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Zaccai, Gianfranco. "Art and Technology: Aesthetics Redefined."

The premise of Gianfranco Zaccai's essay is that the Industrial Revolution led to a division of labor and level of specialization which served to compromise the quality of the whole.

The products of the craft age reflected the single-minded but limited capabilities and energies of the individual. In contrast, the products of the industrial evolution [sic] were conceived, developed, and assembled as a result of the collective efforts of many experts, each focusing on a specific aspect of the product. The products of the industrial age often reflect the homogeneity and compromise of an otherwise unlimited group of capabilities and energies. [p.3]

The material product came to be seen as a collection of discrete pieces rather than a unified whole. He argues that a sense of a unified whole is necessary to satisfy sense and soul and is the very definition of aesthetics -- "the appropriate and harmonious balancing of all user needs and wants within technical and social constraints" [p. 9]. He sees the current method of production as "a highly efficient way of producing mediocre products" [p. 8].

This decline of design proceeded through three stages:

• Coming to terms with the new industrial technology.
• Developing an aesthetic to match the new technology.
• The drive for competitive advantage through superficial manipulation.

The implied argument is that this superficial manipulation is a rational outcome of allowing design to be co-opted by industrial production. He argues that design must play a key role in product development in a way that fulfills the following guidelines.

• The designer acting as a visionary generalist, coordinating the product development process.
• A deeper understanding of nature and aesthetic and their interconnectedness.
• Integration into design of requirements that balance rational, sensory, and emotional expectations of users and society.
• A deeper knowledge of kinesthetics -- the interaction of all senses in a dynamic state.

Some salient quotes:

By quality I do not mean the individual components of quality such as reliability, performance, value, and visual appeal. Rather, I am referring to the simultaneous presence of all these values and something more. [p.3]

[...] the superficiality of the sensory experiences associated with the actual use of these objects eliminates the possibility for emotional connection between them and the human beings they are meant to serve. [p.4]

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Borgmann, Albert. "The Depth of Design."

Albert Borgmann argues that the province of design is the world of engagement, "the symmetry that links humanity and reality." In his opinion, engagement is declining in the aesthetics of contemporary life, partly as a result of the growing rift between design and engineering. In this system of product creation, engineers focus exclusively on the underlying mechanisms of a product, attempting to improve its functionality and ease of use while shifting away from user engagement at the cost of deskilling the consumer in the use of such products. Conversely, the designer is reduced to producing an aesthetic design that focuses exclusively on a superficial smoothing and styling of the underlying mechanism. Borgmann sees designers as the principle component of humanity's common memory, the trustees and conservators of common values, and the innovators of the exploration and expression of engagement. For a designer to delve only in the superficial is to create a thin gloss that is a poor substitute for the common memory which it has replaced. Rather design must once more fuse engineering and aesthetics to provide the "material setting that provokes and rewards engagement."

Some salient quotes:

In assembling our material culture, we have been much concerned with safety, efficiency, and commodiousness, and we have undertaken gigantic if often insufficient efforts to improve our material surroundings in these respects. At the same time, we almost entirely disavow responsibility for the moral and cultural excellence of our material surroundings. [p. 13]

Design, taken as an objective quality, needs design as a professional practice because the quality of the material culture urgently needs the care and advocacy of profesionals. Design as a practice needs design as an object because designers as professionals appear to suffer from an uncertain sense of identity that would be firmed up through the focus on excellence of the material environment. [p. 14]

The good of design is the moral and cultural excellence of the humanly shaped and built environment. More particularly, I want to urge, designers are charged with making the material culture conducive to engagement. [¶] More particularly still, designers must constitute the common memory of practices of engagement. [ p. 18]

Communal festivity is suffering and neglected because we have surrendered much of the public sphere to the utility of transportation and storage and because technological commodification has transformed common celebration into private consumption. [p. 21]

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Buchanan, Richard. "Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design."

Richard Buchanan, in the introduction sums up his own essay with a definition of design, calling it the new liberal art of an industrial and technological culture. He points out that design is an art and designers are artist continually creating their subject in an exploratory and evolutionary process. He considers the development of design in the twentieth century as a pluralistic exploration of a new rhetoric of the conception and planning of the humanly-made world. He harkens back to Aristotle to break out the study of design into poetics -- products at they are, and rhetoric -- products as vehicles for communicating social norms.

His essay is primarily focused on historical definitions of design, which he breaks into four separate categories, based on what is the perceived origin of design:

• God's design -- design as implicit in all of creation -- design as spiritual ideal.
• Design as implicit to the human condition -- design as old as prehistoric images and objects -- design as making, a way of influencing humanity's material conditions.
• Design as technological innovation -- design as a result of the Industrial Revolution -- design as means of power and control over the transformation of the instruments of production and social conditions of work.
• Design as design -- design as a result of 20th century innovations -- design as a new discipline and way of thinking about the humanly made object and environment.

He argues that each of these are not different arguments about the history of design, but rather the philosophy that underlies design, and that each is correct, but is incomplete without the others. In order to progress in design and the understanding thereof, all of these aspects must be considered. This approach also allows him to provide a short history of perceptions of design and making from prehistory to the present.

Some salient quotes:

What is needed to reduce the welter of products, methods, and purposes of design to an intelligible pattern in a new conception of the discipline as a humanistic enterprise, recognizing the inherently rhetorical dimension of all design thinking. [p. 24]

Design is a discipline where the conception of subject matter, method, and purpose is an integral part of the activity and of the results. [p.26]

Art should not be something outside of experience or segregated to a small part of experience. It is experience in its most vital and essential form. [p. 37]

Expression does not clothe design thinking, it is design thinking in its most immediate manifestation, providing the integrative aesthetic experience which incorporates the array of technical decisions contained in any product. [p. 46]

The scope and nature of design in the contemporary world are determined by two considerations: The pluralism of principles which have guided designers in exploring the human-made world, and the pluralism of conceptions of the discipline which have provided new instrumentalities for such explorations. [p.28]

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Morello, Augusto. "'Discovering Design' Means [Re-] Discovering Users and Projects."

Augusto Morello sees design as a means by which to bring cultural values back into the marketplace. Design must be a part of culture, not a tool of the marketplace. The question that needs to be answered is the clarification of the values that infuse the process of design and production.

The problem Augusto Morello finds with contemporary design is that it targets the consumer, not the user, and fails to differentiate between the two. The user is the subject who uses, while the consumer is one who selects for use. This focus on the consumer undermines the worth of the object designed by removing its foundation in functionality. He divides the aspects of design between genotypes, the products meant for use, and phenotypes, the general conception of a product. The genotype, knowing what is to be produced, is a prerequisite for the phenotype, conceiving the final product, but current design is focused on phenotypes, product differentiation, rather than genotypes, new and useful products. We are coming up with innovative products, but not innovative processes that utilize new and better products.

The result of this process, he argues, is an overcomplication of performance. Objects have a poor semiotic content focused on corporate communication, not on the expression of material culture. Product form becomes separated from structure and design is reduced to styling. Form becomes confused with pure ludic or hedonistic styling. Although this process reduces cost, it also oversaturates the market with similar products, reducing profits as well. There is also an increased social cost in the face of forced acceleration of symbolic changes. This process is a result of analytic design, which separates designs, rather than synthetic design, which fuses together domains into new combinations.

Augusto Morello presents an agenda for design theory. Society must be taught the principles of useful, clear, and critical judgment about products and related matters as part of their civic education. Industry must be made aware of the nature, quantity, and quality of their responsibilities. Designers must learn the importance of intellectual integrity and probity.

Some salient quotes:

If "design" is defined as a complex of projectual acts intended to conceive products and services as a whole, the only way to design properly is to have the user in mind; and the role of marketing (a new marketing) is to have in mind the true project of the consumer, which, paradoxically, is not to consume but to be put in the condition to use properly. [p. 70]

Today, competition between enterprises is implicitly considered more important than service to users; and this attitude contributes again to the "consumer ideology." [p. 71]

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Orel, Tufan. "Designing Self-Diagnostic, Self-Cure, Self-Enhancing, and Self-Fashioning Devices."

Tufan Orel's essay focuses on the public (laical) use of medical research and clinical devices. Devices, treatments and therapies developed for home use to be applied to the self to improve health and well-being are technologies which he terms "vital self-technologies". He points out that there is a trend toward vital self-technologies designed to be directly marketed to the lay public. He then looks at what factors go into determining the criteria and constraints of these new technologies.

• knowledge of an emerging market
• usage locality
• object-user relations and user behavior
• power symbols, social status and identity symbols of consumer goods
• product maintenance and user requirements
• legislation constraints

Since medical technologies are designed for the medical setting, reinventing them for consumer markets requires overcoming various hurdles in the above factors. The three he is most concerned with, since they, in his opinion, are the most directly design issues are the sybolics of power inherent in medical technologies which are designed to reinforce the authority of the doctor, problems with maintenance by lay persons and the need for self-diagnosing technologies, and user behavior.

Tufan Orel points out that by focusing on the user as consumer designers forget the nature of object-user relations. Users as consumer use the technology as designed, they follow the directions for the use of closed objects whose purpose is reified. "Utilizors", a truer reflection of non-idealized users, use technologies as open, non-reified obejcts, the use of which is open to experiment. Consumer technologies must be designed to account for this.

Some salient quotes:

... we realize more and more that the means (the technology) and the results (the expected normality) are not two different entities. [p. 81]

The vital self-products must be designed not for the utilizator who seeks rationally possible ways of using a product, but for an experimental user, who may modify the purpose of use as well as the instructions for use of the product. [p. 88]

The symbolics of power can be considered one of the highest cultural values that today's designers consciously or unconsciously wish to channel through their creative productions. [p. 88]

Although today much biomedical technology is still the victim of power symbolism, with the emerging vital self-technologies it will be necessary to give them a less rational look and make them more friendly like any intimate object, agreeable to touch, to wear, to carry. Especially by remembering the raison d'être of these devices is not to master and control the world (control-panel complex) or others (medical power of doctors) but to control and mater the vital self, by oneself. [p. 90]

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Cross, Nigel. "Discovering Design Ability."

Nigel Cross asserts that "design ability" is a cultivable skill, possessed to some extent by everyone. Yet it is often treated as a systematic method independent of individual capability, or as an ineffable art. He compares design to C.S. Pierce's "abductive reasoning", based on the principle that something has the potential to be. To make this argument, he anaylzes the current themes in the discussion of design. His categories are:

• creativity and intuition
• the interconnectedness of problems and solutions
• lack of straightforwardness/linearity in the design process
• use of modelling to explore problems.

He contrasts design against other forms of thinking. In his analysis, logic is the study of abstract forms, science is the study of extant forms, and design is the study of novel forms. As the student of novel forms, the designer must be able to produce novel, unexpected solutions, tolerate uncertainty, work with incomplete information, apply imagination and constructive forethought, and be competent in the use of drawing and modeling. Two factors of design ability which he discussed are the multiplicity of possible solutions which can be used to more clearly articulate the problem, and the ordering principles which artificially limit the range of solutions. Wrong choices in both of these can force an inappropriate answer on the problem.

Nigel Cross considers design ability to be a distinct form of intellegience which is comprised of the ability to:

• resolve ill-defined problems
• adopt solution-focused strategies
• employ abductive/productive/appositional thinking
• use nonverbal, graphic/spatial modelling media.

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Margolin, Victor. "The Product Milieu and Social Action."

Victor Margolin starts his analysis of design with the assertion that products do not just mediate between motives and acts, but are dynamically involved in the formulation of both. The product milieu, the designed environment, is the result of directed courses of action, or projects, in the realm of civics, the market, and independent activity. His ideas are an outgrowth of acton theory with the caveat that traditional action theory lacks a concept of product as an essential component of social action. He contrasts traditional action theory with the work of Abraham Moles, a French sociologist who developed a calculus of actions based on the relations people establish with objects.

In Victor Margolin's scheme, people inhabit a lifeworld which is saturated by the product milieu; objects, activities, services, and built environments. The product milieu is always physically or psychically tangible, an interactive presence that enables or inhibits certain actions. The place to negotiate the nature of this interaction is during construction of the elements of the product milieu.

In order to understand designing for a product milieu, Victor Margolin looks at different processes in design. For starters, one can design for the self or for others, but another component of design is use by the self and by others of the things thus designed. Since his scheme holds the point of negotiation at the stage of design and not of use, the question is raised what direction design can take. His approach is to break it down to levels of engagement and concern for the other a designer may design for, from the customer as prey to customer as stranger to customer as neighbor to customer as friend. He points out that most design takes place with the customer considered either a stranger or a neighbor. The ideal form is customer as friend.

Since he perceives design as a fundamental constituent of all human action, Victor Margolin urges that we treat design as central to all of our concepts and plans for our individual and collective social lives. Design should not only address cost, but also empowerment, self-reliance, self-actualization, and the satisfaction of social needs.

Some salient quotes:

What is needed is an understanding of the product that connects it to action in such a way that it does not simplistically mediate between motives and acts but functions instead as a dynamic factor in the development of both. [p. 122]

The self exists in the lifeworld with other selves; hence action does not arise exclusively from the self nor is it directed only toward the self. [p. 133]

Projection, the process of formulating projects, is designing activity, although in the usage proposed here, it is not necessarily directed to the act of making a product. [p. 134]

In a collective sense, product webs form patterns of culture that are both stable and innovative. [p. 138]

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Winner, Langdon. "Political Ergonomics."

Langdon Winner presents a critique of political theories which ignore the material aspects of design that embody theories of political organization. Objects play a part in the political process, and design choices are shaped by political circumstance. Design is embedded in a network of the social, the political, and the economic. To address this, he proposes a field of political ergonomics. The point of political ergonomics is to "articulate a positive, critical, and perhaps even practical position about the possibilities that patterns within specific technologies present to social and political life" [p. 148]. The goal of this is to develop a suitable fit between the body politic and its instruments within a desired social and political structure. To begin to address this question, he tries to find common ground between statecraft, architecture, and engineering, each of which addresses a different aspect of the social milieu, but each of which overlaps with the other in some way.

While each has its own focus -- statecraft and first principles, architecture and urban planning and the material form of social life, engineering and the process of technological progress and change -- the starting point for common ground he finds is that each " shares a desire to create structures meant to endure for long periods of time" [p. 163]. These enduring structures produce coherent patterns of enablement and constraint which interact with each other. It is this interaction which needs to be studied and considered in the process of future design.

Some sailent quotes:

... relationships of power and authority are frequently expressed in material settings that are deliberately designed and built. [p. 147]

Many of the qualities in key relationships and common practices of civic culture arise directly from the making and use of instrumental devices and systems. [p. 147]

The works of our hands provide a lasting, artificial framework for the biological process of labor in which human life is endlessly produced and reproduced. [p. 150]

... a crucial stage in the introduction of any work is the point at which alternative features and configurations of a device or system exist as abstract possibilities subject to imaginative manipulation. [p. 151]

Philosophers tend to assume that once we have our fundamental principles clarified and well grounded, it will be a fairly trivial matter to decide what institutional forms should embody these principles. [p. 154]

The architect tries to influence social experience by arranging collections of material features that constrain or enable activity in particular ways. [p. 158]

For example, looking at alternative designs of an evolving technology one might notice that different structures involve the creation of (1) different social contracts, (2) different physical environments, and (3) different sets of technical problems. [p. 165]

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Mitcham, Carl. "Ethics Into Design."

Carl Mitcham looks at ethics and design as a form of discourse. He considers design not as a full-blown action, but rather as equivalent to play, existing in the interface between thought and action. As such, design is an anticipatory activity that creates models of cause and effect relations. Going back to ancient Greek philosophy, he compares design to techne, the pursuit of making, and phronesis, the pursuit of doing, both of which involve systematic anticipatory action. In his interpretation of the Greek system, design is the phase between nomos and making. He sees modern design as divorcing of planning and action, an active form of intending that has been divorced from labor, the methodological form of making. The result of this, in his eyes, is the device, a mechanism that serves a function without also serving for social engagement. The challenge of design, as he sees it, is to return a level of engagement to the process, to reintegrate labor with intending.

Carl Mitcham ends his essay with a list of problems that need to be faced in an ethics of design:

• self-containment, activity for the purely aesthetic pleasure of technical achievement
• design as design promotes a distancing of the designer from self-examination and social responsibility
• designing constitutes a general pulling away from or bracketing of the world that can have an immediate impact
• the challenge of remembering reality in computer-aided design
• in a technologically-mediated society (virtual reality) it is difficult to cultivate and intimate, firsthand, internalized knowledge of anything real
• the phronesis of the technolifeworld based on the real experience of struggle to return to real things and the taking of ethics beyond fundamental principles into specific cases.

Some salient quotes:

The thesis here is that both aesthetic criticism and the logic of design must contemplated by the introduction of ethics into design studies, in order to contribute to the development of a genuinely comprehensive philosophy of design. [p. 174]

Possibility and contingency are the fundamental ground of ethics [...] One does not ask ethical questions of what cannot be otherwise. [p. 179]

... design itself constitutes a new way of leading, or a leading into, different technological lifeworlds. [p. 179]

The fundamental ethical problem of design is created precisely by its principled separation from the inner and outer worlds. [p. 184]

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Fry, Tony. "Sacred Design I: A Recreational Theory."

Tony Fry argues for social recreation through design activism. He points out that our current ecological crisis exists due to the compounding of our failures as designers. As such we can no more escape it than we can be other than wherever we are. He argues that we need to study old design, the material deposit of design or the process of design itself, in order to develop a new design, "the study of the productivist inscription of the artificial lifeworld as it brings being into being." A return is needed to the care invested in craftwork and divested from industrial work. Craft value is that of making with care. It sustains manufacture as recreation, and serves to conserve skills. Design should promote "the creation of material change that can increase the prospect of the continuity of the interconnected systems of life, including the maintenance of the social ecology upon which we depend and which we name as community" [p. 191].

Tony Fry wants to recreate design within the potential for change, as a theory of the recreation of the conditions for our survival. An aspect of this is the sacred in design -- as a celebration of life, not of the divine. Modernity has destroyed the coherence tradition has found in ethics, morals, and belief systems. With this loss of meaning and structure comes a loss of the sacred. Design can become a foundation to reestablish the sacred in the absolute, but it needs to acknowledge the totality of life, for only through acknowledging the entire system of life as sacred can life have value and thus be recreated. The artificial must become based in, and determined by the organic, not based in the artificial to simulate the organic. Consumption must become "that which extends the totality of life," returning to a form of life the reabsorbs it own wastes as recycled energy.

Some salient quotes:

This history has delivered an artificial environment of organic being in conflict with a displaced biophysical system. Nature denaturalized and transformed into an antagonistic artificial environment is a product of the mediations of humanity. [p. 193]

Not only are we now unable to liberate ourselves from the artificial, but the non-artificial, including our biology, depends on it; it has become "nature." [p. 193]

For the ecological to become the essential ground of the sacred materialized, what is made has to be taken as an object of belief, a totem, an idol, which functions beyond its utility and meaning as it is articulated by reason. What prevents this statement simply being reducible to pantheism is the negation of the transcendental by the artificial. [p. 195]

The recreation of what design has delivered requires an inversion of its directional drive through the conservation of being, the survival of being, but now in the form of a contingent value which directs designing under the provisional laws of "total economy." [p. 202]

Care is that which divides life from death. [p. 204]

Care for self and future, as a working practice toward a quality of being of objects, and being with objects, clearly is inseperable from the quality of survival of all being. [p. 207]

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Manzini, Ezio. "Prometheus of the Everyday: The Ecology of the Artificial and the Designer's Responsibility."

Ezio Manzini argues that the ultimate responsibility of the designer is the creation of a habitable world. He credits humans with the ability to act in a purposeful manner. However, this Promethean ability must focus its talents on the current environmental "problematic" and strive for a "sensuous horizon" of a vast series of cultural transformations and contemporary societal practices. Energy and waste processing need to be addressed in order to acknowledge the limits of the biosphere, while semiotic and information transmission limits need to be address to acknowledge those of the semiosphere. Since, he holds ,we cannot go back we must move forward into eco-technological equilibrium. Designing and producing comprise a complex of historical and socially determined activities which exist in a system of meaning in which humans place being and doing. To that complex we need to add a vital awareness of the limits of design, the limits of the environment in which design must operate.

The old ideas about design are no longer valid (and never were). Well-being cannot be measured by the increase in production. Quality is founded in complexity, it cannot be measured by a single frame of reference. Nor can process be continually simplified into smaller and simpler goals. Cycles and cybernetic structures cannot be resolved into linear systems. The broken and ignored links are surfacing as the problems we now face with our artificial world. "The grand project of the simplification of reality is showing its limitations" [p. 228] We must get beyond a concept of doing that claims objects as clear, generalizable, and technologically achievable. Instead, doing must be a process of responsibility and solidarity, an exploration of alternatives, and an act of conservation through innovation. Doing must be a process not of producing, but of reproducing. The designer must work to reproduce the hoped-for, as delimited by the possible, in visible form.

Some salient quotes:

The debate on ethics, which is defined in reference to large choices, is hard to articulate in relation to the smaller and more minute choices made in the manufacture of daily objects. [p. 220]

In the contemporary world, matter -- which is always considered the solid, stable, inert counterpart of ideas -- seems to have become pliable and capable of being molded into any possible form. [p. 221]

The ethical force of modern industry is really an idea about the democracy of consumption. [p. 225]

... the logic of self-maximizing entities is not human because the subjects in which it operates are dehumanized. [p. 232]

... no technological discovery, not even the most optimistic hypotheses of new limitless availability, will ever produce a world without limitations. [p. 236]

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Copyright 2000 -- Peter L. Kantor [daaq@daaq.net]