Design: The fourth autonomy

The following is a quote from Tom Gleason on the blog Speak Up. It expresses the sense that I have about the direction design must take, or at least “a design” that can create some positive formative change or praxis. Rather than perpetuating the spectacle in which we currently live, design can be a “fourth autonomy”, bringing together the sometimes disparate autonomies of art, science and morality.

What does it mean to have an autonomous exploration and development of design? Most of us would agree that design is not “art”, so the autonomous development of design is not one with that of art. Most of us would say that design occupies a place that encompasses, touches, or resides within science, morality, AND art.

So the question is, what is the goal of autonomous design? It is not one with modern art. It is not simply science or morality. If it is all three, then how can it be autonomous? It would simply be a description of the combination of these three realms wherever they happened to fuse in a specific context.

Does design play the role of a fourth autonomy, helping to keep the three realms in balance? Constantly correcting, stressing science when life is becoming too aesthetic, and art when science instrumentalizes people? This possibility would indicate that the purpose of design studies is to understand and coordinate the development of these three basic spheres of rationality. Developing the knowledge and the means of these balancing powers is the responsibility of design studies.

That is an interesting possibility, and closely relates design studies to the study of rationality. It can’t even come close to being approached until the focus is on theory in whatever way it manifests, not production based on prior assumptions of what forms production should take. There is no picture I can make that will inspire this kind of thinking to move forward. If there was a diagram or something, sure, but I’m afraid the reader’s emphasis would still be on aesthetics, so we need to break entirely out of our current conception of design by rejecting it completely and completely rebuilding our understanding of design, this time from communication to design (rather than from design to communication).

That’s just a snippet. I recommend reading the discussion, where his thoughts above are further contextualized. For my part, this thesis seeks to address these concerns by looking at the autonomies of art (visual artifacts), science (linguistics, anthropology, semiotics et al), and morality (philosophy) as tools of the “fourth autonomy” of design.