To design means to literally involve oneself in a practical
experience with signs. To design means to express, in various
signs, thoughts, feelings, and intentions pertinent to human
communication, as well as to project oneself in artifacts
appropriate to human practical experiences. In the remote age of
direct practical experiences, there was no design. The practice
of signs entails the possibility to transcend the present. In
nature, future means insemination; in culture, future is
in-signation: putting into sign, i.e., design. In its broadest
definition, design is the self-constitution of the human being
as an agent of change. This change covers the environment,
conceiving artifacts (tools included), shelter, clothing,
rituals, religious ceremonies, events, messages, interpretive
contexts, interactions, and more recently, new materials and
virtual realities. Shakespeare, who would have enjoyed the
intense fervor of our age, gave a beautiful description of
design: "...imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown"
(Midsummer Night's Dream). Although design contains elements
ensuing from experiences involving language, design is
essentially a non-verbal human activity. Its means of expression
and communication are grounded in the visual, but extend to
sound, texture, odor, taste, and combinations of these
(synaesthesia), including rhythm, color, and movement.
To the human being involved in practical experiences of
self-constitution, the realm of nature appears as given. In
counter-distinction and in retrospect, human nature appears as
designed. In some cases, design is an act of selection: something
is picked up from the environment-a stick, stone, plant-and
assigned an a-natural function through implementation: mark
territory, aid an activity, support a structure or the human
body, trap animals or humans, attack or defend against attack,
color skin or clothing. In other cases, selection is followed by
some form of framing, such as the frame of the ritual around a
totem pole, animal sacrifice, mourning, and celebrations of
fecundity and victory. Selection and framing are related to
efficiency expectations. They embody the hope for help from
magic forces and express willingness to pursue goals that
support the individual, family, and community. Between the
present of any experience and the future, the experience of
design bridges in the form of new patterns of interaction
(through tools, artifacts, messages), recurrences, and extensions
of consequences of human activity from the immediate to the
future.
The projection of biology into an experience of long-lasting
consequences implies elements of planning, no matter how
rudimentary, and expectations of outcome. It also leads to new
human relations in family-based interactions, education, shared
values, and patterns of reciprocal responsibility. Random sexual
encounters that reflect natural drives are not designs.
Awareness of reciprocal attraction, shared feelings, and
commitments extending well beyond the physical encounter can be
identified as a design component present even in sexuality.
Between the design component of sexual consequence of the
evolving human being and the design of offspring by selection of
a partner, by selection of genetic traits catalogued in semen
banks, by genetic splicing and mutation, and by all that is yet
to come upon us, there is a difference that reflects the altered
human pragmatic condition.
Of real interest here is how the future is captured in design.
Moreover, we want to know how it unfolds in practical
experiences of design by which human beings extend their reality
from here and now to then and there. In ways different from
language, design gives the human being another experience of time
and space. This experience is for the most part coherent with
that of language. But it can also make individuals constituting
themselves through design work aware of aspects of time that
the language experience misses altogether or makes impossible.
Designs are expressed in drawings and eventually complemented by
models testifying to the experiences of volume, texture, and
motion. The anticipated time dimension is eventually added in
simulations. Design liberates the human being from total
conditioning through language.
Within the convention of design, signs are endowed with a life of
their own, supported by the energy of the persons entering the
convention. This is how human symbolism, of confirmed vitality
and efficiency, is factually established. Symbols integrated in
human experience are given the life of the experience. The entire
heritage of rituals testifies to this. Today the word ritual is
used indiscriminately for any habitual preparation, from bathing
to watching TV to after-game celebrations. Initially, rituals
appeared as dynamic designs centered around episodes of life and
death. Their motivation lay in the practical experience; their
unfolding in connected interactions acquired an aesthetic
quality from the underlying design.
From the earliest known experiences, the implicit aesthetic
component is the optimizing element of the experience. This
aesthetic component extends perceived formal qualities found in
nature to the aesthetics of objects and activities in the realm
of human nature. The language of design expresses awareness of
these formal characteristics. Practical experiences display a
repetitive pattern: the optimal choice (of shapes, colors,
rhythms, sounds, movement) is always pleasing. The quality
through which pleasure is experienced is not reducible to the
elements involved, but it is impossible without them. Selection
is motivated by practical expectations, but guided by formal
criteria. Individuals involved in the earliest pragmatic
framework were aware of this. Other formal criteria make up a
generic background. One of the recurrent patterns of the
practical experience of design is to appropriate the formal
quality associated with what is pleasing in nature and to
integrate it in the optimal shaping of the future. This is how
the aesthetic dimension of human practical experiences resulted
within such experiences.
Notation systems (e.g., the quipu, representational drawings on
stone or on the ground, or hieroglyphics) that eventually became
writing can be classified as design, not lastly in view of their
aesthetic coherence. Only when rules and expectations defined by
verbal language take over notation does writing separate from
design and become part of the broader experience of language. We
can now understand why changes in verbal language, as it
constituted a framework for time and spatial experiences, were
not necessarily reflected in changes in design. By the time
literacy became possible, the underlying structure that led to
it was embodied in the use of language. This is not true, to the
same extent, in the practice of design. It is at this juncture
that design is ascertained as a profession, i.e., as a practical
domain with its own dynamics and goals. By no coincidence,
engineering design emerged in the context of the pragmatics
that began with building pyramids, ziggurats, and temples, and
culminated in the Industrial Revolution in the design of
machines. The broad premise of the Industrial Age is that
everything is a machine: the house, the carriage, stoves, the
contraptions used in literate education, schools, colleges,
institutions, art studios, even nature.
From a relatively focused and homogeneous field of practical
experiences within industrial society, design evolved, in the
civilization of illiteracy, as an overriding concern that
extended to many specialized applications: tool design, building
and interior design (architecture), jewelry design, apparel
design, textile design, product design, graphic design, and to
the many fields of engineering (including computer-aided
design), interactive media and virtual reality, as well as
genetic engineering, new materials design, event design (applied
to politics and various commodities), networking, and education.
Technologies, from primitive to sophisticated, supporting visual
languages made possible complexities for which the intuitive use
of visual expression is not the most effective. Consequently,
the scope of design-oriented practical experiences changed.
Design now affords more integrative projects of higher levels of
synaesthesia, as well as experiences involving variable
designs-that is, designs that grow together with the human being
self-constituted in practical interactions with the designed
world.
In the pragmatic framework based on the digital, design replaced
literacy more than any other practical experience has. The
results of design are different in nature from those of
literacy. As optimistic as one can become about a future not
bound to the constraints of literacy, it takes more to
comprehend the sense of design at a time when evolutionary
progress is paralleled by revolutionary change.