Author, Authority

RELATED TERMS: Intertextuality; Intersemioticity

In the context of design practices, the concept of authorship is troubled, in part because the purity of the kind of ‘authorship’ that pertains to the writer of a book, as sole author, and the kind of ‘authority’ which accrues to such an author over time, does not often apply to design practice, where elements are borrowed from existing materials and designs and often involves collaborations of various kinds.

The practice of design is, more often that not, re-design. [It might be argued that, retrospectively, the same applies to literary authors, as indeed Barthes did, in that they partake in a broader intertextuality in which and against which their specific text takes shape and differs].

Author is perhaps not a good metaphor for designer. Author and designer differ radically. Perhaps the notion of ‘bricoleur’ may be more appropriate, a terms used by Claude Levi-Strauss for cultural production, recently picked up by Etzio Manzini.

As Susanne Hauser (2017: 50) comments, in discussing the concept of the architect as authoring designer and as artist: “Beginning fifty years ago, the idea of authorship has tended to focus on the elimination or vanishing of the author, rather than on his or her presence or endurance.”

References

Hauser, S. (2017) ‘Design/Entwurf: Observations’, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 21(1), pp. 45–51. doi: 10.1017/S1359135517000136