The Routledge Companion to Design Studies

Penny Sparke, Fiona Fisher, Penny Sparke, Fiona Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317203285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the 1990s, in response to dramatic transformations in the worlds of technology and the economy, design - a once relatively definable discipline, complete with a set of sub-disciplines - has become unrecognizable. Consequently, design scholars have begun to address new issues, themes and sub-disciplines such as: sustainable design, design for well-being, empathic design, design activism, design anthropology, and many more.

The Routledge Companion to Design Studies charts this new expanded spectrum and embraces the wide range of scholarship relating to design - theoretical, practice-related and historical - that has emerged over the last four decades. Comprised of forty-three newly-commissioned essays, the Companion is organized into the following six sections:

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• Defining Design: Discipline, Process
• Defining Design: Objects, Spaces
• Designing Identities: Gender, Sexuality, Age, Nation
• Designing Society: Empathy, Responsibility, Consumption, the Everyday
• Design and Politics: Activism, Intervention, Regulation
• Designing the World: Globalization, Transnationalism, Translation

Contributors include both established and emerging scholars and the essays offer an international scope, covering work emanating from, and relating to, design in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia and Africa.

This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of Design Studies.

Part I Defining Design: Discipline, Process

Free for all

Penelope Dean

DOI: 10.4324/9781315562087-1

If at the beginning of the twentieth century “design” referred to the activities, objects, graphics, and interiors produced by the modern design disciplines and professions—architecture, graphic, industrial, and interior—today it refers to all of this and more. New types of design have emerged within, between, and in combination with, the traditional specializations to bring forth a surging landscape of designs: enterprise design, instructional design, social design, network design, user experience design, climate design, sound design, business design, applied design, green design, universal design, and market design to name a few. As if by genetic mutation, design has inflated in scope beyond the confines of the aesthetic disciplines to encompass the non-aesthetic techniques, services, and organizations of other professions and everyday practices as well. Inhabiting all previously distinct domains of specialist expertise, along with the un-designed gaps that were left between them, design has come to define an environment where every dimension is conditioned by controlled application. Today, it connotes a generalized condition, a natural fact more than a constructed field. From objects to cities, landscapes to national identity, design is no longer simply what or where it used to be.

For many cultural critics and historian-theorists, this delta-like dissipation of design’s status has represented a distinct cultural decline (Foster 2002: 13–26; Gregotti 2009: 121–4; Hays 2010: 168–9). The spread of design activities, values, discourses, identities, and practitioners has generally been construed as a great fall from grace relative to the clarity and purpose of design in the early twentieth century: from disciplined form-making to superficial surface styling; from expert practices to non-expert ones; from utilitarian to non-utilitarian; from objects to services and experiences. These critical narratives portray a situation where expansion culminates in confusion and a loss of distinctions: between design and art; between design and architecture; between design and politics; between design and individuals. Yet, from another perspective, the infiltration of design offers equally exciting potentials. In a fundamentally transformed design world that has subsumed former modes of modern design and adopted myriad values often antithetical to the received dogma, the validity of core beliefs becomes questionable. At stake is not the loss of distinctions between areas of expertise, but rather the need to re-imagine the terms on which distinctions get made. In short, the situation presents the opportunity for recalibrated conceptions of design where the expansion of design can only be accounted for through re-conceptualizations of its boundaries.

Out of bounds

Critical lines of thinking assume that boundaries exist a priori, or that it is possible and desirable to police such pre-existing borders. But the contemporary situation reveals that boundaries do not really “exist”; they are, in fact, designed. Indeed, they are design. The call for fixed definitions and delimitations is an incoherent demand in the new world of design. There is no place for referees in a free-for-all, only participants in imagining new zones of exchange. Rather than revert reflexively to primary definitions of fields and assign their proper domains today, the first task is to suggest how design’s recent expansion establishes new characteristics for what might constitute a design boundary. The following six points offer a schematic outline to uncover how boundaries among design fields emerge, what they do, and how they behave.

Boundaries erupt from within. If there is nothing outside design, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard’s famous observation that “everything belongs to design” (Baudrillard 1981: 200), then design is more usefully approached as an accumulation of carefully labeled local properties than an externally imposed definition. Ever-increasing numbers of design genres, practices, objects, activities, and institutions of every description continue to manifest themselves in differing contexts—corporate, governmental, institutional, academic, domestic—are authored by different people—lay, expert—and are imagined, produced, packaged, and distributed for different purposes—business profit, public utility, mass consumption, personal pleasure. Various practices and forms of design jostle side-by-side without hierarchy; few achieve pre-eminence and even fewer longevity. Indeed, design is as diverse in character as it is in resolution; there are efficient states (commercial); pure states (disciplinary); and unsophisticated states of do-it-yourself (DIY culture). The litany of terms applied to design, “recognition tags” as Reyner Banham (1955a: 355) once remarked in another context—“information,” “participatory,” “critical,” “adaptive,” “applied,” “social,” and so on—not only evidence this internal differentiation, but more importantly show the attempts to distill limits through the act of labeling. Labels are to design culture what images are to Gestalt psychology: they are attempts to articulate well-defined figures from less-defined backgrounds. Labels bring legibility and specificity to a situation where everything is design.

Boundaries are extrapolated. The alignment of design culture with market culture (here understood as the culture of competition between organizations and/or individuals for consumers) yields similar structural characteristics in both domains: the intense degree of specialization that typifies design culture closely mirrors the extent of differentiation attained in niche market culture. This alliance of previously antithetical domains through organizational characteristics renders obsolete long-standing adversarial relations between high modes of design and “the rest.” Indeed, the century-long impulse by art and architectural historians to draw lines in the sand, to define boundaries along old lines of separation between culture and market, to pit commercial design activities against those of the fine arts, architecture, or even modern design no longer makes sense.¹ Design values are not always in opposition to commercial standards; design culture is not sequestered away in groves beyond the reach of markets; and design practice is not the sole charge of experts (see Edgar Kaufmann Jr. 1954). Equally, commercial “standards” themselves no longer exist in that totalizing manner. It is not simply, or even primarily, that design exists “in” the market, but that markets today have, themselves, been designed, or are constituted “by design.” In circumstances where conflation supersedes separation, design boundaries cannot be imposed a priori on the basis of old values, but must be extracted a posteriori to express “differential specificity,” to borrow a term from art historian Rosalind Krauss (2000), on a case-by-case basis.

Boundaries are provisional. As with market cultures, design cultures select their own audiences—customers, consumers, institutions, corporations, clients, critics, and practitioners—through the filter of discourses, tastes, and practices, and in a particular space and time. Design now meets the potential consumer—“you”—more than halfway; it anticipates your needs before you know you have them. This reception-by-selection model is exactly what optimist-critics—Reyner Banham, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Paul Reilly among others—recognized in the 1950s and 1960s during the British pop movement. As Reilly, then head of the British Council of Industrial Design, retroactively put it: “a design might be valid at a given time for a given purpose to a given group of people in a given set of circumstances, but outside that limit may not be valid at all; and conversely there may be contemporaneous but quite dissimilar solutions that are equally defensible for different groups” (Reilly 1967: 256). Trading an attitude of opposition for one of acceptance, Reilly reluctantly rejected the long-standing universal design principles laid down by modern architects as setting the limits for industrial design—“[f]unctional efficiency, fitness for purpose, truth to materials and economy of means”—in favor of temporal, looser, and more popular values (ibid.: 255).² Further, he alluded that these new values were “permissive, precocious, [and] commercially successful” (ibid.: 256). In one fell swoop, design values were no longer assumed given, but were instead produced and manipulated; design limits were not definitively imposed but provisionally excerpted. Diagrammatically, boundaries had passed from fixed, adjacent boxes, to mutable Venn diagrams. Boundaries are acts of (re-)design.

Boundaries evolve from shared principles. In his essay “The Surface of Design,” French philosopher Jacques Rancière distills differences between things from the starting point of what they have in common (Rancière 2009: 91–107). He juxtaposes German architect-designer-engineer Peter Behrens with French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, to argue that both share the idea of “type” in their work, despite acknowledging that one designs for commerce and the other for art: for Behrens, through the formal language of the industrial object; for Mallarmé, through the graphic language of typography. This shared investment in “type” is predicated on a shared desire to outline certain physical communities: Behrens a new communal life expressed through objects; Mallarmé a domicile where “man is at home” expressed through the alphabet. Rancière’s point is that both Behrens and Mallarmé propose certain ways of inhabiting the world, but achieve their ends through different material expressions (ibid.: 95–7). The boundary that separates their practices originates from a shared ambition—i.e., to project new forms of life. From this starting point, activities then diverge through respective techniques of production.³ Boundaries originate, evolve, and differentiate design activities from the degree zero of sameness, not from imposed difference (whose ultimate fate is convergence). Boundaries are products of shared desires or, in Rancière’s words, of equivalences (ibid.: 99).

Boundaries correlate horizontally. Rancière goes on to imply that boundaries emerge through the dynamics of lateral exchanges, or in his words, “how two things resemble or differ from one another” (ibid.: 92). For Rancière, Mallarmé’s and Behrens’s types are connected by proximity and by distance: on the one hand, they are conceptually similar; on the other, they differ in their contexts. Importantly, both conditions occur simultaneously. Boundaries manifest themselves in the oblique relations between things; they are zones of exchange that permit surprising contradictions and strange bedfellows; they give license to connection and separation.⁴ They are not hierarchical dividing lines. They do not enforce binary oppositions of center and periphery, design and non-design, inside and outside, part to whole. Instead, they mark points of inflection, areas where one mode of design mis-recognizes itself in the other. This does not amount to disorder or a loss of distinction between things; on the contrary, it leads to equilibrium. Design boundaries associate laterally (Dean 2012: 28).

Boundaries regenerate. Boundaries not only articulate provisional kinds of design inside an expanded situation; they enable expansion. The historic interactions between related fields (e.g., architecture, interior, graphic and industrial design) have been exceeded in a contemporary context by exchanges across previously unrelated contexts, expertise, practices, and resolutions. A new understanding of boundaries sheds light on what has always been true of the design fields across time: an exponential multiplication of boundaries actually accounts for design’s extraordinary expansion. Boundaries provisionally construct, sustain, dismantle, and buckle under pressure. They proliferate. Their effects are both inward (toward precise articulation) and outward (toward dissipation). To concentrate on the momentary character of specific relationships between fields—e.g., as being cordial, symbiotic, volatile, ill-disposed, anxious, reconciliatory—is a mistake, since emphasis is too often placed on border skirmishes. The focus instead should be on what boundaries propag...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction—Penny Sparke
• PART I Defining Design: Discipline, Process
• PART II Defining design: objects, spaces
• PART III Designing identities: gender, sexuality, age, nation
• PART IV Designing society: empathy, responsibility, consumption, the everyday
• PART V Design and politics: activism, intervention, regulation
• PART VI Designing the world: globalization, transnationalism, translation
• Index