THE NEXT BIG THING IS NOT A THING

Chapter 1: The Designer’s Perspective
This exhibition takes a closer look at the design research that lays the groundwork for each design
process, and it approaches design as a transdisciplinary domain.
In recent years, designers have been inspired by the history and methodology of the social sciences
but also by biology or economics. Similar to the science of anthropology, which uses a variety
of research methods, the design discipline includes a series of approaches to initiate the design
process. Firstly, it concerns a way of looking – the subject and object. In the traditional practice
of cultural anthropology, an anthropologist always looks at a topic from an emic and an etic
perspective. Etic represents the external perspective: how an outsider views a particular reality.
Etic elements are things that occur in all cultures: they are universal phenomena (power relations).
Emic represents the perspective from the inside, how someone from a particular (sub) culture
experiences it from within.1
An anthropologist is trained to get to know and understand a culture internally, in order
to visualise and translate it into the language and the frame of reference of someone who is not
internally familiar with this culture.
The design process is neither a predictable nor an easily navigable process. Through taking
a multitude of perspectives into account, this process is deepened and gives designers a wider
and more creative view of their field or work. Knowledge development and critical reflection
are essential for every designer. Our worldview is increasingly put into doubt, and longstanding,
self-evident ideologies are now considered as short-term thinking and as an out-dated perception
of society. By zooming in on the elementary particles of an extended concept of design, the design
discipline is examined in an innovative way.
The sociologist Yana Milev’s research and publication Design Anthropology, which serves as
a starting point for this exhibition, shows that the design concept is based on three fundamental
pillars: Mythus, Segno, and Techne.
Anthropological design research is transdisciplinary and develops through the connection
between:
― Visual Culture: signal, visibility / invisibility, image / emptiness, imagination,
and representation
― Doing Culture: act, cooperation, relationship, exchange
― Material Culture: object, artefact, thing, texture
― Knowledge Culture: techniques, practices, norms, beliefs
― Narrative Culture: mythology, meaning, memory, identity
― Critical Culture: criteria for looking, antagonism, theory
― Aesthetic Culture: emotion, sentiment, taste2
Chapter 2: Designing Myths, Signs, and Symbols
It was not so long ago that the application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to human culture seemed
self-evident. Western civilization was seen as the furthest developed, and all other cultures, such
as African, Asian, or any foreign indigenous culture, were seen as a subordinate on the evolutionary
ladder. Terms such as ‘Third’ World countries or developing nations indicate that some countries
need to catch up with economic development in order to participate in the main discourse.
Since the advent of globalisation and medialisation, the world appears to be smaller; moreover,
time and space have become both singular and multiple. Prevailing ideologies are stagnating,
and with the rise of the BRIC nations, Western dominance is diminishing. Modernism long reigned
as the dominant ideology under the motto of ‘doing good’. Through the pernicious belief
in the application of a makeable world and the hope that technological developments brought,
it was assumed there was a fitting solution to any problem. Also, the design discipline is influenced
by the modernist discourse, with the adage that the idea of progress makes the world a ‘better’
place. But what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design? Is design successful because it is sold and has aesthetic
and psychological value?3 What are the myths about the roles and responsibilities of the
design sector?
Symbols belong – knowingly and often unknowingly – to human communication possibilities.
Due to the growth and acceleration of increasingly hybrid and intercultural communication
possibilities, original meanings are often lost, or new meanings arise. The phenomenon of applying
‘meaning’ is uniquely human. It will be interesting if we can relinquish control of this application
to nature and technology.
Chapter 3: Designing Techne
The traditional division between episteme (the domain of theory or knowledge) and techne
(the material and practical application of art and craft) still determines our thinking and divides
the humanities from the natural sciences, the intellectuals from the engineers, and our mind from
our hands. The design discipline circumnavigates this division, weaving theory to the pragmatic,
thus connecting cultural techniques and achievements to theories of knowledge, craft, and the
virtual / artificial world.
The works in this exhibition explore how the hand and head are related. In Richard Sennett’s
book, The Craftsman (2008), he addresses the thinking and performing hand. ‘Every good
craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking’, he writes. ‘All the skills,
even the most abstract, begin as a bodily practice.’
Artists and designers speculate and experiment between art and science with technological
innovations that expand the limits of our human potential. The autonomy of these technological
innovations is now so far developed that the human as authority is increasingly diminished.
Chapter 4: The Changing Attitudes and Role of the Designer / Anthropologist
Since industrialisation and the Arts and Crafts movement in the second half of the nineteenth
century, the question concerning design’s function and role became a topic of discussion. Design
as a cultural phenomenon is a relatively recent development. An emancipation of design and its
related discourse is currently taking place. Today, the designer / anthropologist occupies a modest
position, continuously gathering new information and learning from other people’s mistakes.
The design discipline is increasingly related to other domains, such as ecology, anthropology,
politics, architecture, journalism, government, and warfare, and it outlines possible future
scenarios. It is an attitude that connects people to the world around them in innovative ways.
Designing Environments (From the Blue Planet to Google Earth)
The fundamental attitude of the designer has changed: originally, the designer would serve the
future user through the ‘illusion’ of comfort, convenience, and luxury. Subsequently, there was
a shift to ‘serving the environment and society’. The designer and design philosopher Victor Papanek
wrote about the latter in 1971 in his book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social
Change. Never before was this theme so topical.
At the same time, a dent has emerged in the expectations it created. Is the designer able
to offer a ready-made solution to the world’s big problems? All design in itself wants to be complete
and, therefore, be a symbol of unity and perfection. Imperfection would be a sign of decay.
But perhaps it is these imperfections that lead us, through trial and error, to create new insights
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