Bastard Design Practices: An Archaeological Perspective
Issue: Vol 2 No. 2 (2015)
Journal: Journal of Contemporary Archaeology
Subject Areas: Archaeology
Abstract:
Design is a bastard practice, it is fundamentally detached from its own inherited ethos so as to appear progressive, virtuous and fashionable. Such abstinence from knowledge and past experience models a practice that advocates competition over communion – a renunciation of experience and sanction of illusory solutionism. The design discipline would benefit greatly from the principle ideologies of archeology, a practice which uncovers the past to inform the present and shape the future. It is proposed here that a practice of Design Archeology be installed into fundamental design practices to create responsibility in the agency of design. Are we all archaeologists? not quite yet.
Author: James Dyer
References :
Alloway, L. 1990. The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books.
Huhtamo, E., ed. 2011. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Parikka, J. 2013. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity.
Massey, A. 2015. The Independent Group. Online: http://independentgroup.org.uk/
Simon, H. A. 1969. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tomes, A. and P. Armstrong. 2010. “Dialectics of Design: How Ideas of ‘Good Design’ Change.” Prometheus 28(1): 29–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08109021003694154