Design Culture

Objects and Approaches

Guy Julier, Mads Nygaard Folkmann, Niels Peter Skou, Hans-Christian Jensen, Anders V. Munch, Guy Julier, Mads Nygaard Folkmann, Niels Peter Skou, Hans-Christian Jensen, Anders V. Munch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350196544
• eBook ISBN: 9781474289832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design History & Criticism

Design culture foregrounds the relationships between the domains of design practice, design production and everyday life. Unlike design history and design studies, it is primarily concerned with contemporary design objects and the networks between the multiple actors engaged in their shaping, functioning and reproduction. It acknowledges the rise of design as both a key component and a key challenge of the modern world.

Featuring an impressive range of international case studies, Design Culture interrogates what this emergent discipline is, its methodologies, its scope and its relationships with other fields of study. The volume's interdisciplinary approach brings fresh thinking to this fast-evolving field of study.

PART ONE

Developing design culture

Mads Nygaard Folkmann

The title of this section carries a twofold question of how to develop design culture. We may develop our understanding of what to look at as the object of investigation and we may develop methods of how to look at this object. Of course, we may as researchers and students of design not forget to also ask why design is important to study: What is the motivation to privilege design as an entry to investigate and understand our cultures, historically as well as in a contemporary perspective?

The contributions in this section discuss possible developments in the field of design culture, both as an object to be analysed and scrutinized, and as a multifaceted, interdisciplinary discipline still in its becoming. In their different approaches to investigating the design as a cultural phenomenon, the contributions do not necessarily build up Design Culture as a homogeneous discipline with an established methodology of investigation and a common theoretical ground, but they explore different analytical and theoretical settings for understanding the importance of design.

The starting point for Kjetil Fallan’s chapter, ‘Design culturing: Making design history matter’, is that even if design is ever more central to our societies and cultures, design seems to gain only little academic interest in the social sciences and the humanities. Fallan discusses the disciplinary demarcations of Design Studies, Design Culture and Design History and argues for the latter as a focal methodological entry for investigating also the developments in contemporary society. Consequently, Fallan argues against the objections against Design History for delving into historical studies without relevance to contemporary concerns. On the contrary, Fallan demonstrates his methodological point by pointing to three key recent developments in design – ‘designification’, ‘sustainification’ and ‘digitalization’ – which pose challenges for how design can be studied, but all can be studied with the prism of Design History in its interest in ‘design as deeply entangled in social and cultural networks and processes, portraying a much more complex design culture’. Ultimately, Fallan’s point is that history writing is also concerned with the present, and that the methodological tools we employ in our analytical enterprises also ‘actively configures design culture’.

In the chapter ‘Taste and attunement: Design culture as world making’, Ben Highmore continues the discussion of design culture as a methodological approach. He does not, however, take his starting point in a discussion of disciplinary demarcations (which also may be a question of institutional conditions in design schools and universities). Instead he experimentally explores what it means to position design at the centre of our interest, and how an interest in design culture enables ‘us to see the world as particular sets of qualities, feelings and meanings as well as a purposefully fashioned material environment’. In Highmore’s view, the term ‘design culture’ orients the investigation of design towards a larger consideration of the ‘world-forming activity of design’. As a prism, design culture may direct the attention towards constitutive factors in design studios, manufacture and consumption, but also look at modern society at large with all its tools, technology and shaping of the physical as well as mental environment. In this sense, Highmore advocates for regarding design as a ‘cultural form’ and employs this as a platform for analysing the emergence of the duvet in the United Kingdom as a cultural form. Through the duvet case, it is demonstrated how the duvet is a physical object as well as engaging in a cultural configuration, including the history of bedding and media and marketing discourses.

In the chapter ‘Embedding design in the organizational culture: Challenges and perspectives’, Alessandro Deserti and Francesca Rizzo make a case of applied design culture methodology. They question and explore how design culture approaches can be productive in understanding how companies and organizations operate according to their cultural setting. Taking a starting point in a discussion of the concept of Design Thinking (which, indeed, has been a strong conceptual currency in the last fifteen years), Deserti and Rizzo argue that this notion ‘tends to be fixed as an abstract design model applicable independently from the context and the object of design’, whereas the concept of design culture introduces a situated, dynamic and context-dependent approach which ‘emphasizes the peculiar “way of doing things” of an organisation or system’. Through the cases of Apple and Samsung, which have similarities in the field of consumer electronics, but have quite different company cultures, Deserti and Rizzo demonstrate that the specific cultures of understanding and conceptualizing design are reflected in the organizational culture of the companies. In their analysis, design is not only a strong determinant in giving shape to new products, but may also, through the concept of design culture, be a driver of development and innovation in the organization.

In the final chapter, ‘Use in design culture,’ Toke Riis Ebbesen examines the status of the concept of use within the disciplinary framework of Design Culture and other recent approaches oriented towards an understanding of design being embedded in and a product of cultural, social, economic and political contexts. Ebbesen argues that ‘the concept of use in design is, if not overseen, then at least under-prioritized, both in practice-related design fields and within the fields of history, theory and criticism of design’. Employing semiotic concepts for a better understanding of the character and role of use in design, Ebbesen proposes ‘a model of use in context’ which points out how users can make inferences about material properties, potential use schemes and typical discursive valuations and relationships on the basis of concrete products and their formal and material properties. Ultimately, the chapter not only argues for a ‘revival of the concept of use in the study of design as culture’ but also seeks to demonstrate how the conceptual framework of Design Culture can (re-)connect to a concept of use.

CHAPTER ONE

Design culturing:

Making design history matter

Kjetil Fallan

Introduction

Ours is a culture of design (Highmore 2008; Fallan 2013a). Design is the interface between us and the world. Everywhere. Always. But why, as Stuart Kendall asks, is this so poorly reflected in current research in the humanities, ‘when design, in all of its myriad forms, is manifestly both the most significant force shaping our lives today and so widely misunderstood?’ (Kendall 2011: vii). In the following I will make a case for how design history – arguably the most established form of humanistic design studies – can best contribute to our understanding of design culture – understood both as an object of study and as a field of inquiry – and thereby regain the relevance to contemporary concerns some of the discipline’s critics claim it has lost (Fry 2009: 122; Tonkinwise 2014; Julier and Narotzky 1998). One possible strategy for doing this is turning the attention of design history to key developments in contemporary society rather than the less obviously relevant phenomena of the distant past. This is not to subscribe to a crude instrumentalist approach demanding of scholars they maximize the social relevance of their work, but rather to argue that design historians can and should also address topics of more immediate concern to contemporary challenges.

Although design culture can certainly be a useful shorthand for describing the subject matter of a design history more attuned to the socio-cultural embeddedness of design than its biographies and iconologies (Fallan 2010: 149–50), the term is probably even more interesting as a dynamic, a course of action – something that we do, produce or configure, rather than something we observe (Kendall 2014: 364). One way of explicating this would be to coin the neologism ‘design culturing’ as a paraphrase of Tony Fry’s concept ‘design futuring’ (Fry 2009). Just like, for Fry, the future of design is not something that is just ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but has to be facilitated, so can the culture of design be conceived as configured rather than preconditioned. Importantly, this con-figuration is a relational, networked process inhabited by people and things alike (Atzmon and Boradkar 2014: 145; Boradkar 2010: 4–5).

A processual approach to design culture has the advantage of highlighting the open-ended, constantly shifting nature of its subject matter – a familiar challenge in all types of contemporary history. It also requires scholars to acknowledge our status as actors in the world we engage with rather than as disinterested observers, and thus forces us to reflect on our subjectivity (Fallan and Lees-Maffei 2015). Another consequence of this line of reasoning is that those who study design culture are as complicit in its configuration as is design, designers, mediators and consumers. Therefore, we should choose our objects of study with care – after all, we only ever get the design culture we deserve. Let me briefly outline, then, a few key themes in contemporary design culture – as object – that warrant closer attention from design historians and that hold the potential to increase the extrinsic, or exogamous, relevance of design history.

Designification

First, we might make the modest move from stating that ours is a culture of design to describing the situation in more processual terms as the designification of society. Design practice, design awareness, design terminology and even ‘design thinking’ seem to permeate society to an ever-increasing degree, creeping into every nook and cranny of our existence. Of course, as many scholars have noted, design culture is nothing new – it can be claimed to be as old as homo faber (Huppatz 2010; MacGregor 2010; Margolin 2015). Jean Baudrillard (1981: 185–6) points to the Bauhaus as ‘the genesis of the universal extension of design’ (Holt 2016: 56). But there is an argument to be made that its sheer pervasiveness has escalated significantly in the course of just the last decades, even. We now have not only ‘designer’ furniture and ‘designer’ clothes, but also ‘designer’ diapers and ‘designer’ dildos. Pretentious hairdressers become ‘hair designers’; and even God is nowadays referred to as a ‘designer’ – at least by creationists. The use of design lingo and designer signatures in marketing is no longer restricted to high-end furnishing companies, but equally eagerly embraced by mass-market actors like IKEA and Target.

It is this development – this profusion and de-elitification of design – that apparently offended Hal Foster’s aesthetic sensibilities and prompted him to decry the current situation ‘when the aesthetic and utilitarian are not only conflated but all but subsumed in the commercial, and everything – not only architectural projects and art exhibitions but everything from jeans to genes – seems to be regarded as so much design’ (Foster 2002: 17). Being an art critic rather than a design historian, Foster, of course, is late in the game, beaten to it by some thirty years by Wolfgang Haug (Haug 1971).

These criticisms of the designification of society, though, are in reality criticisms of the commodification of society, and as such can be thought of as a more design-centred version of Frankfurt school critique of the Kulturindustrie and the aestheticization of society (Featherstone 1991). Or, perhaps more specifically, they are criticisms of the commercial and market-driven nature of design – at least of the kind of design under attack. In this logic, of course, ‘the aesthetic’ does not refer to a more general notion of sensory qualities or experiences, but rather to a narrower sense of ‘visual appeal’. Similarly, products are reduced to signs, carriers of symbolic meaning, ignoring their functional...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of image credits
• List of Contributors
• Introducing Design Culture Guy Julier and Anders V. Munch
• PART ONE Developing design culture Mads Nygaard Folkmann
• PART TWO Addressing market and society Niels Peter Skou
• PART THREE Positioning design professions Hans-Christian Jensen
• PART FOUR Locating design culture Anders V. Munch
• Epilogue: Towards design culture as practice Guy Julier and Anders V. Munch
• Index
• Copyright