A new publication to announce. But first, some background…
A while ago, I started noticing that the word ‘design’ and the concept of ‘design thinking’ seemed to be everywhere. I wondered if it was just me – but I was particularly struck that I so often seemed to hear the word ‘design’ used in contexts where I expect to hear about ‘plans’ and ‘planning’. I slowly got the sense that we seem collectively unwilling to assert our ability to shape the future – but, at the same time, I wasn’t sure quite why we are so keen to be ‘designing’ things instead. Why now? I realised in any case that I didn’t really understand what ‘design’ meant.
Problematically, there seemed to be no widely accepted overall theory of design to turn to. Or, rather, there were lots of individual perspectives on the subject, often related to particular areas of design practice. And most of these seemed to claim that theorising design as a whole is not possible.
Following on from that, I and some colleagues organised an exploratory conference on the topic of ‘Design after Planning’ last year It went rather well overall (and you can watch some of the videos here), but it threw up more questions than it answered. So, I started slowly reading up on design theory, and have now pulled together some of my thoughts in the introduction of a ‘forum’ on Resilience and Design, published today in the journal Resilience.
The introduction is followed by four short essays, by Clive Barnett, Tania Katzschner, Nate Tkacz, and Filip De Boeck, each touching on design-related issues in different ways. The abstract and table of contents are shown below.
The forum as a whole is rather like a collection of papers in a conference panel: loosely connected rather than prepared in close collaboration. But we hope this approach will be generative of new thinking and connections, rather than seem incoherent. An experiment, at least.
If you’d like to read the publication, but can’t access it, please get in touch so that I can send you a copy. 50 free eprints (first come, first served) are also available from this link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/aIX3rSjGWTeEdr3gjG29/full
Cowley, R., Barnett, C., Katzschner, T., Tkacz, N. & De Boeck, F. (2017). Forum: Resilience & Design. Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses. Advance online version, DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2017.1348506
Abstract:
This forum aims to encourage theorists of resilience to engage more closely with different aspects of design theory and practice. The introduction outlines a series of largely unacknowledged parallels between resilience and design, relating to the valorisation of processes over states, the loss of faith in ‘planning’, the ambivalent status of boundaries and interfaces, and open-ended political possibilities. Four short reflections then follow on various design-related topics: the significance of the ‘wicked problem’ in contemporary urban planning and design, and the urbanisation of responsibility; design’s potential to repoliticise and engender new forms of responsibility; the significance of the digital interface; and the condition of everyday life in the ‘unplanned’ post-colonial city. Readers are invited to build on or refute the explicit and implicit links made between resilience and design in the various forum contributions.
Contents:
Resilience and design: an introduction
Robert Cowley (Department of Geography, King’s College London)
Planning as design in the Wicked City
Clive Barnett (Department of Geography, University of Exeter)
Design, responsibility and ‘Staying with the Trouble’: rethinking urban conservation in Cape Town
Tania Katzschner (School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics, University of Cape Town)
In a world of data signals, resilience is subsumed into a design paradigm
Nathaniel Tkacz (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick)
‘The Hole of the World’: designing possibility through topography in Congo’s urban settings
Filip de Boeck (Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, KU Leuven)
London, 14 July 2017
robertcowley 