RELATED TERMS: Design and Theory: Total Design, Total Theory; Design Practice and Functionalism; Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Modernism; Modernity; Ontological Designing; Theoretical Practice;
It may be of value in thinking about the design of narrative environments, as a particular kind of, or approach to design, to consider it in relation to design history. It may also be worth considering whether in narrating a particular design history one is also articulating a design theory, a theory of what design is through a history of what one is arguing it has been.
For example, in writing their history of design, Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim (2021) highlight the problematic and violent legacies of design practices. The essays in the volume they have edited show how contemporary struggles to rework the material and conceptual logics of design practices are made difficult by the recognition that design practices and design thinking are deeply complicit in many structural systems of oppression which serve to materialise, perpetuate and disseminate power and privilege. Thus, Mareis and Paim (2021: 11) argue that,
“Historically, Western design as a professional and academic field has been a narrow and exclusive domain that often imagines itself as universal. Striving to define ideals and norms, the modernist lineage of design has proved largely ignorant of its all-pervasive anthropocentrism and exclusionary assumptions, projecting a vision of the world largely defined by a small number of mostly white, male, cisgender designers in the Global North.”
Lauren Williams (2019) takes a different tack in exploring the same terrain. She writes:
“the origins of neoliberalism, racism, and design, and benchmarks the confluence of their histories in the United States in the 1960s, a decade which reconfigured and drew these systems even closer together over the following four decades. These shifts preceded a rapid move toward neoliberal de-politicization and privatization; they paved the way for post-raciality (the notion that racism is extinct); and set up the advent of Design Thinking and the primacy of empathy, its operative element … Racism and design have always supported capitalism, but as neoliberalization drives innovations on both, post-raciality and Design Thinking emerge, respectively, as new formations.”
These are both histories and theories of design which bring to attention the ontological, epistemological and axiological, that is, philosophical, assumptions made by the historian-as-researcher-as-situated-theorist. Historical and theoretical narratives are intertwined, with the purpose, in this case, of showing the role of design both in world-building and, through those same processes, of simultaneously making exclusions from the world or worlds that are built, rendering many beings worldless, to use Vegso’s (2020) term.
Taking a different, but nonetheless similar approach to Mareis and Paim and Williams, Arturo Escobar (2013) states that serious inquiry into the history of design as a practice must engage with the trials and tribulations of capitalism and modernity, beginning with the emergence of industrialisation through to the current era of globalisation and pervasive technological development. Design has been a central political technology of modernity and the processes of modernisation. It was with the full development of the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century that industrial design came to prominence as a field and set of practices, the products of which were showcased at the Crystal Palace in 1851 and subsequent world fairs.
The Arts and Crafts movement sought to counteract the dominance of machine production in design practice during the second half of the 19th century. However, by the time modernism emerged in the 20th century design had become fully wedded to functionalism. The aim of designers, as ‘stylists’, was, in large part, to improve mass-produced artefacts through the use of new materials and techniques.
During the first half of the 20th century, with the Bauhaus and Ulm schools of design, as well as design schools in other parts of Western Europe, modern design sought to articulate a new view of the intersection of art (ars) and technology (techne) as it instilled new ways of living in the mass of the population through the design of lived environments (Lebenswelt, Umwelt) and the functionality of objects. Functionalism, however, Escobar concedes, carried the day.
As a design practice of the 21st century, the design of narrative environments stands among those design theorists and practitioners who are seeking different kinds of engagement, i.e. other than strictly functional, between design and the world at all levels, from experience to everyday life to infrastructures of all kinds and scales. In short, the design of narrative environments is part of design practice for a complex world. It seeks to contribute to people’s meaningful and environmentally responsible lives. It recognises that (narrative) environments, as part of the Earth’s geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere, are increasingly ‘designed’ or, at least, that such spheres have been modified and are modifiable through intentional and unintentional acts of design[1]
It has been argued by Escobar (2002) that the contemporary world is a great design failure. The question then becomes how we can design our way from that situation towards a more sustainable world, given that design itself is part of the problem to be addressed, as Papanek (1971) had already noted in the 1970s. This might be considered a paradox or an aporia. In this context, the design of narrative environments may be considered part of an endeavour which seeks to offer means to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing conditions into preferred ones, in Simon’s terms, as part of a shift from object-centred to human-centred, or rather, human-environment-centred, design, one which takes into account of the paradoxical or aporetic situation of design as complex professional practice, academic discipline, discursive practice and material culture.
The concept of ‘environment’ in the design of narrative environments is complex, encompassing different scales. This is partly because design itself is at once a global, regional, national and local phenomenon. This has been the case at least since the dramatic increase in intercontinental trade and travel in the fifteenth century (Fallan and Lees-Maffei, 2016: 1). Like the authors in the collection Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (Fallan and Lees-Maffei, 2016: 3) the notion of a ‘narrative environment’ aims to incorporate a recognition that the globalisation of design history takes place alongside, “the highly complex co-construction of national identity and material culture” (Fallan and Lees-Maffei, 2016: 3). In this context, “Design extends to everything that is planned and/or made” (Fallan and Lees-Maffei, 2016: 3). Therefore, design history enjoys a broad area of enquiry. It is not limited to high or official culture nor is it confined to popular culture.
Notes
[1] Perhaps, rather, it recognises that design practices modify the dynamics of the litho-bio-hydro-cryo-pedo-atmo-geo-magneto-sphere.
References
Edensor, T. (2002) National identity, popular culture and everyday life. Oxford, UK: Berg.
Escobar, A. (2013). Notes on the ontology of design [Draft paper]. Available from http://sawyerseminar.ucdavis.edu/files/2012/12/ESCOBAR_Notes-on-the-Ontology-of-Design-Parts-I-II-_-III.pdf [Accessed 4 September 2016].
Fallan, K. and Lees-Maffei, G. (eds) (2016) Designing worlds: National design histories in an age of globalization. New York, NY: Berghan.
Fry, T., Dilnot, C. and Stewart, S. C. (2015) Design and the question of history. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
Mareis, C. and Paim, N. (2021) Design struggles: An attempt to imagine design otherwise, in Design struggles: Intersecting histories, pedagogies, and perspectives. Amsterdam, NL: Veliz, pp. 11–22.
Papanek, V. J. (1971) Design for the Real World; Human Ecology and Social Change. New York, Pantheon Books.
Vegso, R. (2020) Worldlessness after Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Williams, L. (2019) The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism, Design and Culture. Routledge, 11(3), pp. 301–321. doi: 10.1080/17547075.2019.1656901.
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