Einführung - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Einführung

Designers make things. This idea is so basic to our shared under-
standing of design, across fields and practices, that it is almost
uncontroversial. Und doch, making no longer seems enough to ex-
press the work of designers. In addition to making things, manche
designers are also doing things. Put another way, for some, von-
sign is a mode of action. This distinction between making and doing
is not merely semantic, and to say that design is a mode of action is
not trivial. These are meaningful shifts in how we understand and
participate in and through design. Vor allem, the tensions between
making and doing and the potentials and problems of action per-
meate the articles collected together in this issue. Across these
articles, in both direct and indirect ways, the authors call our atten-
tion to how the idea of design as doing, as a mode of action, begets
not only new practices and outcomes, but also new ethical and po-
litical consequences.

Kipum Lee’s article most directly addresses these questions
of making, doing, and action. Lee begins his article by offering an
institutional lens to better understand design in organizations. Er
explores the ideas of institutionalization by design and design as a
social institution as an alternative to the received view of organiza-
tionen. With this interpretation, design is not merely capacities and
skills for innovation, but also habits and values that shape purpo-
sive action. But Lee’s argument is not another simplistic call for tak-
ing design more seriously in organizations. He goes on to confront
the challenges of design in organizations achieving agency, due to
the pressures of structure and what Lee calls “the entrapment of de-
sign by design.” One way to address these challenges, according to
Lee, is to broaden our understanding of design beyond activities of
Herstellung, to also be an activity of doing. This shift opens a space of
possibilities for realizing design as a liberal art and appreciating
how a culture of design might mature within organizations.

In his article, Mahmoud Keshavarz brings a critical perspec-
tive to design as an activity of doing in relation to humanitarian
efforts. Keshavarz problematizes the practice of humanitarian
design as a potentially paternalistic endeavor that may reproduce
situations and consequences that are detrimental to those whom
designers are purporting to serve. To develop this line of inquiry,

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_e_00609

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Keshavarz investigates two concepts central to humanitarian
design—crisis and compassion—and explores how these concepts
are mobilized in design responses to refugees. In casting crises as
opportunities for invention, designers often overlook the complex
environments in which those crises occur, and as a result, create
products that fail in their efforts. Compassion can also be misused
in design practice as a means of objectifying and distancing those
who are suffering, casting the refugee as an abstraction in need of
emancipation by design. Such perspectives, according to Keshavarz,
thwart justice and equity; what is needed is a shift from practices of
problem-solving to politics of solidarity.

Elisa Giaccardi and Johan Redström call our attention to how
non-humans shape action, and in the process, they question the idea
of human-centeredness that is the basis of so much design. Im
contemporary moment, as our lives are increasingly mediated
through and manipulated by algorithms, non-human perspectives
are important for understanding what it is that both designers and
things are doing. Giaccardi and Redström offer two moves to re-
orient designers toward an appreciation of non-humans. The first is
a move from delegation to co-performance, recognizing that non-
humans participate, in distinctive ways, in the making of the world.
The second is a move from functionality to responsiveness, recog-
nizing that computational entities behave in ways that extend their
immanent use and develop in interaction with their environment.
These characteristics of non-humans have both aesthetic and ethi-
cal implications for design. Through their argument, Giaccardi and
Redström aim to move designers away from deterministic perspec-
tives on computational things and bring awareness to diverse modes
of agency.

This attention to technology continues in Niya Stoimenova
and Rebecca Price’s article, which offers a consideration of the role
of design in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Stoimenova and Price begin
by returning to discussions of tame and wicked problems, welche
they use to frame the space of applications for AI. Viele der
initial applications of AI are to address tame problems. But given
the ubiquity and entanglement of computation in our lives, solch
tame applications of AI often unfold into wicked problems. Für
designers to engage the wicked problems of AI, according to
Stoimenova and Price, we must consider infrastructure as design
Material. This turn toward infrastructure sensitives designers to
the imbrication of the social, technical, and organizational aspects
AI, while also offering an approach to designing systems that
recognizes emergence, or what they refer to as unanticipated events

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DesignIssues: Volumen 36, Nummer 4 Herbst 2020

and performances. Stoimenova and Price end their article by noting
that the building blocks for robust approaches to designing AI are
present in the field, but in need of articulation.

Miso Kim considers other forms of action in her article on
service design, asking the question of how to design for participa-
tion in services. She approaches this question through an inquiry
into the forms of conceptual models used in service design. She in-
terprets these models, and a corresponding set of projects, durch
ancient and medieval systemizations of the arts. Moving through
an astute discussion of grammatical, rhetorical, poetisch, and dialec-
tic forms, Kim draws our attention to the diverse ways that concep-
tual models express a relation of the whole of a service. Each of these
diverse expressions frame the possibilities for participation differ-
ently. By taking such a pluralistic approach to conceptual models
and their role in service design, Kim creates and shares a multiplic-
ity of possibilities for design action.

While much of the discourse of design, particularly with re-
gard to action, is implicitly about decisiveness, Hung Ky Nguyen’s
article asks us to consider ambiguity as expressed through the con-
cept of ma in Japanese poster design. Nguyen begins with a careful
exposition of the concept of ma in Japanese culture, which means
an “interval” or “pause,” but also expresses an aesthetic sense of in-
betweeness. He then examines how this concept of ma is present in
the Japanese graphic design, through ethnographic interviews with
designers Nagai Kazumasa and Sugiura Kohei and interpretations
of their work. Nguyen’s attentiveness to the complexity of ma and
the aesthetics of the posters of these designers provides the reader
with a nuanced perspective on the interplay of cultural ideals and
design forms. As Nguyen points out, ma is concept that is present in
both the production and the consumption of these works, das ist, Es
affects the action both of the designer and the viewer.

In his review essay, Cameron Tonkinwise takes up a recent
book by Ezio Manzini, Politics of the Everyday (Designing in Dark
Times). Here again, the relationship between making and doing is
present and action takes centerstage, as Manzini is one of the pre-
eminent theorists and practitioners of design for social innovation.
Tonkinwise’s interpretation of this book is critical, but fair. While he
acknowledges the significant contributions Manzini has made to de-
sign, Tonkinwise calls attentions to the limitations of Manzini’s for-
mulation of design in this book as “an account of the politics of a de-
signer rather than a stronger articulation of design-based politics.”
This review essay is followed by Arden Stern’s review of The
Graphic Design Reader, edited by Teal Triggs and Leslie Atzmon and
Alice Twemlow’s review of Writing for the Design Mind by Natalia

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DesignIssues: Volumen 36, Nummer 4 Herbst 2020

Ilyin. Across these books and their reviews, as diverse as they are,
one can sense an expanding field of design, in which making is
present and important, but not all that there is.

Taken together, these articles, essays, and reviews each dis-
tinctively mark and explain shifts occurring in design discourse and
practice—shifts toward design as doing, as well as making, Und
shifts toward greater appreciation of design as a mode of action.
This is not the first time these concerns have been explored in the
pages of Design Issues. In der Tat, many of these authors in this issue
draw from the work of prior authors in Design Issues on these same
topics. Mit anderen Worten, these concerns are not minor nor isolated.
They are emerging themes in design theory and criticism that will
continue to expand our appreciation of both the potentials and the
limitations of design.

Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carl DiSalvo
Dennis Doordan
Kipum Lee
Ramia Mazé

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DesignIssues: Volumen 36, Nummer 4 Herbst 2020
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