RELATED TERMS: Design, Entwurf, Entwerfen
One area to be explored and developed in understanding design practices in the 21st century are the relationships among the notions of writing, technology and design. To what extent is the understanding of designing and designs aided by considering them as practices of writing and as bodies of writing, on the one hand, and as practices of technologising and ecologies of technologies, on the other hand. Equally, how are the understandings of writing and of technology aided or transformed by construing them as (forms of) designs and designing.
The contention is that much of what is discussed under the notion of technology and much of what is discussed under the notion of writing are issues that are of great significance for discussions of design practices; and, indeed, vice versa, discussions of technology and writing could be transformed by considering them in the light of issues that are pertinent to design practices.
There are two initial orientations to this concatenation of technology-writing-design. The first is towards Derrida’s transformation of Heidegger’s notion of technology into writing (Moati, 2014: xiv-xv).
The other is towards Barthes (2013: 99) complex analogisation of writing, technology and (fashion) design, emphasising the inter-related technologies of paper and ink while evoking the technologising and textualising of the body through clothing, in the following quote:
“If today you open a history of our literature, you should find there the name of a new classical author: Coco Chanel. Chanel does not write with paper and ink (except in her leisure time), but with material, with forms and with colours”
(Barthes, 2013: 99)
Designers do not ‘write’ in any simple sense nor do writers ‘design’ in any simple sense, although Oswald and Wachsmann (2015) suggest that writing can be and has been thought of and practised as a design discipline [1], but both designers and writers use existing technologies to create further technologies in an ongoing somatic introjection and exosomatic projection by means of which a technological ‘fabrication’ of cultures (cultural fabrics) takes place.
To pursue Barthes’ analogy between (fashion) design and writing, consider what Anne Cranny-Francis (2008) has to say about clothing and ‘wearable technologies’. She contends that clothing, similarly to jewellery, is a technology that facilitates our existence and gives shape to our lived experience. Such technologies take part in creating the the particular form of the society in which we live and of creating us as particular kinds of socialised beings.
However, she cautions, there is a more onto-political meaning of technology that arises in these circumstances of co-design and co-genesis: techno-genesis as socio-genesis as anthropo-genesis. The ‘ontological’ aspect of this co-creation is explored in the work of Heidegger through his discussions of technology and the potentialities for human existence to which technology gives rise, even if his particular (negative, regressive) view of modern technology may be rejected. It is from the work of Michel Foucault, however, that a more political understanding may be derived, through his discussions of the constitution and the distribution of power. From such perspectives, technologies can be seen as elements of inter-related practices, which are at once normative, disciplinary and coercive, that position human beings to be and to act in particular ways, conditioning, and perhaps limiting, their potentialities. An in-depth discussion of these issues can be found in Steven Dorrestijn’s (2012) thesis, ‘The design of our own lives‘, in which he elaborates a philosophy of technical mediation and subjectivation.
Thus, clothing, as one example of a socio-cultural technology, can be seen to operate in this onto-political sense. Clothing has, for example, in the past served to identify or define the class, gender, ethnicity, age and sexuality of the wearers, locating them within specific sub-groups, thereby creating a sense of in-group membership or a sense of out-group alienation in the wearers. For Cranny-Francis, the enhancement of clothing’s technical capabilities through digital means, a practice in which she is interested, should make us even more aware of its status as a technology, in utilitarian as well as onto-political senses, and thus of its potential positioning of us as social subjects. The technologies, or rather the inter-related ecologies of technologies, available within, and constitutive of, a society determine the possibilities and the potentials for (human and other) being within that society and in that society’s relations, for example, to its ecological and geopolitical environments.
Thus, Cranny-Francis concludes, wearable technologies such as clothes and jewellery, while having great potential for enhancing human being and human society also have the potential to become a form of ordering and governing which situates human subjects within processes or practices that suppress individual creativity and being. It might be added that this is not an either/or situation but a both/and situation: technologies, as wearable or as other forms of designs, have the potential to reveal new possibilities for being-in-the world while at the same time positioning subjects within a determinate social, political, axiological, logical order within particular (limiting) processes and practices. This may be the paradox of design as technology in the (ongoing) ‘writing’ of a (fabricated) material cultural text(ure).
Notes
[1] Otl Aicher, graphic designer and cofounder of the Hochschule für Gestaltung, HfG (Ulm School of Design), wrote that the HfG’s idea of “writing as a design discipline equivalent to graphic design, product design or construction” was an innovation beyond what was practised at the Bauhaus. The establishment of the Information Department meant that writing was instituted as a discipline on a par with two- and three- dimensional visual design (Oswald and Wachsmann, 2015).
References
Barthes, R. (2013) The Language of fashion. Edited by A. Stafford and M. Carter. Translated by A. Stafford. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.p.99
Cranny-Francis, A. (2008) ‘Fabric(ated) Ontologies: the biopolitics of smart design in clothing and jewellery’, Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/94760518/Fabric_ated_Ontologies_the_biopolitics_of_smart_design_in_clothing_and_jewellery (Accessed: 30 January 2024).
Dorrestijn, S. (2012) The design of our own lives: Technical mediation and subjectivation after Foucault [PhD thesis]. University of Twente. Available at: http://members.tele2.nl/s.dorrestijn/downloads/Dorrestijn_Design_our_own_lives.pdf (Accessed: 9 June 2016).
Moati, R. (2014) Derrida/Searle: deconstruction and ordinary language. Translated by T. Attanucci and M. Chun. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Oswald, D. and Wachsmann, C. (2015) Writing as a design discipline: the Information Department of the ULM School of Design and its impact on the School and beyond, AIS Design Journal, 3(6), pp. 87–106.
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