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Dear Victor

In my practice I employ design devices from one culture to educate members of another culture about their own cultural devices. This design education occurs in the context of settler Australian understandings which in the main exhibit a culture of denial in relation to the Indigenous population. 

 

Operating as much as possible from an Indigenous Australian standpoint in this work a number of features become apparent. The first cultural feature is that language itself is often designed to afford particular cultural operations and to direct very specific cognitive operations for a cultural group. Such language devices are useful and effective social tools and they are contrived and constructed as integral to the social being of a group. Language as social design may be seen as integral to 'traders languages' such as English because they focus on objects and construct the value and significance of objects as apparent in the example:

 

1.	A bat ...any object of this kind. This object is designed and may be seen as a particular comprised of a bungle of tropes - its woodiness; its shapeliness; its feel; its balance ... all of which have origins in design.

 

2.	Babe Ruth's bat ... a particular object that is clothed in social values because it signifies a significant social operation at a particular time

 

 

3.	Babe Ruth's feel for the bat ... the appreciated abstract - a social object- the skill that positions this particular object comprised of another bungle of tropes - the 'eye'; the balance; elegance; flow etc. -the abstract exceptional as a socially significant object in a context. The object within social narrative.

 

4.	to bat like Babe Ruth ...social devices that order appreciated social object/kinds - a clothing for abstract particulars that afford social operations concerning other batsmen kinds, ranking their skills and the value of their particular bats.

 

5.	the "Babe bat" a bat - object marketed by the signature of Babe - the faux clothing of another particular to attract social interest - the design and use of a particular style of social clothing to perform other social operations such as a transferrence from the desirable tropes of the abstract original.

 

Many objects can be substituted in the first place of this schema ... and in doing so many layers of particulars their tropes and the social clothing of these particulars are revealed. We normally apply this method to word-artefacts such as primitive with very interesting results. These investigations describe social operations through the use of artefacts-not interpret social meanings -which positions them well for design research.

 

In the context of my work a colonising culture requires quite divergent approaches because in many senses the social objects we address are of the fifth kind on the list above. Although this is not my area I believe that in the Globalising consumer context many design objects now occupy (or are designed to seek to occupy) the faux clothing social space-where possession of the object is constructed a desirable because of the way it socially situates the owner. 

 

From this it may be apparent that a considerable amount of design focuses of the design of faux clothes - significant areas of media communications fall into this design area as do many colonial social attitudes. Designing schemas for situating objects as desirable for consumers because ownership is equated to the identity that they desire is a feature of high order consumerism and also paradoxically deep neo-colonialism. Neither of these areas seems to have much concern for the consequences of such design manipulation, but research in this area has great potential because the possibility that designing and designs for social sustainability proceed along similar lines.