Soundtrack: Philip Glass, Koyaanisquatsi “Prophecies”
This morning, after having let my coffee steep in the french press for as long as I could possible wait (approximately 4 minutes), I stumbled upon a somewhat older article by famed design theorist and professor Richard Buchanan. entitled, “Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture,” (PDF). I pounded the first 2 cups of black sinful brew and dove deep.
(Here is Richard Buchanan’s keynote at IxD11 Conference.)
Design and the New Rhetoric
The typical view of design was once as a styling of the appearance of products. A view which many have, over the past few years, come to realize as a serious misconception of the actual work of designers. Buchanan argues that stance, ensconced in ignorance, is comparable to the popular view of rhetoric as the mere styling of verbal expression, often for the purposes of propaganda or insouciant embellishment. Buchanan’s article argues that for both arts (design and rhetoric), the deeper work lies in the invention and disposition of form and content. This is the major thrust of the article, and he moves forward to draw the conclusion that design is the new rhetoric.
Buchanan states that in approaching design from a rhetorical perspective, the hypothesis should be that all products – digital and analog, tangible and intangible (like service design and software) – are “vivid arguments about how we as humans, situated in social context, should lead our lives.” It’s a positivist argument for use of design to foresee, craft, and impose a set of values upon a culture. One fundamental value Buchanan argues for, not in this article, but later in his speech to the IxD11 crowd was that the principle behind interaction design, in fact, all design, is human dignity.
It is no surprise then when cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon says,
“everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,”
Simon identifies cognitive processes of decision making as the key to understanding design, and it’s predicated on a modality of ethical judgment as to what one defines as “preferred,” hence design as a political act through the use of argument and not simply the styling of an ersatz object.
(For an excellent article that further explores this, read “The Known Unknowns: Exploring the evolution of design education in response to the industry’s expanding role” by Ian Curry at Frog)
Buchanan also posits that the design of products can have a persistent consequence in the behavior (think recent definitions of Interaction Design) of human beings, whether we consider a product’s style or its deeper synthesis of technological reasoning. He argues that this is why the establishment of criteria for successful products is one of the central “wicked problems” of design thinking today (Nussbaum’s recent screed against Design Thinking not withstanding).
I especially appreciated the way Buchanan finds the consanguinity between Aristotle’s four causes and compares his definition of rhetoric with a formal definition of design such that:
- The creative capacity of individual designers as an efficient cause;
- The sequence of goals around which the methods of design thinking and practice have taken shape as a final cause;
- The outcome of the design process in products that serve human beings as a formal cause; and
- The subject matter of design as found in any activities and purposes of human beings as a material cause.
However, in exploring this notion further, Buchanan states that “traditional rhetoricians have been slow to recognize their intellectual resources for exploring the new directions of technology,” and says that, as an example, rhetoricians have:
“not considered the possibility that designers are the agents of rhetorical thinking in the new productive sciences of our time.”
He amplifies this statement by saying that they have not considered the way in which design – as the intellectual, aesthetic and practical craft provides discipline in the creation of the human-made world – and employs “rhetorical doctrines and devices in its work of shaping the products and environments that surround and persuasively influence our lives to an unprecedented degree.”
Design is essentially a political problem of competing values and priorities that designers must learn to navigate with integrity. It is no small surprise, then, the importance that design played in the 2010 election of Barack Obama – where design itself became a major component of the campaigns political rhetoric.
I highly recommend reading the entire article, especially when it delves deeper into the ideas of logos, ethos, and pathos from a rhetorical perspective and then recontextualizes it to better understand the positioning of design as argument. This he further extends – placing design in the center of a triangle of logos, ethos, and pathos, what he calls his “Triangle of Doom,” at the IxD11 conference.
@semanticwill Out.
Sources
Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture
Design Thinking is a Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?
Richard Buchanan’s IxD11 Keynote Speech “Who Are We? Where Are We? Where Are We Going?”
“Form in Design,” by Dan Saffer
Richard Buchanan Bio
Richard Buchanan is Professor of Design, Management, and Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Before joining the Weatherhead faculty in 2008, he served as Head of the School of Design from 1992 until 2002 and from 2002 until 2008 as Director of Doctoral Studies. While at Carnegie Mellon, he inaugurated Interaction Design programs at the Masters and doctoral level.