介绍
One way to understand the ongoing amplification and extension
of design is to see how it is being driven by market and societal
要求. With a public that is familiar with design thinking and
social design, there is a kind of design renaissance today where
those who are not necessarily from within the design community
see its value. This “pull” that design currently enjoys is evident in
several ways: those working in consultancies are adding a more
balanced approach to traditional business-heavy perspectives at
the request of more sophisticated clients; those in corporations are
building in-house design capabilities to meet the needs of their
internal constituents; and those working in and for non-profits
are translating and facilitating authentic insights regarding the
underserved who desire to be engaged in more humane and equi-
table ways.
There is another way that design continues to expand and it
is through its own “push” mechanism. It is a healthy sign when a
discipline—not seeking to rest on its own laurels—takes on a con-
tinuous and collective reflection-in-action. Like the concept of a
learning organization, designers are busy pushing beyond their
own set of boundaries, approaching design itself as a learning dis-
cipline where action and course correction are constantly at play.
The authors in this issue, adopting the latter approach to
developing design, push themselves and the discipline beyond the
status quo. Though they use different terms to describe the idea of
incompleteness and the opportunity to expand, their message is
uniform: design is but one dimension in our complex world and yet
it serves an important function in the shaping of larger wholes. 在
his follow up to providing a Hegelian understanding of the nature
of design problems, Beckett asks what it means when we say that
design problems are complex. To explore this, he introduces another
concept from Hegel—determination of reflection—which posits that
complexity is “the result of the circular reasoning of the reflexive
determination of a social system.” That is, in the kind of social
complexity that is proper to design problems, what is central is
belief—which is required to keep our understanding of complexity
and systems intact—rather than the rational/pragmatic. In Beckett’s
interpretation of the social, he pushes the essence of design prob-
lems beyond complexity as commonly understood and into the
realm of the transcendental and ideological.
https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_e_00584
© 2020 麻省理工学院
设计问题: 体积 36, 数字 2 春天 2020
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Neubauer, Bohemia, and Harman bring another kind of
disciplinary self-examination and opportunity for enlargement
by interrogating what they describe as taken-for-granted catego-
ries within design practice. Similar to Beckett’s argument, 他们
point to the privileged place of dominant design ideas that need to
be reexamined. They question notions of design that heavily rely
on a designer’s subjectivity, things hidden from view, and taking
place “in the head.” They call for a shift away from the represen-
tation of design as an epistemology of tacit knowledge to what they
call the object of design where the emphasis is on “the work of as-
sembling” ontological categories that have until now escaped proper
critical examination.
The next two articles push on existing boundaries by call-
ing for a transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to de-
sign. In her article, Ambole puts forward the idea of an embedded
designer whose aim is to engage with social issues in places like
Africa using a much more balanced approach than designers have
done in the past. 设计, 有时, has been accused of promulgat-
ing an imperialist agenda, and embedding itself as one contributor
in a global transdisciplinary framework is one way to hardwire its
own self-regulatory mechanism. In Yu’s article, the reordering work
remains within the service design community rather than a global
观众. In an effort to achieve internal coherence for researchers
and practitioners, she presents a typology of three service design
concepts and an integrative framework where future inquiry and
practical use may emerge via cross-fertilization among the differ-
ent perspectives.
The last two among our featured articles open up design to
new possibilities through serendipity and playfulness. Pena takes
the reader and viewer beyond “fixed” or established font design and
into “metadesign” where the metaphor is language or sound remix-
英. He argues for an emphasis on methodology—the design of the
design of a font, IE。, meta-font—and writes that the metadesigner,
like a music producer, must be comfortable with a certain degree
of uncertainty. In Nguyen’s article on the playfulness in Japanese
visual culture, ambiguity within an “Asian grammar of design” is
分析过的. According to the author, it is in the context of Japanese
socio-cultural environments that the subject matter of the article—
尤其, Japanese Design Movement posters—is fully under-
stood and appreciated. In both articles, the production process of
exploration and experimentation is key to deciphering the intent
and is a necessary condition to push on conventional boundaries.
This issue closes with a reflection piece by a designer who
has experienced the transformation of design in another Asian
context and book reviews from various contributors. In his personal
account as a practitioner and within the span of a single career,
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Chang traces shifting public perception and appreciation of design
as an indicator of design’s development in South Korea. In what he
calls design curation, he reverberates the aforementioned idea of
“meta,” “or “designing the design,” in the holistic design program
of the Olympic games. 然而, rather than an Asian grammar of
设计, what he describes is a rhetoric and dialectic of design; 经过
emphasizing the communicative function of design, which is both
shaped by and shapes the attitudes and emotions of the general
民众, he pushes design into a national context.
Taking us to another Asian context, Hague reviews a book
dealing with the contemporary issue of identity in Hong Kong.
In his summary of the work by Wendy Siuyi Wong, he writes,
“powerful bodies can all too easily swallow up smaller cultures if
sustained attention is not paid to maintaining those cultures’ in-
tegrities.” Design—through the material expression of comics,
advertising and graphic design—“shows in microcosm many of the
issues facing Hong Kong in a larger sense.” Next, in her review of
Design History Beyond the Canon, Held provides a reserved endorse-
ment of a product intended to “consider alternative stories, offer
unusual approaches, or challenge conventional design historical
narratives” without holding back criticism for voices left out.
最后, Strand’s introduction to Gillian Hadfield’s new book takes
us beyond a national context and into what Thomas Friedman fa-
mously calls a flat and global world. Design now touches the realm
of legal scholars and economists, a realm traditionally guarded by
insiders and characterized by “stuck” institutions where they have
“protectionism and monopoly down to a science.”
It is evident from the articles in this issue that design has its
own generative power for growth and relevance. At Design Issues,
we engage in this disciplinary iteration through our three related
and central themes: an appreciation of history and what has been
laid out as a foundation of design to date; the formulation of theory
or a lens by which to see where the discipline is or should be
headed; and a healthy criticism to judge and elucidate various issues
within a growing discipline. The interpretation of these themes in
contemporary circumstances and their ongoing interrelationships
is itself a larger theme that we continue to celebrate and promote in
设计问题.
Bruce Brown
理查德·布坎南
卡尔·迪萨尔沃
Dennis Doordan
Kipum Lee
Ramia Maze´
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