Incomplete ...

Mono No Aware and Ma

The human-environmental interactive dimensions of the design of narrative environments may be enhanced by a consideration of Japanese aesthetics expressed through design principles. Beginning in the Heian era (794-1185), the Japanese developed a distinct sense of aesthetic perception, including such experiences as mono no aware, ma and wabi sabi. Each of these notions carries a sense of understated aesthetic experience which guide perceptions and feelings toward the natural and the cultural environment or, dare we say, the ‘technological’ environment, as that which supplements the natural – both takes the place of (supplants) and adds to (augments). Furthermore, each of these aesthetics relies upon the participants’ keen sense of their surroundings, their mindful perception of their (own and shared) experience and the dynamic relationships between them.

Narrative Environments

“Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice.” (De Certeau, 1984:115)

A narrative environment is a many-dimensional, orientational interface. In one direction, it makes the world comprehensible and navigable. In another direction, it opens up to the challenges that the world presents or harbours. It may explain, but in doing so it also questions; it may settle yet it also unsettles; it may ground but it also un-grounds and re-grounds. It is here, there and elsewhere; it is now, then and of other times. Another way of seeking to understand its status is to say that a narrative environment is an argument about the real, in the real.

Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers

RELATED TERMS: Design History; Iconic Designs, Critical Designs

“Kenya Hara is a design icon.” (Design Intaba, 2004)

Design is often spoken of in terms of ‘iconic’ designs^[1]and ‘iconic’ designers. ‘Iconic’ designs are discussed frequently in terms of individual entities – ‘things’. ‘Iconic’ designers are individual, named designers – ‘persons’.

‘Iconic’ designs are most often product designs, fashion designs or architectural designs but now also include services and entire business practices or processes (Lees-Maffei, 2014; Bentley, 2020) ^[2].

‘Iconic’ designers are most often fashion designers, product designers and, more recently, digital interaction-experience designers, as listed, for example, in McDowell (2020), Abbattista (2018), Altrum (2023) and London Daily News (2024)^[3].

Technology, Writing, Design

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.

Deutscher Werkbund

RELATED TERMS: Arts and Crafts Movement; Bauhaus; Gesamtkunstwerk; Hochschule fur Gestaltung;

The Deutscher Werkbund was founded founded in Munich in 1907. It sought to bring together designers, manufacturers, writers and others in a progressive organisation that promoted modern design. The major difference between the Deutscher Werkbund and the Arts and Crafts movement was that the Werkbund, rather than simply rejecting machine production, sought to combine promotion of craft alongside industry. Acknowledging that craft and design influenced people’s lives, the Werkbund embraced technology in order to design objects and buildings that fulfilled the changing needs of society.

Promptography

RELATED TERMS: Artificial Intelligence (AI); Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Large Language Models; Photography; Pseudomnesia; Remembering: Mnemonics, Mnemotechne and Memory; [Historical Trauma; Intergenerational Trauma; Hauntology – Psychoanalysis]

Boris Eldagsen is a major proponent of a practice that he calls ‘promtography’ ^[1]. It differs from photography because, as Eldagsen explains, photography is writing with light and image creation with artificial intelligence is writing with verbal prompts that draw out digital visual content and visualisation techniques from prior image-making practices. Through his ‘promtography’, Eldagsen plays with the notion of pseudomnesia, a word formed from the Greek terms pseudes, meaning false, a-, meaning without, mnasthai, meaning to remember, and -ia, indicating a condition or a quality.

Design, Narratives, Pasts

RELATED TERMS: Design, Narratives, Futures

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) contended that we were finished with grand narratives or master narratives or narratives of mastery. Nevertheless, in 2017, George Monbiot contended that the political history of the second half of the 20th century could be summarised as the conflict between its two great narratives: the stories told, first, by Keynesian social democracy and, afterwards, by neoliberalism.

Some years prior to Monbiot’s statement, Bruno Latour (2009) had declared that the present historical situation may be defined by a complete disconnect between two great alternative narratives. The first concerns emancipation, detachment, modernisation, progress and mastery. The other, concerns attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care.

Alltäglichkeit

RELATED TERMS: The Everyday and Design; Alienation

Alltäglichkeit – Lefebvre, Lukács, Heidegger

Alltäglichkeit is a German word meaning everydayness. Michel Trebitsch (2014: 13) highlights a curious affinity between Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, by way of Heidegger, concerning the use of that term. The issue for design practices, from the perspective of Incomplete …, concerns a questioning of the lowly status assigned to everydayness, whether as inauthenticity, alienation or simply triviality. The everyday, it is held here, is the site wherein those practices that generate such distinctions as the ontological difference are enacted, questioned, un-done and re-done through their reflexive ‘transcendental empiricism’, to use a paradoxical phrase coined by Deleuze ^[1].

The young Lukács, in his pre-Marxist period, formulated the concept of Alltäglichkeit in 1911 in a passage of Metaphysik der Tragödie. For Lukacs, Alltäglichkeit designated the ‘trivial’, inauthentic life of the human being, the dreary, mechanical and repetitive unfolding of the everyday (Trebitsch, 2014: 13). Lukács contrasts this mode of living with an ‘authentic’ life in which the human being accedes to themselves through the work of art or, even better, turns themselves into a work of art.

Finnegans Wake (and Design)

RELATED TERMS: Design: Incomplete Conjectures

“The Wake, fin negans, begets only beginnings but invalidates all origins…” (Rabaté, 1984: 79)

In the understanding of design being constructed in the Incomplete … website, design can be grasped in four main modalities: as a set of professional practices, sub-divided by (industrial era and digital era) designed outputs; as academic discipline, partly organised by the divisions within professional practice but also open to potential inter-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity; as a major element of material cultural practices, or ‘the everyday’ and everyday interactions, perhaps even ‘the real’ as phenomenality; and as material public discourse, taking part in informing, teaching, governing and constituting publics as addressees, or ‘you’ as interpellant, respondent and inter-actant. The urban environment is saturated with the outputs of design practices which come together in various non-preconceived assemblages as material public culture. Design as academic (inter)discipline opens a space for reflection upon the relationship between design as professional practice and the public agency or actantiality of design assemblies or ecologies.

Fordism and Post-Fordism

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Remembering;

Introduction: Design practices, political-economic and socio-cultural conditions

Design practices are contextualised by the political-economic and the socio-cultural circumstances in which they are invented and deployed as specific responses that are considered appropriate to those circumstances. For example, design practices may take up different roles in a Fordist political-economy to a post-Fordist one. It is further argued, however, that design practices have the potential to break with those circumstances, to alter the context reflexively.