o_19po8js951tvs1r0t1r8s4bb1vpla.pdf

Gui Bonsiepe
superficial way nor only as a temporary fad;
- third: the design life-style, that occupies a great part of the design expositions,
design festivals and media comments;
- fourth: author’s design, with products signed by famous designers and generally
destined to a small elite;
fifth: art-design, or trans-disciplinary design, present in the art galleries, with
emphasis in the esthetics and with disdain of the utilitarian aspects of the products;
- sixth: handmade design, that tries to rescue the local materials and cultures. With
the design subcategory “etno”;
-seventh: strategical design, that presents a broader vision of design, not being
restricted to the project of a specific object, but including it in the business strategy
of the company;
- eighth: design research, that tries to generate and systematize new relevant types
of knowledge for the practice and interpretation of design;
- ninth: experimental design with new technologies, based, above all, in digital tools.
The scientist of culture and literature, Edward Said, asked if there is – besides
the contemporaneity – a relation between the politics of Ronald Reagan, in the
80s, and the inundation of literature programs in the North-American universities
with the textualism imported from France. The textualism treats the texts as unities
closed in themselves, without extra-textual relations with the social, political and
economical contexts. Said (1982) formulated three questions for the politic of text
interpretation:
- first: who wrote it?
- second: the text was written for whom?
- third: under what circumstances was it written?
These questions may be – with the proper adjustments – adopted in design, with
the aim of design interpretation and design practice. The project was developed for
whom? Under what economical, social and technological conditions? Maybe we
can extract from there the criteria of relevance of the design project and propose
at least one of the possible exits for design – and not only for design. In this
moment, the chances for that may seem scarce; but one thing is right: the crisis
cannot be outsourced.
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Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 131-139