Introduction - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Introducción

In a rich and complex world full of cultural diversity and social con-
conflicto, design often gives the essential interface between human con-
ditions and purposeful actions.

In reminding us of Gui Bonsiepe’s observation that “Design
is a basic activity whose capillary ramifications penetrate every
human activity,” Fernando Secomandi and Dirk Snelders extend the
notion of a technological interface into the design of intangibles
such as services. Expanding on Bonsiepe’s description of the inter-
face as a tool connected to purposeful action, they suggest that
designers “might be able to learn as much from the hairdresser as
from the cabinet maker.” So, they propose four user-interface
relations—embodiment relations, hermeneutical relations, alterity
relaciones, background relations—that embrace a great expanse of
users’ experiential possibilities through designed interfaces.

Describing the plywood splints produced by Charles and
Ray Eames for the US Navy in 1942, Victor Margolin points to an
interface designed to better connect wartime amputees with their
purposeful acts of walking as well as the direct human conse-
quences brought by massive efforts to produce weapons of war.
Through this, he illustrates how these conditions of aggressive
conflict were to stimulate companies to collaborate rather than
compete, innovate rather than repeat, y, see resources pooled
rather than dispersed in ways that peacetime conditions have yet to
hacer. Margolin also highlights designers’ growing awareness of
people as an essential interface between machines and actions along
with the automation of complex scenarios. This theme is further
developed by David Mindell in his account of Harold Hazen’s 1941
memorandum to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of the Nat-
ural Sciences in which Hazen addressed the limits and dynamics of
a human interface saying this approach made “the human being in
this capacity nothing more nor less than a robot which, as a matter
of fact, is exactly what he is or should be.”

In design activism, Thomas Markussen describes a disrup-
tive interface between aesthetics and politics, between consensus
and dissensus. In describing political dissensus as a reordering of
power between two or more groups, he characterizes aesthetic
dissensus, not as the realization of utopias through violent acts,
riots or revolutions, but as the non-violent unsettling of social inter-
faces that restrict our everyday actions and behaviors. This he devel-
ops through examples of disruptive interventions designed to help
people reshape the public spaces in which their communities and
© 2012 Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts
Problemas de diseño: Volumen 29, Número 1 Invierno 2013

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identities are shaped. So his framework for urban design activism
shows how artifacts can promote social change through altering the
conditions of urban experience.

The great cultural divide that exists between alphabetic char-
acters linked to sounds and those that are linked to ideas or images
is explored by Ory Bartal in his survey of Japanese typographic
poster design. Focusing on the essentially visual nature of Japanese
ideograms, he describes a multi-layered system of meaning that is
made possible through the combination of two semiotic systems
(text and image)—often the underlying meanings created by this
union having a power beyond any direct connection to the product
in hand. Maria Mackinney-Valentin proposes that the seemingly
chaotic nature of fashion trends, and their radically high frequency,
can be better understood through the concept of an underlying
interface—a rhizome—that perpetually prolongs itself by cultivat-
En g, from the middle, new trends to connect disparate elements that
will reach out to explore fresh territory.

Murat Bengisu and Füsun Erdoğanlar Bengisu explore the
elements that shaped 19th century Beykoz Glassware in Turkey.
With the immense influx of low-cost European products, end of the
Ottoman Empire, rise of the Turkish Republic and adoption of the
Latin alphabet, the production of Beykoz Glassware eventually
came to an end when the last factory closed in 1858. The surviving
examples of original Beykoz Glassware give us an interface back to
the abandoned culture of an earlier period.

Gökhan Ersan reviews two books that discuss episodes in
Greek design history and alternative histories of Scandinavian
diseño. In stressing the intertwining of design with Greek national
historia, in Fragile Innovation, Artemis Yagou explores both the lim-
ited success of Greek products and Greece’s economy in the global
marketplace. Por el contrario, the illustrious reputation of Scandinavian
design is explored through a series of essays edited by Kjetil Fallan
in Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories. In response to current
global challenges, both these books set out to reconsider critical
positions and convictions that have prevailed in the humanities
throughout the last three decades. In the words of Yagou, ellos son
contributions to “an emerging global design history, cual
acknowledges peripheral layers, and explores connections with
powerful centres” so helping us to better interface with an increas-
ingly interconnected world.

Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carl DiSalvo
Dennis Doordan
Víctor Margolín