I might take Gunnar's point too far (?), but I am not convinced by the way "craft" is left aside in Terry's and Ken's posts.
Not that I claim that A design theory should integrate all practices AND/OR results of what goes under the umbrella of design (and I guess that I even think the opposite, but I am not yet clear about that, sorry).
I am pretty sure though that there is occasionally a specific thinking process attached to the way some people develop a form. Please note that I am NOT saying that going to the workshop and doing something out of some material IS thinking (hopefully, people think a bit when doing that, but that's not what I have in mind). Nor do I say that all people who do forms THINK in terms of form.
What I have in mind is close to the German notions of Gestaltung and Bildung, at least in the -original- way Goethe has studied morphogenesis and art.
I think that it is also the value of the german theoretical contribution to design, though it took and takes strange twists (at least from what I can read, which is not exhaustive) -but that is another issue.
I have studied a couple of cases that led me to think about that.
Following this track is another programme : it would suggest that one could make a critical/differential theory of design (rather then a positive model), explaining the uniqueness of some works. To make it maybe simpler the theory of litterature is not the theory of language.
I believe that there is -still- space for both (and, hopefully, others).
This brings me to Ken's Challenge (which I am not entering). I don't know what Alec R. had in mind, but I would suggest that, to a significant scale, some forms would fit with most of the criterias that you put up. Of course, this is valid if you do accept that the answer to the criterias might be non-verbal, I mean by that : in the same medium as the form itself, but can rely on the past experience of the receiver (and I think that you would agree on the possibility, after all, some authors have rather convincingly established the fact that a text is meaningfull also because it refers to other texts).
Here are the works that I have in mind :
- Manet's "Déjeuner sur l'herbe", which re-exmines 3 important issues in painting : what is the subject (of painting), what is objectivity, what is light,
- Mallarmé's "A throw of the diceŠ" which is a self explanatory form of what is poetical language,
- Dos Passos novel on New-york (I don't remember the title know), which reconsiders the formal problem of time<>language disruption in urban context,
- D. Vertov's "Man with the camera", which is still unmatched (in my opinion), and deals with the fundamentals of images and motion.
No product design, sorry (I have some idea on why, but I'm too late with other things to go on with that).
Happy Easter,
Jean
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