Project funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation,
2018-2021.
Project home page: thingsthatchange.net
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Design philosophy for things that change
The purpose of this design research project is to develop
a design philosophy for things that change: a philosophical and
aesthetical foundation that forms and informs a design practice
capable of conceptually handling the complexity of the evolving,
globally connected and locally manifested socio-technical
landscapes now created using networked computational technologies
and digital media. It seeks to investigate what happens when
computational processes, dynamic networks, and contextual
customization emerge as factors as important as form, function and
material were for designing, using, and understanding objects in
the industrial age.
Previously designers have looked into for example form and
colour to understand the basic materials of design. Now,
technological developments demand that designers and researchers
find new ways of thinking about the role of design and the things
it produces.
In this project, we are looking into how THINGS are changing. The
actual thing is important in design, and we are arguing that
designers must reconsider what a thing actually is. In many cases,
we can say a lot about a thing just by looking at its physical
attributes. Take a hammer for example: by looking at it, holding it
and so on, you can get a good idea of its function. There is no
other layer to the hammer than its physical appearance. But today
we encounter many things where you can't guess their function just
by looking at their physical appearance. An iPhone for example, it
is a designed physical object, but its physical appearance is just
a small fraction of what it actually is. We call these new kind of
things "fluid assemblages".
The iPhone, even as it remains a stable physical artefact, is at
the same time being dynamically assembled in many ways in terms of
what it actually is and does. It is on one level customized by a
particular user, both in terms of the preferences set and apps
installed, but also through a linked iCloud account that provides
further customization and data syncing and even influences the
targeted ads that are displayed within apps. On another level, the
apps and even the operating system are frequently updated, which
can change how the iPhone works and what it is capable of. The apps
and iPhone itself also connect to other networked platforms and
resources that are necessary for its operation, but that are not
contained within the physical device. So these types of things, or
fluid assemblages, are never really made but rather always in the
making, and constituted by both physical and digital materials
contained within the device as well as elsewhere. These dynamics
imply radical changes in relations of production and consumption,
and in how we understand what things are and what they do. In
exploring these issues, we are trying to develop design theory that
addresses the future foundations of industrial design.
