INCOMPLETE DRAFT – The Grammar of Design Thinking
A long-time-coming still-not-yet-done totally-without-references piece drawing on two Australian presentations in 2011 at RMIT Business and UTAS. The piece is in three sections: historical, contemporary/political, and theoretical. It does not yet get to the ‘grammar’ bit which concerns the middle-voiced-ness and gerundive qualities with which design works. Feedback and Communication Design welcome.
Sustainable Design Reader Proposal
The initial proposal as contracted with Berg for a Sustainable Design Reader – scheduled for Spring 2012.
Sharing Trust: Tasteful Design of Social Systems
A draft of a piece requested by Trust Design that summarizes a recent lecture on trust in sharing systems. ‘Tis a bit long and dull, but feedback welcome before it gets published.
I [heart] Sustainability (Because Necessity no longer has Agency)
At a time when politics has explicitly rejected science (as is its sovereign right), design comes to the fore as a decisionist politics. What happens if I wanted more sustainable futures, not because calamity will befall the earth and its inhabitants, but just because – because that’s what I decide I like, what I want designers to design…
Forthcoming in Design Philosophy Papers.
Redesigning Theory: The Art of Making-Real the Counter-Factual in the Indecent Institution
‘Theory’ is construct of the idiocy of Post-Theory. Nevertheless, Post-Theory attests to the failure of the thinking that is caricatured as ‘Theory’ to redesign institutions of higher learning as they interface with the media. In sum, an attempted paean for Derrida.
Artspace Projects 2006 Reuben Keehan (editor)
Thingly Cosmopolitanism: Caring for the Other by Design
An examination of the inherently anonymous-other-directed ethics of materialized and so semi-permanent designs. Starting with an examination of philosophies of cosmopolitanism, and then working through Elaine Scarry’s and Bruno Latour’s account of making as world-sensitizing.
What things Know: Exhibiting Animism as Artefact-based Design Research
with Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic
Again using Elaine Scarry’s account of making, this time to develop a defense of design-based research, but with the caveat that articulating the knowledge embodied in materialized designs requires performative staging.
Knowing by Being-There Making: Explicating the Tacit Post-Subject in Use
Paul Carter usefully provides the debate about creative research practices with a poetics that captures aspects of the dynamism of the material in the making process. However, Carter does not explicitly reconnect the implications of this poetics with that debate. This essay attempts to articulate those consequences by making explicit the ‘other’ed, beyond-a-self that is necessary to postulate or explain how making can be a source of knowing. It explores i) the animism that underlies crafting materials, ii) the embodied being that harbours skills, and iii) the empathetic projections required in collaborations. It concludes by relating Carter’s rhetorical project to Donald Schon’s slogan, that ‘design is a conversation with material situations.’
Studies in Material Thinking Volume 1, Issue 2 ( 2008 )
“Hung out to Dry: Washday Blues”
A short, preliminary investigation of the link between sustainability, inconvenience and socio-technical conventions, via a consideration of the ‘laundromat.’
Design Philosophy Politics E-Zine April 2007
