Alter Design: A clearing where design is revealed as coming full circle to its forgotten origins and dissolved into nondesign

Abstract

Design for/by the Global South is a field that begins to show itself as constituted by a dialectical tension between design and alter design. The latter is a historical clearing where design is revealed as coming full circle from its forgotten origins (which were in the transformation of tékhne into technique) to finally dissolve itself into non-design. Cultivating the recovery of this memory and beginning to display the aforementioned dialectics is of vital importance for the future of humankind, since design is highly implicated in the unfolding of a world order that has become totally unsustainable.

Keywords:

• Alter design
• design
• clearing
• tékhne
• non-design

Notes

1. Tony Fry’s writings in this journal draw a philosophical account of this context for understanding the phenomenon we are calling here design for/by the global South.

2. Tony´s design for/by the global South is an exemplar of what we are calling here design and design-thinking. The reader is warned that we are not talking about design-thinking as understood, for instance, by the d-School of Stanford.

3. The visual has prevailed over the aural in Western thinking. Yet aural thinking opens up the world in ways that are impossible for the visual. In this writing, we will give examples of new words whose sound invites one to see things differently. And vice versa. In this connection, see Reyhner et al. (2000, p. 85–101).

4. The situation is similar to that of a person listening to a telephonic conversation. We can only hear one side of the conversation and guess from that what the other person might be saying.

5. We are using “clearing” in a Heideggerian sense. In his Origin of the work of art (Heidegger, 1971b), the work of art is a means to open a “clearing” for the appearance of things in the world, or to disclose their meaning for a people in a particular historical time, and “as part of a holistically structured, pre-interpreted background of meaning” (Johns, 2015, 193). 

6. Design and creativity are concepts that are usually associated with one another. For instance, design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end. Examples of this can be seen in Hollanders and Van Cruysen (2009). We are saying that design is more deeply related to creation, and to the control of the bringing forth of things. Suffice to point out the methodological fads that have permeated design and which look to control the process of innovation all the way from ideation to prototyping and product fabrication.