Introduction - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Introduction

Mortality is a universal, indeed an inescapable, phenomenon.
Initially it may seem Mortality in Design is an odd subject for
a special issue of Design Issues. Mortality involves endings while
design is so often about beginnings: making new products or intro-
ducing new ways of doing things. There is an optimism in begin-
nings, an optimism inherent to the activity of designing that is
typically missing when we contemplate endings. What does it mean
to probe the role of design in confronting our mortality? After all,
to engage with the impermanence of human existence is a challenge
that goes far beyond simple definitions of design as problem
solving or treatments of design processes as useful strategies
for promoting innovation. The contributors to this special issue offer
a provocative set of answers to this question. The guest editors
Connor Graham, Wally Smith, Wendy Moncur, and Elise van den
Hoven provide a useful overview of this discussion in their intro-
duction. They identify five themes that serve the reader as
avenues into the discussion of Mortality in Design: materializing,
translating, preserving, remembering, and continuing. Disconnect these
key words from the concept of mortality and they still serve as
useful descriptions that capture subtle variations on efforts to
answer the question what is it to design?

Nurturing humanistic reflection about design has long
been an important goal for Design Issues. Among other things this
special issue devoted to Mortality in Design demonstrates the
capacity of design to support deep thought about fundamental
aspects of the human experience. It is useful to pause for a moment
and reflect on how design actually promotes deep thought and what
form design reflection assumes. In their introduction the guest
editors point to a distinctive aspect of design discourse as it engages
the theme of Mortality in Design, something they identify as a
design imaginary which they describe as the imaginative creation and
deliberate construction of enduring artifacts and meaningful spaces:
tools for thinking and acting. One finds parallel discussions of
something similar to this design imaginary in the work of people like
Arjun Appadurai and Donald Norman. Imagination in this context
is conceived not as the intimate and intensely personal life of the

doi:10.1162/DESI_e_00471

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mind that unfolds within individuals; rather, it is a shared collec-
tive and social ability to speculate about what is needed, possible,
and desirable. It is the ability of designers to support, enhance, and
celebrate such a collective imaginary that interests the editors of this
journal. We are committed to ensuring that Design Issues provides
the kind of intellectual space which the design community needs
not only to report on what designers have done but to imagine what
design could be.

Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carl Di Salvo
Dennis Doordan
Kipum Lee
Victor Margolin
Ramia Mazé