Hello listers
It may pay in all this talk about design as discourse to separate out the different ways in which discourse might be used in relation to design rather than simply pulling in an admitteldy slippery term (discourse) and using it in all sorts of relations with design. Some ideas:
Foucauldian discourse and the archaeology of knowledge uses a sense of discourse, e.g. medical discourse, psychaitric discourse, always in relation to insitutions, power ideology), and objects (which are formed and made available in certina ways to people). It is always helpful I've found to keep in mind this historical and insitutional dimension of discourse in Foucault's work. this is also tru in a differnt way for Bourdieu's work on habitus, field, etc, concepts which have value where insitutions are being examiend for the ways they work. Keeping this institutional and ideological sense in mind will limit the applications discourse might have to discussion design but it mght, for example, be used (as in cultural studies and other general fields inspired by Foucault's wrk) to look at the ideolgical function of designed objects in society and how they contribute to fashioning certain identities and exlcsing others etc. This as been developed some what by the Open University crowd (Stuart Hall etc) who use a very useful visual 'metaphor' of the circuit of culture to examine the role of designers, objects, etc. And see Guy Julier's bok on the culture of design. So this is one area where discourse in one sense might prove useful for exmaining how design works.
There is a more linguistic sense of discourse, which has recently embraced the visual, which looks at the production and reproduction of society, objects, etc., on the basis of micro-analysis of text and image. This kind of discourse analysis can be useful for looking a how talk and representation of design is 'done' so to speak on a day to day basis. This micro analysis of discourse (text + image) is then used to connect to broader social and ideological contexts in different ways by people like James Gee, Norman Fairclough (the Lancaster crowd), etc., But the beginning of wisdom is the micro-analysis. So this is another sense of discourse which could prove useful (or not) to understanding how design functions.
Some of the recent posts which talk about design as discourse appear to be proposing something like design being merely rhetorical - somewhat close the perhaps Derridean notion that the text is everything. While this kind of notion of design as discourse might pay off for cultural studies and for certain kinds of investigation of the power of style, design etc., it will exclude taking into consideration the material domain of design - and something like the social construction of technology seems to do a better job of keeping both the material, historical and discursive in play when looking at designed/engineered objects. Again, what I'm proposing is to consider again what we want from this notion of discourse in relation to design. What kind of work do we want it to do. There are different ways of scoping discourse as I suggest above) and some f these will have pay off for what design s rying to achieve. There is then no question of design as discourse being wrong or right or miscontrued - it is rater a question of clarifying what sens of discourse we are using and then looking at what we want to clarify if anything) in relation to design and then using the appropriate hammer, wrench or spanner (to paraphrase Witgenstein) to clarify the games that are played in the particualr form of life we want to know more about
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