Design Without Discipline

Abstract

Design, again, finds itself in the midst of a crisis from a number of different perspectives, including professional, cultural, technological, and economic forces. The present crisis, however, is not new. Almost 20 years ago, design’s crisis of identity was highlighted
in Adam Richardson’s paper, “The Death of the Designer,” in which he reminded us that design’s crisis had been around since the days of the Italian Radical Design Movement of the 1960s.

Full text

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013
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© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Design Without Discipline
Craig Bremner, Paul Rodgers
Introduction
Design, again, finds itself in the midst of a crisis from a number of
different perspectives, including professional, cultural, techno-
logical, and economic forces. The present crisis, however, is not
new. Almost 20 years ago, design’s crisis of identity was high-
lighted in Adam Richardson’s paper, “The Death of the Designer,”
in which he reminded us that design’s crisis had been around since
the days of the Italian Radical Design Movement of the 1960s.1
In addition, at about the same time, Dan Friedman, in his book
Radical Modernism, argued from a historical perspective that design
is in crisis and is searching for a new sense of balance and vision
in a period of historic transformation.2 Throughout the book,
Friedman emphasizes the responsibility of designers to avoid over-
specialization and to see their work as an important creative
aspect of a larger cultural context.
That design is in crisis from a disciplinary perspective
has been suggested more recently, as well. Of course, this state of
crisis is not unique to design—most disciplines are in crisis at
some point in their development. Nevertheless, recent evidence of
design’s methodological reinvention indeed suggests that design
as a discipline is “in crisis.”3 The robust debates around research
methods and design, articulating a number of territorial engage-
ments, appear to have missed the general understanding in
disciplinary scholarship that such debates about research methods
are already an indication of a discipline “in crisis.”4 A similar point
is made by Nigel Cross when he reminds us of the concerns that
arise every 40 years or so in design research.5 Cross describes how,
in the 1920s, the search focused on developing scientific design
products; then in the 1960s, the concern shifted to finding a scien-
tific design process. According to Cross’s chronological calcula-
tions, then, that we are now experiencing another crisis about the
development and use of appropriate research methods in design is
no coincidence. Richardson’s essay proclaimed 20 years ago that
design “…is in a crisis of identity, purpose, responsibility, and
1 Adam Richardson, “The Death of the
Designer,” Design Issues 9, no. 2 (1993):
34–43.
2 Dan Friedman, Radical Modernism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
3 Joyce S. R. Yee and Craig Bremner,
“Methodological Bricolage–What Does
It Tell Us About Design?” in Proceedings
of the Doctoral Education in Design
Conference (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
Polytechnic University, 2011), 181–90.
4 John Law and John Urry, “Enacting the
Social,” Economy and Society 33, no. 3
(2004): 390–410.
5 Nigel Cross, “Designerly Ways of
Knowing: Design Discipline Versus
Design Science,” Design Issues 17,
no. 3 (2001): 49.

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013 5
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meaning…” and that “…the viability of the profession as it is
currently practiced needs to be seriously considered, its boundaries
examined, and its values reconsidered.”6 This paper seeks to explore
design’s crisis as it wrangles with its disciplinary boundaries.
The Serious Profession of Design
We are told by Donald A. Norman in the Epilogue to his book,
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, that we
are all designers,7 yet arguably one of the greatest designers of
all time, Dieter Rams, states that he is “…troubled by the devaluing
of the word design” and that he finds himself “…now being
somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer.”8 To combat the
devalued meaning, he suggests treating the discipline of design
seriously, understanding that design “is not simply an adjective to
place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance
its value.”9
As a signatory to the “The Munich Design Charter,” pub-
lished in Design Issues in 1991, Rams knows design’s responsibili-
ties in all parts of contemporary life.10 This charter states that
design must concern itself with “…economy as well as ecology,
with traffic and communication, with products and services, with
technology and innovation, with culture and civilization, with
sociological, psychological, medical, physical, environmental, and
political issues, and with all forms of social organization.”11 Now,
20 years later, Rams needs to remind us again “…that design is a
serious profession, and for our future welfare we need to take the
profession of design seriously….”12
If we follow Donald Norman and others’ claims that “…we
are all designers,” we could cite evidence for the growing phenom-
enon of “amateur designers;”13 but more pressing on the discipline
has been the contention that design is everything—from the
design of objects that we use on a daily basis, to the design of cit-
ies, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and the way we
produce food, to the way we travel, build cars, and clone sheep.14
In fact, long before the emergence of the biotech and financial
services economies, Ernesto Rogers succinctly described design’s
reach as “…dalla cucchiaio alla citta [trans: from the spoon to the
city].”15 Even before everything became design and Norman
declared that we are all designers, Lazlo Maholy-Nagy struc-
tured his pedagogy at the Bauhaus around the general notion
that “…everybody is talented;”16 Joseph Beuys later enlarged the
scope of Maholy-Nagy’s statement when he professed that “every-
one is an artist.”17 All these generous assertions illustrate what
Thierry de Duve describes as the shift from the academic model to
the modern model of art education, in which talent is replaced
with creativity.18 Talent resided in the few and required skill,
6 Adam Richardson, “The Death of
the Designer,” Design Issues 9, no. 2
(1993): 34.
7 Donald Norman, Emotional Design:
Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
(New York: Basic Books, 2004), 213.
8 Matt Warman, “Dieter Rams: Apple
has Achieved Something I Never
Did,” The Telegraph, June 7, 2011,
www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/
apple/8555503/Dieter-Rams-Apple-has-
achieved-something-I-never-did.html
(accessed March 13, 2012).
9 Ibid.
10 Dieter Rams et al., “The Munich Design
Charter,” Design Issues 8, no. 1 (1991):
74–77.
11 Ibid., 75
12 Warman, “Dieter Rams,” www.telegraph.
co.uk/technology/apple/8555503/Dieter-
Rams-Apple-has-achieved-something-I-
never-did.html (accessed April 11, 2012).
13 Norman, Emotional Design: Why We
Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, 225–26.
14 Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?
A Few Steps Towards a Philosophy
of Design (With Special Attention to
Peter Sloterdijk)” Keynote Lecture for
the Networks of Design meeting of
the Design History Society, Falmouth,
Cornwall, 3rd September 2008,
Sciences-Po (2008).
15 Deyan Sudjic, The Language of Things:
Understanding the World of Desirable
Objects (New York: W. W. Norton,
2009), 34.
16 Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan,
The Idea of Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), 38.
17 Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (London:
Thames & Hudson), 7.
18 Thierry de Duve, “When Form Has
Become Attitude—And Beyond” in The
Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine
Art Education and the Wider Cultural
Context, ed. Stephen Foster and Nicholas
deVille (Southampton: John Hansard
Gallery, 1994),19–31.

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19 Ettore Sottsass, “Conferenza al
Metropolitan Museum 1987,” in Ettore
Sottsass: Scritti 1946-2001, ed. Milco
Carboni and Barbara Radice (Milan:
Neri Pozzi Editore, 2002), 327–45.
20 Paul A. Rodgers, “Design Now,” in
Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders,
ed. John Marshall, (Manchester:
Fast-UK Publishers, 2008), 8–11.
whereas creativity was universal and just required a medium for
its expression. Superseding the modern in de Duve’s critique was
the postmodern, where attitude replaced creativity and required
a “practice” for its form. Nearly 20 years later, we are just playing
catch-up by imagining that everyone can practice design.
Rams laments the devaluing of the word “design” because
the practice of design is serious. Ettore Sottsass warned long ago
that design has deep and durable ethical and political dimensions
and requires knowledge and consideration of our relationship with
each other and the world we are changing (our anthropological
condition) because, while the effect of design can be short-lived, it
can also last a very long time.19 Being reminded about the serious-
ness of design comes at a time when the relationship between pro-
duction and the project of design has been changed by digital
technology. Instead of projecting “what-might-become,” the digital
is producing the design of an “other” world where the project is to
archive “what-was.” At this time, in these changed conditions, we
find that the discipline of design is dissolving.
The Dissolving of the (Design) Discipline(s)
The boundaries of what were once recognized as discrete design
disciplines, such as product, graphic, textile, and fashion design,
have been ruptured and continue to dissolve.20 Key among these
changes is the realization that an indeterminacy of professional
boundaries now exists, and fluid patterns of employment within
and between traditional design disciplines is commonplace (see
Figure 1).
The Rupturing and Blurring of the Design Disciplines
Moreover, many modern-day design pursuits, such as the design of
domestic products like audio equipment, communication devices,
Service
Design
Graphic
Design
Fashion
Design
Tex tile
Design
Product
Design
Vehicle
Design
Interior
Design
Exhibition
Design
Figure 1
The Rupturing and Blurring of the
Design Disciplines.

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21 Christopher Hight and Chris Perry,
“Collective Intelligence in Design,”
Architectural Design 76, no. 5 (2006):
5–9.
22 Paul Atkinson, “Boundaries? What
Boundaries? The Crisis of Design in a
Post-Professional Era,” in Proceedings
of the 8th European Academy of Design
Conference (Aberdeen: The Robert
Gordon University, 2009), 34.
and electronic products, require a core of designerly activity
supported by other subject specialist areas, such as engineering,
anthropology, business, and other areas of expertise (see Figure 2).
Design as a Central Component in Contemporary Design Practice
A number of possible reasons exist to explain the crisis and frag-
mentation among conventional design disciplines, including:
 •The crisis of professionalism. The design world today is
a challenging and dynamic arena where professional
disciplinary boundaries are continually blurring.
Growing evidence suggests that design is in the middle
of a great transformation, inasmuch as the market-driven
years of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to a more
people-centered era. Thus, today we experience and
inhabit a situation where a blurring of traditional design
domains exists and a new capacity for collaboration has
encouraged new types of design practice.21 Atkinson
believes this change is not so much a crisis for design,
but a crisis for the design profession: “Post-industrial
manufacturing necessitates a new kind of designing
that has the potential to create a different role for
the designer.”22
 •The crisis of the economy. Financial and royalty patterns
in design are in crisis. McGuirk’s recent exposé on the
fiftieth anniversary of the Milan Furniture Fair revealed
that the vast majority of the designers exhibiting there
are barely able to afford to pay their own rent. More than
2,700 furniture leading brand manufacturers exhibited
Figure 2
Design as a Central Component in
Contemporary Design.

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their work at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile,
Milano in April 2011, where many of the lamps and
chairs are prototypes produced by designers for free,
in the hope they will make their money back in royalties.
As McGuirk discovered, however, “Only the lucky few
ever do. I spoke to one young designer who has five
items in production with a respected Italian manufac-
turer—no small achievement. ‘My royalty check last
year came to 600 Euros,’ he said. [That’s] half a month’s
rent.”23 This downgrade of the financial stock of design-
ers coincides with the “financialization” of the global
economy, which has turned all exchanges into a
derivative, a form of insurance against change. For
a profession predicated on change, this development
is potentially terminal.
 •The crisis of technology. Explosive developments in
information and computing technologies, encouraged
by the enhancement in telecommunication technologies,
new interconnections, and new configurations of
knowledge, have materialized and presented new
opportunities for creative practice.24 Hight and Perry
propose a reformulation of practices around networked
communication infrastructures as conduits for new
power.25 The significant developments in information
and computing technologies have created processes
and procedures that enable individuals to engage
in a form of digital design and production that
calls into question their familiar relationship with
consumer products.
As a result of these crises of professionalism, the economy, and
technology we can say today that design is characterized by fluid,
evolving patterns of practice that regularly traverse, transcend,
and transfigure disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. This
mutability means that design research, education, and practice are
continually evolving and “…new hybrids of design are emerg-
ing…; they’re a mixture of artists, engineers, designers, thinkers.”26
This paper posits that the terrain of design continues to shift
and extend well beyond the boundaries of the (single) discipline.
Design now encompasses multiple disciplinary perspectives (i.e., it
is characterized by multidisciplinarity) and entails cross-disci-
plinary pursuits. In addition, interdisciplinarity arises where
several disciplines help create unified, sustained and substantial
outcomes, even to the degree that a new disciplinary endeavor
could develop. It has gone beyond transdisciplinarity, toward
a disciplinary condition in which globalization and the prolifera-
tion of the digital result in connections that are no longer “amid”
23 Justin McGuirk, “Designs for Life Won’t
Make You a Living,” The Guardian,
April 18, 2011.
24 Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga
Nowotny, Simon Schwartzmann, Peter
Scott, and Martin Trow, The New
Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics
of Science and Research in Contemporary
Societies (London: Sage
Publications,1994).
25 Hight and Perry, “Collective Intelligence
in Design,” 5–9.
26 Daniel West, “A New Generation,” ICON
43 (2007): 56–64.

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013 9
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disciplines and cannot be measured “across” them, nor even can
be seen as encompassing a “whole,” united system. In fact, the dig-
ital has generated an “other” dimension so that we might now
need to consider “alter-disciplinarity” or “undisciplinarity” as the
most effective approach for the future of design.
John Chris Jones in 1998 hinted at an “alter-disciplinary” or
“undisciplinary” approach to research in design when he stated
that the nature of a PhD qualification for designers should include
“[a] measure of ability to integrate imagination and reason, tech-
nology and art, and to make noticeable improvements to the qual-
ity of industrial life and its products. To successfully integrate art
and science—as art/science—a new discipline, if you want to give
it a name. Difficult!”27
For design to find itself without discipline has been precipi-
tated by the prescriptive manner of digital’s total disrespect for the
disciplines; as we demonstrate, this disregard has resulted in the
dissolution of the disciplines. Coupled with design’s poor histori-
ography, we argue that design now finds itself in a position of not
knowing what to project.28
Disciplinarity
Debates around disciplinarity are not new. Many authors have
investigated a variety of disciplinary perspectives across a wide
range of design activities, including architecture and engineering
design.29 An earlier paper by Dykes, Rodgers, and Smyth develops
a new disciplinary framework for emerging forms of design prac-
tice.30 One aim of this new disciplinary framework was to better
facilitate the location and delineation of activities and outputs in
emerging types of design practice, research, and education.
The first international conference for interdisciplinary stud-
ies was held in 1970. Here, Erich Jantsch presented a set of hierar-
chical terms to describe forms of collaboration that involve
alternative disciplines.31 This framework is cited several times in
key texts concerning knowledge production across disciplines, and
Jantsch is most commonly associated with coining the currently
popular term, transdisciplinary, which emerged during the confer-
ence.32 Jantsch in his framework was intent on providing specific
characteristics that nuance the disciplinary terms, thus making
explicit the form of cooperation in question.33 The hierarchy begins
with “multidisciplinary,” the simplest form of work proceeding
from the single discipline, and then continues with pluridisci-
plinary, crossdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary.
Each term relates to variations in the structure and complexity of
group work across disciplines in a hierarchical fashion.34
The terms are commonly used outside this framework.
For example, “interdisciplinary” is often used in a non-specific
manner to refer to general collaboration across disciplines, and
27 John Chris Jones, “PhD Research
in Design,” Design Studies 19, no. 1
(1998): 5.
28 Clive Dilnot, “Some Futures for Design
History?” Journal of Design History 22,
no. 4 (2009): 392.
29 For architecture, see Jane Rendell,
“Architectural Research and
Disciplinarity,” Architectural Research
Quarterly 8, no. 4 (2004): 141–47; for
engineering, see Tetsuo Tomiyama,
Valentina D’Amelio, Jill Urbanic, and
Waguih H. ElMaraghy, “Complexity of
Multi-Disciplinary Design,” CIRP Annals-
Manufacturing Technology 56, no. 1
(2007): 185–88.
30 Thomas Dykes, Paul A. Rodgers, and
Michael Smyth, “Towards a New
Disciplinary Framework for Contemporary
Creative Design Practice,” CoDesign 5,
no. 2 (2009): 99–116.
31 Julie Thompson Klein, “Integration,
Evaluation, and Disciplinarity,” in
Transdisciplinarity: Recreating Integrated
Knowledge, ed. Margaret A. Somerville
and David J. Rapport (Oxford: EOLSS
Publishers Co. Ltd, 2000), 49–59.
32 Julie Thompson Klein, “Notes
Toward a Social Epistemology of
Transdisciplinarity,” Bulletin Interactif du
Centre International de Recherches et
Etudes 12 (February 1998), http://perso.
club-internet.fr/nicol/ciret/bulletin/b12/
b12c2.htm (accessed March13, 2012).
33 Erich Jantsch, “Towards Interdisci-
plinarity and Transdisciplinarity in
Education and Innovation” in Interdisci-
plinarity: Problems of Teaching and
Research: Proceedings of Seminar on
Interdisciplinarity in Universities,
ed. G. Berger, A. Briggs, and G. Michaud
(Paris: Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development, 1972),
97–121.
34 Zachary Stein, “Modeling the
Demands of Interdisciplinarity:
Toward a Framework for Evaluating
Interdisciplinary Endeavors,” Integral
Review 4 (2007).

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013
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crossdisciplinary is often used in adjectival form to describe move-
ment between disciplines.35 Because of their imprecise use, the
terms are often confused and not solidly defined in the literature.
Since Jantz’s construction of the original disciplinary hierarchy,
many other scholars have tried to distinguish between the terms,
and as a result, a variety of different interpretations have devel-
oped across different disciplines.36
Further structural considerations arise in looking at what
has happened to the integrity of the disciplines. The first is that
the critique of interdisciplinarity and its other fragmentary forms
is impossible to conduct from within a disciplinary perspective.
Whatever doubts we might have about what has become of the
discipline of design, we have to be aware of the fact that disci-
plines are designed, variously, to perpetuate and domesticate
doubt as healthy skepticism, to produce a sense of belonging
and submission to a set of regularized practices, and to create a
space where expertise is internally unstable.37 Thus, design should
be aware that it has to use discrete tactics to analyze its blurring
disciplinarit y.
Stanley Fish argues that “…being interdisciplinary is so
very hard to do…” on the basis that, despite having a historical
core that cannot be ignored, disciplines are not natural, and their
identity is conferred by relation to other disciplines, making it
impossible for an authentic critique.38 However, 20 years later in
the ongoing debate around the disciplines, Mitchell responds to
Fish, claiming instead that interdisciplinarity “…is in fact all too
easy.” Mitchell bases his negation on a taxonomy of three different
kinds of interdisciplinarity: “…top-down (conceptually synthe-
sized), bottom-up (socially motivated), and indisciplinarity (anar-
chist) or what he now calls lateral interdisciplinarity….”39 The first
looks to frame an overarching system in which all disciplines
relate; the second responds to emergencies and upheavals in disci-
plines; and the last is a rupture in the continuity of the regulariz-
ing practices of disciplines (i.e., the disciplines disciplining the
disciplines, or self-discipline). In this paper, we argue that the
blurred disciplines cannot exist with the disciplines, so when
design now finds itself without discipline, we need to find what
does exist.
With this understanding, Stein’s hypothetical framework of
individual competencies can be refined. Table 1, in the next sec-
tion, uses Stein’s terms, “disciplinary,” “multidisciplinary,” “cross-
disciplinary,” “interdisciplinary,” and “transdisciplinary,” and
adds to them “pluridisciplinary,” “metadisciplinary,” “alterdisci-
plinary,” and “undisciplinary” for a more developed perspective
on the notion of what has become of disciplinarity in design.
35 Rudolf Kötter and Philip W. Balsiger,
“Interdisciplinarity and
Transdisciplinarity: A Constant Challenge
to the Sciences,” Issues in Integrative
Studies 17 (1999): 87–120.
36 Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges,
Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzmann,
Peter Scott, and Martin Trow, The
New Production of Knowledge: The
Dynamics of Science and Research in
Contemporary Societies (London: Sage
Publications, 1994).
37 Bill Brown, “Counting (Art and
Discipline),” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4
(2009): 1032–53; James Chandler,
“Introduction: Doctrines, Disciplines,
Discourses, Departments,” Critical
Inquiry 35, no.4 (2009): 729–46; and
Robert Post, “Debating Disciplinarity,”
Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009):
749–70, respectively.
38 Stanley Fish, “Being Interdisciplinary Is
So Very Hard to Do,” Profession 89
(1989): 15–22.
39 William J. T. Mitchell, “Art, Fate, and the
Disciplines: Some Indicators,” Critical
Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 1023–31, 1026.

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Design Losing Its Discipline
The preceding section has illustrated briefly the disciplinary
dissolve of design and the relational response of the disciplines.
Given that the global problems of the twenty-first century are
increasingly complex and interdependent, and that they are not
isolated to particular sectors or disciplines, the possibility exists
that design might need to be “undisciplined” in its nature (Mitch-
ell’s indisciplinarity). Moreover, there might even be a need for the
designer to be “irresponsible” because we need more playful and
habitable worlds that the old forms of production are ill-equipped
to produce.40 Moving toward an “undisciplined” design in an age
of what we have labeled in a recent paper “alterplinarity” requires
an epistemological shift.41 This shift will in turn offer us new ways
of fixing the problems the old disciplinary and extra-disciplinary
practices created in the first place. We can chart these changes as
shown in Table 1.
Table 1 Similarities and Differences of the Disciplinary Dissolve
Inquiry Character of the Designer
Disciplinarity Individuals demonstrate understanding of one
set of conceptions and one methodological
approach. They are able to generate unique
questions and contribute new research in this field.
Multidisciplinarity Individuals demonstrate disciplinary competence and
understand that their endeavors must be related to
the endeavors of others in surrounding disciplines.
They therefore come to know and use some concepts
used in these disciplines.
Crossdisciplinarity Individuals demonstrate disciplinary competence and
know how concepts from other disciplines relate to
their own, having mastered some of those concepts.
They are able to constructively communicate with
those from other disciplines.
Interdisciplinarity Individuals demonstrate at least two disciplinary
competences. One is primary, yet they are able to
use the concepts and methodologies of another
discipline well enough to contribute to its questions
and findings. New understandings of the primary
discipline result.
Transdisciplinarity Individuals demonstrate at least two disciplinary
competences, neither of which is primary. They
work in and contribute to both and generate unique
conceptions and artifacts as a result of an emergent
transdisciplinary perspective. They are able to
communicate with individuals from a variety of
disciplines in a synoptic manner.
Character of the Discipline
An understanding is demonstrated of one set of
conceptions and one methodological approach from
field of practice. Able to tolerate questions and
contribute new designs in this field only.
An understanding is demonstrated of disciplinary
difference and shows ability to learn from other
disciplines.
An understanding is demonstrated of disciplinary
difference and can follow problem-focus of other
disciplines.
An understanding is demonstrated of at least two
disciplinary competencies. One is primary, yet it is
able to employ the concepts and methodologies of
another discipline. Strengthens understanding of
the primary discipline.
An understanding is demonstrated of at least
two disciplinary competencies, neither of which
is primary. Results in a trans-methodological
perspective. Abstracts disciplines to bridge
new problems.
40 John Marshall and Julian Bleecker,
“Undisciplinarity,” in Digital Blur:
Creative Practice at the Boundaries of
Architecture, Design and Art, ed. Paul
Rodgers and Michael Smyth (Oxon: Libri
Publishers, 2010), 216–23.
41 Paul A. Rodgers and Craig Bremner,
“Alterplinarity: The Undisciplined
Doctorate and the Irresponsible
Candidate,” in Proceedings of the
Doctoral Education in Design Conference
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, 2011), 27–34.

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013
12 DESI_a_00217
Table 1 Similarities and Differences of the Disciplinary Dissolve (continued)
Inquiry Character of the Designer
Pluridisciplinarity This problem-solving mode combines disciplines that
are already related, such as design and engineering.
Some of the various domains in design itself involve
pluridisciplinarity.42
Metadisciplinarity This mode connects history/theory and practice so
as to overcome specialization; it seeks to develop an
overarching framework that differs from disciplinarity
in that it does not address single problems.
Alterdisciplinarity Globalization and the proliferation of the digital
results in connections that are no longer “amid”
systems, cannot be measured “across systems, and
do not encompass a “whole” system. Instead, the
digital has generated an “other” dimension so that
we might now need to consider “alter-disciplinarity.”43
Undisciplinarity Practice shifts from being “discipline-based” to
“issue- or project-based.”44 “Undisciplined” research
straddles the ground and relationships between
different idioms of distinct disciplinary practices.
Here a multitude of disciplines “engage in a pile-up
of jumbled ideas and perspectives. Undisciplinarity is
as much a way of doing work as it is a departure from
ways of doing work.”45 It is an approach to creating
and circulating culture that can go its own way without
worrying about what histories-of-disciplines say is
“proper” work. In other words, it is “undisciplined.”
42 Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Why
Interdisciplinarity?” in Interdisciplinarity
and Higher Education, ed. Joseph J.
Kockelmans (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press,
1979).
43 Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern
Manifesto: “Postmodernism is Dead,”
2009, www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibi-
tions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm
(accessed March 15, 2012).
44 Stephen Heppell, RSA Lectures: Stephen
Heppell-Learning 2016, 2006, www.
eyfsonline.org/index.php/primaryvideos/
viewvideo/7297/headteacher/stephen-
heppell-learning-2016 (accessed March
15, 2012).
45 Marshall and Bleecker, “Undisciplinarity,”
219.
46 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 4th
ed. (London: Verso, 2010).
Character of the Discipline
An understanding is demonstrated of a combination
of disciplines that are already related in the various
domains within design itself.
An understanding is demonstrated that shows an
effort to overcome disciplinarity by using methods
to construct overarching frameworks to connect
practices and their histories to new problems.
An understanding is demonstrated that shows an
ability to make connections that generate new
methods to identify “other” dimensions of design
activity and thought.
An understanding is demonstrated that purposely
blurs distinctions and has shifted from being
“discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based;” an
ability to mash together jumbled ideas and meth-
ods from a number of different, distinct disciplinary
practices that can be brought together to create
new unexpected ways of working and new projects.
Displays an “anything goes” mindset that is not
inhibited by well-confirmed theories or established
working practices.46
Conclusion
In Nicolas Bourriaud’s altermodernity manifesto, he states that “[t]
he times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in
the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within
which we live—crucially in the age of globalization—understood
in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.”47
In a similar vein, we argue for an “alterplinarity:” “an other” disci-
plinarity in which design (“artist” for Bourriaud)…
becomes “homo viator,” the prototype of the contemporary
traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers
to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and
transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works
are made: A new type of form is appearing, the journey-
form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materi-
alizing trajectories rather than destinations. The form of
the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a
fixed space-time.48
This paper argues that the boundaries of the historic disciplines of
design have been superseded by a boundless space/time we call
“alterplinarity.” The crises of professionalism in design, global

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financialization, and the rapid adoption of digital technologies
have all modified the models of design thought and action. As a
consequence, the traditional design disciplines need to transform
themselves, moving from a convention domesticated by practice to
a responsive reformulation of practices revolving around net-
worked communication infrastructures—infrastructures that are
yet to be disciplined and that serve as conduits for new power—
power, to re-organize space and re-regulate time to do things that
respond/react to the crises we identify in this paper.
Blurring the disciplines is good. It offers tremendous possi-
bilities in the hands of anyone with a disciplinary platform of
knowledge and skill, but bad in the hands of all others; in the
wrong hands, it spawns new idioms and reinforces disciplined
knowledge. In this paper, we have argued that design now starts
from a globalized state of culture. If it is to retain some characteris-
tics of a discipline, then it should re-evaluate its history. The digital
offers new territories; the discipline of design has to be stable
enough in those territories to offset the threats of uniformity and
mass culture/consumption, exploring the bonds that text and
image, time and space weave between themselves as it responds to
a new globalized perception.
While the universality of disciplinarity ceases to make
design innovative, powerful, or valuable, it nevertheless still con-
tributes to the alterdisciplinary condition as design navigates a
new universalism based on translations, subtitling, and general-
ized dubbing. A well-structured discipline, refusing to follow
trends that become outdated after a short time, reflects instead a
profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of
inhabiting it. However, as we have presented it, disciplinarity now
makes this structure inconsistent and arbitrary. Thoroughness and
accuracy demonstrate respect toward the language of the modern
project; in contrast, alterdisciplinarity translates and transcodes
information from one format to another and wanders in geogra-
phy, as well as in history. The digital has made it possible that our
universe has become a territory all dimensions of which may be
travelled both in time and space.
As the design disciplines have fragmented, so too have the
responsibilities of design. We propose that, from the domesticated
form shaped by practice, the discipline can be both undisciplined
and responsible, and disciplined and irresponsible. By following
the tracks across the landscape of the transfigured disciplines, we
have demonstrated that the design imaginary has been “stripped
of its center,” casting design in a new role of showing us the way
through discipline.49
47 Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern
Manifesto: “Postmodernism is Dead,”
2009, www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibi-
tions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm
(accessed March 15, 2012).
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.