A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Applied Virtuality
On the Problematics Around Theory and Design
This article discusses certain issues that arise around the quest for a theory of design. It is engaged with the conditions and frameworks behind such a theory. Seeking to approximate design and science by a search for a methodology makes it quite obvious that the perhaps most abundant notion of design, design as problem-solving, falls short of important aspects. Without a respective architectonics, a set of systematically related methods alone could not legitimize normative actions (even if the performed normativity may be a factual one only). It could not do so other than as a specific form of dogmatism. Here, the difficult relation between design and theory becomes relevant: Would design as a science be theorized as one of the so-called natural sciences (in search for “natural design principles”)? Or as one of the positive sciences (in search for its “formal ways of operation”)? Or as one of the humanities disciplines (engaging within the difficult grounds of “semantic evaluation”)? Or even as a kind of politics (striving to integrate divergent intentional configurations)? This article suggests conceiving of design as an integral vector among any of these, and it tries to formulate candidate principles for theorizing it. Departing from a reference to the notion of “a thinking of the outside” as a kind of rationality that is capable of organizing topologies and networks, beyond the reign of the Cartesian grid, we identify “design” in addition to the more familiar guides of our thinking, namely “operationalization” and “description,” as an interesting third pole. With that aim, the philosophical concepts of the virtual and the differential are introduced as eminently practical figures of thought. The article concludes with the emphasis that design is, constitutively so, a regulated practice of and negotiation of and for prognosis.
Applied Virtuality
On the Problematics Around Theory and Design
This article discusses certain issues that arise around the quest for a theory of design. It is engaged with the conditions and frameworks behind such a theory. Seeking to approximate design and science by a search for a methodology makes it quite obvious that the perhaps most abundant notion of design, design as problem-solving, falls short of important aspects. Without a respective architectonics, a set of systematically related methods alone could not legitimize normative actions (even if the performed normativity may be a factual one only). It could not do so other than as a specific form of dogmatism. Here, the difficult relation between design and theory becomes relevant: Would design as a science be theorized as one of the so-called natural sciences (in search for “natural design principles”)? Or as one of the positive sciences (in search for its “formal ways of operation”)? Or as one of the humanities disciplines (engaging within the difficult grounds of “semantic evaluation”)? Or even as a kind of politics (striving to integrate divergent intentional configurations)? This article suggests conceiving of design as an integral vector among any of these, and it tries to formulate candidate principles for theorizing it. Departing from a reference to the notion of “a thinking of the outside” as a kind of rationality that is capable of organizing topologies and networks, beyond the reign of the Cartesian grid, we identify “design” in addition to the more familiar guides of our thinking, namely “operationalization” and “description,” as an interesting third pole. With that aim, the philosophical concepts of the virtual and the differential are introduced as eminently practical figures of thought. The article concludes with the emphasis that design is, constitutively so, a regulated practice of and negotiation of and for prognosis.
Applied Virtuality
On the Problematics Around Theory and Design
X.media.publishing
Konsorski-Lang, Silke (editor) / Hampe, Michael (editor) / Bühlmann, Vera (author)
2010-01-18
12 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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