introduzione
One of the most interesting and curious features of design is that it
is an art—a discipline, a field, a practice, a profession—without a
subject matter. Most other disciplines have subject matters. Infatti,
those subject matters often become the basis for a definition of the
discipline: physics studies matter and motion; chemistry studies the
interaction of molecules; biology studies living creatures and their
relationships to each other and to environments; English literature
studies, BENE, English literature—the novels, plays, poems and other
forms of literary discourse with which we are familiar. In place of
subject matter, Tuttavia, design has problems. And what is still
more curious about design is that the way designers address those
problems ends up creating what appear to be subject matters, sub-
ject matters that are recognizable and “subject” to study by a vari-
ety of other disciplines—including, Ovviamente, by the disciplines of
design history, design criticism, design theory and so forth. Questo
makes design and the recent somewhat controversial variation of
this term, “design thinking,” difficult to define and pin down for
others to understand. It is as if the work of design spins off, like
sparks, concrete products that are often so interesting in themselves
that they become substitutes for what the art and discipline of
design is really about.
What this means for a journal such as Design Issues is that
any Table of Contents can be puzzling, if not downright disconcert-
ing, to a casual reader who is looking for the solid middle of what
is clearly a central art of the new technological culture of our
new world culture. Instead of being solid, the middle of design is
a molten middle in a constant state of transformation, evolution,
and becoming. A discerning reader, Tuttavia, discovers in the
variety of articles in any issue of the journal the fluid nature of
progetto: the ability of the design community to pursue what is
“emergent” in understanding and practice. So it is with this issue
of the journal: a series of articles carefully chosen to bring to light
the working of design.
In the first article, “Real Imagined Communities: National
Narratives and the Globalization of Design History,” Kjetil Fallan
and Grace Lees-Maffei seek a new balance in design history
between national narratives and the complexity of production and
doi:10.1162/DESI_e_00359
© 2016 Istituto di Tecnologia del Massachussetts
Problemi di progettazione: Volume 32, Numero 1 Inverno 2016
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consumption that depends on the simultaneous context of
local, regional, and global relationships. They seek to highlight
the diverse strategies of historians who are working to under-
stand the globalizing history of design without neglecting “the
importance of the national in design.” From this discussion, we
turn immediately to a national context in which the profession of
industrial design is emerging in Turkey, striving for the recognition
that is common in other countries. This is an article by Ali O. Ilhan
and H. Alpay Er, “Existential Antagonisms: Boundary Work and the
Professional Ideology of Turkish Industrial Designers.” Their
account of “boundary work” and the formation of “professional ide-
ology” is a study in the sociology of professions. Its careful argu-
ment about the establishment of a positive ideology for industrial
design points out the role of ideologically negative “others” in
antagonists that are familiar in many other countries: industry, IL
general public, and the engineer. If Turkey has witnessed the for-
mation of a new profession of industrial design, Eduardo Castillo’s
“The School of Arts and Trades in Santiago (EAO), 1849–1977”
traces the formation of a special school in Chile over the course of
a hundred years that has encouraged a “civic sense” in generations
of students and helped “to play a role in the country’s construction
and its future.”
The next article likely will be controversial among design
theorists. Odette da Silva, Nathan Crilly, and Paul Hekkert give
us “Maximum Effect for Minimum Means: The Aesthetics of
Efficiency.” They make an unusual claim: “Existing design theory
does not provide the concepts required for describing this aspect of
aesthetic appreciation . . .” Their interest is the relationship between
a product and its purpose (function or effect). Whether one agrees
with their claim about design theory, the article is useful in the way
it continues and highlights a long tradition of discussion around the
nature and role of aesthetics in the products around us. In contrasto,
Ezio Manzini’s “Design Culture and Dialogic Design” focuses on
the issues that characterize new design practices in what has some-
times been called “fourth order design,” where culture, dialectic (cioè.,
for Manzini, the dialogic), and co-designing or participatory issues
emerge as a new challenge for designers. Manzini carries forward
an interesting variation of the Italian concern for “design culture”—
a long-standing concern for the cultural dimension of design—and
offers a framework for design and design practice in our contempo-
rary context. Though the article is brief, it is a useful addition to our
discussion of the new forms of design that we see around us in
many places, for example in discussions of social innovation.
As if to say that not all design practice today yields to a single
theory, the next article presents an important account of designing
uniforms—in Denmark. Fashion design or clothing design is an
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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 32, Numero 1 Inverno 2016
area that we have long wanted to see represented in Design Issues,
and this article, “Pockets, Buttons and Hangers: Designing a New
Uniform for Health Care Professionals,” by Trine Brun Petersen and
Vibeke Riisberg serves very well to suggest one approach that
reveals the substance behind what is sometimes regarded merely
as a highly ephemeral branch of design. The article draws on Actor-
Network Theory to explore the design of a new uniform for health-
care (health care) professionals in Denmark. The authors discuss the
wide range of influences in a large-scale system that led to the final
design—and they point out that Actor-Network Theory has been
explored by a number of scholars in relation to design, citing a
special issue of Design Issues from 2004 on Science and Technology
as only one example. There are many themes in this article that
should draw attention, not the least of which is the relationship
between fashion design and industrial design and the idea of
design as “micro-politics.” The authors write: “In common dis-
course, fashion is often presented as whimsical and fleeting, but as
this study shows, fashion design—at least in institutional settings—
shares many concerns with industrial design. Like other designers,
the fashion designer must be able to navigate in the complex tech-
nological and politically charged processes that may be inherent in
such large-scale clothing design projects.” There could not be a
better addition to design research in the area of fashion design than
Questo articolo.
When the Harvard Business Review (settembre 2015) E
The Chronicle of Higher Education (Marzo 26, 2015) both find it
useful and expedient to publish articles on “Design Thinking,” then
they must believe that the concept has entered the mainstream.
After all, neither publication presents cutting-edge work, only pub-
lishing on topical themes after they have entered wide conscious-
ness. (Not to make too fine a point of it, but readers will remember
that the argument for design thinking first appeared in this journal
in the issue of Spring 1992, Volume VIII, No. 2.) This brings us to the
final article in this issue of the journal, Barry Wylant’s “Design and
Thoughtfulness.” Wylant offers an alternative way of focusing on
design thinking: he seeks the “atom of thoughtfulness” that begins
design work. His article is an extended reflection, a musing on the
earliest moments of a design idea and the progression toward a
design solution. Though he writes of the atom of thoughtfulness, he
actually appreciates the importance of wholeness and the Gestalt
understanding of wholeness. He writes: “To perceive things within
a figure/ground framework also requires a capacity for abstrac-
tion—to see beyond noisy detail and, more importantly, to perceive
with seemingly insufficient detail the underlying relationship of
a form against ground. The Gestalt notion of emergence precisely
theorizes this phenomenon, holding that ‘we perceive objects in
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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 32, Numero 1 Inverno 2016
an image not by recognizing the object parts, but as a whole,
all at once.’” This is an unusual article that is both insightful
and suggestive.
From time to time, Design Issues includes “Reflections,” a
category of writing that allows for the expression of thoughts and
ideas and themes that may be pointed and argued somewhat dif-
ferently than most of the articles in the journal. In this issue, we
have a reflection by Victor Margolin, a man of a certain age—no, IL
English does not translate the French nuance of “d’un certain age”
very well—as he encounters a person of a certain gender and the
technology that makes this possible. The reflection is titled “There
is No There There.”
Well planned by the editors, we also have a short visual essay
to follow Victor Margolin’s reflection. This is “The Collection of
Technical Toys in the Deutsches Museum, Munich” by Artemis
Yagou. It speaks for itself, but is also delightful. Inoltre, we also
have three book reviews: John Fass reviews Collaborative Media: Pro-
duction, Consumption, and Design Interventions by Jonas Löwgren and
Bo Reimer; Gideon Kossoff reviews Automony: The Cover Designs of
Anarchy, 1961–1970 edited by Daniel Poyner; and Tom Lee reviews
You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Wieland
Hoban. Finalmente, we have an exhibition review that will be of general
interesse. Teal Triggs reviews the exhibition Ivan Chermayeff: Cut and
Paste, at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK.
Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carlo Di Salvo
Dennis Doordan
Vittorio Margolin
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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 32, Numero 1 Inverno 2016
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