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

Abstract

Methods in design attempt to guide and prevent projects from deviating from planned trajectories. For the sake of efficiency, productive dynamics involve temporalities that can hinder the perception or creation of non-linear models that often prove to be more fertile, yet on different scales and with different objectives. 

The chrono-logical conception of time fuels the desire to resolve any project, an issue that is evident in its pressing terminology, with words such as phase, stage, sprint, timeline or deadline, terms with a mercantile tinge that, in turn, permeate the teaching environment and become grades, competencies, credits, deliverables, results or evaluations. The confluence of these models with digital tools has spurred the speed with which work is done as opposed to slow reflection, favouring an exhausting determinism. Everything must be completed and closed on time. 

The article reopens the debate that has historically explored the potential of design between commodity and utopia. To do so, it analyses cases that bring together different design disciplines and their teaching (Bauhaus, HfG Ulm, Black Mountain College, Victor Papanek, Buckmister Fuller, Enzo Mari, Bruno Munari, Ray and Charles Eames) in order to identify the conceptions of time they integrate, in order to discern how they affect the ways of proceeding and the policies they champion. In short, the ways of doing and being in and with the world. An ethical background that appeals to the designer's relationship with work, between perceptions that tend to consider the project as concluded and others that consider the project as a living organism in continuous transformation (of the world and of oneself).