JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Design Issues. Introduction 1) Part of this work was supported by the The etymology of design goes back to the Latin de + signare and design firm RichardsonSmith, Worthmeans making something, distinguishing it by a sign, giving it ington, Ohio, and Ohio State University, Columbus, while on sabbatical leave in significance, designating its relation to other things, owners, 1986-87 from the University of Pennsylusers, or gods. Based on this original meaning, one could say: vania, Philadelphia. design is making sense (of things).
Design is making sense (of things)The phrase is conveniently ambiguous. It could be read as "design is a sense creating activity" that can claim perception, experience, and, perhaps, esthetics as its fundamental concern and this idea is quite intentional. Or it can be regarded as meaning that "the products of design are to be understandable or meaningful to someone" and that this interpretation is even more desirable. The phrase of things is in parentheses to cast doubt on a third interpretation that "design is concerned with the subjective meanings of 'objectively existing' objects." The parentheses suggest that we cannot talk about things that make no sense at all, that the recognition of something as a thing is already a sensederived distinction, and that the division of the world into a subjective and an objective realm is therefore quite untenable.However, making sense always entails a bit of a paradox between the aim of making something new and different from what was there before, and the desire to have it make sense, to be recognizable and understandable. The former calls for innovation, while the latter calls for the reproduction of historical continuities. In the past, sense was provided by alchemy, mythology, and theology. Now we speak less globally of a symbolic ordering that is constitutive of cognition, culture, and reality. Somehow, the word design has not remained in this creative state of paradox, but has shifted to one side. Its current meaning amplifies the aspect of making or, more specifically, of applying a technical-functional rationality to the material world at the expense of the sense that was to be achieved thereby. Perhaps, the pendulum has swung too far. Perhaps, technology has moved too fast for culture to keep up with it. Whatever the explanation, the current concern with Design Issues: Vol.
