Design has moved from being a practice of making “aesthetic” artifacts, rooted in mostly Euro-centric craft traditions, to many things: a philosophy of material aesthetics, a business and innovation strategy, a “futures” approach to manage complex change, etc. However, it is important to investigate the origins of these emerging notions of what design is and could be. It is important to historicize design, and its emergence in the contemporary world, through investigating the roots of the claims to theory of aesthetics and materiality made by design. The course will be structured around introductory readings of design theory and their historical emergence, but will be driven by an individual ‘practice’ where we each will engage in historicizing a particular strand of design theory. The aim of such historicizing is to locate the particular theoretical strand to its social, cultural, economic and political specificities and hence open up the space to question the underlying assumptions about the universality of design history, theory and aesthetics.
We will take turns to propose a 'reading' every week for the first 9 weeks. Every week one of us will propose a reading—articles, book chapters, audio / video materials—which we will read on our own time and annotate. We will share our annotations with each other asynchronously on the MIRO board, through the week. At the end of the week (Tuesday afternoons) we will meet to discuss our annotations of the reading. And then move on to the next reading.
The reading can be in any media - written, audio and video. We will use this calendar to propose and share reading materials.
The last 9 weeks we will engage in a project where we will, individually or small groups, investigate a particular aspect of "Design Theory" "Design History" and "Design - Aesthetics". More details and structure for this to follow.
This is a link to an annotated resource collective we will build collectively during the course of this course.