Mediums in Design seminar, for a symmetrical anthropology of design – 2022
The “Mediums in Design” seminar is co-led by CY Design Research, Dicen-IDF and the Jean Prouvé Chair of Design at CNAM. It invites members of the design research community to contribute to the understanding of design as an ecosystem made of humans and non-humans, of living and non-living, structuring and structured by practices and achievements.
Design? A conversation with materials
In the 1980s, design research initiated a turn that brought back the materiality of design practices to the forefront. Among the founders of this research, Donald Schön (1992) describes the designer’s activity as a “conversation with materials”: for him, materials are as much words, speeches that we play with and return to, as drawings that allow prefiguring future architectures or objects.
Agency of design mediums and embodied practices
Design research has also largely drawn inspiration from anthropologists of material cultures (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008; Ingold, 2007) who draw attention to what the medium does to the designer and focus on embodied design practices.
Physical but also social and cultural properties
This research now meets both Anglo-Saxon media studies (McLuhan, 1965; Mitchell & Hansen, 2010; Hayles, 2004) and German philosophy of media (Kittler et al., 2018; Mersch et al., 2018) and French-speaking research in information and communication sciences (Jeanneret, 2000; Bonaccorsi & Flon, 2014).
Indeed, since the famous “the medium is the message”, we realize how the support is not transparent behind the message, or to put it in semiotic terms (Fontanille, 2015) the plane of expression does not disappear behind the plane of content. Even the digital presents a sensible materiality that must be taken into consideration. In France, it is the historians of the book (Chartier et al., 2001), of writing (Christin, 2009) and researchers in information and communication sciences (Jeanneret, 2008) who understood the importance of returning to the embodiments, metamorphoses, legitimations, and circulations of what makes mediation between our psychic reality and the external world, as well as what creates bonds between us.
Mediation and mediality
More broadly still, it is a theory of mediality that meets design theories: indeed, to change the world, one must not be completely caught in this world. We need an in-between, spaces and objects of mediation, which allow both connecting and creating distance to compose and recompose alternatives to what surrounds us (Guillory, 2010; Gentes, 2017).
A history of mediums
Thus, research focused on design mediums is interested not only in the agency of materials but also in how the designer makes meaning with materials that are inscribed in a culture and a history of their implementation (Greenberg, 1971). Wood, for example, not only presents chemical and mechanical properties, it is also inscribed in a culture of wood: the social values associated with it, and in the traditions of its use: for utilitarian objects but also for sculptures.
The role of mediums and the relationship maintained between the designer and these mediums also evolve over the temporality of the project and that of use (Levy, 2020). On one hand, the variety and plurality of the prototype’s functions within the project makes it a medium at the heart of the project’s deployment. On the other hand, appropriation is a moment of evolution of meaning.
What mediums for today’s design?
Today, design no longer deals only with wood or plastic, but with the living, our ways of being together, and the technologies that organize our lives. From earth to AI, there is more than one step and for contemporary designers colossal challenges. What are the characteristics of these new design materials? What are the working methods of these new mediums? How to train for these new design materials?
The “Mediums in Design” seminar invites those who question their practices, who interrogate their methods, to join the research community formed by CY Design Research, Dicen-IDF and the Jean Prouvé Chair of Design CNAM to exchange on these questions.
The journal Sciences du design is associated with this work: we will invite authors who have addressed these questions to present their paper.
Bibliography
Bonaccorsi, J., & Flon, É. (2014). La « variation » médiatique: D’un fondamental sémiotique à un enjeu d’innovation industrielle. Les Enjeux de l’information et de la communication, n° 15/2(2), 3–10.
Chartier, R., Collectif, & Cavallo, G. (2001). Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental (Édition : [Ed. augm. d’une bibliogr. rev. et augm.]). Seuil.
Christin, A.-M. (2009). L’Image écrite ou La déraison graphique (Enlarged édition). Flammarion.
Fontanille, J. (2015). Formes de vie. Presses universitaires de Liège. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulg.2207
Gentes, A. (2017). The In-Discipline of Design: Bridging the Gap Between Humanities and Engineering (1st ed. 2017 edition). Springer.
Greenberg, C. (1971). Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Beacon Press.
Guillory, J. (2010). Genesis of the Media Concept. Critical Inquiry, 36(2), 321–362. https://doi.org/10.1086/648528
Hayles, N. K. (2004). Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis. Poetics Today, 25(1), 67–90.
Ingold, T. (2007). Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127
Jeanneret, Y. (2000). Y a-t-il (vraiment) des technologies de l’information ? Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
Jeanneret, Y. (2008). Penser la trivialité: Volume 1, La vie triviale des êtres culturels. Hermes Science Publications.
Kittler, F., Guez, E., & Alloa, E. (2018). Gramophone, film, typewriter (F. Vargoz, Trans.; Illustrated édition). Les Presses du réel.
Knappett, C., & Malafouris, L. (Eds.). (2008). Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74711-8
Levy, P. (2020). Artefactual emptiness: On appropriation in kansei design. Proceedings of the Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research International Conference 2020, KEER2020.
McLuhan, M. (1965). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.
Mersch, D., Alloa, E., Baumann, S., & Farah, P. (2018). Théorie des médias: Une introduction. Les Presses du réel.
Mitchell, W. J. T., & Hansen, M. B. N. (Eds.). (2010). Critical Terms for Media Studies (Illustrated edition). University of Chicago Press.
Schon, D. A. (1992). Design as a reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation. Research in Engineering Design, 3, 131–147.