s “early bent steel tube chairs” by Italian designers such as Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass, Studio De Pas D’Urbino, Lomazzi, Archizoom, Alessandro Mendini and Memphis as well as by the Dutch design group Droog. But in the 1980s, design turned “into a miasma of extreme commercialism.” Conceptual design, influenced by conceptual art that brought political ideas to the fore, ought to use its own medium to ask questions about the given reality and inspire its public to look for better alternatives that transgress, at least conceptually, the limits of reality: not “experimenting with how things are now, making them better or different, but about other possibilities altogether.” Conceptual design aspires to what is named “the unreality,” as exemplified by the MTKS-3/The Meta-territorial Kitchen System-3 (2003) by Marti Guixe (Figure 8.9), which offers models of an open-source kitchen. The idea is to offer ideas. New ideas, or better yet, ideals, rather than objects, are what is needed nowadays. Tony Fry presents a paradigmatic example of ideological design in his “Designing a Metabolic City,” which is presented in Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice. Fry, a prominent theorist of design and Figure 8.9 Marti Guixe, MTKS-3/The Metaterritorial Kitchen System-3, 2003.

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ideologies, calls for design to fight the current tendency of what he names “defuturing” our future. Design ought to be an active, political, ideological agent in the field of forces, he stresses. One of the ways to be such a force is to shift design from a spatial medium to a temporal one, called by Fry “designing-intime,” which considers the preservation of the possibility of having a future rather than demolishing it, and which he argues is being done today by industry and design. Designing-in-time does not overlook the failure of design to acknowledge our finitude and faces the “mass catastrophe” caused by the way we act in the material world. Designing-in-time is exemplified by the plans for a transition from the existing settlement of Boonah in Australia to Boonah Two (see Chapter 1), “conceived of metabolically.” Boonah was an award-winner in the international concept design competition “Building a Sustainable World: Life in the Balance,” which was organised in 2007 by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Fry describes it as follows: Designing a metabolic city requires the city to be established and managed as much as possible within the immediate catchment of its settlement. The city has to be directly connected to its region’s ecological carrying capacity and natural resources [like water, soil, biodiversity). This also means identifying the number of people that the catchment can support. The form of the city, the goods and services it employs, the human capital it selects and recruits, the industries and businesses it attracts or creates, the cultures it forms – all are essential to create and maintaining its metabolism. A metabolic city has to have the capability to largely sustain itself and adaptively self-reproduce rather than just grow in size and impacts… Base-level self-sustainment for a metabolic city means sustaining the food, energy, water, waste infrastructure, common utility materials and cultural needs of its population without defuturing its catchment. The move from Boonah to Boonah Two included retrofitting the catchment to make it largely selfsustaining in terms of food, energy, water and common utility materials. From such comparatively high base level of self-sustainment, all growth would have to equate with improved performance upon this base. (Fry 2009, 63–64)

The award-winning plan calculated the water shortages and restrictions felt in many areas in rural Australia as well as the fact that in small towns all the water has to be trucked in. It also accounts for the worst drought that Australia has faced in 1,000 years. It also considered extreme weather events, such as cyclones, floods and hailstorms, which are becoming more and more frequent. Fry exposes us to ideology-driven design, which is saturated with a profound acknowledgement of reality; he offers both material and conceptual possibilities for how design might play a role in determining our (better) future. Finally, considering that designers need to make a living amid this sea of values and industrial restrictions, we wish to propose another alternative, namely that of professional responsibility (Guersenzvaig and Ventura 2022). In short, this

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approach is based on the McIntarian premise and the broader values of design as a profession. Professions, in the classic normative understanding, need to be understood as being involved in more than just getting paid for a job or doing a job skilfully in a technical sense. It goes without saying that not all occupations are professions. Professions are those occupations that are primarily concerned with helping others attain certain strategic goods that play a crucial role in their lives and in their flourishing. We must remember however that design is indeed a practice, but a practice with the added ability to influence a considerable number of people. A practice, in philosophical terms, is a specific type of social co-operative activity that has specific intrinsic rewards, its own standards of excellence, methods, tradition, vocabulary and values. Practices are always embedded in a wider social context and require at least a minimally shared conception of the goods that are pursued by their practitioners (MacIntyre 2007). At the same time, practices are intrinsically integrated into the practitioner’s own quest to lead a good life, as an individual human being. A profession, by virtue of being a practice, is centrally linked to one’s identity and life plans—not only the identity of our design partners, but also the identity of the designer as well. The central aspect to grasp here is that being responsible is a feature of the person and not about a set of obligations to which a person is bound. To elaborate on this issue, we need to introduce the notion of “Care,” which relates fully to the ideological people-oriented movements at the end of the twentieth century (such as inclusive and social design). Care is a key component of responsibility as a virtue. Thus, for instance, inclusive design cares for marginalised social groups, not by labelling them as such, but rather by following the concept of “innovate to the extreme, design for the mainstream.” In an interesting paraphrase of the typical sociological approach proposed by Coleman et al. (2003), rather than fighting stigma by creating other stigmas, we might transform marginalised societies into part of the mainstream while using design to conduct this mission. However, the essence of imbuing care among designers as practitioners might lie in reframing and restructuring the very role of designers in society, as we have seen. Our contribution to the issue of design and ideology lies in the need for designers to make a living while still creating an ethical and ideological impact through their practice. Thus, good professional designers (again, good in an ethical sense) are personally affected when an object of care (the design profession or even design as a whole) is advanced or hindered. Hence, seeking to realise specific purposes and design solutions matters to them. Indeed, design empathy deals not only with generating empathy towards other design partners, but also with the discipline itself and with the very definition of design practice (Segal and Ventura 2019). Unlike other professions, in which ethics dictate an aloof position or one that is present in theory but not in practice, design is different in two regards. First, designers, as an inherent trait of their profession, work with and for the industry.

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Thus, an ethical perspective must maintain their ability to make a living through contributing to the industrial world. Second, because designed products affect our daily existence on a global scale, we cannot leave these important issues to philosophers or sociologists (Guersenzvaig 2021). To create meaningful and long-lasting change, designers need to harness practice-based theory through which their work might be conducted anew. REFERENCES Badiou, A. 2013. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by P. Hallward. London and New York: Verso Books. Bell, D. 1988. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties: With a New Afterword. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Braungart, M. and W. McDonough. 2009. Cradle to Cradle. New York: Random House. Coleman, R., Lebbon, C., Clarkson, P., & Keates, S. (2003). “From margins to mainstream: Why inclusive design is better design.” In Inclusive design: Design for the Whole Population, edited by P. Clarkson, 1e25. London: Springer. Coles, A. and C. Rossi, eds. 2013. The Italian Avant-garde, 1968–1976. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Crouch, C. 1999. Modernism in Art, Design and Architecture (Illustrated edition). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, C. 2017. A New History of Modern Architecture: Art Nouveau, the Beaux-arts, Expressionism, Modernism, Constructivism, Art Deco, Classicism, Brutalism, Postmodernism, Neo-rationalism, High Tech, Deconstructivism, Digital Futures. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd. Donovan, A. E. 2014. William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (First issued in paperback). London, New York: Routledge. Dunne, A. and F. Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press. Eagleton, T. 2007. Ideology: An Introduction. London and New York: Verso Books. Fathy, H. 2010.  Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Flinchum, R. 1997. Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit. New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Rizzoli. Fry, T. 2009. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice (English edition). Oxford: Berg. Gal, M. 2021. Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics. London, New York: Bloomsbury Publication. Guersenzvaig, A. 2021. The Goods of Design: Professional Ethics for Designers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Holland, A., F. Ansari, and C. Weber. 2010. Integrated Systems, Design and Technology 2010: Knowledge Transfer in New Technologies (M. Fathi, Ed.; 2011th edition). New York: Springer. Hunt, T. 2023. The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain. London: Penguin Books. Kennedy, E. 1979. “Ideology from Destutt De Tracy to Marx.” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 3: 353–368. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709242 Lohtaja, A. 2021. “Designing Dissensual Common Sense: Critical Art, Architecture, and Design in Jacques Rancière’s Political Thought.” Design and Culture 13, no. 3: 305–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2021.1966730 Loos, A. 2019. Ornament and Crime. London: Penguin UK.

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Maldonado, T. and J. Cullars. 1991. “The Idea of Comfort.” Design Issues 8, no. 1: 35–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511452 Maldonado, T. (2018 [1972]). Design, Nature and Revolution: Towards a Critical Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Margolin, V. 2002. The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/ book/chicago/P/bo3623186.html Margolin, V. 2007. “Design, the Future and the Human Spirit.” Design Issues 23, no. 3: 4–15. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi.2007.23.3.4 Margolin, V. and S. Margolin. 2002. “A ‘Social Model’ of Design: Issues of Practice and Research.” Design Issues 18, no. 4: 24–30. https://doi.org/10.1162/ 074793602320827406 Papanek, V. 2011. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and social Change (2nd. edition, complete revised reprint). London: Thames and Hudson. Rancière, J. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London; New York: Continuum. Sadler, S. 2005. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sana Tayyen, N. 2017. “From Orientalist Sexual Object to Burkini Terrorist Threat: Muslim Women through Evolving Lens.” Islamophobia Studies Journal 20, no. 10: 101–14 https://doi.org/10.13169/islastudj.4.1.0101 Segal, K. and J. Ventura. 2019. The Short Story of Design: From the Palaeolithic Axe to the iPhone. Tel-Aviv: Books in the Attic [in Hebrew]. Taylor, A. 2016. “The Surprising Australian Origin Story of the Burkini.” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 2016. https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/the-surprisingaustralian-origin-story-of-the-burkini-20160818-gqvdu9.html Troy, N. J. 1986. De stijl environment. Cambridge: MIT Press. Valls, Manuel: 2016. “Burkini ‘not compatible’ with French values.” POLITICO (August 17, 2016). https://www.politico.eu/article/manuel-valls-burkininot-compatible-with-french-values/ Weber, M. 2004. The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Whitford, F. 1984. Bauhaus. London: Thames and Hudson.

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Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. About the Word Design (Flusser) 137 Actor-Network Theory 37–38 Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Mukařovský) 11, 107, 110 aesthetics 10, 55, 60, 72–74, 76, 79, 80–81, 84, 90–91, 104–105, 107, 115, 123, 216 Aesthetics of Design (Forsey) 12, 18, 21, 28, 49, 52, 64, 104 The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design (Folkmann) 109 affordance 19, 23, 29, 38, 108, 109 Agamben, G. 229 agentic abilities 151 Alessi, A. 75, 91–92 Alfa Romeo 196, 198–199 Alliot-Marie, M. 160 anti-functionalism 70 Anti-Slavery Medallion (Wedgwood) 252, 252 Antonelli, P. 151 Anzieu, D. 153 Appadurai, A. 176 Apple 91, 150, 176, 195, 196 Arad, R. 173 Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Sadler) 255 Architecture of Fear (Ellin) 232 Arendt, H. 147, 150, 153 Aristotle 62, 126–127, 219 Arnheim, R. 17, 53–54, 59–60, 69–70, 76–77, 79 art 4, 10–15, 17, 22, 25, 26, 28, 33, 46–48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 74, 76,

77, 80, 82, 84, 85, 88, 90, 95, 98, 99, 102–105, 112, 114, 121, 123, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 165, 179, 191, 204, 207, 224, 229, 250, 254, 260, 261 Art and Agency (Gell) 115 Art and Commerce (Fry) 98 Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (Read) 15, 48 Art as Language (Hagberg) 104 Artifacts and their Functions (Eaton) 64 Art Nouveau apartment building 31, 83, 83 The Art of Interior Design: A Text in the Aesthetics of Interior Design (Ball) 54, 61 Arts and Crafts movement 6, 84, 252 The Artworld (Danto) 103 Astbury, P. 161, 162 attachment to forms 80 aura 190–191 B17 Flying Fortress 212–213, 213 Badiou, A. 243–244, 249, 252 Bakhtin, M. 220, 231, 239 Baldwin, J. 163 Ball, V. 54–55, 61 banana chair (Zjedzony) 7, 8, 78, 79, 100, 100, 102 Band-Aid 163–164, 164 Barbie dolls 157–158, 158 Barthes, R. 156, 160, 177, 198 Bauhaus 6, 12, 54, 80, 85–87, 88, 112, 135, 253, 261 Bauman, Z. 200 Bayley, S. 72 beauty 7, 15–17, 27, 37, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52–56, 60, 62, 66, 71, 74, 75, 76, 79, 116, 122, 167, 228

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Becoming Human by Design (Fry) 44–45 Behrens, P. 102, 103, 194 Beitz, M. 45 Bell, C. 60–61 Bell, D. 199, 248 Benjamin, W. 152, 190 Bentham, J. 147 Bialetti Moka Express 75, 75 Bichard, J. A. 206, 216 Bill, M. 6, 151, 215 Black History Month sneakers 167, 172, 173 Black is Beautiful (Taylor) 167 Black Lives Matter 167, 173, 174 Black women 167, 231 BMW 201, 202 body: design and 219–226; disciplined 223–225; point of conflict 221–223; politics and design 225–226, 232 Boonah Two 44, 262 Bourdieu, P. 121, 144, 146, 192, 224 Branzi, A. 45, 46 Brazilian culture 167 Brazilianness 183, 184 Brazzi, A. 255 Breuer, M. 85–87, 87 bricolage 121 Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work (Mau) 35 Buchanan, R. 10, 104, 136 burkini swimwear (Zanetti) 250–251, 251 Cangaço furniture (Campana brothers) 183, 184 Cantilever Wassily Chair (Breuer) 85–87, 87 care 263 Carlson, A. 66, 75, 77 Carnap, R. 27 cat-eye design 239, 240 Central Library, Kansas 100, 101, 102 Chanel, C. 160–161 Chapanis, A. 213–214 Christianity 176, 179–180 civilising process 221 claim 70 client 195, 197 closed garden approach 150 Cloud Table (Morris) 246, 246

Coca-Cola 159, 176 co-design 218 cognition (cognitive) 19, 23, 26, 28, 29, 40, 77, 78, 122, 202, 230 Coke Zero 159 Coleman, R. 216, 263 Collingwood, R. G. 14–15, 26 composition 3, 8, 14, 17, 22–23, 31, 45, 47, 50–51, 54, 61, 72, 79, 102, 216 conceptual design 260–261 Conran, T. 72 consumerism 34, 41, 52, 150, 197, 205, 248–249, 254, 257 co-operative design 218 Corbusier, L. 189, 205, 227–229, 231 corporate identity 176–178 COVID-19 145 Cradle to Cradle® 245 craft 6, 13, 15, 21, 23, 25, 26, 48, 55, 66, 84, 104, 126, 132, 135, 137, 164, 180, 190, 191, 252, 253 creativity 25, 79, 133, 136–137, 139–140, 190, 202 critical design 41–42, 259–264 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 74 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 128, 130 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 128 cross and pisces symbols 179–184, 180 cultural capital 146–147, 224–225 cultural colonialisation 199 culture 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 12, 23, 33, 39, 40, 41, 51, 72, 73, 74, 110, 114, 120, 127, 134, 135, 136, 142–184, 190, 197, 199, 212, 216, 220–221, 223, 225, 227, 229–232, 244, 245, 247, 248, 258 Dahlstrom, D. 116 Danto, A. 98, 103–104, 110 Debord, G. 152, 229 De Certeau, M. 121, 147–148, 152, 157–158, 232 deconstructivist architect 88–89 Defuturing: A new Design Philosophy (Fry) 42–43 De-Léry, J. 231 democratic design 147, 150, 152 democratic space 147–148 De Montaigne, M. E. 231

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dependent beauty 74–75 design 190; and body 219–226; communication 104; and complex meanings 110–113; and corporate identity 176–178; definitions of 14–17; and essence 3, 8, 9, 43, 73, 89, 126, 252, 255; ethnicity 168, 173, 176; externalist definition 31–36; formalist and aestheticist definitions 45–56; and gender norms 155–162; group identity and 168–169, 172–173; and hermeneutics 113–118; historicism 11–15; and identity theory 153–155; national identity and 168–174; normative definitions 36–45; ontology 6–9; point of conflict 221–223; and racial norms 163–168; as research 134–140; social-normative theories of 40, 45; variety 9–11 Design as Art (Munari) 55 Design Discourse (Margolin) 71, 115 designer 189–193 Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (Papanek) 41, 59, 82, 151, 244, 255–256 Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and new Practice (Fry) 44, 261–262 Designing a Metabolic City (Fry) 261–262 Designing for People (Dreyfuss) 204, 214, 227, 254 designing-in-time 44, 262 Design in History (Margolin) 39 Design: Intelligence Made Visible (Bayley and Conran) 72 Design Knowing and Learning: Cognition in Design Education (Eastman and McCracken) 28–29 Design, Nature and Revolution: Towards a Critical Ecology (Maldonado) 257 Design Noir and Speculative Everything (Dunne and Raby) 140 The Design of Everyday Things (Norman) 73, 77, 79, 108 The Design of Future Things (Norman) 108 Design, the Future and the Human Spirit (Margolin) 258 design-thinking 43, 139, 214, 216, 218 design values 34, 258–259

Dessau-Törten Housing Estate (Gropius) 253, 254 De Stijl 86, 253 De Tracy, C. D. 248 DiCaprio, L. 224 disciplined body 223–225 Discovering Design (Buchanan and Margolin) 136 Donovan, J. 217 Dove soap 158–159 Dreyfuss, H. 31–32, 36–37, 51–52, 71, 80, 90, 156, 189, 204–205, 206, 211, 214, 227–228 Duchamp, M. 88, 191 Dunne, A. 41–42, 140, 259–260 Durkheim, E. 219–220, 225 Dyson, J. 52 Dyson vacuum cleaner 53 Eagleton, T. 249, 252 Eames, C. 21, 111 Eaton, A. 64, 69 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Gibson) 109 ecology 211, 257 Eco, U. 95 educated carpenter 151, 247 Egypt 182–183 Eiffel Chair (Eames) 111 electric kettle (Behrens) 194, 194 Elias, N. 221 Elsaesser, T. 183 Elwood, J. 156 embodied cultural capital 224 empathic design 217 End of Ideology (Bell) 248 end users 4, 11, 19, 32, 47, 51, 59, 64–66, 69, 90, 95, 99, 106, 114, 116, 122–124, 156, 160, 188–189, 192–195, 197, 201–205, 207, 212–214, 216–218, 227 Engels, F. 248 entre parenthèses 86–87 ergonomics 194–195, 214, 227, 229–230, 232, 234; physical 121; physiologic 234; social 121, 230–232, 237, 239; sociocultural 234 Erikson, E. 155 ethical consistency 243

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Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Badiou) 243 ethnicity 168, 173, 176 Eupalinos: or, the Architect (Valery) 106–107 evocative object 91, 150 Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Turkle) 106 The Evolution of Useful Things (Petroski) 68 expression 4, 6, 14, 16, 18, 22, 24, 53–54, 60, 65, 77–78, 92, 95, 109, 123, 126, 156, 217, 219–220, 229, 239–240, 251 externalism 18, 20, 31–36 eyeglasses design case 232–237, 236; rise and fall 237–238; spectacles 238–241 Fanon, F. 166 FC Barcelona 172, 173 Fire Station (Hadid) 200 First World War 160, 212, 252 Fish, J. 163 Fish, S. 114 Flusser, V. 21, 30, 32–34, 121, 136–137, 190, 219 Ford 197 Ford, H. 197, 199 formalism 8, 27, 45, 47, 54–55, 60, 123, 129 form and function 59–60, 70–76, 78; history 81–93 forms 60–62; claim 71; non-formality of 79–81 Forsey, J. 12, 15, 18, 21–22, 28, 36, 49–50, 64–65, 69, 75, 104, 134 Forty, A. 72 Foucault, M. 121, 144, 146–147, 150–151, 168, 224 The Four Books of Architecture (Palladio) 16 Freud, S. 120–121, 155, 219 Freyre, G. 167 From Function to Expression (Arnheim) 59 Frozen Peas ice cube mould design (Martorelli) 105, 106 Fry, R. 14, 22, 24, 24, 25, 42–44, 47–48, 78, 98, 110 Fry, T. 42–45, 261–262 Fukasawa, N. 200 function 62–70; as message 106–109; non-functionality of 76–79; see also form and function; proper function

functional beauty 7, 74–76 Functional Beauty in Contemporary Aesthetics Theory (Parsons and Carlson) 66 functionalism 8, 27, 29, 49–52, 63–65, 71–76 function proposition 70 Gadamer, H. -G. 104, 113–115, 122, 207 Gamper, M. 88, 89 Gaugin, P. 231 Gebrüder Thonet A.G 86–87 Geddes, N. B. 80, 205 geek chic 240 Geertz, C. 207 Gehry, F. 200 Gell, A. 115, 128, 151 gendered design 155–162 Gibson, J. J. 109 Giddens, A. 178 globalisation 176, 198–199, 249 Golan, A. 246–247, 247 Goodman, N. 98, 103–104 Goodyear 171 Google Glass 193, 236–237 Grace Wristband (Astbury) 161, 162 graduate work (Golan) 246–247, 247 Grand Confort, Sans Confort, Dommage à Corbu armchair (Zwicky) 78, 78 Great Depression 143, 254 Gropius, W. 6–7, 9, 12, 85–86, 88, 110, 254 group identity 168–169, 172–173 Guinard, P. -L. 238 Guixe, M. 261, 261 Gunn, W. 217 Habermas, J. 147 habitus (Bourdieu) 146, 224 Hadid, Z. 200, 200 Hagberg, G. 104 Hamilton, A. 52–53 Hardcastle, V. 64 Harlequin Frame (Sander) 239 Hebdige, D. 172 Hecht, S. 200 Heidegger, M. 113 The Hell with Culture (Read) 74

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hermeneutics 113–118, 207; circles 98, 113, 116, 117, 122 Hobsbawm, E. 38–39 Hodder, I. 64 Honda Civic 111 Hoover Iron 255, 255 hoplites vs. marianu 182, 182–184 hostiledesign.com 233 Hume, D. 128 hybrid cars 111, 193–194 hysteria 230 The Idea of Comfort (Maldonado) 258 identity theory 153–155 ideology 204, 217, 229, 243–251; aftermodern 255–259; pre-modern and modern 251–254 Ideology: An Introduction (Eagleton) 249 IKEA 197–198 iMac (Ive) 195, 196 inclusive design 215–217 Independence Square 147, 149 industrialism 47–48 Industrial Revolution 12, 14–15, 18, 21, 40, 120, 126, 132–134, 190, 194, 198, 212, 214, 227–228, 258 industry 82, 135, 190, 201–202 institutionalised cultural capital 224 instrumental rationality 26, 29 Integrated Systems, Design and Technology 2010 (Holland, Ansari and Weber) 244 intention 18–21, 32–33, 64–66, 95, 125 intentionalism 66 internalism 18, 20, 21–25 internalist approach 8–9, 17–21; instrumental rationalism and functionalism 25–30; internalism and mass production 21–23; internalism and rationalist 23–25 Introduction to Design and Culture (Sparke) 12, 23–24, 40 Iser, W. 121 Ive, J. 21, 195, 196 Jacob, M. P. 159 Jacobsen, A. 111 Jameson, F. 88

Janin, S. 46, 46 Jobs, S. 91, 150 Johnson, P. 88 Juicy Salif (Starck) 91–92, 92, 137, 138 Julier, G. 136 Kadushin, R. 204 Kahlo, F. 157 Kamil Güleç Library of Karabuk University 100, 101 Kant, I. 74, 127–132, 190–191 Kickstarter-funded Measure of Man (Dreyfuss) 228 Knight, G. 206, 216 Lammily dolls 158, 158 Langer, S. 103 language 96, 98–99, 105, 114–117, 207–208 Languages of Art and Ways of World Making (Goodman) 103 Latour, B. 37–38 Laurel, L. 161, 162 Lavirotte, J. 31 Lefebvre, H. 147–148 LEGO set (Beatles) 177, 178 The Lesser Arts (Morris) 56, 62 Levi-Strauss, C. 121, 169, 193 Levy, S. 80, 81 Locke, J. 144 Loewy, R. 80, 192, 192–193, 193 Lohtaja, A. 259 Loos, A. 76, 85–86, 151, 180, 229, 247 Louis Ghost Chair (Starck) 198 Lucky Strike packet (Loewy) 192, 192 Lukásc, G. 144, 195 Lury, C. 200 Luther, M. 180 machine age 205 Maldonado, T. 134, 151, 156, 204, 215, 257–258 Mandeville, John 230–231 manspreading chair (Laurel) 161, 162 Marcia, J. 155 Marginal Notes on Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Agamben) 229 Margolin, V. 10, 12, 38–40, 115, 136, 151, 258

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  Index

Margolis, J. 104 marketability 34–35 Marks, J. 163 Martorelli, A. 105, 106 Marx, K. 144, 151, 195, 248 Maryannu 182 masculinity 159 mass production 12–15, 18, 21–23, 37, 41, 47–48, 51, 80–81, 86, 120, 126, 132, 190–192, 249, 256, 260 The Masters and the Slaves (Freyre) 167 Masters Chair (Starck) 111, 112 material culture 39, 136, 197 Matisse, H. 21–22 Mau, B. 35–36, 42 Mauss, M. 225–227 McCartney, S. 174 McCloud, S. 95 McLuhan, M. 139, 226 Mead, D. 223 Measure of Man (Dreyfuss) 227 mega-brands 199 mega designer 200 mentalism see internalist approach mental models 19 metaphor (metaphorical) 7, 80, 100, 102, 105, 159, 178 Michelin star system 221 Millikan, R. 63–64, 69 Mini Cooper 95, 97 modernism 34, 40, 60, 83, 87–88, 248 Modern Times (Chaplin) 194 moratorium 155 Morris, N. 246, 246 Morris, W. 55–56, 61–62, 84–85, 260 Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (MAYA) principle 193 MTKS-3/The Meta-territorial Kitchen System-3 (Guixe) 261, 261 Mukařovský, J. 11, 20, 106–107, 110–111 Munari, B. 12, 14, 55, 189, 261 Murphy, P. 156 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 151 Mussolini, B. 168 Muthesius, H. 6 Mythologies (Barthes) 177

national identity 168–174 nationalism 168–169 The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (Pye) 13, 15, 46, 68 NBA (the U.S. National Basketball Association) 169–172, 172 New Deal 204–205 Nike 117–118, 167, 169, 169, 172, 173, 176, 191, 191, 195, 251 non-formality of form 79–81 non-functionality of function 76–79 Norman, D. 19, 29, 38, 65, 73, 77–78, 107–109, 116 normative theories 36, 107 objectified cultural capital 224 Objects of Desire (Forty) 72 Omega Workshops 14, 22, 24, 47 On Normativity of Functions (Hardcastle) 64 On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But it Won’t Work in Practice (Kant) 129–130 ontology 1, 3, 6–9, 12, 15, 21, 27, 35, 36, 43, 51, 110, 114, 207, 246 On Translation (Ricœur) 114 opifact (Fry) 110 Optics: The Science of Vision (Ronchi) 235 ordinary language 99 Ornament and Crime (Loos) 229 the “Other” 169, 215–216, 231–232 OXO peeler 206, 207 Palladio, A. 16, 214 Papanek, V. 10, 13, 36–37, 41, 59, 61, 72–73, 82, 108, 134, 151, 156, 244, 255–258 Parsons, G. 19–21, 36, 51, 66, 75, 77 participatory design 218 Penty, A. J. 48 Petroski, H. 68, 71–72, 82 Pevsner, N. 110 Phaedra (Racine) 221–223, 230 philosophy 35, 43, 45, 59–60, 63, 99, 104–105, 132 philosophy of design 6, 24, 31, 35, 104–105, 108–109, 219

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Index  

The Philosophy of Design (Parsons) 19–21 photographic jewellery (Speckner) 105, 105 physical ergonomics 121 physiologic ergonomics 234 Picnic Table (Beitz) 45 Pininfarina Spider 195, 196 Pinker, S. 147 pink tax 159 Plato 27, 62, 235 Playmobil Figures 156, 157 Playmobil tractor 65 Plaza Major 66, 66 Politics (Aristotle) 219 Politics as a Vocation (Weber) 248 The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Rancière) 249 Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Margolin) 12, 39, 258 post-fordism 201–202, 204 postmodernism 34, 60, 83–84, 87–88, 249, 255 practice, definitions of 124–127 The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) 152 praxis 125–126 prescriptive theory 7 The Principles of Art (Collingwood) 14–15 problem-solving 8, 28–29, 32, 35–36, 39, 50, 52, 73, 89 professions 131, 133, 135, 195, 217, 245, 249, 256, 262–263 proper function 3, 63–65, 69, 70, 107 prosthetic leg cover 207–208, 208 Pye, D. 13, 15, 20–21, 46–48, 50, 54, 68–70, 73 Quaderna table (Zanotta) 255, 256 Raby, F. 41–42, 140, 259–260 racial norms 163–168 Racine, J. B. 221 radical functionalism 27–28, 53–54, 59, 64, 70 Ralph Lauren 174, 175 Rams, D. 71–72, 150 Rancière, J. 106, 112–113, 249–250, 259 rational dress 159

rationalism 23, 27–28, 31, 127 rationalist vs. anti-rationalist 9 rationality 23–25 Read, H. 15, 48–49, 74 rehabilitation process 166 Renault 197 Ricœur, P. 113–115 Rittel, H. 39 Rogers, E. N. 6 Ronchi, V. 235 Roosevelt, F. D. 143, 254 Rosen, E. 237 Rousseau, J. J. 219 The Routledge Companion to Design Research (Rodgers and Yee) 22, 26 Ruskin, J. 16–17, 56 Ryd, N. 197 Saarinen, E. 111 Salif, J. 91–93, 92 semiotics 95, 99, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 134, 159, 163, 169, 173, 208 Sander, A. 239 Schachter, E. P. 155 Scheper-Hughes, N. 223 schism 125, 132–135, 151, 180 Schleiermacher, F. 115 Scoiattolo (Branzi) 45, 46 Scope of Total Architecture (Gropius) 6 Second World War 133, 182, 192, 211–212 self-exoticism 183 Seneca 153 7 Series (Jacobsen) 111 Sforza, F. 237 Shaker chairs 180–181, 181 The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (Flusser) 21, 32–33, 137 Ship House (Levy) 80, 81 significant form 60–61 Simmel, G. 191 The Skin-Ego (Anzieu) 153 Smith, A. D. 168 Smith, D. S. 102 Smurfette 166, 166 The Social Contract (Rousseau) 219 social design 212, 215 social ergonomics 121, 230–232, 237, 239

273  

  Index

socially or politically oriented 9 social-normative theories 40–41, 45 sociocultural ergonomics 234 socioeconomic order 37 sociopolitical theories 219 Socrates 27, 62 Souza, d. C. 108 Sparke, P. 12–13, 23, 33–35, 40, 110 Speckner, B. 105, 105 Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Dunne and Raby) 13–14, 41, 140, 259 speculative thinking 139 sports uniform design 170, 170–172, 171, 174, 175 Starck, P. 21, 28, 91–92, 111–112, 112, 137, 138, 161, 198, 200 Sullivan, L. 83–84 supervision by design 146–147, 150, 153 symbolic objects 98–106 Symbolism and Art (Weitz) 103 symbols 98–100, 168–169, 172, 179–180, 237–239 Tahrir Square 147–149, 148 Taylor, F. W. 199 Techniques of the Body (Mauss) 225 teleology 3, 27, 62–65 telesis 37, 73 telos 3, 27, 37, 62 theory: definitions of 125; and practice 120–136, 139 Thonet, M. 84 3D printer 202, 203, 204 Tolstoy, L. 14 Tomes, A. 197 totemism (Levi-Strauss) 169 Toyota Prius 111, 193 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Danto) 98 triumvirate design 188–189, 195, 197 Tulip Armchair (Saarinen) 111 Turbine Factory (Behrens) 102, 103 Turkle, S. 91, 106 Ulm stool (Bill, Gugelot and Hildinger) 215, 215

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (McCloud) 95 Understanding Media (McLuhan) 226 use 2, 10, 14, 15, 19, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 43, 46, 51, 55, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 71, 73, 80, 82, 92, 99, 107, 108, 109, 110, 116, 117, 122, 123, 126, 131, 139, 147, 151–153, 168, 176, 179, 181, 197, 204, 206, 214, 218, 225, 227, 229, 230, 232, 234, 237, 238, 239, 261 user, end user 4, 11, 19, 32, 47, 51, 59, 64, 65, 66, 69, 90, 95, 99, 106, 114, 116, 122, 123, 124, 160, 188–189, 192–195, 197, 201, 202, 204, 205, 207, 212, 213, 214, 216, 218, 227 Valery, P. 106 Valls, M. 251 value-oriented design 164, 245, 258 Ventura, J. 155 Venturi, R. 102 Visual Thinking (Arnheim) 77 Vitruvius, M. 15–17 Voyager Pioneer plaque 164, 165 Wallerstein, I. 199 Ways of World Making (Goodman) 98 Webber, M. 39 Weber, M. 145, 150, 180, 248 Wedgwood, J. 15, 252, 252 Weitz, M. 10, 103 Wellington traffic light 95, 96 What is Art? (Tolstoy) 14 whitening 166–167 wicked problem 39–40, 122, 131, 134, 247, 257 Wigley, M. 89 Wittgenstein, L. 63 Wood, W. 128 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin) 190 Yaneva, A. 38 Zanetti, A. 250, 251 Zanotta 256 Zwicky, S. 78, 78

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