Objects and Events

RELATED TERMS: Being and Doing (and Having); Things; Time

It is argued that a design ‘is’ what it ‘does’. Although constituted by materiality in the form of ‘objects’ or ‘things’, a design ‘is’ an ‘event’; it ‘occurs’, in a particular place, at a particular time for particular people.

Carlo Rovelli notes that, “The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. They are — if they are at all — in a where but also in a when. They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events.”

It is this recognition that underlies the understanding of design practices as event-making: the composition of ‘things’ (materials, objects, bodies, persons) which choreograph a temporal ‘when’ (through narrativity) and a spatial ‘where’ (through environmentality), thereby constituting a deictic and indexical field that positions human subjects somewhere for sometime, an experience from which they draw meaning and inferences for continued inter-action, but not ‘conclusions’, as actants (Greimas) – interpretants (Peirce).

References

Rovelli, C. (2018) The Order of time. Translated by E. Segre and S. Carnell. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.