4) How to Derive What and Why
In response to a physical impact, we usually start with the question: What was that? It can be something that touches us or that we touched involuntarily, something that we see, hear, or smell, in other words, something that we perceive aesthetically, that is, with our senses. Once we have identified what it was, depending on whether it seems important to us, we ask why it happened. Either to prevent it from happening again, because we are afraid of it, or to ensure that it will be repeated for our pleasure.
The designer's task is to find an aesthetic answer to a communicative question. The communicative questions are always related to the needs of the particular sender; what needs to be communicated in order to stabilize the particular position. It can be a market position, a political position, a religious position, and so on.
Regarding the position, we also find the what and why questions, but here not related to the sensual impact, but rather to the need to secure or increase the respective position. To do so arguments are needed. We are dealing with two different kinds of arguments, intellectual and aesthetic. The main aspect of studying design is to relate them in an adequate manner.
Expressed in a simple scheme, we can say that the intellectual arguments are related to the What and Why questions, and the aesthetic level (or argumentation), that is, what we perceive with our senses, is related to the How question. If we break down the How question into its basic components, we find first an impulse, and second, how long the expansion of the impulse will last.
Based on our bodily experience, we understand that any what question, whether or not it leads to a why question, presupposes an impulse that somehow happened.
The powerful force in the play between the intellectual questioning of what and why, on the one hand, and the sensual perception of something happening, on the other, is the aesthetic that transforms the how of the happening into a sequence of lasting impulses.
The strongest arguments are the physical ones. In its most extreme form, such as corporal punishment, we speak of physical violence. But it has never been possible to convince anyone of intellectual positions by physical punishment. This applies to any kind of punishment, even if it is not physically carried out. Part of every punishment is the promise of a reward. All you have to do is accept the arguments and follow the given instructions.
Simply following instructions does not require understanding, but rather a maximum of obedience. Obedience never asks what is happening and why (to guarantee the reward, it is much safer to ignore the what and why), never seeks knowledge, never asks how to do what to do, in your own way.
The designer who simply follows the rules is caught between punishment and reward: “If you are a good boy, if you do all your chores to everybody's satisfaction, you will get this wonderful house, this wonderful car, this wonderful wife, these wonderful children, this wonderful dog...". The problem is that between punishment and reward, the world perishes; the environment, democracy, social interaction.
The problem goes deeper. Only by resisting the promises of reward will nothing change. The search for great change has always been a promise in itself. At the beginning of the 20th century, design started to work for the big social change, failed, degenerated into a service provider for the consumer, finally finds itself pushed out of the game, which will be almost completely taken over by artificial intelligence by the end of this decade.
Arthur Arbesser