E Sottsass Jnr, “How to Survive with a Company, Perhaps (unpublished lecture)

A De Angelis, ‘Anti-Design’ quoted in F. Raggi, ‘Radical Story’ in Casabella, no 382, 1973, p39

But the practice of design is in transformation and prior disciplinary definitions and distinctions are no longer the most appropriate way to characterize the breadth or depth of design as it appears today. As previously noted, the emergence of interaction design as a new design field is one element of this transformation. One might assume that because of the technological developments that paralleled, and to a certain extent prompted, the development of interaction design that engineering perspectives would be taking a greater hold in design proper. However, I would argue that is not the case, nor should it be. Engineering perspectives are present, but no more so than they ever have been as design proper has always had a close relationship to technology. In fact, it is from within the fields of design proper that design is undoing the disciplinary assumptions that previously bound it, making advances into other domains of production and taking on a more critical and engaged role in the purposeful making of the human-made world. One reason for this is the increased presence and importance of the social sciences and the humanities in design due to the development of design studies and design research. Increasingly the theories and methods of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and psychology, philosophy of culture, cultural studies, literary theory, and rhetoric inform and influence design proper (much more than engineering). This does not signal a dilution of design as a discipline, rather it exemplifies the trajectory of design as a productive humanistic endeavor grounded in the study of the full range of the human experience. It also suggests that while distinctions between the various fields of design are valuable for understanding biases and charting the progression of discipline, such historical categories will not suffice for fully capturing the present state of design or its future. While disciplines may be important for professional and academic identity and ordering, as structures they can get in the way, obstructing the greater view of the activities of inquiry and production occurring within, between and beyond them. Rather than considering design as just a discipline (or set of disciplines) it is worthwhile to examine design beyond disciplinary boundaries as a social practice.