Exhausting Discipline: Undisciplined and Irresponsible Design

Abstract

Modern design practice is a fluid, conceptual and discipline-breaking activity. This unpredictable creative practice regularly traverses, transcends and transfigures conventional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. As the fragmentation of distinct disciplines has shifted creative practice from being “discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based,” we present the argument that the undisciplined and irresponsible researcher/practitioner, who purposely blurs distinctions and has exchanged “discipline-based” methods for “issue- or project-based” ones, will be best placed to make connections that generate new ways to identify “other” dimensions of design activity and thought that are needed for the complex, interdependent issues we now face. We present the case that reliance on the exhausted historic disciplines as the boundaries of our understanding has been superseded by a boundless space/time that we call “alterplinarity.” The digital has modified the models of design thought and action, and as a result research and practice should transform from a convention domesticated by the academy to a reaction to globalization that is undisciplined.

Keywords:

• undisciplined
• irresponsible
• not-knowing
• alterplinarity

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Rodgers

Paul Rodgers is Professor of Design Issues at Northumbria University, UK. He has had a distinguished and extensive career in design research. Prior to joining Northumbria University in 2009, he was Reader in Design at Edinburgh Napier University (1999-2009) and a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Engineering Design Centre (1996-9). He has over 20 years of experience in product design research and has led several research projects for Research Councils in the UK and design projects funded by the Scottish government and The Lighthouse (Scotland's National Centre for Architecture, Design and the City). He is the author of more than 130 papers and 7 books, including Digital Blur: Creative Practice at the Boundaries of Architecture, Design and Art, published in 2010.

Craig Bremner

Craig Bremner is the Professor of Design at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Prior to this he held the positions of Professor in Design Pedagogy at Northumbria University and Professor of Design at the University of Canberra. With an Arts degree in English literature, he then studied design in Milan and completed a Ph.D. in architecture at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. His research deals with developing methods to discover how and why we don't know much about the experience of design, as well as finding ways to clarify the reason why not knowing is an essential and valuable starting point. His research has traced the experience of living in Glasgow, using banks and driving motorcars. In his private practice, he has curated design exhibitions that have toured Australia, the USA and Japan.