13 Feb 2010 1318H

The Ah Ha moment

just arrived. This morning, doggedly pursuing leads on the internet in my pursuit of my new intellectual project, the history of design in East Asia, I ran across this article by Matthew Turner, a professor at Edinburgh Napier University. In this journal he writes (forgive me for quoting wholesale here):

For some time, now, Occam’s razor has been hovering over this tenuous thread of reasoning and, having entered into Discourse’s hall of mirrors, only an investigation on the scale of a Foucault or a Said would be sufficient. Such an investigation must demonstrate that the history of design has developed into a useful buttress of values central to the First World and, to such an extent, that its retrospective application elsewhere is problematic. Of course, what these central values might be is a question open to much speculation. Supposing that the history of design embodies a number of key beliefs about First World development seems reasonable. These beliefs are in economic growth and technological development, in progress through free competition and consumer choice, in aspirations towards the comforts and sophistications of affluence, in the importance of individuality, creativity, and innovation fused with the benefits of standardization and mass production. If a demonstration that design is less a description of a process and more a representation of an ideology (conveniently depoliticized and positive, filling the vacuum left behind by science, which has lost so much of its innocence since the 1950s) could be made, a fruitless search for essences might be avoided. After all, an essence being distilled from practices as varied as engineering, design, and fashion design has never seemed likely.

Would such an investigation yield any positive result? Yes, for it would open a perspective on an immense, unexplored storehouse of knowledge about the developing world in the modern era. While enlarging the understanding of world design, valuable material for other disciplines would be provided and a much needed boost would be given to the growing confidence of designers working outside the First World.

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