Design topics — 1x5, The intersection of Design: the embodied space where to process the Being human
In theory, this would be the last Topic of this column devoted to design culture. And in theory, at least, as written in the Intro, this should be a dedicated Topic for deciphering what kind of weird intersection design should be. Well, it would seem impossible, in theory, at least, to crack a practice that redefines itself at the speed of novelties introduced into reality — in aesthetic and cultural terms. But this is not a dropout. It is, instead, a continuous nightmare for any conscious designer. Therefore, starting from the simple image of the human being immersed in the concrete world, design appears to be a socio-material place that connects, into an evaluative and foresight agency, those two “actors”. The first one, in fact, is made of shocks and blood, and the second one is the entanglement of reality. Finally, there is design. A chaotic intersection where different conceptual and physical energies converge, talking and interacting with each other and with history. Producing artefacts, namely the culture we are all surrounded by.
The human being distinguishes itself for the beauty of its physiological states, expressed mainly by language. A vital ability through which man understood awareness and subconscious. Right down in this mortal world, the very first movements toward reality occur. Right here, the need for inheritance arises. Moving between imagination and rationality, we deal with the entropy that leads us through a mutation or an entrenchment. Beneath our “minded-body”, an explosion of ill-matched energies, as semantic, symbolic, aesthetic, technical and economic agencies begin to speak their languages and identities. It shapes a new ground that asks for change and dialogic, where the man faces the struggle of being close to a personal void that must be figured out. Here a tragic fight for recognition between man and artefact starts. On one side, the Ego finds a new interlocutor: the thing in which he is immersed, with which have to undertake, without any certainty, the arduous detachment from its grim energy of pure need to discover the resolution of its development torments. On the other one, the Object asks for domination. It invites us to find the mortal Being of its means and its meanings. In this relationship, the man unfolds his dispositions and his expectations. He evolves its aesthetic of being designed into future alternative possibilities. Folded between sensation and technic, thanks to the higher descriptive, argumentative and imaginative states of mind and body, he controls and refines its anticipation faculties. Thus began the actual entry into an undisciplined intersection of rational and sensual desires and appetites. Linguistics and meta-linguistics.
This is the intersection of design, a complex assembly of uncertain symbols and senses. Right here, Subject and Object encounter each other and start a confused, messy, and sometimes unpleasant dancing, where they consume and test each other. Thus begins the discovery of the impossible, something that has never been seen, known, or spoken but requires concern to make us behave in harmony with the environment. This mechanism of desire calls for transcending our own identity through the concrete objects of our culture. Trying to find an odd balance between values and qualities, functionality and sensory. The Subject repeatedly fights for subjectivity here, in the extent to which it discovers and makes its own the rules of the Object. This hermeneutic circularity activates and develops our deliberative capabilities. It allows us to take a cognitive stance on the world, a philosophical distance proper to the fragile modern man, constructing new theories and languages. A form of knowledge without danger and direct experience. In this substratum, we increase our ability to perceive ourselves as something from the present that extends and acts in time and space. In the intersection of design, we develop the hierarchy and plasticity of our anticipation controls, test, question, and, above all, self-criticize how and why we exist. Here we do a pre-experience of the impossible. This course hides several traps between our causal and perfect calculations and the utopian aim to shape the quantum-particles languages of reality (at least within our Western culture), where we want to place our hopes, destiny, and eternity. Here comes the designer. The designer is accountable for the prediction of new unifying symbols that would be able to welcome and govern the messy energies that demand need and consumption. Being a designer, besides doing it, means being a bearer of these concerns.
That is the complex “hypertext” we go through to conceive new forms of Being. That is the risk we take in the first person to realize our objective world. This chaotic process goes from our tacit needs and arrives at our cultural assets, passing through desire, projection, production, consumption and aesthetics. The entanglement of reality is matter and medium. This reality is obstructive. The more culture we produce, the more reality becomes complex. And the more we demand new design that removes the obsolete one. Culture is the offshoot of our body that also contains the process and the content of our reasoning, with which we interact and embody ourselves completely and where we find the script we created and transcodified to consume it. Reality is made by man, and man is the reality he uses. This objective culture in which we are pre-formatted reminds us of who we are. By means of the functionality we confer in it, we delude ourselves into that eternity is at hand. We help ourselves to do better what we must continue to do by necessity and virtue: intermediate, through the space of design, between implicit and new explicit processes coming from the environment. In this reality, our existence exists and extends into the objective world we have created to give us different opportunities of Being. A chair is not just an object for “sitting” but the possibility of “being seated”. The car is not only a machine for “moving”, but it is the point of view of the “being steering”; it is the possibility of “being moving”. But now, what about the culture in the making? Is it still so objective and material? Is the Information Age, the new products and services of reality, graspable in the same way as the artificial culture? Is it still possible to clearly distinguish and shake content and container? The new elusive culture we are producing will change the world again. It will detach us, once again, towards another human being. Now, as difficult as it is to affect the behaviour of existence, what will be the new aesthetics when we are fully united to the non-things we are designing?
