On Making
I'm a few days out from the fabulous third Design Engaged, so well-organized by Andrew Otwell, Jenn Bove, Boris Anthony and Mouna Andraos. I've talked to so many people at the event about things grand and banal, and now, I've reimmersed in school's more theoretical issues of critique, history and theory.
All of these things leave me thinking about the nature of design as it seemed to be defined by the community surrounding Design Engaged.
There is a real privileging of Making, to the extent that I feel I should capitalize the word. Making includes building something, prototyping, manufacturing a product. Making seems to be particularly valued when it results in something being not only prototyped but manufactured. It relies on tools and materials. Other things go into Making, like sketching, molding, and wiring. But Making does not seem to include writing, researching, or interpreting.
Design is the endeavor of form and forming. What to design and how to do it is the primary, vital question of the designer. Form takes place not only by work in three dimensions and by machines, but through conversation, interpretations and argument, by pencils and words and feedback. Since cybernetics, design has taken on networks and feedback, as a correcting mechanism, to define design problems, to introduce possibilities of the agency of objects.
Design can encompass the forming of things that never get built. This is the realm of sketch, drawing, rendering, model, maquette. All of these involve some manner of imagination, conception, figuration. Their formation may may be pinned up on a wall to be critiqued, may see their way into stacks of construction drawings or business plans. It may also stop at any moment: left in a sketchbook or hard drive, balled up after being spit from a plotter, left in a pile of old models, rejected in a competition, turned down by a client. If the instances of design only matter in their manufacture or construction, much -- or even most -- of design and architectural history must be written off.
The history of design since the founding of the Bauhaus (1918-1933) tackles the questions of building and making within a theoretical and built context. In the education and work of designer, there are many stops on the way: learnings of color and form, practice in a specific field, discovery of how all the fields converge to make the work of art. But also, this same trajectory tries to make sense of itself -- to perform, to write, to photograph, to document, to share.
Does Making leave out interpretation or sensemaking? If it excludes these activities, what does that say in turn for the nature of design? And where does it leave those of us for whom design involves these other activities?
I'm reminded of an e.e. cummings poem:
All of these things leave me thinking about the nature of design as it seemed to be defined by the community surrounding Design Engaged.
There is a real privileging of Making, to the extent that I feel I should capitalize the word. Making includes building something, prototyping, manufacturing a product. Making seems to be particularly valued when it results in something being not only prototyped but manufactured. It relies on tools and materials. Other things go into Making, like sketching, molding, and wiring. But Making does not seem to include writing, researching, or interpreting.
Design is the endeavor of form and forming. What to design and how to do it is the primary, vital question of the designer. Form takes place not only by work in three dimensions and by machines, but through conversation, interpretations and argument, by pencils and words and feedback. Since cybernetics, design has taken on networks and feedback, as a correcting mechanism, to define design problems, to introduce possibilities of the agency of objects.
Design can encompass the forming of things that never get built. This is the realm of sketch, drawing, rendering, model, maquette. All of these involve some manner of imagination, conception, figuration. Their formation may may be pinned up on a wall to be critiqued, may see their way into stacks of construction drawings or business plans. It may also stop at any moment: left in a sketchbook or hard drive, balled up after being spit from a plotter, left in a pile of old models, rejected in a competition, turned down by a client. If the instances of design only matter in their manufacture or construction, much -- or even most -- of design and architectural history must be written off.
The history of design since the founding of the Bauhaus (1918-1933) tackles the questions of building and making within a theoretical and built context. In the education and work of designer, there are many stops on the way: learnings of color and form, practice in a specific field, discovery of how all the fields converge to make the work of art. But also, this same trajectory tries to make sense of itself -- to perform, to write, to photograph, to document, to share.
Does Making leave out interpretation or sensemaking? If it excludes these activities, what does that say in turn for the nature of design? And where does it leave those of us for whom design involves these other activities?
I'm reminded of an e.e. cummings poem:
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
I wasn't at the conference, so there is probably some misinterpretation to be done here, but why should that get in the way of a conversation, right?
Is there some kind of hylomorphic divide at work here? I'm inclined to suggest that interpretation and research are inseparable from making in many cases, I'm thinking primarily from the point of view of artistic practice (particularly although not exclusively electronic, interactive, digital... ) as a production of interpretive or critical machines. In the process of making is design not performed dialogically with the materials at hand?
Another way of putting it might be that the making of a piece is surely one solution to a perceived problem if you like, an interpretation of a situation made concrete. This involves interpretation, research, design, redesign, failures and occasionally produces something that for a while can be considered adequately complete.
If making is thought of as a kind of artisanal production then its perhaps easier to separate making from design but more difficult, perhaps impossible, to dissociate design from making.
What's the context for this separating out of design and making, it seems like your referring to the production and manufacture of consumables?