Our way of thinking/acting is to design. Call that a discipline when
you want. It finds expression or embodiment in various forms:
graphics, architecture, perhaps even politics and management if we
believe some. That was the point of my example from architecture, a
field (there you are, I'm hedging and notice the agrarian nature of
the metaphors in English) which other designers seem to want to
exclude from discussions of design as much as architects wish to have
their field considered as different from (and, of course, superior
to) design.
It seems to me, from what I see on this list, our problem is that we
do not even begin to agree about what design is: indeed we maintain
mutually incompatible and inconsistent positions. And that problem
seems to me to come about through differences in intention in those
who study our field: those who are designers and are interested in
understanding what they do; and those who bring other criteria and
try to understand design within (or, in bad cases, force it into)
their criteria, or who are interested in evaluating the outcome in
preference to understanding the way of thinking that the outcome
derives from. This is often done in ways that run counter to the way
of thinking that designers are involved in and leads to much of the
debate on this list, which is (to my mind) valuable only insofar as
it shows the incompatibility of positions and views (again).
I'm not sure how the above helps in the current debate about
disciplines, especially regarding etymologic arguments, except in
pointing out yet again that (I understand) design is a way of
thinking that (often) produces behaviours that produce artefacts from
the rather ill defined. As such, it's not really a discipline, but
may generate things that can be treated as disciplines. This is, of
course, in contrast to those who bring criteria, critiques and
intentions from outside, for whom it is probably important that
design can be treated as made up of disciplines, so there's something
for them to get their teeth into.
Ranulph
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