Dear Francois, Juris, Norm and Chris,
Its fascinating how we use things in different ways from how they were
intended. (e.g. leather polish works well to repair scratched DVDs). This
is not as an 'afterlife' but as a real use that it outside the control and
common prehensions of design teams.
An area I researched a few years ago was how designed artefacts were
differently purposed by users - as design tools - to support the design of
different aspects of their lives (see below).
The huge realm of practical acts of design by users (e.g. realigning a
boat's bent mast by driving a fourwheeldrive over it, designing ways of
growing ones' own food, etc ) is not yet well addressed in the literature -
and would be good fun to explore!
Best wishes
Terry
T. Love (2003) - Customers' Use of Products as Design Tools. In Proceedings
of the 6th Asian Design Conference. Tsukuba. Preprint at
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/product_design_tools.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Francois-Xavier Nsenga
Sent: Thursday, 23 August 2007 12:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Instigation Design
Dear Juris,
In my previous post, I proposed four loci where the activity of design
occurs as an instigation to design further, eventually. You responded with
the following suggestion:
"It may be reasonable to propose a "fifth place" to find artifacts.
My anthropological understanding of the term compels me to suggest an
"afterlife", if you will, where the artifact comes to serve yet more
purposes unintended by its maker or user (ie the historical or
archaeological uses). I mention this not to be facetious, but to highlight
the 'green' part of the original post by expanding the context a bit, to
perhaps reconceptualize the artifact's "life cycle (...)"
You are absolutely right but, to me, there is no "afterlife" of whatever.
What there is, in fact, is just a continuum of different phases of existence
(or use) under respectively appropriate forms or formats. So, to be more
precise, you'd rather say: "after a certain kind of use" instead of
"afterlife".
If you agree with this above, then, there wouldn't be a "fifth place", for
the fourth in my proposed categorization includes what you consider to be a
fifth. Artifacts found and used for historical and archeological purposes,
those exhibited in museum or contained in all other cultural places, they
are in fact in one of the twelve phases in the use process of artifacts. We
named this phase "disposal" (in the sense of orderly
arrangement) at the "end" of one cycle use, till resumption of some other
next use cycles...
Yours,
Francois
Montreal
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