This project deconstructs the concept of design in the light of current understandings of things, objects and goods and their related manufacturing operations, processes and utilization orientations, and also the codification of the designer as a “maker”. It provides a cultural anthropological underpinning of design in both its linguistic coding functions (symbols, signs, signals) and linguistic exchange functions (afterlife, communication, re/production, distinction).
The concept of “design” is currently facing a crisis, calling into question the design regime of industrial production, computing, object and trademark culture that has held sway since the 1950s. This crisis calls for a complementary form of design research and design studies, to re-evaluate and re-communicate the field. An anthropology – and more particularly a sociology – of design aims to address this paradigm shift.
The book Design Sociology: an extended concept of design within the generative field of political theory and sociology as production of symbolic orders and formations defines design in social, political and cultural contexts. Symbolic order structures and formations are to be seen to a very large extent as equivalent to linguistic structures and formations, or “semioses”, which in their variety and diversity become significant as social and societal practices.
This book, published by Peter Lang in the PL Academic Research series, sets out to investigate, on the basis of a complementary extension to the concept of design, central concepts of sociology and political theory such as precarity and poverty, creativity and criminality, anarchy and anxiety, resilience and deviance, governance and violence, war and guerrilla warfare. Or conversely: the “sociology of design” project seeks to answer questions of design and representation from the perspectives of power, identity, rituals, work, the mass media, technology, protest and resistance.
The radical sociological argument within complementary design research is manifested in participation, involved observation, solidarity and vulnerability, and ultimately in the creative force of afterlife in social fields.
Design Sociology: an extended concept of design within the generative field of political theory and sociology is to be understood as a component of the overarching project D.A. – A Transdisciplinary Handbook of Design Anthropology, published in English in 2013, comprising five books. This work on design sociology (D.S.) is the third book in the series (Book 3).
The “D.S.” book project will be followed up by further empirical research undertaken in collaboration with the Seminar for Sociology (SfS) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS) of the University of St. Gallen.