WHERE DESIGN IS GOING?

The world of design is roughly divided between those who produce designs and those who speculate about them. This theory vs. praxis distinction does not quite hold in any given performative agency, though, as it’s hard to imagine a producer who never renders his or her works with any thought as to how the designed objects fit or would fit within the conceptual frame of the entire field. The same applies to theoreticians. In the final analysis, they, too, are practically involved in design – on a linguistic level, generating and arranging concepts in a way to arrive at certain conclusions that can be effectively compared and evaluated in terms of their compositional qualities and cultural significance. Theoreticians of design are designing claims about design. And they approach their object (thesis) the same way designers approach theirs – by means of relying on the developments in contemporary thinking, while for designers it is the developments in contemporary making that keep them primarily focused and preoccupied.

So I am reading this article that I have accidentally come across while browsing my links to periodicals. The piece is by Marco van Hout titled Global Market, Global Emotion, Global Design. I like the word global – just as any other word with a semantic proximity to it. This word is reminiscent of an ambitious philosophical project that culminated with Hegel, that holistic thinker, and I am thrilled to witness his terminology back in the discussion of the new design trends. Indeed, history does repeat itself. In this article, the author is concerned with finding universal emotional factors of good design – what really matters in design beyond, or rather despite it’s techne; it’s uniform truth that transcends all the irregularities found in the generative and perceptual multicultural contexts – in an attempt to philosophically determine it’s telos, the ultimate destination of design as a whole. Marco van Hout takes on himself not a small task of finding out where design is going. And how could I have just blinked away this brave (perhaps impossibilistic) attempt?..

See, given that all human beings can be defined in terms of their common basic needs and desires, this common ground for emotional life is insufficient a premise to build an argument that accounts for the whole variety of aesthetic attitudes - none of them is definitive. There is nothing stable in our emotional states, if we do not limit the analysis to this unilluminating fact that every human being is essentially a sensitive subject hardwired to his or her crude basic needs – some of them frustrated, while others satisfied. We cannot build a theory of an aesthetic development (where design is going) on such a gooey foundation as human psychology. How would we aggregate all psychologies? The only feasible approach to the theory of a trend is through studying the trend itself - it’s institutional potentials. It is not that emotions, therefore trends; it is the trends, therefore the emotions.

Hmmm.. Do I sound like a structuralist? No, that’s for the sake of argument…

Global Market, Global Emotion, Global Design?

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