De-signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice

(Hardback)

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De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice throws new light on the terrain between theory and practice in transdisciplinary discourses of design and art. The editors, Elizabeth Grierson, Harriet Edquist, and Hlne Frichot, bring together diverse approaches to design theory, practice, and philosophy from leading scholars in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Themes include spatiality, difference, cultural aesthetics, and identity in the expanded field of place-making and being. The concept that design can be de-signed is presented as a way of exploring different approaches to an experimental and experiential thinking-doing that promises to further open up research possibilities in the fields of design and art thinking and practice. The book enacts a series of cartographic devices to articulate the spaces between theory and practice.

Reviews

At a moment when the term design is used not only to designate acts of a designer such as projecting the organizational, representational, technical, and material dimensions of an object, building, image or interface but to reference any act of strategic or even managerial thinking, De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice offers welcome conceptual and discursive tools for thinking critically about the future. Demonstrating the complex relays between thinking and doing, or theory and practice, it marks out a variegated new ground upon which to operate beyond the purely instrumental. -- Felicity D. Scott, Columbia University
De-signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice is a synthetic modernist handbook for de-signing design and for the city as design outcome. Its compelling narrative begins with Jacques Derridas provocative placement of the hyphen in the formation of the term de-signing. Thus equipped, we set off on a journey that leads from the production of the first atlas by Abraham Ortellus in 1570 all the way to the world of BwO (body-without-organs) and other entities poised in potentiality. Strategies and outcomes that once seemed out of the world of Superfictions now appear tantalizingly real. This book will appeal to, will excite, and will inform artists, designers, architects, bio-engineers, narratologists, city planners, graduate students, and anyone with a keen sense of wonder about our future and how it might be de-signed. -- Peter Hill, Deakin University

Author Bio

Elizabeth Grierson is professor of art and philosophy at RMIT University. Harriet Edquist is professor of architectural history at RMIT University. Hlne Frichot is assistant professor of critical studies in architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.