Transdesign: A Prospective Exercise on Design Transformation

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The reconfiguration of the historical and cultural conditions of modernity in which design emerged as a field of study and practice demands a renewed approach to discussions about its nature, perspectives and possibilities outside the epistemological discussions that have taken up hundreds of hours of effort and pages of published work by the community of researchers involved. From this perspective, concepts such as “border design” or “new designs” are currently being considered, resulting in an expansion of the universe of design or design as a universe.Through this approach, we can see how the design imaginary has evolved from the discussions regarding its emerging scientificity during the 1970s, and the need to understand where the nature of its practice lies.These discussions, frequently addressed by professionals, researchers and theoreticians who do not necessarily come from design, have made it possible to conceive this discipline as an emerging, convergent and divergent field with multiple perspectives and ways.At present the situation has not changed much. The dynamics, possibilities and logic that have served design are also used by people from various sciences, arts or processes; this has generated a system of disciplinary interaction across a great spectrum, with focuses or concerns that may be different from those of the designers themselves, questioning in practice the supposed immobility or epistemological purity of design research and its methodological drifts closer to the traditional ways of doing science, conceiving on the contrary the research in design and arts as post-paradigmatic with hybrid methods.Therefore, the article abstracted here proposes a prospective look, a wager, that starts from a consideration of the field of design, from a gnoseological and aesthetic approach, avoiding the dichotomies science/nonscience; research/creation; theory/practice, which allows us to outline the possible scenario of a design to come, an area that has been called in this proposal transdesign.From this perspective, the notion of transdesign is proposed as a horizon of joint construction, as a possibility to think about creative activity, beyond the disciplining and disciplinary origins of a version of modernity based on the precepts of homogenization, industrialization, serialization and progress.Thus, the idea of transdesign is based on a set of visions that allude to nonlinearity, transit, mixing, crossing and demarcations in the fields of knowledge, cultures, history and forms of creation, expressed in the contemporary notions of transculturality, transdisciplinarity, transitionality and transmediality, as constitutive horizons that force us to map in a different way the question of the nature of knowledge and current and possible ways of doing design.Therefore, we turn to the force of aesthetics, which goes from a lower-level gnoseology to a diverse field, due to the need to place it differently from the exclusively epistemic approach, which allows us to affirm its experimental nature, its relational nature to other knowledge and its vocation to project and realize possible futures.This expanded vision of aesthetics offers a different point from which to understand the relationships between art, science and technology, assuming a conception of design as an articulating, creative and project-based approach to knowledge.Transdesign is a field open to proposals and development that seeks to define itself through four guideline areas: design of itself; design for collective intelligences; design of socio-technical-cultural systems; and meta-design; this work in synergy with four vectors: sensography; connectography; meteorography; and gnoseography, described in the body of the article.Transdesign constitutes a scenario for outlining possible futures for the binding field of design, not only within the scientific possibilities that the discipline and the professional exercise of design provide but recognizing the influence and potentialities of the multiple cultures of design.Rather than a finished proposition, the idea of transde-sign suggests a possible construction horizon for the future of design: a future that is thought from the potentiality of the present and the impulse of the past.