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Changing implies planning and design.
By admin | October 18, 2009
We change our environment by using it. Changing implies planning and design. The traditional notion of design is object oriented; however, a transformation of objects and events takes place when design is seen as a process. People and things come to share a common destiny. In his book, We Never Had Been Modern, Bruno Latour explains that people and things are crossed over with one another, Objects and spaces are conceivable as sensitive and interactive entities that are capable of reacting automatically to brightness, temperature, and moisture, and to the absence or presence of people with whom they are able to interact, Products acquire transformational qualities, and this marks the point where the manufacturing process begins to extend beyond what is generally understood by the production of finished goods. Karl Marx’s idea that the production process becomes complete in consumption takes on a completely new perspective.
This relation, however, is mostly experienced as something different. The world appears for the designer as one of objects, one that is separated from the world of subjects. Things appear as a gigantic accumulation of artifacts, as an arsenal of buildings, of landscapes, of infrastructures, of means of traffic and communication, of technological aggregates, etc., and of all the other material as well as immaterial products that are part of life. In the traditional understanding of design, the development of civilization from this point of view is reduced to the material. The irreconcilable division between the world of objects and the world of subjects has its predecessor in pre-industrial design methods. The objects were thought of as if they did not have a self-dynamie momentum—with the possible exception of, say, wind and water mills. This static understanding of artifacts still continues to have a strong effect on design. Historically, the first decisive change in the concept of design happened during the course of mechanization. Starting from mechanical engineering and from transport and communication, thinking in terms of processes began to enter design in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second step took place with the microprocessing of daily life. A new concept of processes characterized by developments in the electronic sector is condensed in the products. With the Internet, the growing knowledge-orientation of the economy, and the scientific insight that inter-objectivity exists as well as inter-subjectivity, the ambivalent relation of subject and object is up for debate. People and things are involved in process-related associations; they form collectives, and they are transformational.
Topics: Communication |