Chapter 1 – Design as Meaning and Form Making: an Introduction
Chapter 1 presents the scope and ambition of the research: to produce a model of design that accounts for the practices of designers, artists, and researchers in engineering. The goal is to reveal what connects these practices while respecting their respective contributions to the challenge of invention. The main question is what does it take to produce an original work of science, art, or design? According to the author, the answer lies in the humanities, in particular the use of semiotics and media studies that help to understand and produce the autonomous poetic space of design.
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Chapter 2 – From Interactive Design to Reflective Design
The Second Chapter offers to switch from the interactive to the reflective design paradigm. The book posits that interactive design relies on a model that focuses on activities and does not question the values and aesthetics of the artifact and therefore restricts the expansion into new norms, or new aesthetics. On the contrary, reflective design is about methods that generate new questions not only about functionalities, but also that explore new formats. Here media are considered as design tools and materials that contribute to “denaturalize” activities and forms and lay new foundations for a design project.
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Chapter 3 – Creative Figures of Users
In the Third Chapter, the reader will follow the trail of the “user”. Many disciplines claim to best represent her: ergonomics and engineering research focus on the system made of humans and machines, aesthetics concentrates on the sensitive experience, media studies focus on audiences and spectators. Rather than trying to catch the reality of the user, the chapter shows that the design process relies on several “figures” of the user. These figures are poetic productions and “indirect representations” of user models that support the expansion of the design project beyond a mere replication of standard uses.
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Chapter 4 – The Poetics of Invention
The Fourth Chapter exposes the difference between the rhetoric of science analyzed by the sociology of sciences and technologies and the poetic of science better apprehended thanks to the humanities. Research is just as much about naming things and telling stories as elaborating theories and testing them. Engineering researchers are also poets who work on words, acronyms, expressions, to give an identity to their production and who use their narrative skills to project the invention in complex stories that weave the present and the future together. The chapter studies the expansive properties of these poetic practices.
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Chapter 5 – Design as Composition of Tensions
In Chapter Five, design is considered as a practice of composition of tensions. By laying out materials, ideas, forms, models of communication and activities, designers organize their practice not so much as a sequence of events but more as a field to compose within. Rather than using the metaphor of the project, the author uses the metaphor of the matrix to show how the design project brings together materials in unexpected ways without necessarily following a defined plan. Elaborating on Peirce’s theory of abduction, the composition is seen as a projective abductive practice.
Gentes_chap5_Indiscipline_design_Composition of Tensions
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Chapter 6 – Design as Debate: the Thing beyond the Object
The Sixth Chapter introduces political philosophy – in particular Habermas’s theory of communication – and critical design. From the point of view of design, the question is how stakeholders organize a debate around their production and how it sustains the generativity of the design project. In this respect, designers not only produce objects, but produce “things” whose identities are in question, hence the need for expansive debates that contribute to the invention. Chapter Six examines three examples that shape the way artists, designers and researchers challenge their own perception and that of their users and audiences.
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Chapter 7 – Conclusion: the Indiscipline of Design
Chapter Seven concludes this book by reflecting on the “in-discipline” of design. Designers claim that their practices are transversal, multidisciplinary, and holistic. However, design is not a Leonardesque fantasy of mastering all the known disciplines, but rather the dynamic activity that launches concepts, facts, methods, between disciplines so that they can come up with new concepts and artifacts, or situations. Through design/practice, disciplines under-determine each other, leaving space for a radical unknown to emerge. The process of under-determination is considered here as the foundation of design epistemology.
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| Contents | |
| 1 Design as Meaning and Form Making: An Introduction | 1 |
| 1.1 Book General Viewpoint and Goal | 1 |
| 1.1.1 Examples and Context | 2 |
| 1.1.2 People | 3 |
| 1.1.3 Hybrid Methods | 4 |
| 1.1.4 Structure | 5 |
| 1.2 Definitions of Design: The Challenge of New Beginnings | 5 |
| 1.3 Epistemology of Design: Building the Future | 7 |
| 1.3.1 Abduction and Formal Practice | 7 |
| 1.3.2 Introducing Humanities to Design: Following Foucault and Peirce | 8 |
| 1.4 The Humanities and the Designed Object | 10 |
| 1.4.1 The Extension of the Media Sphere | 11 |
| 1.4.2 Design and Media Studies | 13 |
| 1.5 The Humanities as Active Methods for Design | 13 |
| 1.6 The Humanities as Part of the Epistemology of Design | 14 |
| 1.7 In the Field: Research Through Design | 14 |
| 1.7.1 Research Through a Collection of Breaching Experiments | 15 |
| 1.7.2 Reflective Research Practice: The Two “Moments” of Research Through Design | 16 |
| 1.8 Book Overview | 17 |
| References | 21 |
| 2 From Interactive Design to Reflective Design | 23 |
| 2.1 When Objects “Talk Back”: Design as a Strategy in Critical Aesthetics | 23 |
| 2.1.1 “The Reflective Practitioners” | 24 |
| 2.1.2 Outline of the Chapter | 25 |
| 2.2 Sound “Mirror”: A Theory of the Mirroring Effect | 26 |
| 2.2.1 Interactive Systems and Pleasure | 27 |
| 2.2.2 Pleasure to Learn | 28 |
| 2.3 The Concept of Interactivity: Tricks of a Concept | 30 |
| 2.4 Resisting Interactivity | 34 |
| 2.4.1 Two Use Cases: “Just Married” and “With Determination” | 34 |
| 2.4.2 Defining Reflective in Design | 38 |
| 2.4.3 Comparison Between Interactive/Reflective Metaphors | 39 |
| 2.4.4 Reflective Technologies as a Metaphor for the Design Process | 40 |
| 2.5 Designing for Reflection: Two Use Cases in Distributed Networks | 42 |
| 2.5.1 Quick Overview of the Projects | 42 |
| 2.5.2 The Bug That Saved Us | 46 |
| 2.6 Reflective Objects for Reflective Design: A Delicate Balance of Signs | 48 |
| 2.6.1 Reflectivity as Method | 48 |
| 2.6.2 Reflectivity as Style | 49 |
| 2.7 Conclusion: Reflective Design with Reflective Artifacts | 52 |
| References | 53 |
| 3 Creative Figures of Users | 57 |
| 3.1 Introduction | 57 |
| 3.1.1 Who Cares About the User? First Steps of a Survey | 58 |
| 3.1.2 Politics of Prudence: “Know Thy Man” | 60 |
| 3.1.3 Aesthetics: Answers Are Not Found in Numbers | 62 |
| 3.2 Pluridisciplinarity in Research Frameworks: The Allegory of the User | 66 |
| 3.2.1 Disembodied Technologies: The Rise of the Ellipse | 66 |
| 3.2.2 Re-embodied Technologies: The Allegory of the User | 69 |
| 3.2.3 First Conclusion: Frameworks for the Allegory of the User | 70 |
| 3.3 Who Is the User? How to Organize Different Viewpoints on the Subject | 71 |
| 3.3.1 PLUG: The Multifaceted User | 72 |
| 3.3.2 From the Non-descript User to a Complex Visitor | 74 |
| 3.3.3 The Users Challenge the Users | 77 |
| 3.3.4 The Role of the “Figure of the User” in the Invention | 77 |
| 3.4 Three Multidisciplinary Figures of the “User”: Multi-tasker, Aesthete, Reflective Practitioner | 79 |
| 3.4.1 The User as a Figure of Multi-tasker and the Designer as the Efficient Inventor | 79 |
| 3.4.2 The User as the Figure of the Aesthete and the Designer as a Virtuoso of Norms | 81 |
| 3.4.3 The User as an Interpreter, and the Designer as a Messenger | 82 |
| 3.5 Is the User a “Figure of Speech”? | 84 |
| References | 86 |
| 4 The Poetics of Invention | 89 |
| 4.1 Questions and Methods | 89 |
| 4.2 Poetic Versus Rhetoric | 91 |
| 4.2.1 From the Rhetoric of Science… | 92 |
| 4.2.2 … To the Poetics of Science | 93 |
| 4.3 Speaking of Which… Word Invention | 96 |
| 4.3.1 Scientific Puns: Play on Words and Definitions | 97 |
| 4.3.2 Naming Projects: Acrobatic Acronyms | 101 |
| 4.3.3 Scientific Logos: A Question of Identity | 104 |
| 4.3.4 Literary and Visual Productions Supporting Engineering | 107 |
| 4.4 Use Case and Story Boards: The Researcher as a Story Teller | 109 |
| 4.4.1 Engineering “Use Cases” as Fairy Tales? | 110 |
| 4.4.2 The designer’s Storyboards as Theater Sets? | 117 |
| 4.4.3 Narrative Cultures | 121 |
| 4.5 A New Genre: “Expansive Literature”, Suspension of Disbelief and Future Building | 122 |
| 4.5.1 Fictions of Science as Reflection on the Present Times | 123 |
| 4.5.2 How to Produce Good Narratives? | 124 |
| 4.5.3 Beginning of a Typology | 126 |
| 4.5.4 Staging “Change” | 130 |
| 4.6 Conclusion: Design as Projection, Condensation and Expansion | 131 |
| References | 132 |
| 5 Design as Composition of Tensions | 135 |
| 5.1 How to Organize a Design Crisis? | 135 |
| 5.2 “Contrasting Semiotic Analysis”: The Semiotic Organization of a Confrontation | 137 |
| 5.2.1 First Case: The e-Learning Platform VUE | 139 |
| 5.2.2 “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Learner” | 140 |
| 5.2.3 “Empathy” and Togetherness in Other Media | 143 |
| 5.2.4 The Result: VUE as a Digital Control Room to Fight Loneliness | 144 |
| 5.2.5 Definition of the “Contrasting Semiotic Analysis” | 145 |
| 5.3 Using Several Tools as a Confrontational Technique | 147 |
| 5.3.1 A Lesson from Art: Designing a Three-Stage Show | 147 |
| 5.3.2 From Writing a Text to Exploring Writing Tools | 149 |
| 5.3.3 Mixing Software: The Organization of the Confrontation | 152 |
| 5.3.4 Designing a Field of Tensions to Fight the Apparatuses | 156 |
| 5.4 Conclusion: “Two to Start” | 158 |
| 5.4.1 Going from a Metaphysics of Design to a Pragmatic of Design | 159 |
| 5.4.2 The Art of Composing | 161 |
| 5.4.3 From Inductive/ Deductive Methods to Projective Abductive Methods in Design | 162 |
| 5.4.4 “Projective Abduction” | 164 |
| 5.4.5 “The Earth Is Blue Like an Orange”. The Claim to Paradox and Coherence | 167 |
| 5.4.6 Open Conclusion: Design as an Apparatus of Tensions | 169 |
| References | 171 |
| 6 Design as Debate: The Thing Beyond the Object | 175 |
| 6.1 Design as Debate: First Definition | 175 |
| 6.2 Nicolas Frespech: “Tell Me Your Secrets”. A Story of Censorship in Art | 177 |
| 6.2.1 Public Art and Private Contributions: Aesthetics of the Internet | 178 |
| 6.2.2 Offering a Space for Debate | 179 |
| 6.2.3 Lessons from Nicolas Frespech’s “Tell Me Your Secrets” | 181 |
| 6.3 Debate in Research: Designing the Demonstrator. | 183 |
| 6.3.1 The Epistemological Complexity of the Demonstrator | 184 |
| 6.3.2 A Feeling of Closure | 186 |
| 6.3.3 Nothing Is Forever: A Very Special Design, “Infra Design” | 188 |
| 6.3.4 A “Transparent” Design of “Open Objects” | 190 |
| 6.3.5 The Demonstrator in Action: Tests and Interpretation | 191 |
| 6.3.6 Lessons from Demonstrators: An Aesthetic of Bugs and a Crisis Communication | 193 |
| 6.4 Critical Design: Designers Questioning Their Contribution | 197 |
| 6.4.1 Design Exploration as a Step Beyond Sociology of Technologies | 197 |
| 6.4.2 Tobie Kerridge – The Biojewelry Project | 199 |
| 6.4.3 Designing for a Design Space “Out of Place” | 202 |
| 6.5 Conclusion: The “Thing” Reopening the “Object” | 203 |
| 6.5.1 Critical Strategies and the Incomplete Thing | 204 |
| 6.5.2 “Critical Technical Practice”: For a General Theory of Scientific Change | 205 |
| 6.5.3 Ethical and Political Stakes: Who Can Debate? | 208 |
| 6.5.4 From Objects to Things: The New Design Rationale. | 209 |
| References | 211 |
| 7 Conclusion: The Indiscipline of Design | 213 |
| 7.1 Introduction: Far Too Many Disciplines or Not Enough? | 213 |
| 7.2 Addition of Disciplines: The “Leonardesque Aspiration” | 214 |
| 7.2.1 What Comes First? Object or Activity? | 215 |
| 7.2.2 Hybridization of Concepts | 216 |
| 7.3 « Under-Determination » as the Design Episteme | 218 |
| 7.3.1 “Under-Determination” of Disciplines and “Integrative Thing” | 219 |
| 7.3.2 Pluri-Disciplinarity as the Foundation: Challenging the Subordination of Disciplines | 223 |
| 7.3.3 The Aesthetics of the Demonstrator | 224 |
| 7.4 Under-Determination in Action: Discovering the Generative Properties of the Integrative Thing | 225 |
| 7.4.1 Computer Sciences’ Under-Determination of Game Design Theories | 225 |
| 7.4.2 Museology and Human Sciences’ Under-Determination of Computer Sciences | 226 |
| 7.4.3 Human-Machine Interfaces’ Under-Determination of Information and Communication Sciences | 227 |
| 7.4.4 The Demonstrator as an Integrative Thing Between the Disciplines | 228 |
| 7.5 The Forgotten Discipline: The Humanities | 229 |
| 7.5.1 Science as a Generative Space of Fiction and Experience | 229 |
| 7.5.2 Lessons Learned Along the Way | 232 |
| 7.6 Conclusion: Contriving Observation and Analysis of the In-Discipline of Design | 237 |
| 7.6.1 The Methodological Benefit of the Integrative Thing | 237 |
| 7.6.2 The In-Discipline of Design | 238 |
| 7.6.3 Pluri-Disciplinarity in Practice | 243 |
| 7.6.4 Last Word on In-Discipline: The Grace of the Heterogeneous | 244 |
| References | 245 |