What’s in a word? Nicholas de Monchaux considers the need to redefine how we think of ‘design’
Though there was indeed a key shift in the meaning of “design” between 1300 and 1500, it had less to do with language and more with a fundamental shift in the making of things themselves. The relationship between drawing and design did not give rise to a word—or even expand its meaning. Rather, it diminished the word as it had previously been used, and in a way that may now be important to reverse.What’s the difference between modern and historic conceptions of the industry’s most misused word? MIT Head of Architecture Nicholas de Monchaux says it was the “literal mechanization of production that firmly separated the work of designing from making — with profound consequences for the definition of design, as a word and as a structure of our society.” Indeed, the advent of consumer economies has seen the word taken on a less-creative meaning “inextricable from a corollary diminishing of the planet’s finite resources,” according to his thinking. The ability to delineate in the now highly-technicized design process is the inevitable victim, remedied only, he says, by a further broadening to include “the resources and decisions on which a designed world depends.” “We must reshape not just objects but also the culture and institutions that create them,” he concludes, jumping back two millennia. “Not incidentally, such work recaptures dē-signo in its original sense: Not just the sea...
Though there was indeed a key shift in the meaning of “design” between 1300 and 1500, it had less to do with language and more with a fundamental shift in the making of things themselves. The relationship between drawing and design did not give rise to a word—or even expand its meaning. Rather, it diminished the word as it had previously been used, and in a way that may now be important to reverse.
What’s the difference between modern and historic conceptions of the industry’s most misused word? MIT Head of Architecture Nicholas de Monchaux says it was the “literal mechanization of production that firmly separated the work of designing from making — with profound consequences for the definition of design, as a word and as a structure of our society.”
Indeed, the advent of consumer economies has seen the word taken on a less-creative meaning “inextricable from a corollary diminishing of the planet’s finite resources,” according to his thinking. The ability to delineate in the now highly-technicized design process is the inevitable victim, remedied only, he says, by a further broadening to include “the resources and decisions on which a designed world depends.”
“We must reshape not just objects but also the culture and institutions that create them,” he concludes, jumping back two millennia. “Not incidentally, such work recaptures dē-signo in its original sense: Not just the sea...
