Core Competences /
a full introduction to the methodological process and a first small task

The vocabulary of composing

One of the most important questions in design - if you want to become a designer with the will, the ability and the responsibility to realize design as a tension between authorship and performance - is how to cut up an object to get the elements we need to design another object, which in any case means composing the fragments anew.

In a sense, this is something we do all the time; we cut up the world around us. We will continue to use the term deconstruction to describe what we do to order the chaotic reality around us in a very special way.

You might think that everything is pretty well arranged. Certainly not perfect, but good enough to find a path for one's life, to act according to what one wants to achieve and what one wants to avoid.

Sure, physical and mental things are ordered - as best they can be - but that is already a result of the design that has been in place since we as humanity began actively writing our history. To think in terms of history is to order our being here according to past, present, and future. Thus, to make history is to design the world according to the words (and numbers, and formulas, lists, equations, etc.) we use to describe and calculate our plans for the future.

Behind the seemingly ordered world reigns pure chaos. This is the stuff that art (in all forms) deals with. For the past three centuries (as long as communication design has existed as a separate discipline), designers have done their best to stay on the side of order. The idea has always been that an orderly world is a safe world. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have to painfully accept that this idea has fundamentally failed - which was already obvious with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, but we tried to ignore it for another 75 years.

The problem is not the chaos behind the ordered world, but rather the assertion that only an ordered world, i.e. a world ruled by humans, is the only world worth living in.

Now the designer is forced to change sides. The question of design is no longer how to create physical and media products that optimize - or at least ensure - the order of the world. The question a designer must actively address is much more: How to create physical and media products that enable us to deal with chaos, that is, to deal with a highly complex, multiple, multidimensional reality. A reality that we will not be able to determine or control, no matter how sophisticated the technology.

Although today the designer is forced to change sides, the way of changing is paradoxical (in fact a leap into disorder). A paradox characterized by the question: "How to develop a system of order in order to deconstruct order, so that disorder becomes the order of togetherness".

What does it mean to say that disorder becomes the order of togetherness? We define the term disorder not as the opposite of order, but rather as a constant background state of being. Disorder provides the possibilities to become someone or something. Order is a necessary condition for every being to stay, at least for a longer or shorter period of time. If order completely replaces disorder, then no development is possible, it is just a matter of keeping the being in a mood of optimized functionality that resists any decay.

Certainly, we are very afraid of decay. For us, decay means getting sick, losing mental control, and ultimately dying. As long as we assume that only maximized functionality guarantees an optimized life, we need a reference for the idea of optimized functionality. For this we have a simple equation: the better we fulfill the commandments of order, the better our life will be.

It is hard for us to accept that decay (or falling apart) is an elementary condition of being as such. The more we try to work against it, the more decay overwhelms us. This is exactly what we are facing after the first quarter of the 21st century.

We can remain within the idea of systems of order that will eventually stop any decay, or we can replace this idea with the immediate perception of becoming part of becoming, which always means becoming a subject of togetherness. This is what art is: participating in the becoming of the togetherness of elements that we neither expected nor could have foreseen, which build the coded score of a living figuration that we call composition. And this is what a designer has to take from the artist's toolbox:
How to deal with the order of disorder?
How to unfold the possibilities of disorder as given with the solidification of any order?
In other words, how to deconstruct the ordered solidification found in every physical or media object we call a product?

To understand more about the evolution of how objects, products or things have been ordered, I highly recommend reading "The Order of Things" by Michel Foucault.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

If there is a first conclusion to be drawn, it is that it will be impossible to understand the seemingly paradoxical demands of being a designer today - in terms of authorship and performance - if we don't practice it.

From my experience as a student, the practice of art has two prerequisites:

1. (even if it seems paradoxical) not to know why one is driven to write poems, to draw and to paint, and what their actual purpose is,

2. to encounter works of art that arouse an irrepressible desire to become active oneself.

I can neither give you the drive nor the desire to follow the drive. What I can and will do is show you how to develop your own methodological approach to fulfilling the drive to create.

I will do this using my own work. Your task will be to use your work to develop, step by step, your own methods of design.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––