Project and temporality. An analysis of design method between survival and/or utopia

Abstract

This article analyses cases that bring together different design disciplines and their pedagogy in order to identify the different conceptions of time that they integrate and to discern how these impregnate or condition the ways of proceeding and projecting, in short, the ways of making the world.

Design methods seek to guide and prevent projects from deviating from the planned trajectories, establishing stages, phases and timelines that guarantee their resolution. Mastery of time is now a core part of the skills required in the practice and teaching of design. This has been confirmed by numerous figures since the 1960s, such as Mari, Munari, Maldonado, Papanek, Fuller, or the Eameses, whose reflections on the agency of design resonate nowadays. It is considered opportune to recover the breath of their teachings and the debates they provoke today in order to contrast the hegemonic and patterned times that monopolise the methods of design through other possible conceptions that are alien to the immediacy of the market.

The productive dynamics of industry entail a temporality that hinders the perception or creation of non-linear models that often prove to be more fertile, but on different scales and with different objectives. These models, if we look at their main practitioners and referents, also in the field of teaching, as is the case of the German and American art and design schools of the pre-war and post-war periods, exude a tradition that is uncomfortable with chronology and with productive time oriented towards the mass market. This study analyses various sources, legacies and inertias of this disturbance created in the design process by a particular conception of time in a discipline strongly imbued with a sense of anticipation that repeatedly evades or dislocates other temporalities.