Disegno Lectures — The Fourfold Method
Design as Thinking-in-Form: An Education in World-Making
The Disegno Lectures explore drawing not only as representation but as the intellectual and poetic origin of form.
We trace how bodily rhythm and perception become structure, and how structure returns to shape perception and society.
The process unfolds as a rhythmic cycle rather than a linear sequence:
Objectification → Deconstruction → Formalisation → Composition.
Each phase is both a conceptual lens and a creative operation; together they describe how ideas enter the world and how the world can be re-imagined.
Overview
1. Objectification
Objectification is the act through which an idea, emotion, or perception takes material or visible form. It’s not about reducing something to an object, but about tracing how the invisible (intention, rhythm, desire, social force) becomes visible and tangible.
In Disegno, this can mean:
a movement turning into a line,
a memory becoming an image,
a gesture translating into a designed object.
Philosophically, it refers to what Hegel, Marx, and Merleau-Ponty each in their own way recognized: that to exist is always already to appear in form.
In design education, this step invites students to ask: what is being made visible when I draw, build, or perform — and what remains hidden?
2. Deconstruction
Deconstruction examines the cultural, symbolic, and political conditions that shaped the object’s form. Here we unpack how forms (images, artifacts, languages) carry layers of meaning, history, and ideology.
A chair, for instance, is not only a functional structure; it also embodies hierarchies of comfort, power, and representation. A portrait reveals conventions of seeing and being seen.
Drawing on Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben, deconstruction in the Disegno Lectures means to suspend habitual seeing— to make the implicit visible, the naturalized strange. Through this act, students learn to recognize how every design participates in systems of mediation and control — but also how it can resist or reconfigure them.
3. Formalisation
Formalisation is the transformation of insights into new visual or conceptual systems. It’s the moment when intuitive or critical understanding crystallizes into structure — when gestures become geometry, narratives become grids, and rhythms become architectural or digital forms.
Form here is not an end, but a language of thought:
In drawing, formalisation is the composition of dots, lines, and planes into tension.
In writing, it is the movement from experience to syntax.
In AI or design, it is the translation from perception to code.
It’s the phase where Disegno reveals its original sense — as both drawing and design — a unification of artistic intuition and rational construction.
4. Composition
Composition re-integrates these transformations into living relations — social, spatial, or poetic. It’s the act of situating a form within a world, where it begins to interact, communicate, and resonate.Composition is not merely arrangement; it’s ethical and relational design: how things coexist, how differences meet, how tensions are held without being resolved. It recalls musical composition, where harmony and dissonance coexist within a time structure.In the Lectures, composition is where a student’s inquiry becomes worldly: a text, a performance, a prototype, a collective act. It’s where form returns to life — to perception, movement, and the poetic field from which it began.
Objectification → Deconstruction → Formalisation → Composition is not a linear process but a rhythmic cycle. Each phase folds back into the next: the composed work becomes a new object to be re-examined, re-deconstructed, and re-formed. This recursive rhythm mirrors both the Renaissance workshop and the feedback loops of digital creation — grounding modern design in a timeless, human movement between body, idea, and world.In detail
1. Objectification – The Ideological Genesis of Form
Every form, every object—material or immaterial—is a crystallisation of thought. To objectify is to make an idea perceptible, to render visible what a culture believes, values, or fears. Thus, every physical or intellectual object can be read as a representation of an idea or ideology that strives to shape society—and with it, the consciousness and conduct of its members.
A building embodies a political order; a garment, a gendered norm; a digital interface, a mode of control or freedom. Objectification is therefore both creative and normative: it enacts an invisible script of how the world should appear and how people should inhabit it.
To study objectification is to read form as condensed social intention. Every form—from the simplest tool to the most complex institution—participates in world-making. It helps produce society by shaping how its members perceive themselves and one another.
Core questions:
• What idea or ideology is materialised in this form?
• How does it influence perception and behaviour?
• What ethical stance does its design embody?2.1. Deconstruction – The Aesthetic Level
Deconstruction, in aesthetic practice, is the process of taking apart a visual or spatial form to reveal the relations, tensions, and hierarchies that hold it together. It does not mean destruction or negation, but a method of seeing through — of making visible what is usually hidden within the apparent unity of form.
Where philosophy reads structures of language and power, aesthetic deconstruction works through artistic means: drawing, cutting, fragmenting, rotating, layering, re-scaling, or recomposing. Each operation seeks to disturb the stability of the form so that new meanings and perceptions can emerge.
Seeing Through Form
To deconstruct aesthetically means to suspend the illusion of completeness.
A drawing, sculpture, or object is treated not as a closed whole, but as a field of relations: line and surface, inside and outside, solid and void, light and shadow.
By isolating or exaggerating one of these relations, the artist exposes the underlying logic that binds the object together — a logic that often reflects cultural, symbolic, or ideological assumptions.
The Act of Taking Apart
This can be performed physically (by cutting, folding, dismantling) or conceptually (by translating a form into its components — color, line, texture, rhythm, scale).
In two-dimensional work, it might involve:
breaking the composition into autonomous fragments,
re-arranging the visual hierarchy,
overlaying transparent or mirrored planes,
tracing negative space rather than contour.
In three-dimensional work, it can take the form of:
slicing or sectioning a solid object to reveal its inner voids,
rotating elements around multiple axes,
re-scaling parts to expose disproportion,
using material displacements (e.g., soft where it should be hard, hollow where it should be dense).
Each of these acts loosens the original order of perception and allows form to become event — dynamic, open, and self-reflective.
From Critique to Creation
Deconstruction on the aesthetic level is not a mere analysis; it’s a creative act of translation.
By dismantling the visible, the artist opens the possibility for new formal languages — structures that no longer conceal their ideological inheritance but display it as part of their expressive truth.
In this sense, aesthetic deconstruction is both critical and poetic: it transforms critique into form, and form into a space of questioning.
The Purpose
The goal is not to destroy meaning but to multiply it — to create conditions where different readings, temporalities, and identities can coexist.
In the Disegno context, deconstruction becomes an exercise in freedom: a rehearsal for how we might also dismantle and recompose the forms of life, thought, and society that have shaped us.
2.2. Deconstruction II – The Theoretical Level
Reading the Inscriptions of Power
Where objectification makes ideology visible, deconstruction unravels its inner grammar. To deconstruct is not to destroy but to listen—to the histories, exclusions, and asymmetries encoded in form.
A deconstructive gaze asks: What has been naturalised as “given”? Whose voices are absent from this design? Which metaphors, hierarchies, or desires sustain its structure?
Following Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben, deconstruction acts as critical archaeology: it uncovers the layers of language, law, and image that stabilise power. In practice, it invites the student to unlearn inherited grids—colonial, gendered, industrial—before attempting to rebuild.
Deconstruction reveals there is no “neutral” form—only forms whose origins we have forgotten. It is the pause between making and re-making.
3. Formalisation – Translating Thought into Structure
After critique comes formalisation—the transformation of insight into new aesthetic or structural systems. It is the moment when intuition becomes construction, when rhythm becomes geometry, and when language, movement, or sound crystallise into coherent syntax.
Formalisation is not about standardisation but articulation. It translates chaos into conversation, maintaining tension between freedom and structure. The process echoes Plato’s eidos and Deleuze’s diagram: form as dynamic schema, not fixed image.
Core principles:
• From rhythm to grammar: gesture → geometry, experience → syntax, perception → code.
• Form should breathe—precise yet adaptable.
• Clarity of tension is more important than perfection.
4. Composition – Returning Form to the World
Composition reunites the individual act with the collective field. Every created form begins to circulate in space, language, media, or memory. Composition is the art of situating this form within the living world—where it becomes relational, ecological, and ethical.
It asks: How does my form touch others? How does it resonate, disturb, or heal? How does it alter the rhythms of a space, a body, a community?
Composition is coexistence. It acknowledges unfinishedness: every composition is temporary, destined to become material for a new cycle. Philosophically, it reflects Nancy’s being-with and Bachelard’s reverie of matter: design as participation, not domination.
The Circular Process
The cycle Objectification → Deconstruction → Formalisation → Composition does not proceed linearly. Each composition becomes a new object to be re-examined. Each critique generates a new form. This continuous oscillation mirrors both artistic practice and social evolution.
Disegno thus emerges not only as method but as philosophy of becoming—an education in how to think through form, and how to let form think through us.