Introduction - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Introduction

In the middle decades of the twentieth century discussion in the
design community sometimes turned to questions of national iden-
tity. Through the variety of practices and products available in the
monde, writers wondered if there was a national identity that distin-
guished, Par exemple, work in the United Kingdom from Italy; ou dans
the United States from Scandinavian countries, such as Sweden; ou
in Japan from Europe and the United States. The idea of national or
regional identity was perhaps at odds with the idea of design as a
universal art and discipline, but there were grounds enough to
make the investigation worthwhile. Bien sûr, the issues were
somewhat obscured by the interplay of the practices of designing
and the realities of business, the marketplace, and economic forces.
Were all of those books on national design—still in our homes and
office libraries—really about design or were they about the prod-
ucts of successful companies?

In this issue of the journal, our Guest Editors, Rosan Chow,
Wolfgang Jonas and Felicidad Romero-Tejedor, explore a different
version of the theme of national identity. They explore design
recherche, placed in the national context of Germany. Their thesis is
that following the closure of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm in
1968, design research in Germany became a pluralistic enterprise,
guided by individuals from many disciplines, representing not a
single perspective but many perspectives, et, hence, without a
single school of design research. Whether this is unique or special
in the context of Germany rather than common among many other
countries as well, due to the growing influence of design and the
recognition of its importance among intellectuals in a wider and
wider variety of disciplines, the approach in this special issue of
Design Issues offers an important opportunity to consider the vari-
ety of design research in German today.

One of the distinctive features of the HfG Ulm School
was an effort to redefine the terms of the new industrial culture
that slowly began to emerge following the Second World War. Comme
Tómas Maldonado wrote, “The HfG we are building in Ulm intends
to redefine the terms of the new culture. Unlike Moholy-Nagy in
Chicago, it does not merely want to form men who would be about
to create and express themselves. The school at Ulm . . . wants to
indicate what the social goal of this creativity should be; in other
words, which forms deserve to be created and which do not.”

est ce que je:10.1162/DESI_e_00302

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(Quoted in Kenneth Frampton, “Apropos Ulm: Curriculum and
Critical Theory,” Opposition, Non. 3, 1973.) To this end, Maldonado
and other leaders at HfG Ulm invited individuals from a wide
variety of disciplines and political persuasions, setting the ground
for a questioning or skeptical dialectic that persists to this day, comme
revealed in the essays of this special issue.

Over the years, Design Issues has published many articles
that focus on or deliberately reflect a particular nation or region.
Cependant, one of the most interesting and influential efforts to
represent different countries and regions was a Special Issue on
“Design in Asia and Australia” (Design Issues Vol. VI, Non. 1, Fall
1989). À l'époque, the region was virtually ignored in the design
literature—as were many other countries and regions, as the Edi-
tors of Design Issues noted in their Introduction to the special issue.
Since that time, the journal has received and published important
work from many of the previously neglected areas, demonstrating
that design and design research is now alive and well throughout
the world. Donc, it is with pleasure that we return in this special issue
to “Design Research in Germany?»

Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carl DiSalvo
Dennis Doordan
Victor Margolin