About Us
In his reflections on the ethics of industrial design, Vilém Flusser noticed that, until recently, design meant enabling the production of useful objects. And for an object to be useful, it should be “in accord with scientific facts” 1 1 Etyka w projektowaniu przemysłowym?, przeł. P. Wiatr, „Kultura Współczesna” nr 4 (92)/2016, s. 187–188 [V. Flusser, “The Ethics of Industrial Design?” [in:] “The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design,” transl. A. Mathews , London 1999, p. 66]. ↩︎ and “provide the person who used it with an experience.” 2 2 Ibid. ↩︎ In an article published in 2014 under the telling title: “Design Away,” design studies theoretician Cameron Tonkinwise proposes to actively “design things out of existence” – i.e. undesigning them in such a way so that they seize to exist, following a radical method of sustainable design. 3 3 C. Tonkinwise, “Design Away” [in:] “Design as Future Making,” ed. S. Yelavich, B. Adams, Bloomsbury, London, New York 2014, p. 198. ↩︎ Between the stories of designing out of lack (lack of beautiful, useful, solid, available objects) and designing for excess (the excess of things in general), there is a whole spectrum of strategies and narratives about the role of design and its place in culture, the economy, the environment, technology, and everyday life.
Design is an interdisciplinary activity, which means not only that it requires a variety of competences from its adepts, but also that high hopes are placed upon it to solve numerous problems: from optimizing production and increasing the gains of businesses, to organizing life conditions for the masses, guaranteeing everyday comfort and safety, beauty and pleasure, to gaining independence from the natural environment, or, on the contrary, trying to save it. Solving these problems generates new ones – and design itself, to some extent, shall be held liable for, among others, the overproduction and exploitation found both in a 19th-century factory as well as in contemporary rare earth mines; it is responsible for creating artificial needs, ostentatious consumption and extreme inequalities as a result of corporate enrichment; unsustainable construction and anonymous dwelling spaces; creating solutions for only half of the world’s population, as in the case of car seats and seatbelts; for greenwashing and the Great Pacific garbage patch. Contrary to Goethe’s Mephistopheles, design is “part of that power which eternally wills good and eternally works evil”: by providing safety and hygiene, it generates heaps of single-use, disposable waste, and by enabling us to order food to our homes, it contributes to creating precarious work conditions and producing even more waste.
These paradoxes reveal some densely woven nets of codependences between various actors, and within these networks, design plays an important role. It arises among consumers, workers, technology, politics, the environment and the extraction of resources, waste management, economy, psychology, art and culture. This is why design theory should not focus exclusively on a designer’s work, but it should also embrace all these factors, forces and contexts which affect not only the design process, but also the phases of implementation, sale, use, and disposal that follow after the blueprint leaves the designer’s computer.
Our publication series titled simply “Design” (“Projektowanie”) is devoted to this entanglement that weaves design together within knots of various activities and forces. Its aim is to provide a broad platform to reflect on design in the context of contemporary challenges. The papers published in “Projektowanie” (“Design”) will shed light on various perspectives and will present design through the lens of diverse disciplines and fields of knowledge that simultaneously shape and are shaped by design. Such interdisciplinary approach is part of both our tradition and our current programme at the Faculty of Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, which sources from the achievements of the Experimental and the Artistic And Research Units of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw 4 4 J. Gola, Artistic and Research Unit of the Academy of Fine Arts,Proceedings of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) Symposium 2013 „BEYOND THE LIMITS OF MAN” 23-27 September, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland J.B. Obrębski and R. Tarczewski (eds.), www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iass/piass/2013/00002013/00000022/art00003?crawler=true, accessed: 1 November 2024. ↩︎ , which, together with an inspiration by Ulm’s Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) programme, has, since the beginning, integrated research and study with education in the fields of design and technology while nurturing sensitivity and artistic courage and anchoring its theoretical reflection in the contexts of the humanities and the social and economic studies. Being aware of the designers’ responsibility for the environment and recognizing the influence design has on human interrelations, we want to provide a platform for reflection to better understand the place and role of design in contemporary world.