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University of Pennsylvania
ScholarlyCommons
Departmental Papers (ASC) Annenberg School for Communication
1-1-1995
Redesigning Design; An Invitation to a
Responsible Future
Klaus Krippendorff
University of Pennsylvania, kkrippendorff@asc.upenn.edu
Postprint version. Published in Design: Pleasure or Responsibility, edited by Päivi Tahkokallio & Susann Vihma (Helsinki: University of Art and Design,
1995), pages 138-162.
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/46
For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.
1
Pages 138-162 in Päivi Tahkokallio & Susann Vihma (Eds.). Design - Pleasure or Responsibility? Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 1995
Redesigning Design;
An Invitation to a Responsible Future
Klaus Krippendorff
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
Overview
This essay proposes new contours for design as a profession in
a world whose industrial products have become more and
more language-like and incommensurate discourses compete
with one another for hegemony - the design discourse being
merely one of many. It takes design to be constituted (that is,
defined with)in processes of languaging. It calls on us to
recognize and act in the awareness of how our discursive
practices identify us as the experts we are, create the objects of
our concerns, and provide us with a vocabulary to
communicate or coordinate our actions relative to each other.1
The motivation for this essay stems from the far too common
experience that whenever designers do work with their
counterparts from the so-called 'harder' disciplines,
professionals who can argue with statistics, with experimental
findings, with calculations or from positions of administrative
authority, they most often lose out. Examples are abound.2 I
conclude from them that, first, designers often are preoccupied
with products when what matters is how their ideas occur in
talk, in clear presentations, in hard evidence, and in
compelling arguments. It is communication that makes a
difference and gets results. Second, design is foremost
conceptual and creative of future conditions. Dwelling on
existing facts often inhibits and is generally less important than
the ability to bring a multiplicity of people to recognize the
benefits of collaborating in the realization of new ideas.
Designers are bound to fail when they do not act on the
premise that their conceptualizations must make sense to those
that matter. Third, the success of famous designers is based
primarily on carefully nourished publicity, personal
connections, or longtime working relationships with clients.
The visual qualities and functionalities in terms of which
1 The insight that we humans, whether as ordinary people, as
professionals or as scientists of one kind or another, are living in
language is the starting point of several philosophers such as Martin
Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard
Rorty. I can not review their ground and must go on here.
2 The version of this essay which was presented to the conference
included five examples, among them Robert Blaich's account of how
Philips' well known Roller Radio almost didn't come to be. See Robert
Blaich (1990), Forms of Design, pp. d1-d14 in Seppo Väkevä (Ed.),
Product Semantics '89, Helsinki: University of Industrial Arts.
designers justify their work are never obvious and mostly
derivative of their social standing. Forth, facing increasingly
sophisticated stakeholders in material culture, designers' claim
of possessing superior visual sensibilities has lost much of its
appeal and is easily countered even by entirely irrelevant but
voluminous data, impressive calculations, predictions, or
business arguments. In sum, current design discourse has lost
much of its rhetorical strength. I contend that this need not be
so.
With this in mind, my essay explores what makes engineering
(including ergonomic), sociological (including marketing), and
economic (including business) discourse so compelling and
what makes current industrial design discourse rather easily
discountable, wherever they happen to meet. Against the
emerging knowledge of how discourses behave, this essay
then locates several weaknesses, I am inclined to say
"pathologies," inherent in design discourse, and ends up
proposing ways of overcoming these.
At the center of this proposal is an astonishingly simple axiom
for industrial design, one that is at least as irrefutable as the
axioms of other disciplines with whom designers typically
need to collaborate. This axiom holds the promise of an
indigenous vocabulary that could make design discourse
compelling, gives rise to new research questions, even to a
new science for design, suggests a unique identity for
designers, and thus creates exciting possibilities heretofore
unavailable.
Discourse and professional design discourse
Notwithstanding dictionary definitions,3 I see discourse as a
particular way of languaging, as a social phenomenon with a
life of its own. In languaging, people talk and listen to each
other’s voices, acquire their identity, coordinate their behavior
relative to each other and produce or reproduce what matters
to them, both individually and jointly. Writing is merely one
way of languaging. Discourse is not coextensive with natural
3 Dictionary definitions typically refer to bodies of literature, to
organized writing. They ignore the writer and the community that
makes contributors to this literature into writers and assigns meanings to
their work. Additionally, the traditionally outstanding contributions by
designers are visual and tactile, not linguistic, which requires
rearticulations of what their discourse does.
2
language. For example, designers can more easily talk with
designers speaking another language, especially with the help
of drawings and models, than, say, with professional athletes,
pharmacists or theologians speaking the same language. We
are confronted with a postmodern world that consists of many
incommensurate discourses.4 With the notion of languaging
we overcome the Cartesian dualism, (e.g. the semiotic two-
world assumption); we overcome disembodied notions of
language (e.g. as a formal system of representations); we take
account of how real people (not convenient statistical
abstractions of them) actually do use language in their lives;
and, we acknowledge the fundamentally constructed or
artifactual nature of the world. As a form of languaging,
discourse provides us with new and powerful foci for social
analysis quite different from Marxian social classes,
anthropological constructions of linguistic communities,
Weberian bureaucracies, all of which homogenize people,
interactions, and relational practices.
From this radically new understanding of discourse,5 I am
sketching a five-dimensional definition - concerning its textual
matter, its community, its institutionalization, its boundary,
and its justification to and by outsiders - and illustrate each
with how the practices of industrial designers appear in them.
(1) A discourse surfaces in a body of textual matter.
Textual matter is the literal heritage of a discourse. It
consists of artifacts, records, literary works or, simply,
texts left behind for subsequent (re)6examination,
(re)search, and (re)articulation. Its "body" nature, the
connections between texts or its intertextuality, is apparent
in
(i) the recognition of distinct vocabularies, enabling users
to see different texts or artifacts as composed of
recognizable families of components,
4 I am not referring here to an architectural style but to a sociological
account of knowledge. For example, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, the
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
5 I like to acknowledge the formative role of the conceptions by
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979; J. Lyotard. Op. cit. 1984;
Siegfried J. Schmidt, Literaturwissenschaft als interdisciplinäres
Vorhaben. Schriften #30. Siegen: Institut für Europäische Literatur und
Medien Forschung der Universität-Gesamtschule Siegen, 1991; and Ian
Parker. Discourse Dynamics. New York: Routledge, 1992. Against
these dynamically oriented and comprehensive approaches, I find the
conception of "discourse analysis," focussing almost entirely on the
critical reading of texts, for example in Teun A. Van Dijk (Ed.)
Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Volumes 1-4, London: Academic
Press, 1985, far too objectivist in intent and limiting.
6 I am using parentheses to suggest easily forgotten meanings, for
example in the double reading of "(re)search" as both "search" and
"repeated search."
(ii) the use of quotations, citations, references or pointers
within one text to others,
(iii) the presence of (re)- or (over)views, (hi)stories,
(re)search literature, indices, and citation studies, all of
which organize portions of that textual matter into distinct
bodies, and
(iv) its openness to divergent readings, new
interpretations, creative (re)articulations, and additions,
thus, in a living discourse, the textual matter is never
complete or finished.
What industrial design leaves behind as "texts" consists first of
all or most obviously of designed objects, collected in
museums, displayed for sale in stores, arranged in spaces of
everyday living or work. Such "collections" or bricolages.7
have their own orderliness, its parts being arrangeable in
historical sequences, by commonalities, by origins (e.g. by
designers, producers or cultures), into working systems, etc.,
all involving humans in various capacities. They always are
constructed and consensual. The role artifacts are seen to play
in them contributes to their meaning and their passage from
one bricolage to another contributes to their history.
An important aspect of any discourse is its vocabulary. It
creates a structure within textual matter that is based on
selectively (re)cognizing similarities in the compositions or
usages of artifacts: (re)combinable and (de)composable forms,
components or assemblages, much like words, and syntactic
structures. The vocabulary of industrial designers stems from
several sources, predominantly from the arts (e.g. aesthetic
qualities of form, materials, surfaces, expressions, styles,
periods, schools, artists as individual creators), crafts (e.g.
workmanship, materially appropriate forms), engineering (e.g.
structure, function, technology of mass production),
ergonomics (e.g. efficiency in performance, manipulability),
advertising (e.g. average consumer, creatable motivation,
purchasing power, market forces), popular culture (e.g.
generations) and, of rising importance, from software
manufacturing (e.g. the emerging linguistic standards for
interfacing with computers).
Publications probably are the more important ingredients of
any textual matter, here: books, magazines, journals or
newspaper articles, exhibition catalogues, biographies of
designers, documentations, histories of design, etc. These
texts organize the presentation of artifacts (not to be confused
with the artifacts themselves), refer to other publications,
establish connections within textual matter, thus introducing
discourse-typical intertextualities. As with the origins of the
vocabulary of design discourse, its publications are authored
largely from art historical perspectives and tend to arrange
products, as would be expected, in terms of styles, schools,
designers, periods and other traditional categories, typical for
7 This term stems from Claude Levi-Strauss (1966). The Savage
Mind. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
3
museums and other curatorial intentions. There also are
sociologies of design, cultural anthropological accounts and
studies of the technological influences on celebrated forms, not
to forget the manifestos of particular design movements, and
most recently a book on The Psychology of Everyday Things.8
While most of the larger libraries and bookstores have sections
on architecture and design, the intertextuality of design
discourse is very different from that of other discourses. In
medicine, for example, which is a very practical discourse,
much like design, and relies heavily on pictorial matter as well,
there exists a far more impressive volume of textbooks,
research journals, and scholarly books that continuously
(re)present the changing medical knowledge and update its
vocabulary, both of which must be mastered by its
professionals. Each addition to the textual matter of medicine
responds to or builds upon prior texts and acknowledges
findings as stepping stones on one's own path to such
additions. Consequently, in medicine, virtually every text is
directly or indirectly connected to every other text. Medical
procedures, medications, instruments, tests, research reports,
etc. are all cross-referenced and mostly supportive of each
other. Much of medical research aims to weed out
inconsistencies within its textual matter and to define the
problems to be solved. It is not the greater volume of literature
but the rich network of interconnections in medical writing
that accounts for the amazing ability of medical professionals
to be able to retrieve or (re)search everything known about
medicine.
In design, by contrast, there are no widely accepted textbooks,
dictionaries or reference works that could provide a sense of
coherence and the kind of connectedness that enables efficient
access to its textual matter, at least not from the perspective of
practicing designers. There are hardly any commonly
accepted exemplars of design processes that students could
(re)examine and learn from. Although there are journals on
design, many of its articles are written by non-designers, and
as mentioned, art historians are the main contributors to design
talk. Even after nearly a century of its existence, industrial
design still lacks a scholarship of its own. The intertextualities
that do emerge under these conditions further the discipline
that creates them but provides little intellectual support for
design. Other discourses can be said to colonize and confine
design discourse. Consequently, much information on past
design practices stays irrecoverably lost.
To avoid the equation of discourse with text, typical of
"interpretism," I insisted that discourse "surfaces in textual
matter." The remaining four dimensions concern what is
below its surface.
8 Donald A. Norman (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things.
New York: Basic Books.
(2) A discourse is kept alive within a community of its
practitioners in whose conversations
(i) textual matter is continuously (re)read, (re)written,
(re)produced, (re)searched, (re)articulated, elaborated or
rejected. A community continually (re)generates its
textual matter and acquires the character of a dynamically
connected diversity.
(ii) textual matter remains not only meaningful to or
understandable by members of a discourse community,
each in its own terms, but, because of their necessary bodily
involvement in other discourses, textual matter is also being
validated by remaining in touch with certain (largely
backgrounded and generally unattended) other-discursive
lives these members have as well: bodily (e)motions,
sensoria, live stories (memories), and communication with
practitioners of other discourses.
(iii) Members of a discourse community continually test
each other’s commitment to it, learn from each other’s
practical successes and failures and generate motivation
for their participation.
Poetry, for example, does not reside in text but in its being
performed in the presence of Others, in its being read and
listened to. Material artifacts similarly come to live in use, in
their being woven into stories that are told and retold by their
users, in public celebrations, and in their connection to the
mythologies of a culture. Things nobody cares about have
little or no meaning. The communal involvement in textual
matter need not be conscious to insiders. Poets may attend to
their works as texts while enjoying the fruits of their
significance with the help of readers.
The design community is constituted as a network of diverse
stakeholders among which at least five kinds may be
recognized.9 These are the designers or core practitioners
(who invent ideas for intervening in the human interfaces with
artifacts), the interpreters (who largely talk or write about
design and offer journalistic or scholarly accounts of design
accomplishments, people, ideas, histories and trends), the
jurors (who decide which products to produce, exhibit,
advertise or talk of), the legislators (who seek to institute
design standards - whether to uphold certain qualities, certify
members or adjudicate ethical conduct, avoiding plagiarism
for example), and finally knowledgeable users (not just
consumers or end-users, but all those "lay" persons who claim
a stake in the manifestations of design). Obviously, these are
not of equal influence within a community nor need they share
the same knowledge, interests, or values. Their network is
held together as long as processes of design and talk of
9 Other discourses make quite different distinctions within a
community, see L. Fleck (1979), Op. cit. for an example of distinctions
in the discourse of science. The point of such distinctions is to highlight
the existence of diversity and stratifications of most discursive
communities instead of the usual emphasis on commonalities, what
community members share.
4
designs, of designers, and of designing continue.
Communication, not commonality, keeps the design discourse
"alive."
This very conference exemplifies design discourse in action.
Here, papers are presented and discussed, design ideas are
analyzed, related to each other and assessed from different
perspectives, and things are categorized and made sense of in
public. Only in conversations among real people, with their
own (often only partially articulated) feelings, with their own
histories of involvement with one another, do designs acquire
their meanings and their significance, and bring a design
community together. Meanings are not fixed (intrinsic)
correlates of form (as assumed by a semiotics that favors
statements like "X stands for Y," or "X is a sign of Y"). They
emerge, are maintained, or retired in conversational/cultural
contexts and shift with them in time.
Unfortunately, current design discourse is not very supportive
of its community. One reason is the largely (auto)biographical
artifact of the designer as a lone, artistically creative and
publicly visible genius who is far ahead of his or her time. In
fact, such designers, rare as they may be, usually derive their
visibility and aesthetic influence from being promoted by
influential producers or corporations who need them, much
like medieval court artists were adopted by rulers to hide their
power behind cultural concerns. This ideal, pursued by many
but achieved by few, is hardly supportive of a viable design
community. It conceals both the hard work that goes into
design research and practice and the actual failures that could
enter the stock of professional knowledge and be instructive to
other designers. Its individualism marginalizes the
collaborative or dialogical nature of most design
accomplishments and retards knowledge of successful team
methods in design. It also sidesteps the political and
managerial skills by which good designers become who they
are. The self-serving fiction of the ingenious designer seems
almost parasitical on the very discourse community without
which he or she can hardly be.
The present weakness of our design discourse community can
also be traced to the fact that designers are very competitive
among each other, even where challenging problems and
resources are not scarce. In discussions, designers habitually
put other designers down, into unfavorable categories and near
the margins of their own community. One rhetorical strategy
is to question each other’s artistic sensibilities. This is all the
more devastating as most designers claim such sensibilities as
part of their identity and objective standards by which disputes
concerning them could be settled can not exist by their own
definition.10 A second strategy is to outdo each other
10 This fact demonstrates the rhetorical nature of most aesthetics. The
fact that aesthetic sensitivities are acquired does not deny the reality of
perceptions for those claiming to possess them, sensitivities are always
claimed or denied, either of which are verbalizations. To have any
social currency, sensitivities must be practiced, granted or denied, a
regarding who represents "the latest thinking" and is privileged
to speak of it. Convincing clients that other designers are
"behind times" or "have nothing new to offer" is a way of
painting oneself into the center of things to come. In this race
for newness, it is only natural that other designers who
contributed to one's own thinking are deliberately silenced -
which is also reflected in the lack of citations in the design
literature.11 These and other rhetorical devices deter open
professional conversation, discourage thorough and mutually
beneficial explorations of design problems, and in the end
contribute to the lack of intellectual solidarity within the
design community. As a consequence and by comparison to
other discourses, many important issues of design remain
undeveloped.
For an example of such mindless struggles consider "product
semantics." The word was coined only in 1984.12 Its
appearance in the literature led superficial readers to the very
semiotic terminology whose epistemology was explicitly
criticized as unable to provide an appropriate understanding of
how artifacts mean. This word brought some semioticians, in
search for a new area of exploration, into the picture. For
designers, the sound of semiotic terminology triggered doubts
as to whether there was "anything new here" - after all,
semiotics was fashionable in graphic design circles of the 60's
but abandoned a decade later. Then the Cranbrook School
began to publish an innovative approach. Initially joining the
rising importance of product semantics,13 it attempted to
process that may start at design or art schools and certainly continues in
negotiations among designers, artists, critics, clients or everyday users.
Differences in "sensitivities" can stigmatize only if "naturalizes" them
and attributes reality to what actually are mere logical opposites, such as
"insensitivity" or "lacking it."
11 Readers that are curious about this assertion may wish to examine
the articles in this publication for how authors connect themselves to
previous work.
12 Klaus Krippendorff and Reinhart Butter (1984), Exploring the
Symbolic Qualities of Form, Innovations 3,2:4-9; Translated into
Japanese (1987), Industrial Design 139-140:10-13; K. Krippendorff
(1984-5), Die Produkt-Semantik öffnet die Türen zu einem neuen
Bewustsein im Design, Form 108-109:14-16. For two precursors to the
study of meanings in design see: K. Krippendorff (1961), über den
Zeichen- und Symbolcharakter von Gegenständen: Versuch zu einer
Zeichentheorie für die Programmierung von Produktformen in sozialen
Kommunikationsstrukturen, Diplom Thesis, Ulm: Hochschule für
Gestaltung Ulm; and (1961), Producktgestalter Kontra Konstructeur,
Output 5+6:18-21.
13 R. Blaich (1989), Philips Corporate Industrial Design: A Personal
Account, Design Issues 5,2:1-8 gives an excellent account of these
developments. Lisa Krohn and Michael McCoy (1989), Beyond Beige:
Interpretive Design for the Post-Industrial Age, Design Issues 5,2:112-
123 describe the connection between Cranbrook and Product
Semantics. Other articles can be found in Design Issues 5,2, 1989; S.
Väkevä (Ed.)(1990), Product Semantics '89; Susann Vihma
5
express functions through visual metaphors, which is part of
the semantics of meaningful interfaces, but before it reached
adequate levels of understanding, it came to be dismissed as
another style. Meanwhile ergonomists,14 who had never been
concerned with meanings and whose measurements are just
not powerful enough to tab them, felt threatened and hoped to
capitalize on these new developments by borrowing from the
emerging vocabulary of cognitivism. Claiming to be the latest
craze, cognitive science looks at everything from a
computational or artificial intelligence perspective, not
realizing, despite available criticisms, that it can not possibly
cope with processes of languaging, with human existence in
discourse,15 with the emergence of meanings in human
interfaces, and therefore is wholly incompatible with
designers' concerns. This gerrymandering of territory clearly
slows down efforts to address human interaction with artifacts
more knowledgeably and achieve increasingly natural or
meaningful interfaces, regardless of how one names this effort.
(3) A discourse institutes its recurrent practices, by
(i) enabling social organizations to thrive on controlling
the technical means of (re)producing and disseminating the
discourse - not only its textual matter and its community,
but, most importantly, its very own organizational forms
(social autopoiesis),
(ii) legitimizing its procedures, methods, theories, schools
of thought, and criteria through the very acts of making
them selectively available, especially to members of its
discourse community who may turn the benefits of
participation into loyalties to particular organizations
operating within that discourse, and by
(iii) applying its axioms relative to which a discourse (its
textual matter, conversations, and organizations) can
achieve a certain autonomy, coherence, and direction.
(Ed.)(1990), Semantic Visions in Design; S. Vihma (Ed.)(1992),
Objects and Images, all three: Helsinki: University of Applied Arts.
14 Fredrick Wildhagen (1992), Product Semantics in a Macro
Perspective, pp. 138-145, in S. Vihma (Ed.), Objects and Images, Op.
cit. relates the transition from ergonomics to product semantics to the
challenge mechanistic sciences experienced in the concurrent climate of
post-industrial restructuring.
15 Note that artificial intelligence (AI) is nothing but a discourse but
one that can not reflect on itself. Its boundary is defined by
computability, embracing only phenomena that are afforded by
algorithmic accounts and can be reproduced by a machine. AI
researchers talk about symbol manipulation but only in the very
restricted sense of following syntactical rules not meanings.
Notwithstanding its remarkable accomplishments, AI's boundaries
exclude the dialogical emergence of new forms, their embodiments in
real people (especially the AI researchers without whose creativity there
would be no AI at all), and how realities come to be socially constructed
in everyday languaging.
Institutionalization "freezes" recurrent interactions into
traditions, codifies ways of communication into (re)producible
forms and standardizes practices in support of particular
organizational pattern. Typically, educational institutions play
a major role in developing particular thought styles and
teaching appropriate language practices. Professional
associations oversee the certification of practitioners, enforce
ethical codes of professional conduct and lobby relevant
organizations. Governments legitimize and the courts interpret
procedures that regulate the roles of individuals relative to
each other and to organization, defining what is legal and
rational.
In the United States, there are hardly any institutional
requirements for industrial designers to practice. Universities
certify graduation but no more. Professional associations have
little influence on the conduct of individual designers and
business or government decisions. Although this lack of
institutionalization has the virtue of inviting into the
conversation individuals that may have something new to say,
it makes valuable design traditions difficult to transmit,
explains why design is often considered unsystematic or not
rigorous - the popular belief being that "everyone with
appropriate taste and talent can be a designer" - and it accounts
for the limited responsibilities designers tend to be given as
compared with other professionals. By contrast, consider the
political clout of the American Medical Association, which
controls the certification of medical practitioners, codifies
procedures for drug use, etc., thereby institutionalizing the
rights and responsibilities of all medical practitioners.
Even in academic institutions, design discourse finds little
respect. Although the situation may be better in other
countries, in the United States there is only one doctoral
program in design with two students, but no graduate yet.
Designers with academic ambitions must earn advanced
degrees elsewhere and then become sidetracked, into art
history, art education, psychology, communication,16 or
systems and industrial engineering, for example. Even
master's degrees in design are rare and industry does not
particularly reward designers with advanced degrees. In fact,
there is long-standing tension between industrial practitioners
and teachers of design over the value of education.
Consequently, most schools of design are comparatively weak,
under-staffed, and under-resourced. This is in marked contrast
to virtually every other profession where graduate education is
highly valued.
Organizations that happen to grow in design discourse are of
basically two kinds: Corporate producers, largely of
consumer products and to a lesser extent of capital goods, who
impose rational, efficiency, and economic criteria on design,
and cultural institutions, museums, art publishers, universities
16 I myself am a product of this situation.
6
with large art or architecture departments who promote design
for its cultural and artistic values. Taken together, the two
criteria for (judging, teaching, financing, producing,
advertising or publishing) design often are in conflict.
Instead of developing criteria of their own, designers often
allow themselves to be torn between two: Industry's interest in
developing competitive technologies and achieving high sales
volumes on the one hand, and the cultural institutions'
attention to making publicly significant, meaningfully
discussible, and culturally or artistically influential
contributions on the other hand. The title of this conference,
contrasting responsibility with (aesthetic) pleasure, attests to
this tension. The two conflicting institutional demands yield
artifacts that are - in the extreme - either mass-produced but
not much talked of or never manufactured but put on a
pedestal and cheered.
Organizations not only thrive in a particular discourse, they
also conserve themselves in their own terms, live their own
ideologies and in turn shape the discourse they operate in.
This affects definitions of design. So, design conceptions may
be influenced by the economic interests build into a local
design curriculum, by the publicity needs of the sponsors of
international design competitions, or by governmental policies
aiming at recognition and market expansion for their
industries, the concepts of "Nordic Design" or "Japanese
Design" are classical outcomes of such policies.
Institutionalization stabilizes a discourse and strengthens its
resolve. But, it also moves that discourse in an
organizationally beneficial direction.
Notwithstanding the organizational forms in which design
does flourish, design discourse currently lacks the kind of
axioms that organizes other discourses. Economic discourse,
for example, in which business organizations thrive, is
predicated on the axiom that "individuals always act according
to what they have and how they value what they don't."
Medical discourse is organized around the possibility of
"curing diseases," using an elaborate and institutionalized
vocabulary to spell out just what abnormalities are to be
treated and how - in the West, largely by chemical or
mechanical interventions. Nursing discourse is kept coherent
by the commitment to "patient care." Religious discourses
grow out of certain axiomatic beliefs of a transcendental
nature. Positivist science is committed to "the ontology of a
single natural universe waiting to be discovered and
described." Currently, no comparable "truth" has been
developed for design.
Competitiveness among designers unwittingly obstructs
institutionalizations in yet another way. Usually, much before
the virtues of a new idea, theory or approach to solving design
problems are being understood, its fascination is lost for
designers. Living "on the cutting edge" and by the rule that
"any five year old idea is a dead one" - facetiously suggested
by a critic - makes the successful institution of workable
design practices virtually impossible and retards the systematic
accumulation of knowledge in design. Organizations need
viable organizational memories. Discourses need some
measure of institutionalization. Avoiding textbooks, devaluing
past contributions, and loathing organizational procedures
works against acquiring the institutional muscle other
discourses undoubtedly enjoy.
(4) A discourse draws its own boundary within:
(i) textual matter, among texts or artifacts that do belong
to the discourse and those that don't, among
(ii) individuals that are bona-fide members, contributors,
experts or representatives of the discourse community and
those that are excluded from making contributions, and
concerning the
(iii) organizational or communicative practices that are
legitimate within the discourse and those that are not.
These boundaries are more or less permeable.
Niklas Luhmann17 describes the boundaries of (his notion of)
social systems in terms of their use of a binary code. This idea
is applicable here as well. If a discourse is sufficiently
coherent, I am moreover suggesting, its code could derive
from its axioms. For example, according to the above-
mentioned axiom of economics, anything that has value is
included and anything that doesn't has no place in it. This
code distinguishes between what economists may want to
attend to and what is irrelevant to their discourse.18 Indeed,
theories in economics have nothing to say about human
biology, for example, or about patient care, transcendental
beliefs, truths, ecology, meaning, or design, for that matter,
because these phenomena are not driven by anything
resembling the circulation of a currency or values. The code
of economics is extremely successful not only by protecting
the discipline from being undermined by other disciplines but,
moreover, by allowing economic thinking to be expanded into
the empirical domains of others; for example, by treating
social relations (e.g. friendships), politics (e.g. holding
political offices) or culture (e.g. the reproduction of a cultural
heritage) as economic issues.
Design discourse draws boundaries as well. But, what
constitutes design literature, who is a designer, what is a good
design solution to a design problem, how design is to be
taught, certified or judged is the subject of frequent
discussions among designers, with their clients, even in courts.
17 Niklas Luhmann (1986), Ecological Communication Chicago IL:
University of Chicago Press.
18 The concept of externality, for example, is important in economics.
It acknowledges measurable effects on a system that are, however, not
describable in economic terms and are, hence, located outside the
system to be modeled. Externalities are not facts. They are at best the
artifacts of economic theories, of what economists have decided to
exclude from their discourse.
7
At such occasions boundaries are being drawn and redrawn,
some say negotiated. Conversational or institutional efforts of
this kind attest to the importance of a boundary for designers
to work and feel at home within but also to its uncertain
location.
The largely visual and hence non-verbal nature of design does
not help to clarify this boundary either. Design publications,
awards, and exhibitions tend to celebrate outstanding examples
and thus provide important landmarks or prototypes but say
little about the boundaries near which ordinary designers
typically operate.
The above mentioned incentives for claiming to be "on the
cutting edge," of understanding what is momentarily "in,"
may offer one explanation of the need to constantly redraw the
boundary of design, evidenced by wave-like appearances and
disappearances of styles, product concepts or techniques,
much like in the fashion industry. It favors attention to new
but undigested knowledge at the expense of developing
enduring wisdom. It also diverts attention from the very
rhetorical practices that produce these boundary fluctuations.
Probably the most notable pathology of design discourse is its
openness to colonization by other discourses. Perhaps it is
because designers tend to be concerned more with non-verbal
phenomena than with texts, have little patience for scholarly
writing, and prefer acting to research, that design discourse is
virtually invisible to designers. No wonder that it is freely
subvertible by outsiders, journalists, economists, cultural
commentators, museum curators or art critics who have their
own interest in claiming that discourse as part of their own
territory. From within, designers' groping for new conceptions
and uncritically adopting the perspectives of other discourses
invite into their discourse paradigms that can easily turn
parasitical, intertextualities that may prove disabling in the
long run, and incoherences that could break a community apart
and systematically erode its identity. Beginnings of this can
surely be seen in design. For example, the economists'
conception that design add value to a product19 unwittingly
restricts the attention of designers to the point of sales in the
complex life of an artifact, leaving other considerations
secondary if not irrelevant; psychological, cultural, and
ecological ones, for example. Or, accounts for the meanings
of artifacts in semiotic terms leads one to see artifacts as
representative of things extraneous to them, as signs or
symbols of something else. This favors a view of design as
being concerned only with attractive surfaces, with superficial
symbolisms, and with forms that hide the nature of artifacts in
the service of other institutions.
19 See Helene Karmasin (1993), Mehrwert durch Zeichenwahl, pp.
73-87 in Michael Titzmann (Ed.), Zeichen(theorie) und Praxis, Passau:
Wissenschaftsverlag Rothe; and H. Karmasin (1994), Producte als
Botschaften, Wien: Ueberreuter Wirtschaftsverlag.
(5) A discourse justifies its identity to outsiders.
Justifications occur in dialogue and in response to
challenges or contestations by members of other discourse
communities and affect
(i) the discourse's reality (truth) in these outsiders' lives,
(ii) the discourse's virtue (value) relative to these outsiders'
discursive practices,
(iii) the competencies (abilities) discourse practitioners
may claim and the responsibilities they are given in
response.
This is to acknowledge that discourses, while ideally
incommensurate, may not be entirely autonomous. Their
identity - what its members distinguishes and are able to do in
society - is being shaped in interaction with other discourses.
For once, people cross and may even experience internal
conflicts near their boundaries, having to wear different "hats"
at different times. More importantly, members of different
discourse communities may need to collaborate on joint
projects without giving up who they are.
I am suggesting that the respect discourse practitioners enjoy
in communication across discursive boundaries depends
largely on the existence (creation, promulgation and
acceptance by Others) of compelling justifications for their
own discursive practices. One only needs to examine why we
take the advice of doctors or how we select a good plumber.
Professions are held in high esteem when they can prove their
discourse to be real, their work to have virtue in the projects of
Others and they themselves capable of assuming the
responsibilities they desire. Good justifications can give a
discourse a fighting chance against usurpatory efforts by other
more dominant discourses.
Generally, a discourse that can not successfully justify itself to
outsiders, becomes either totally isolated (like astrology which
is only believed by its practitioners), is increasingly ignored
(like dying crafts) or is being raided and colonized by more
aggressive discourses. Design clearly suffers from the latter.
Unless its discourse becomes the target of purposeful
reflections and actions, there is a good chance that design
disappears. Notwithstanding several flagship examples to the
contrary - from the commercial successes of Braun to those of
Black&Decker and from the corporate successes of an Elliot
Noyes to the personal successes of a Charles Eames, I fear the
colonization of design discourse is progressing.
This seems to be so particularly where design is taken to be
subjective. The language in which this subjectivity is
expressed is difficult to justify to Others. The claim to possess
aesthetic sensitivities, cultural insights or foresight that non-
designers lack has reality only where it can be empirically
demonstrated and compellingly argued. It surely helps to
occupy the position of an unquestioned authority or to be able
to rely on personal or political connections, for example. But
such extra-discursive variables do not change the perception of
those who do not see how designers see and are likely to
8
conclude that designers do not know what they are talking
about. Most designers find themselves confronted by
sophisticated research methods from other disciplines whose
reality they are unable to relativize, analyze, and put in place.
The reality of markets, of profits, much like the reality of
engineering products is rarely doubted precisely because
language makes this compellingly obvious and their
institutions back it up. When outsiders can veto a design
without being confronted in an empirically grounded language,
designers have lost the debate over the reality of their ideas.
Subjectivity defies communication.
Popular opinion assigns virtue to design but few can say why.
This is blatantly obvious for designers in the automobile
industry who are surely more appreciated than in most other
industries and generally do lead product developments, but it
is marketing, advertising and sales that drive designers
questions and judge their answers. In the absence of
compelling arguments, the role that designers are left to play is
no longer their own.
Presently, there is no consensus on an area for which designers
could claim professional competence exclusive of other
professions. Designers know rudiments of engineering but
usually learn only what they need to know from those actually
responsible. Designers are familiar with elements of
ergonomics - which was once claimed to hold the answers to
most design questions - but non-designers do the research and
write our guidelines. Some designers see themselves as
advocates for consumers, but market experts, executives, and
sales people often claim to know them better and present even
data to this effect. Many designers espouse artistic abilities,
but most professional artists consider them second rate ("un-
fine" artists). Professionals who can rely on a coherent
discourse and are able to make it compelling cases for their
work generally are accorded large responsibilities. Knowing a
little bit of everything is not enough, trying to be integrators of
multiple perspectives requires managerial knowledge most
designers do not have, and withdrawing into the reality of
other disciplines amounts to being unaware of ones own
discourse. The most frequent complains designers are heard to
make concerns not being given the responsibilities they
deserve. This should make us question our discursive
practices and particularly the justification of design discourse
to outsiders.
Toward a new design discourse
Hopefully, the preceding made us aware of our professional
existence in discourse, a phenomenon we have been largely
blind to and which we have systematically ignored. By taking
other discourses as a yardstick, I have tried to show where
design discourse deviates from normalcy and I have attempted
to point out some of its weaknesses, if not its pathologies. The
picture that emerged is painfully deficient for industrial
designers. Our way of languaging is in trouble. The very
discourse in which we acquire our identity vis-à-vis other
professions, institutionalize our professional practices, and
justify our contributions to society is full of problems that we
have not attended to. Industrial design is being appropriated
by other rhetorically stronger discourses. The
human/social/cultural/aesthetical role of technology and
concerns for the quality of human interfaces with artifacts is
left unattended or exploited by other interests. I contend that
this can be changed and I am making three recommendations
to strengthen our discourse. Together they intend to give
designers the opportunity to claim new and exciting
responsibilities. In effect, this means - the title of this essay
suggests just this - "Redesigning Design" by focusing not only
on material things alone but also, if not as a priority, on the
very discourse we live in.
(I) An Axiom for Design
My first recommendation is to adopt a powerful axiom for
industrial design, one that gives us a clear focus, gives our
discourse an intrinsic coherence and extrinsic appeal, and
gives our profession a rhetorical strength currently unavailable
to it.
Looking back, Industrial design has always been concerned
with what industrial artifacts mean. All schools, all
movements, all philosophies, however short lived or ill-
conceived they may appear to us now, can be characterized by
their particular approach to making sense of material culture.
Unlike the axiom I am proposing, their concerns were
expressed largely in terms of ideological (if not idealistic)
projects that manifested themselves in the pursuit of particular
approaches to things, of formal/aesthetic styles or of certain
often vaguely formulated social visions. However, by failing
to recognize the very choice of such projects as a matter of
design, previous generations of designers did not reach the
awareness we are seeking here.
For example, William Morris wanted industrial products to
become related to users through the valued understanding of
crafts. The fact that we may see the products of this early
period of industrial design differently does not deny his
mission. The Bauhaus sought a new synthesis between the
arts, the crafts, and the emerging forces of mass production. It
was the social implications of its program that drove it out of
Weimar to Dessau, to its closing, and to the ultimate
dispersion of its proponents all over the world. We now
reproduce (images of) its (surprisingly few actually
manufactured) products and admire its bold play with
heretofore unused geometric forms - but this is a retrospective
view that does not take into account the bauhäusler's
justifications. We now see styling in the US as faking speed,
false glamour, and conspicuous consumption, but the
designers of its days saw themselves as satisfying hidden
desires that were thought real. Notwithstanding the industrial
interests this served, it was a social or perhaps a psychological
mission that designers actively pursued. The Ulm School of
9
Design recognized and opposed the product cosmetics of
styling and sought to achieve a functionalism whose
minimalism would be equally acceptable and useful
everywhere and to everyone. Not recognized at that time was
the correlation between the international success of this
universalistic and culturally insensitive anti-styling style and
the increasing globalization of markets for industrial goods.
Memphis challenged the dominance of functionalism by its
playful use of anti-archetypal forms. The fact that its products
became expensive art objects may have served their creators
but such meanings were again quite unintended. And so the
story goes on.
Its point, however, is that designers, while expressing
themselves largely with forms, were deeply motivated by
achieving certain social meanings whose consequences could
hardly be foreseen at their time. Every vision, every
ideological project that motivated design at one time ultimately
became obsolete. Currently enacted perspectives on design,
especially at the expense of social contexts of use, are not
exempt from this generalization. Indeed, images alone do not
convey the terms in which Others see them. However, when
we (re)connect these images with the writings of their
contemporaries about what they saw in their products or meant
to accomplish with them, we usually come to more
differentiated conclusions about design. (This is why its
textual matter is so important).
In contrast to the changing and more or less articulated
ideological projects of past generations of designers, what has
been learned in the process of developing product semantics is
that any project or vision, however broadly formulated it may
be, must be realizable in local practices and afford individual
users' conceptions. Even big trees must have tiny roots in
nutritious soil. Grand visions may change but the actual
interfaces between users and their artifacts must always work,
must be able to enter human communication and survive
within the very ecology of artifacts within which designers
reside as well. What is constant despite the fluctuations in
perspectives on design is the empirical fact that we never act
on the physical qualities of things (as described by experts
other than ourselves) but interface with our material world
according to what they mean to us and talk brings forth what
we are seeing.
This is axiomatic for understanding why the owner of a
Lamborghini tolerates much discomfort and spends an
extraordinary amount of money for the identity he or she
acquires when driving it. This is axiomatic for explaining
what salespersons do and say to whom industrial products are
nothing but more or less valuable merchandise. This is
axiomatic for understanding why computer users utilize only
the features that are explainable and they can make sense of.
This is axiomatic also regarding designers who simply can not
design anything outside their imaginability, outside of their
command of technical knowledge, and outside of their
capability of reading, talking, and collaborating with
colleagues, clients, and users. In other words, designers too
need to (re)cognize that the meanings already held or emerging
in communication with Others direct their actions and their
designs. Hence my proposal:
Accept as axiomatic that
humans act not on the physical qualities of things but
on what they come to mean to them.
Axioms are not hypothetical of anything. They are adopted by
a community for the conceptual consequences they yield. This
axiom offers to make design discourse coherent, is capable of
generating a wealth of new ideas and rearticulating old ones,
and its apparent irrefutability constitutes an extremely solid
basis to argue with and live by. Elaborating on it, we state
with unprecedented confidence:
No artifact can survive within a culture
- be conceived, produced, distributed, used, maintained, etc.-
without being meaningful to those
who can move it through its defining process.
For industrial design, this obvious truth has considerable
consequences. To be clear, with the term "artifact," I want to
broaden our usually narrow attention to industrial end
products. The whole sequence of manifestations, preceding
and succeeding such products - from models to trash, so to
speak - are literally "made" as well and are, hence, artifacts in
their own right, albeit of a more transitional kind.20 Their
"meaningfulness" shows up in our understanding something
upon seeing it or in our knowing what to do in a situation we
face.21 By "defining process" I mean the network of
transformations, from one of its manifestations to another,
until it coheres with the definition its stakeholders have for it.
For example, a "real" computer exists neither in the form of a
drawing nor when displayed in a showcase but when it shows
up as such in someone's interactive involvement with it, when
it affords its users' definition. Accordingly, reality is not
composed of unattended objects but brought forth in human
interaction, in seeing and acting in concert with something and
someone. This is an important epistemological turn. "Those"
are the stakeholders and include everyone who happens to be
concerned, affected, involved with or has something to say
about a particular artifact, and what becomes of it.
Stakeholders claim their own stake in bringing forth an artifact
20 As Larry Keeley in his lecture to this conference suggested, we
should be concerned not with "forms" but with "transforms."
21 For the concept of meaning appropriate to artifacts, see K.
Krippendorff (1989), On the Essential Contexts of artifacts or on the
proposition that "Design Is Making Sense (of Things)," Design Issues
5,2:9-39; and (1990), Product Semantics: A Triangulation and Four
Design Theories, pp. a3-a23 in S. Väkevä (Ed.), Product Semantics '89.
Op. cit.
10
through its many manifestations:22 models, production
drawings, work schedules, marketing plans, sales displays,
many kinds of uses, even ecological effects. Our proposition
merely says that any one of an artifacts' necessary
manifestations must have meanings, at least to those who
count. No artifact will come into existence otherwise.
Meaning drives use.
I contend this axiom to be indisputable. Everything known
makes sense to somebody. Surely, meanings differ for
different stakeholders, especially for makers, users, and
observers of artifacts. They may evolve into something other
than their designers had intended and they may acquire
different identities over time, for different people, especially
from different cultures. Everything known must make sense to
somebody. I have found no examples to the contrary.
Indeed, our axiom is as definite as the second law of
thermodynamics, which asserts that "energy may be consumed
but can not be created," and is foundational for much of
physics. It is also as solid as the axioms of mechanics, the best
known of which states: "all actions have reactions, equal in
magnitude but opposite in direction." (Mechanical)
engineering is built on it. None of these axioms are
contradicted by evidence precisely because we choose to
construct physics and mechanics in that way. Our axiom too is
consistent with everything we know. It is a condition of
everyday life. Few propositions are as compelling. Therefore,
I am proposing that we adopt this axiom as our very own and
build our discourse and our profession upon it. If we do just
this, design discourse could have a strength that parallels the
strongest discourses designers usually come in touch with. Let
us declare:
Design concerns itself with the meanings
artifacts can acquire by their users.
This would bring into focus what I believe has always been the
key concern of industrial design although it surfaced in various
ideological projects or design "philosophies" that fascinated
designers at different times, frequently confused our
vocabularies and pulled us into all kinds of directions -
whether in pursuit of fashionable ideals or in the service of
other discourses. The axiom delineates a unique and
empirically rich domain within which any ideals may be
pursued without prejudice provided it is brought down to
where human interfaces with artifacts do occur. Everything
else is a matter of rhetoric.
22 From this new perspective, designers can no longer simply equate
artifacts and material objects when what seems to "matter" is their
continuous transformation, from one temporarily frozen form into
another. The designers' "artifact" becomes the process of his or her
intervention.
To make good on this way of delineating the empirical domain
of design, we have to invent new concepts and a language in
which it is obvious that meanings are not entities that could be
designed into machinery or attached to their surfaces, using
separately meaningful symbols, for example. This conception
would bring us back to the dualist position that excludes the
constitutive role humans play in any social construction,
including in design. Sense is always made by people and
meanings become accessible to us in how the stories of our
involvement in everyday things are enacted and how Others,
spectators, experts or friends are woven into particular
interface practices. Artifacts by themselves, much like figures
without a ground or words without a context have no stable
meanings. The meanings we are concerned with here arise in
and direct user interfaces with artifacts. They differ from
designers' interventions into the material conditions of Others
only in that the former may but the latter must embrace the
conceptions of Others.
Artifacts always afford many meanings.
By controlling their forms and
placing them in various (material and discursive) contexts,
designers can do no more than provide
the affordances for users' meaningful involvement.
Knowledge of how artifacts afford the meanings users hold or
can construct defines our empirical domain quite differently
from that of other professions. Engineering knowledge
concerns mechanical functions and engineering has done
extremely well in plowing this idea into its discourse.
Marketing grew out of the notion of markets as having
statistical propensities for sales and has explored this
conception extensively. Economists are concerned with
accounting for costs, optimizing profits, maintaining economic
growth, etc. and their mathematical theories reflect this
attention. Ergonomists have adopted as their problem the
human physiological/perceptual functioning under
institutionally controlled conditions.
Each of these professions pursues its own perspective, makes
its own epistemological assumptions creates its own discursive
reality, and asks its own research questions. However, no
profession other than design is concerned with (the multiple)
meanings (of things), with how humans as knowledgeable
agents interface with their material world, with how
meaningfulness can be materially afforded.
Our axiom achieves a clearly articulable and defensible
boundary for design discourse. It leaves engineering to
engineers, marketing to market researchers, art to artists and
yet offers designers a wide field for creative explorations.
The axiom also justifies an unprecedented reality for design
discourse. Unlike the self-serving claims of visual
sensitivities, meanings can be explored empirically and tested
in their consequences on the human interfaces they direct. It
provides a new reality for designers and an empirically
11
grounded language. The scientific implications of this reality
will be addressed below.
The competencies that designers can then claim for themselves
is then grounded in their ability to develop ways for artifacts to
be easily recognizable for what they are, for its controls to be
self-evident, for interface languages to turn breakdowns into
breakthroughs, for complex devices to be intelligent, self-
instructing, reconfigurable or adapting to users' world
conceptions, and for systems to be viable and technological
complexes to grow into the lives of diverse users. This
expertise gives designers considerable strength in negotiating
the kind of responsibilities they wish to assume.
Wherever artifacts need to be in contact with knowledgeable
users, the virtue of design to other stakeholders becomes
obvious. Designers' expertise is unique and indispensable.
Neither engineering nor ergonomics, market research, and
psychology can answer questions of these kinds of meanings.
(II) A Science for Design
My second recommendation is to join hands and
Develop a genuine second-order science for design
that faces the research questions our axiom raises. This
science for design must not be confused with science "of"
design for it can not rest on describing "facts" as detached
observers do. It must be proactive and support design as a
material intervention into processes of living. It must address
the problematic of articulating artifacts in a language that
includes their stakeholders. And since knowledge has all the
attributes of artifacts, this science for design must apply its
design principles onto itself, be radically self-reflexive,
dialogical, and constructive of future conditions - not
conservative of facts as most traditional sciences are.
First of all, a science for design must be developed in a
vocabulary that provides strategical support for interventions
into the network of meaningful interfaces that designers wish
to argue for (or against). It must have a strong practical
moment. Secondly, and despite its discursive nature, a science
for design has to maintain strong connections to the visceral,
to the non-verbal, to the sensual, to the intuitive, and develop
compelling empirical tests for the validity of meaning claims.
This becomes its rhetorical moment. Thirdly, a science for
design must direct designers' attention toward broadening
material affordances, toward making technology humanly
enabling rather than oppressive. This becomes its humanizing
moment. Fourthy, a science for design has to inform
curricular developments on all levels, from undergraduate
courses to academic research. This is its pedagogical moment.
Finally, a science for design can not but respect the cultural
differences of users, specifically in support of cultural
diversities. Rather than standardizing people under the guise
of universalistic ideologies, it has to respect different
rationalities (including the universalistic claims some may
espouse). This becomes its ethical moment.
All of these moments converge on a new kind of
understanding which I have been calling "second-order." Let
me explain this by contrast. The notion of function,23 for
example, as in "form follows function," comes from
mechanistic explanations of how parts relate to the known
purposes of their (superior) whole. For example, the role a
steering wheel plays in driving a car or how the heart serves
the human body. In purely mechanical systems (functional)
explanations have no effect on what their parts actually do and
meanings do not matter. The human heart does what it does
whether one sees it as the seat of emotions or as a pump.
This becomes radically different in systems constituted in
human understanding, where meaning is crucial. Heart
surgeons will proceed differently depending on what they
conceive the heart to be. Any explanation of what a certain
key on a computer keyboard does will make a difference in
how one uses it. The heart and its conception, just as the key
and its explanation, belong to fundamentally different
empirical domains. The latter involves human understanding,
the former does not. Where knowledgeable humans are
involved, explanations, functional or not, constitutively enter
into what something is for them. People can talk, understand,
and act, mechanical systems do not - whether physicians take
such systems as given or engineers consider them constructed.
We are concerned with how such systems are regarded.24 Our
axiom calls on designers to stop trying to understanding what
an artifact "objectively" is, but how different users can
understand and interface with it, designers' own understanding
being merely another possible version. By taking the
meanings of Others as a fundamental starting point for design,
designers must proceed from their understanding of users'
understanding, which is understanding of understanding or
second-order understanding, and this is a way of knowing
wholly different from ordinary (first-order) understanding of
things.25
This science for design will then encourages us to read our
textual matter as a second-order phenomenon. Its vocabulary
23 See K. Krippendorff and R. Butter (1993), Where Meanings
Escape Functions, Design Management Journal 4,2:30-37.
24 Where systems are social in the sense of being constituted in the
understanding that their human participants bring to it, meaning always
matter. However, when one chooses to regard such systems as
mechanical ones, and accounts for the participation of humans in
functional terms, one, in effect, denies them their own meanings. This
is why functional explanations need to be avoided when it comes to
human interfaces with artifacts for they reduce users to some kind of
dupe.
25 See also K. Krippendorff (1989), On the Essential Contexts of
Artifacts ..., Op. cit.
12
is invariably tied to an awareness of our own languaging. It
takes for granted that Others' (the stakeholders') understanding
is different from ours, and that incommensurate logics exist
side by side. In practice, second-order understanding shows
up in designing not functional objects that call for only one
correct use but the material affordances for a whole range of
interface logics, a whole range of cognitive models users
might apply, moreover acknowledging that meanings are
different in different social settings, in different cultures, and
at different times. Second-order understanding gives designers
the confidence of letting go of efforts to control "correct" uses
and delegating some of the design activities to other
stakeholders instead.
Second-order understanding is closer to the humanities than to
the natural sciences. The latter pursue an objective knowledge
that dismisses everyday knowledge as unscientific and biased.
Their statements are about objects (without ever asking Others
to participate in their formulation) and hope to approximate a
single "truth" thought to lie outside an observers' language.
First-order knowledge from the natural sciences retards our
ability to design systems in which meanings matter or it
encouraged us to treat them as if meanings were irrelevant. It
is second-order understanding that offers us the key to a
productive science for design.
But I must also add a cautionary note: Second-order
phenomena have become important in a variety of areas of
exploration. Several professional disciplines are trying to cash
in on our design discourse for their own good. Computer
interface design is a pertinent example. Its problematic is the
paradigm case for solving even traditional design problems
and should be considered the Litmus test of our professional
viability. If we are unable to shift from our traditionally
monological to a multi-logical approach to design, if we
remain unaware of our own linguistic involvement in design, if
we fail to embrace our historical responsibility for the design
of meaningful interfaces and do not move ahead with all our
might, someone else will surely claim this as yet unattended
and certainly exciting territory. Once the implications of our
axiom become widely appreciated, we can expect many
attempts to cross the boundary into design discourse. We must
prepare ourselves for this by pursuing a clear vision of what
matters to design while respecting the discourses of other
professions.
(III) Languaging
My third recommendation is to
Acknowledge, through every individual act, that
design takes place in discourse.
This very essay can be characterized as my attempt to apply
this final recommendation to itself. It hopes to make designers
aware of their own discourse, which can then no longer be
ignored.
I began by saying that most of what we do is accomplished by
talking and by listening to the voices of Others, through
writing and reading Others' writing, and by commenting on
and rearticulating what is made available to us. It is in design
discourse that we present ourselves to clients, define the
problems we try to solve, explain to Others what we are
capable of doing, teach our students a way of seeing,
collaborate with colleagues, get advise from users, justify our
work to whoever matters, etc. Design discourse is what makes
design possible and meaningful. Industry and other
stakeholders in the realization of artifacts may see us as the
conceptualizers of attractive surfaces and subordinate us to
their own interests. We do not need to accept their definitions
and much of what I recommended in the above aims at taking
our discourse into our own hands or, better said, into our own
languaging.
We can not escape the effects of languaging with Others. But
our design discourse is our most important professional
(re)source that we need to care for. The awareness of its role
and of the possibilities of (re)designing or (re)languaging it,
rather than aimlessly drifting within it, does change the very
possibilities this discourse makes available to us. Without
discursive possibilities we are but (functional) machines, and
without our own discourse we serve the discourses of Others.
In the past, discourse has not been the target of conscious
design efforts. Our traditional emphasis on physical objects
rendered our languaging trivial and our discourse invisible.
This essay intended to lift this blindness. Let me therefore
propose:
Designers are responsible to each other
for continually redesigning their discourse
and in that process preserving, if not expanding, the
possibilities it provides them.
The responsibility I am asserting here is to the designers' own
community - not merely to other stakeholders of the artifacts
they may design, to employers, clients, producers, users, etc.
And it is for keeping design discourse viable - not merely for
pursuing a particular design ideology or a socially motivated
project as in our discontinuous past. Here, I am concerned
only with the ground on which designers must stand and may
formulate and enact any design ideology or project they prefer.
To me, taking advantage of being in discourse with other
designers entails the responsibility of giving something back to
ones community. True, the influence any one designer can
assert on the discourse of his or her community may be
negligible, but it is never absent. This lies in the nature of
languaging. All I am hoping for is a conscious effort to
examine ones own discursive habits and replace them where
prove not conducive. In as much as a discourse is a complex
living entity, its redesign must take place along all of its
dimensions, particularly its textuality, its community, its
institutionalizations, its boundary, and its justifications. Let
me mention three things everyone can do.
13
First, we must engage in true conversations within our design
community. In conversation there can be no authorities above
Others. Anything said is contestable in principle, especially
when institutionalizations appear confining. The only criteria
of open conversation are the possibility of its continuation.
Open conversation keeps a discourse alive, inspires the
creativity of its members and provides a home that nourishes
professional growth. As designers, we have to become aware
and then rid ourselves of the senseless effort to always be on
the cutting edge of things, merely to put Others down, only
because we haven't learned any better. Competition is good -
but not when it inhibits intellectual explorations and growth
which, in the end, retards our discourse. We may have to
ridicule the ideal of the ingenious designer whose self-
promoted individualism does not promote conversation,
education, and professional coherence. Instead, we have to
encourage a new kind of designer, one who has collaborative
skills, is aware of the discursive ground of meanings, explores
second-order understanding in depth, and makes his or her
conceptual, literary or material contributions freely available
so Others can benefit from them as well.
Second, given the opportunities that our axiom opens up for us
- emphasizing interfaces rather than objects, meanings rather
than appearances, what discourse brings forth rather than what
already exists, affording diversity rather than searching for
single solutions to problems - it is important that we develop
our own language, our own vocabulary, our own identity, and
protect our discourse against colonization efforts by other
more aggressive ones (who, except for their imperialism, do
what I am proposing but better than us). This calls for
stopping the habit of celebrating "newness" in other disciplines
and adopting their "hottest" ideas without regard for whether
they advance or undermine our professional identity. To
develop our own second-order understanding and design
methodologies is no small undertaking and outside help may
be needed. But ideas from other discourses can also be
"Trojan horses" through which parasitical paradigms enter and
usurp our own possibilities. For example, the fascination with
the kind of measurability ergonomics values easily confuses
design with the control needs of large hierarchical institutions,
the military or business for example, whose purposes much of
ergonomic research was intended to serve. This fascination
diverts our attention to what is measurable, largely to first-
order and behavioral phenomena, disregards the need to
understand users' understanding, and dismisses the possibility
that users could pursue their own goals. It may not always be
easy to identify in advance the discursive practices that
undermine a whole discourse and might even prepare it for
wholesale surrender. However, everything we take into design
effectively (re)draws distinctions that can either strengthen or
weakens our discourse boundary. We need to use our
creativity in our own defense.
Third, our discourse is not only a house to dwell in, it also is
the source of our professional wisdom, the knowledge we must
rely on in facing new challenges. It is therefore important to
enhance the quality of our scholarship and make design
literature, methods, and exemplars, more readily accessible
and (re)searchable to practitioners. This means, creating
reference works, bibliographies, and histories of interfaces -
not from the perspective of art historians, technologists,
economists, or ergonomists but foremost from the perspectives
of designers, of the stakeholders involved, and regarding the
dialogue between them that produces a truly second-order
understanding of artifacts and their life cycles. Indeed, much
valuable knowledge is already lost by not documenting design
processes, by celebrating superficial successes at the expense
of failures, by not quoting ones' sources or by adopting
categories of description that are irrelevant to design.
Textbooks on what meaning means, on how multiple meanings
can be afforded by artifacts, on available methods for
assessing semantic claims, and on theories of the multitude of
human interfaces with material culture designers may have to
address, are badly needed. We must learn to write from our
second-order understanding. For a rather simple start, we my
want to get out of the habit of photographing products on
pedestals with neutral backgrounds, without users - as if they
were art objects in their own right - and instead find ways of
presenting them in interaction with a variety of users in
different social contexts. This is where everyday meanings are
enacted. This is where modern technology provides us with
the most important challenges and this is what our axiom and
our discourse directs us to explore and alter.
Finally
My remarks are not yet truths. They are intended to invite all
those who care about design to a conversation that may realize
them. Its topic would be nothing more precious to industrial
design than its possible future as a self-directing profession, as
a human centered science, and as a practice in everyday life.
Without concern for its discourse, design is bound to drift, as it
has in the past, from one peak to another, ultimately into
oblivion. Too many other discourses seek to expand their
hegemony at designers' expense. To start this conversation, I
have suggested a conception of discourse and an extremely
powerful axiom for design that promises us a clear focus and a
new reality with unprecedented possibilities. Any
reorientation naturally disturbs traditional ways and I do not
expect my proposals to be painless, especially not to those who
have succeeded. As Alberto Alessi26 says: "Design, true
design, disrupts habits and shakes uncertainties" but not
merely "in the industrial environment," of which he speaks.
26 P.14 in Alberto Alessi (1992), Design & Poetry; Design as
Marketing and Technological Tool in Italian Industry, pp. 10-15 in S.
Vihma (Ed.), Objects and Images, Op. cit.
