Design Theory and Philosophy

Es gibt bis heute keine allgemein anerkannte, konsistente Designtheorie; es besteht nicht einmal ansatzweise Konsens zur Frage, was Designtheorie sein könnte. Andererseits gibt es zahlreiche "Designtheorien", teils parallel existierend, teils einander in schneller Folge ablösend. Auch diese Arbeit erhebt nicht den Anspruch, die von einigen langersehnte, von vielen für unmöglich erklärte und von den meisten Praktikern als eher überflüssig empfundene Theorie zu liefern. Sie präsentiert Überlegungen zur Entwicklung einer Begrifflichkeit, die geeignet sein könnte, den strukturellen und prozessualen Rahmen einer erst noch zu erarbeitenden Theorie des Entwerfens zu bilden. Dieser Rahmen sollte das Abstraktions- und Reflexionsniveau einer Wissenschaftstheorie besitzen. Er schafft damit die Distanz und die erforderlichen begrifflichen Hilfsmittel zur produktiven Kritik, Reflexion und Neuordnung der vorhandenen Theorie- und Methodikelemente. Konsequenzen auf der Ebene des praktisch-disziplinären Handelns werden angedacht und sind in weiteren Schritten zu präzisieren. Zur Konstruktion dieses Theorierahmens scheinen Elemente der Systemtheorie, insbesondere der Theorie selbstorganisierender Systeme, der operativen Erkenntnistheorie (second order cybernetics) und der handlungsorientierten Kognitionswissenschaften geeignet zu sein.

Design steht seit seinen Anfängen immer wieder in der Kritik, entweder einer kapitalistischen Warenästhetik Vorschub zu leisten oder dem Selbstmissverständnis der Autonomie zu verfallen. Als Abkömmling der Industrialisierung und Zögling der freien Künste scheint es zwischen den Extremen einer Drapierung von Ingenieursleistungen oder dem kommerziellen Missbrauch von Kunstpraktiken zu schwanken, selbst innerlich zerrissen und ohne eigene Orientierung. Wenn bei Design also von Ästhetik die Rede ist, entsteht schnell der Eindruck, es mit bloßem Styling zu tun zu haben, sei es im Dienst einer Absatzsteigerung oder des symbolischen Kapitals.
Die Tagung möchte demgegenüber ausloten, ob und inwieweit die Ästhetik des Designs – jenseits der Alternative von Warenförmigkeit bzw. Styling und Autonomie – als eigene Form des Ästhetischen verstanden werden kann. Gegenüber der in der ästhetischen Tradition vorherrschenden Ausrichtung an der Kunst geht es der Tagung insgesamt darum zu fragen, was es heißen könnte, die Grundfragen und die Grundbegriffe der Ästhetik noch einmal aus dem Geiste des Designs neu und erneut zu denken. Dabei steht ein solcher Versuch nicht allein angesichts der jüngsten Entgrenzungstendenzen zwischen Kunst
und Design vor der Herausforderung, dass eine Ästhetik des Designs in irgendeiner Weise auch zur Ästhetik der Kunst in Beziehung gesetzt werden muss. Nicht zuletzt stellt sich dabei die Frage, was „Kritik“ mit Blick auf Kunst und Design jeweils heißen kann.

This guide to rhetoric for graphic designers was created by Hanno Ehses, faculty at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in 1987, with assistance and contributions from Ellen Lupton, curator of the Herb Lubalin Study Center at The Cooper Union. The publication includes essays about rhetoric and examples of student work.

Welchen Einfluss hat die Gestaltung des gegenständlichen Umfeldes auf zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen und wie werden diese gewollt oder ungewollt mit den Dingen mitgestaltet? Auf welche Weise werden durch Design und Architektur soziale Kompetenzen wie zwischenmenschliches Erkennen, Handeln und Erleben ermöglicht oder verunmöglicht?
Autor*innen verschiedener Disziplinen gehen diesen Fragen nach und eröffnen hierbei eine dingorientierte Perspektive auf das Themenfeld des Social Design, die sowohl geeignet ist, eine Brücke zwischen Theorie und Praxis zu bilden, als auch einschlägiges Studienmaterial für die sozialen Dimensionen der Gestaltung zu versammeln.

"This study gathers and interprets the earliest extant references to architects in ancient Greek philosophy, as found in select works of Plato and Aristotle.  Throughout this review, Plato and Aristotle [are] shown to consistently present architectonic agents as exemplary civic and intellectual leaders, acting in awareness of their own (and others’) limits, with knowledge of the most appropriate archē, and with a view to the most comprehensive aims—the common good. This discloses an alternative and more accurate etymology of architects: not as master-builders but as leaders and makers of beginnings (archai). The aim of this essay has been not only to rediscover the discursive beginnings for a renewed philosophy of architecture, but to suggest how these philosophical 'archai' might help present-day architects reimagine the full relevance of their still contested role."

‘Designed things fill our world, they are our worlds; so thoroughly are we modernized, affluent people nested with the designed, within the naturalized artificial, neither would we survive if returned to the places of dwelling of our early human ancestors’ (p. 1). In her introduction to The Design Philosophy Reader, editor Anne-Marie Willis contextualizes this book within that topos. Design, today, is pervasive: designed things are so tightly tangled with our everyday lives that we almost forget how much activities of design have transformed our world. Understood here as the way in which humans ‘make’ things in the modernized world, design therefore deserves to be thoroughly examined, and (...).

Fry's 3rd volume (following _Redirective Practice_ and _Design as Politics_) outlines an ontology of human being as 'designed animals.' This scale of thinking, recovering a stronger intentionality behind the idea of 'designing,' is necessary to confront unsustainable liberalism, such as manifests in human-centered designing.

We have lost an important connection with the landscape, a way of seeing and understanding its profound significance in our everyday life and culture.  This gap in our knowledge is the consequence of a rationalist paradigm that continues to dominate western thinking, a conceptual void that threatens the landscape in the face of 21st century challenges. An alternative philosophical approach argues that refocusing attention on materiality and re-evaluating the relationship communities have with the land would be an important step towards addressing the problem, but it does demand a very different role and agenda for philosophy. This chapter illustrates the potential of a new way of thinking about landscape, consciousness and design and aims to initiate a new discourse by abandoning the philosophical filters that currently obscure a meaningful engagement with the built environment. This would help to establish an expanded definition of landscape as a vital means of achieving a better quality of life and robust sustainable development.

This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This ...

"By Mark DeKay. Edited Susanne Bennett

"This book offers practical and theoretical tools for more effective sustainable design solutions and for communicating sustainable design ideas to today's diverse stakeholders.

It uses integral theory to make sense of the many competing ideas in this area and offers a powerful conceptual framework for sustainable designers through the four main perspectives of: behaviours; systems; experiences; cultures.

It also uses human developmental theory to reframe sustainable design across four levels of complexity present in society: the Traditional, Modern, Postmodern, and Integral waves. Profuse with illustrations and examples, the book offers many conceptual tools including:

• twelve principles of integral sustainable design
• sixteen prospects of sustainable design
• six perceptual shifts for ecological design thinking
• five levels of sustainable design aesthetics
• ten injunctions for designing connections to nature.""

The following essay sketches varieties of imagination operative in the best architectural work. It was published in Warehouse Journal, a student-edited journal produced annually by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba. Student editors for Warehouse 25 were, Alena Rieger and Ally Pereira-Edwards.

Capitoli Libro. Attraverso 12 parole-chiave, il libro individua una serie di fenomeni innovativi e influenti che caratterizzano oggi il design. Ciascuna parola-chiave, per seguire la metafora del processo all’oggetto, è associata alla precisazione di alcuni capi di accusa che si suppone ne motivino per reazione l’emergenza. Fino a scoprire, infine, quello che è l’unico vero delitto che può commettere il design.

One way of thinking more generally about design is to focus on the nature of the thinking that takes place in designing, what it is, how it works, and what it is especially good for. There is a growing awareness that the collection of processes that we associate with design thinking can be strikingly effective in resolving complex situations, especially those that require imagination, creativity and innovation. What is there then that is special about design thinking? How does it appear to differ from other kinds of thinking? Answering these questions will require the revisiting and rethinking of some of our taken-for-granted beliefs about thinking itself. The path of inquiry here is to follow what has been called design thinking into its social-cultural habitat, the overlapping realities of the transformative situation; locate design thinking's metaphoric roots in mind and meaning; and explore some of the implications of the design thinking presence in complex systems.

This paper focuses on the structure and dynamic of theory in design research. Problems with existing theory are explored, and a new meta-theoretical method is suggested for assisting the critical analysis, comparison and formulation of design theories and concepts. This meta-theoretical method contributes to building a simplifying paradigm of design research by providing a means to clarify the existing state of design theory in the field, to assist with the establishment of coherence and compatibility between concepts in disparate theories, to validate theory and concepts, and to uncover 'hidden' aspects of design theories.

The domain of Interaction Design (IxD) strives for rich interactions yet continues to work with both a shallow definition of gestalt experience and a meager palette of experiential variables from which to pull. The presence of the body in human experience is noted, but poorly understood or utilized when making design moves. Through a turning of attention to the visceral variables of experience, this thesis presents the first comprehensive definition and taxonomy of Soma Literacy to reveal an expanded palette of variables to the design fields. Interventions into worlds through such a tactile and personal lens challenge many entrenched beliefs and reframes the very nature of interaction and experience. This new framing and set of priorities applicable to designing for engagement of the felt-sense provides both a timely provocation, and a much-needed practical aid to designers and educators.
Influenced by interaction aesthetics, somaesthetics, pragmatic philosophy, and the theoretical and pedagogical principles of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics, I present the sentient body (soma) as the core of experiential perception. I introduce the soma tier of experience and discuss to what extents Design can offer interventions to reveal, nudge, magnify, or diminish experiential gestalts through the manipulatible variables of the soma tier, thus offering interaction design not just a renewed and expanded palette, but also a clarification of the fundamental palette of human interaction factors. The human experience is analog. It is the actual, visceral, flesh and bone, breathing, beating body that is the only translator of experience that we possess. It is only through this lens that we might come to know and thereby design meaningful interactions.
This thesis re-presents the feeling body as the single fundamental constant for IxD, a playground for all participation, engagement, and felt-experience. Soma Literacy is introduced as an encompassing and organizing field of study that frames this renewed attention and offers a path to analyze, interpret, reveal, and make meaning through the bodied content present in experience.

Esta edición corresponde al libro nº 9 de la Colección Creatividad i Recerca dirigida desde el Centro de Documentación de Arte Valenciano Contemporáneo de la Universitat de València. Bajo el título La autonomía del diseño, Fernando Infante abre una reflexión filosófica en donde la Estética se adentra en la noción de diseño. Así, diseño y arte son dos formas de abordar el libre juego entre imaginación y entendimiento del que hablaba Kant. Y si el arte ahonda en el lado de la libertad del juego, el diseño lo hará en el de la ley. Con frecuencia, el artista extrae placer disfrutando del lado de la libertad del juego, el diseñador lo extrae del disfrute de la ley. Más allá de sus rasgos como realidades históricas o modos de hacer, arte y diseño vendrían a ser en este sentido categorías alternativas y relacionadas –fundidas en la práctica en numerosas ocasiones–, dos modos de ser en esos juegos fundamentales de la producción, la ideación, la creación y el hallazgo. Asumido este carácter general de ambos dominios, la Estética, como disciplina filosófica, puede recuperar un marco de interés más amplio, marco al que renunció en su compromiso con la fundamentación y defensa del arte.

This edition is the ninth book of the Creativitat i Recerca collection directed by the Contemporary Valencian Art Documentation Center of the Universitat de València. Under the title The Autonomy of Design, Fernando Infante opens a philosophical reflection in which Aesthetics delves into the notion of design. Thus, design and art would come to be two ways of approaching the 'free play between imagination and understanding' which Kant spoke about. And as art deepens on the side of the freedom of the play, design will do it on the side of the law. Frequently, the artist derives pleasure by enjoying the side of the freedom of the play while the designer extracts it from the enjoyment of the law. Beyond its features as historical realities or ways of doing, art and design would be, in this way, alternative and related categories -fused in practice on numerous occasions-, two ways of being in those fundamental games of production, ideation, creation and finding. Assuming this general character of both domains, Aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, can recover a wider framework of interest, the same one which it renounced to because of its commitment to the foundation and defense of art.

A placebo effect is the measurable beneficial healing effect that results from the context and meaning of a medical treatment rather than its content. Although orthodox biomedicine has sometimes struggled to reconcile the paradox of seemingly inert medicines producing healing effects, in the placebo studies literature, a number of scholars have proposed that alternative paradigms for understanding perception, such as affordance, motor-intentionality, and enaction, can reconcile the apparent paradigm conflict. These models are by no means incompatible with design theory; in fact, they are both embedded in and enriched by a number of design sub-disciplines, such as user experience design. This paper shows that understandings of placebo responsiveness, and the effects of meaning and symbol on the body, can be identified explicitly or implicitly in existing design and allied practices, including industrial design, graphic and information design, marketing and branding, and architecture.
Although the placebo effect is perhaps not a problem in design, the wider cultural influence of the idea of placebo and what it means affect the contexts in which design’s products are encountered. Observing the influence of placebo effects confirms the importance of—and one approach to—articulating and exploring an audience’s expectations and understandings of artifacts of meaning and culture. By talking about some of the ways in which the placebo effect has been mobilized in the context of contemporary mid-Atlantic medical and scientific culture, this paper seeks to give a sense of the entangled ontological and epistemological frames that carry influence between disciplines and practices—in particular, the health sciences and the arts. The placebo effect, as it becomes an increasingly influential concept, seems poised to influence how the meaningful aspects of design– its affects and affordances– come to matter. This paper proposes that the idea of the placebo response might offer a tool that can influence how design products and practices are received and valued.

There is a very unfortunate error on page 4 ------- "No design would judged adequate through empirical measurement" should be "No design would judged adequate WITHOUT empirical measurement". Please note.

ABSTRACT -

Rational idealized linear engineering design (RILED) models, with homogeneous work stages, still underpin much HCI research and practice. Human-centred activities dominate stages corresponding to engineering's problem analysis and validation/ verification, while other work stages receive less attention (e.g., requirements specification, progressive detailing of design). This juried alt.chi paper argues for parallel design work with heterogeneous episodes that can be design-led, human-centred, strategy-driven or evaluation-based, or a mix of some or all of these. To support this. it motivates and develops a vocabulary to replace RILED's lexicon of stage,

Since transcending architecture is fundamentally an action or event (not some esoteric, idealist construct deduced from dogma or philosophy), understanding what it really means to ‘transcend architecture’ demands a serious and detailed study of its experiential nature. And what better way to do this than by investigating one of the most well known yet less probed transcending experiences of architecture ever recorded: the extraordinary encounter of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (who was to become Le Corbusier a few years later) with the Parthenon in September 1911.

This chapter offers a thorough phenomenological examination of the event and delivers an array of new insights on the psychological, physical, and spiritual dimensions of the architectural numinous. It also demonstrates the power that such extraordinary moments may have in one’s life, not to mention the importance of this particular one in the architectural disciplines given the stature of Le Corbusier — arguably the most influential architect of 20th Century.

Design thinking is not thinking about design, but rather a re-focus on the way we think, about the world in general, and in this cybernetic process the real self can be brought into being. Gramma/topology is the social structuration of a theory-as-ontology framework with the ability to function as a design educational model that could enrich the teaching and learning of design in all its diverse applications. To paraphrase and deconstruct Derrida, I shall call this model gramma/topology; since such a peculiar field-of-knowing does not exist, in any particular form, before the model is used, no one can say with certainty what the outcome would be, but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance for both designer-Dasein and design-Dasein.

Designers Make
Designers Plan Making
Designers Visually Plan Making
Designers Visually Plan Making Things
Designers Visually Plan Making Useful Things
Designers Visually Plan Making Useful Things for People
Designers Visually Plan Making Useful Things for Sets of People
Designers Visually Plan Making Useful Things for Sets of People in Situations
Designers Visually Plan Making Useful Things for Sets of People in Situations
Designers Visually Plan Making Fruitful Sets of People in Situations
Designers Visually Plan Making Fruitfully Socio-Material People-Situations
Designers World-Make

Design today has become an extremely wide area of expertise, overlapping with many other disciplines. Knowledge of the classics of modern design has almost become a common cultural property. Design objects today are presented in a similar manner as art.

This book is my interpretation of the design process, covering all disciplines. In the book, I will be occasionally shifting from one discipline to another, but this is because, in reality, disciplines are overlapping themselves. I think it is important to provide as much as possible a holistic overview. There are many different interpretations of design and according to me, as long as the designer can explain and communicate his work in a rational matter, there are no wrong or right design interpretations.

I make no attempt here to create an encyclopedic enumeration of some kind; rather this book is designed, to present a survey of the main lines of the design development, and influential factors that may and will determine the future of the design process. This book represents a contemporary overview of that process and relates to the tendencies of the integrated design approaches in industry and the knowledge that lies behind.

This book has been written and designed as a Masters Project at the Bergen National Academy of Arts (2004 - 2006). I would like to thank this institution for choosing me to become a part of the first generation of the Master students in Design and Visual Communication in Norway. Having American, German, French, British, and Norwegian professors, made the work on this book a valuable international experience.

In this paper, I will examine the need for a transdisciplinary model of doctoral design education as a part of an overall cross-disciplinary design education. In doing so, I will narrow down cross-disciplinary design education and research as an amalgamation of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research models. In addition to this, I will address some of the challenges and the opportunities associated with cross-disciplinary research, while highlighting the prospects of bridging the cross-disciplinary research gap.

Si pone in rilievo il ruolo di una rivista di disegno industriale, oggi design, nella storia dell'italiano contemporaneo. Fondata dall'architetto Alberto Rosselli nel 1954, la pubblicazione trimestrale e poi bimestrale, «Stile industria», accompagnerà per nove anni la crescita della società italiana del "boom" economico, dando una forma testuale e linguistica al dibattito intorno all’estetica della produzione in serie, e toccando nel contempo un insieme di fenomeni e processi riguardanti diversi strati della popolazione coinvolti nella produzione e nel consumo dei beni. La nuova realtà produttiva, che ha profondamente modificato la vita della società italiana condizionando a partire dagli anni Cinquanta gli usi e i costumi della quotidianità, ha trovato nella disciplina del design una delle manifestazioni più evidenti. Alla sua fisionomia di materia e tecnica e artistica corrispondeva appieno l’impostazione del periodico guidato da Rosselli. E così, nella scrittura "del" e "sul" design, le parole antiche, "forma" e "formale", "funzione", acquistano una nuova accezione circoscritta al lavoro del designer. All’epoca poco frequenti nella lingua d’uso, i termini che le affiancano, "funzionale" e "funzionalità", dal linguaggio tecnologico passeranno rapidamente in quello del commercio e della pubblicità, per fissarsi stabilmente nel lessico di settori diversi. A questi si aggiungono "efficienza" ed "estetica", l’antico "creativo" con il valore del tutto nuovo di ‘dotato di fantasia e inventiva’ e la neoformazione "creatività".

En quel(s) sens le design peut-il être objet de science ? Qu’est-ce que la recherche en design considérée comme discipline scientifique ? Quels sont ses modèles ? Que faut-il entendre par « sciences du design » ? En vue de répondre à ces questions, cet article procède en quatre étapes. En premier, il étudie les efforts entrepris depuis une cinquantaine d’années en vue de faire de la recherche en design une science, ou du moins une discipline scienti- fique. En second, il retrace la formation du champ de la recherche interna- tionale en design et fait le point sur la situation francophone. En troisième, il présente et analyse deux modèles de recherche en design, le modèle de la quête créative et le modèle de la recherche scientifique, et prend position en faveur du second, en s’appuyant sur une étude de cas consacrée au design critique de Dunne et Raby. Enfin, il propose une définition du périmètre du savoir en design et présente le modèle des sciences du design.

Who cares ? This question is a provocation for design research. What do, or should, we care about in design and design research today? Underpinning the question are issues of culture and agency – who cares, for whom, and how? Taking care, or being cared for, evokes the choice of roles, and processes of interaction, co-creation and even decision-making. Caring, as a verb, emphasizes care as intention, action and labor in relation to others. Care can be understood as concern for that beyond oneself, for others and, thus, human, societal and even material and ecological rela- tions are at stake. The question of care is also a call for questioning relationships, participation and responsibility, democratic and sustainable ways of co-existing. From this expansive societal standpoint, we could even ask who cares about design? And what should we do about it? The 8th biennial NORDES conference poses the question, “who cares?”, exploring related questions, issues and propositions concerning responsibilities, relationships, ways of doing and directing design today.

Though designing is cast as a creative practice, materializing preferable ways of being, it does so only by destroying current products, habits and values. I argue that designers must learn to acknowledge and take responsibility for this destructive side to their practice. Designers can cultivate their destructive capacities and deploy those against all that is unsustainable about current societies. But to do so also entails challenging prevalent notions that what is preferable is progress, advancement beyond how things were done before. Instead, I argue that the most creatively destructive thing designers can do is work to restore previous more sustainable ways of living and working.

In a world unsustainable by design, we must rethink our relation to the image. To do so, I activate Malabou’s concept of plasticity to propose a materialist conception of the image as imago, which consists of the object in the world in interaction with the neural networks in the brain. Reviewing both a history of human unsustainability and a history of the idea of future, I then consider Derrida’s notion of time as trace and Malabou’s formulation of plasticity, the latter as derived from Hegel and as applied to the image. Finally, I consider the historical rift that developed between art and design at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and review its contemporary configuration in the work of Ranciére, Berardi and Groys. I then conclude by proposing a new model of image practice as arte-facture, the activity of making-wonder.

Book is available from Amazon; the Introduction may be found below, as part of The Image in Plasticity

The present Ph.D. dissertation has as its axis analyzing the role of fashion trend forecasting companies – bureaux de style – in the current fashion system. It deals with the immaterial agency of fashion designers investing in interdisciplinary methods. To accomplish its objectives, this research adopted a qualitative approach of both exploratory and explanatory nature. Therefore, it seeks to understand not only the
factors and motivations for the current connotation of the bureaux de style, but also the willingness and interest of fashion companies to acquire, review, and apply—or not—the fashion trend information on products that they design. Data collected by means of theoretical, documentary, and field research (interviews) were analyzed based on Critical Realism, Giddens’ perspective on structure and agency, and Grounded Theory, from Glaser and Strauss. The duality “insecurity and dependence” seems to be highly expressive of the relationship between bureaux de style and fashion designers. Moreover, the entrusted dependency refers to the successful past of security, while insecurity is
expressed in relation to the future, more specifically to its unfamiliarity and ignorance. Despite the high subscription rates to trend reports from bureaux de style, a discourse based on the “uselessness” of fashion trend reports is pervasive. On the other hand, the way fashion designers deal with the information conveyed by the bureaux de style consists of usage. The research resulted in the development of a model of levels of
fashion trend report usage by fashion designers that expresses how designers respond to fashion trend information.

http://elpub.bib.uni-wuppertal.de/edocs/dokumente/fbf/industrialdesign/diss2017/campos/df1703.pdf

The present Ph.D. dissertation has as its axis analyzing the role of fashion trend forecasting companies – bureaux de style – in the current fashion system. It deals with the immaterial agency of fashion designers investing on interdisciplinary methods. To accomplish its objectives, this research adopted a qualitative approach of both exploratory and explanatory nature. Therefore, it seeks to understand not only the factors and motivations for the current connotation of the bureaux de style, but also the willingness and interest of fashion companies to acquire, review, and apply—or not—the fashion trend information on products that they design. Data collected by means of theoretical, documentary, and field research (interviews) were analyzed based on Critical Realism, Giddens’ perspective on structure and agency, and Grounded Theory, from Glaser and Strauss. The duality “insecurity and dependence” seems to be highly expressive of the relationship between bureaux de style and fashion...

A convoluted attempt to argue that design is in fact a form of magic, an act of social construction that makes things appear coherent, effect action-at-a-distance, and compel people to interact in particular ways. The chapter tries to follow Latour's (and to a lesser extent Graeber's) attempt to give a symmetrical account of fetishism. The argument thinks that it is motivated by solidarity with decolonizing design.

In area Mediterranea, esistono progettualità che fanno coesistere la circular economy con aspirazioni etiche di egualitarismo. In queste realtà, la pratica del riuso trascende il solo aspetto produttivo e assurge a mezzo per rivalutare anche le potenziali abilità delle persone in condizioni di vulnerabilità. All’interno di una più ampia riflessione teorica sull’etica del progetto, l’inclusione sociale e la cultura della diversità, questo breve contributo è volto a indagare e, dunque, portare a conoscenza casi emergenti che potranno essere presi come modelli per celebrare nuove forme di manifattura, circolari, mutue e popolari.

In the Mediterranean area, there are projects that make the circular economy coexist with ethical aspirations of egalitarianism. In these realities, the practice of reuse transcends only the productive aspect and becomes a way to re-evaluate the potential skills of people in vulnerable conditions. Within a wider theoretical reflection about the ethics of the project, social inclusion and culture of diversity, this short contribution aims to investigate and, therefore, bring to light emerging cases that can be taken as models to celebrate new forms of manufacturing, circular, mutual and popular.

N.37 aprile – maggio – giugno 2022
Trimestrale di Architettura, Tecnologia e Ambiente.
Cartaceo ISSN 2532-1218
Digitale ISSN 2384-9029

Maturana and Varela in 1973 declared that an autopoietic unit is the one that creates, reproduces, and repairs its own components and organization. The last two hundred years, humankind has generated an unprecedented technological development. Unfortunately, it has broken the balance of the biosphere, leading to a new geological change, the Anthropoccene. Design must assume its share of responsibility. It is clear that the practical theoretical model assumed so far is not working, it is necessary to make a paradigm shift. By appropriating a methodology born in biology and created to determine whether we are facing an autopoietic entity, design seeks new ways of understanding oneseed and thus being able to have a more sustainable action. This research suggests that contemporary sustainable design, understood as a systemic model anchored in the theory of autopoiesis, will constitute a methodological theoretical tool that will allow a more harmonious link with the environment.

Design Culture(s). Cumulus Conference Proceedings Roma 2021, Volume #2
Edited by: Loredana Di Lucchio, Lorenzo Imbesi, Angela Giambattista, Viktor Malakuczi
ISBN 978-952-64-9004-5,
ISSN 2490-046X – Cumulus Conference Proceedings Series, N°7