A System View of Design. Heuristic Dissertation on Ontological Cross-disciplinary Entanglements.

Abstract

Currently, design activity is categorized based on the output of the process. This means that the final product delineates one boundary of "expertise" from another. It is important to consider, on a theoretical level, design as a multidisciplinary set of the visual, where it is true that there is a categorization and diversification of disciplinary areas, but it is equally true that in essence the end result of this process is something that has its own phenomenal identity.

The way in which humans modify the world and change nature, giving form to the substance, can take on the highest possible meanings. The result of the design process is now a building, now a car, now a chair, now a poster. Although on different levels, he designs symbols. The designer is not simply a specialized person but, on the contrary, a complex figure who operates in reality by shaping substance, transforming the thought into a project and the project into an act. The designer is first of all a designer of intentions.

Can the reality of existing be considered as a complex system in which natural and artificial merge into a constantly changing, interactive, self-configuring phenomenological world? What entanglements link design discipline to the image of the existing?