La Conferencia de Seguridad de Munich 2011: primeros signos del nuevo concepto

In as much as the previous section concludes that design-directed research is uncertain and potentially risky, the question as to what design-directed research specifically could be still remains. Perhaps it is best to further break down the issues: first, what sense of design is to be used in design-directed research; second, what are characteristics of a research framework that fosters such an approach; and third, in the light of the two previous questions, how should this specific research project be structured?

The first question, at its most bare, asks ‘what is design?’ In itself this topic has been the subject of much discussion and scholarly comment and has provided the substance for wider disciplinary discussions about its form, processes and design’s expanding number of disciplinary fields.48 _{As a research question it}

alone could suffice any number of doctoral dissertations.

John Heskett presents design’s syntactical breadth with the statement “design is to design a design to produce a design”49_{. In the course of a}

sentence he shifts the meaning of design from a disciplinary field, to an active process, to a potential prototype, and a fully realised form. Design in this sense is ubiquitous in its use and invocation.

47 Chi, 2001, Introduction: Design as Research, p250.

48 Even the crudest measure of references in the Google Search Engine to the term ‘design’ returns ‘about’ 1470,000,000 usages, while the phrase ‘what is design’ returns ‘about’ 117,000 references. www.google.com accessed 19th March 2008.

Nonetheless in terms of this dissertation its scope can be narrowed. Design is inextricably tied to the notion of making. Making products, communications, places, and environments; and making marks and futures. For Heskett design is “the human capacity to shape and make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs and give meaning to our lives”50_{. For Simon it is the means by which we}

“change existing situations into preferred ones”51_.

It is not my goal at this point to labour different definitions. While each has merit I am cautious of a prolonged discursive analysis, as such a task in itself is not necessarily that designerly. Indeed much that is written about design’s meaning comes from authors who themselves while attracted to the term come at it as non-designers working in the field. What often follows their enthusiasm to capture in words design’s essence is a stifling of its instrumentality as it becomes burdened with what it is rather than what it is does. It is in this light that the definition of design that I am about to propose should not be considered as a thesis to be defended, but rather a point of departure into the wider research project.

Therefore in the context of further prompting research within the discipline of landscape architecture and also aspiring to use it to prise value from a context already of interest outside of design-related fields the following is put forward. DESIGN is an iterative, associative and synthetic process that attempts to build possibility out of diverse elements.52

The notion of synthesis is critical to this definition. Carter states to ‘re- member’ disparity one “has to be a specialist in alloying”53 and of combining elements together. Nor can like be readily mixed with like: “the dialogue has no purchase unless its materials are heterogenous”.54 _{Carter cites Heraclitus}

to evoke this spirit of the synthetic. “Things which are cut in opposite directions fit together. The fairest harmony is born of things different, and discord is what produces all things … Let us unite wholes and not-wholes,

50 Ibid, p7.

51 Simon, 1996, The sciences of the artificial, p112. Likewise Freidman considers design’s meaning as a verb “takes precedence over all other meanings of the term”. Friedman, 2002, Conclusion: Toward an Integrative Dsign Discipline, p200.

52 On the qualities of iteration see Bird, 2003, Chaos and life : complexity and order in evolution and thought, p3-22 and p236-269. Also I have at time considered replacing possibility with innovation. However in the later term I consider there could be a tendency to privilege novelty over suitability.

53 Carter, 2004a, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research, p179 54 Ibid.

convergence and divergence, harmony and discord of voices”.55 _{Or as he}

states elsewhere: “invention, after all, depends on equivocation – the possibility that something might mean something else”.56

Carter terms this sense of emergence from the combination of two elements a ‘third apprehension’. Others also articulate such a conception of hybridisation. Communication designer Bruce Mau calls it the ‘third event’: something that “occurs between images”.57 _{William Burroughs and Brion}

Gyson, term this bringing together as ‘the third mind’.58 _{For Whatmore the}

interface of the researcher and researched is a ‘third party’.59

It is through ‘alloying’ and transformation that new possibilities develop. Possibilities that have “nothing to do with the actual physical character of the form but with something implied in the relationship between forms” and which, for architect Peter Eisenman, may involve ‘blurring’, ‘twisting’, ‘interweaving’ and ‘displacing’ among others.60 _{It is in this process of building}

emergence from the bringing together of diverse elements that designing is at its most instrumental. Nor is such emergence necessarily sequential – from one form to the next then the next. Rather multiple and divergent possibilities may develop from a common inquiry. One only has to consider the diverse responses found across design competition entries to see the spread of understandings, interpretations and designerly strategies that might be enlisted and articulated.61 _{It is in producing such a spread of possibilities,}

rather than the resolution of a single outcome, that suggests much depth and productivity for design-directed research approach.

The following example provides a helpful analogy. Given two pots of ink – one Cyan and the other Magenta – it is possible to define in ever greater precision specific and distinctive characteristics they each may hold such as qualities of hue and saturation. However from a designing perspective (if we ignore which print pieces might be more or less suitable to use such colours in) what is interesting is the range of colours afforded by different combinations

55 Ibid, p11. 56 Ibid, p10.

57 Mau, Maclear and Testa, 2000, Life style, p326. 58 See Burroughs and Gysin, 1978, The third mind. 59 Whatmore, 2003, Generating Materials, p99. 60 Eisenman, 1999, Diagram diaries, p52.

61 See, for example, the range of responses elicited by competitions like those found at www.designboom.com and www.thearchitectureroom.com

of the inks. While the chemical constitution of each ink can be quantified it is the capacity to mix new colours that might be considered the designerly potential of Cyan and Magenta. With the addition of a third colour – Yellow for example – a host of other possible outcomes arise as the series of swatches in Figure 2.4a show.

Figure 2.4a: Colour swatch of different mixes of Cyan and Magenta, and then those swatches with the addition of yellow

Of course this is rather a simplistic analogy. A richer articulation of such hybridity can be found in the work of artist Laurie Anderson who pursued the cut-up approach of Burroughs and Gysin. In Figure 2.4b can be seen the splicing together of the China Times and New York Times to create a third possibility out of the two front pages. In a creative sense the sum is different than the parts – in the act of synthesis a third element is formed which though clearly incorporating a sense of its genealogy is nonetheless definitely of itself.

Figure 2.4b: Laurie Anderson ‘cut-up’ image of Hong Kong Times and New York Times62

While design in its professional guises realises its value according to the designs produced, in terms of a method of inquiry the process ofdesigning

takes precedence. And while producing designs and designing both require the capacity to select viable elements that might be alloyed – and also develop outputs with further potential – the goal of design-directed research is distinct to that of most professional design practice. For in the latter at some point the expectation is to come to a finished, singular production. But in design-directed research it can be argued that this is less critical than the identification of a number of possibilities, and in which it is not essential that one is identified as taking precedence over the others. Indeed I would argue that many multidisciplinary research efforts would greatly benefit from having a spread of possibilities developed through a design-directed research approach before being reintroduced as rich and tangible scenarios to be further examined using research methods more aligned with the social sciences, sciences and humanities. It is in this manner that methodological

approaches and experiments developed using design-directed research could also be further orientated outwards to enhance research being undertaken in other fields

For in design-directed research it is a capacity to be continuously welding elements that enables design to find purchase in many situations. It can readily consider what might happen if different inks are combined with different paper stocks – or for that matter if other newspapers, music, Shakespeare sonnets, maps, buildings or landscapes are similarly ‘alloyed’.63

Instead of seeking to atomise contexts design-directed research seeks out connections. Rather than some formal outcome it is in the generation of a number of hybrids, and the enhanced possibility across such an emergent and interconnected web, that designing as a process and research method is articulated.

In the previous section it was suggested that concentrating on formulating an evermore ‘precise’ definition of design could deaden the very processual qualities essential to the definition of design that was proposed. In other words by putting more effort into entrenching a definition of ‘what design is’ there comes less opportunity for its qualities to shift during the process of researching.

Hence in this research my preference is to explore these dimensions of design through their application in landscopic contexts. My approach will be to enlist various design-led tools and strategies as they become required in the course of this investigation of wilderness and the conservation estate – rather than overly constraining it by further discussions about its definition or scope here. Indeed my intention is to wait until the end of the dissertation to reflect on design’s properties within the landscape architecture discipline. For such a discussion of design’s potential to engage landscape belongs after the research and not before.

63 For example Burroughs and Gysin join texts by Rimbaud and Shakespeare and splice taped sounds to generate unpredictable outcomes. For further applications of this approach see Burroughs and Gysin, 1978, The third mind, and Sobieszek and Burroughs, 1996, Ports of entry : William S. Burroughs and the arts. For examples drawn from a fine arts tradition see: Kelly, Cowart, Pacquement, Bois, National Gallery of Art (U.S.), Galerie nationale du jeu de paume (France) and Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster., 1992, Ellsworth Kelly : the years in France, 1948-1954. ; Poggi, 1992, In defiance of painting : cubism, futurism, and the invention of collage.

Given this, it now becomes relevant to consider what framework best enables this conception of design to be incorporated into a programme of research. How is an investigation that seeks to associatively and synthetically build possibility out of heterogeneity best fostered? What format might stimulate not only the generation of possibility, but also for such possibility to be both a point of arrival and also an opportunity, as a point of departure, for further iteration? Or specifically how might one structure design-directed research?

22.5 A CASE STUDY APPROACH TO DESIGN-