Meaning in Matter

    Publikation: KonferencebidragKonferenceabstrakt til konferenceForskningpeer review

    Abstract

    When addressing present-day challenges, design discourse put faith mainly in design understood as a problem-solving activity, pertaining to innovation on functional, systems and technological level. The aesthetically founded fields, e.g. craft-based design, on the other hand, do not seem to play any significant role in the larger scheme of strategic thinking. Thus, design as an art-form runs in the undercurrent of 'real' meaning, sometimes applauded as high fashion, but mainly framed as an excessive and superflouous feature added onto objects for entertainment and pleasure. In short, discourse isolate aesthetics from proper thinking.
    Looked at more closely, though, aesthetics is not a detached quality, separable from real, functional or, in deed, any other kind of meaning. From findings in recent neuroscience as well as related philosophy and psycholog, we now know that it is in fact the other way round: meaning as such is _grounded_ in aesthetics. Aesthetics, therefore, is properly the study of everything that goes into human meaning-making.
    Based on a review of the architecture of our cognitive functions, this paper proposes a new foundation for design-theory, a theory placing aesthetics central to design-discourse, design-practice and to strategies addressing global challenges.
    Such a foundation can assist in collecting efforts in and advancing the architectonic arts - especially in articulating these as knowledge production and scholarly research. This could provide art and design with a basis for entering strategic discussions. And it could help restore virtues often regarded as obsolete, but perhaps more central to the advancement of material culture than we generally realize.
    As it's field of inquiry, the paper takes the class of our physical world of objects - in particular those which carry _corporeal affordance_, such as clothing, blankets, chairs, tables and houses - perhaps even cities. Things that mean to us, what they mean, mainly _qua_ their physical properties.
    OriginalsprogEngelsk
    Publikationsdato7 nov. 2013
    Antal sider2
    StatusUdgivet - 7 nov. 2013
    BegivenhedMore for Less: Design in an Age of Austerity - Cumulus, Dublin, Irland
    Varighed: 7 nov. 20139 nov. 2013

    Konference

    KonferenceMore for Less
    LokationCumulus
    Land/OmrådeIrland
    ByDublin
    Periode07/11/201309/11/2013

    Emneord

    • Design theory

    Kunstnerisk udviklingsvirksomhed (KUV)

    • Nej

    Citationsformater