Design

Design, as a discipline, has historically demonstrated responsiveness to societal developments and crises. However, amidst the multifaceted challenges of our times, there is a growing discourse surrounding the potential for design to not only react but also serve as a catalyst for transformative change. This discourse raises pivotal questions about the role of design in fostering hope, generating realistic solutions, and mitigating global and local crises. Drawing upon interdisciplinary perspectives and empirical research as well as case studies, the contributors to this volume critically examine the evolving role of designers in responding to contemporary crises.

What does it take to create innovative tech-savvy designs that are usable, appealing, and good for society? The contributions to this volume introduce contemporary research on the digitization and »datafication« of products, exploring topics like user experience, artificial intelligence, and virtual environments in design. Coming from varied backgrounds in product design, interaction design, service design, game design, architecture, and graphic design, they emphasize that digital transformation is not just a technical process, but also a social and learning process that fundamentally changes the way we understand information.

In the small world of Swiss graphic design, prizes such as the Swiss Design Awards (SDA) are followed closely. The winners' works are admired, envied and emulated. The generous prize money allows designers to launch their careers and focus on lesser paid but critically recognised work. Awards thus play the role of bellwethers of the scene. However, criticisms inevitably arise. Speaking in hushed tones, designers speculate as to why a colleague won over another. Rumours have it that jury members favour their inner circles and exclude competitors. Analysing this universe in detail, Jonas Berthod retraces the recent history of the SDA and the emergence of a new design culture in Switzerland.

Since the 1990s, the concern to define areas of research in design has dominated academic debates. As a result, we are now facing a multitude of understandings. This is especially true for practice-based design research. Sandra Dittenberger, Hans Stefan Moritsch and Agnes Raschauer discuss how the concept of learning by research can be integrated into product design studio teaching. They show different international approaches for integrating research into teaching and contrast the areas of design research with scientific standards. The book features study results that helped generate both a general orientation for research in design education and guidelines for students of how to integrate research into their project work.

In its constructive and speculative nature, design has the critical potential to reshape prevalent socio-material realities. At the same time, design is inevitably normative, if not often violent, as it stabilises the past, normalises the present, and precludes just and sustainable futures. The contributions rethink concepts of critique that influence the field of design, question inherent blind spots of the discipline, and expand understandings of what critical design practices could be.
With contributions from design theory, practice and education, art theory, philosophy, and informatics, »Critical by Design?« aims to question and unpack the ambivalent tensions between design and critique.

Digital sovereignty has become a hotly debated concept. The current convergence of multiple crises adds fuel to this debate, as it contextualizes the concept in a foundational discussion of democratic principles, civil rights, and national identities: is (technological) self-determination an option for every individual to cope with the digital sphere effectively? Can disruptive events provide chances to rethink our ideas of society – including the design of the objects and processes which constitute our techno-social realities? The positions assembled in this volume analyze opportunities for participation and policy-making, and describe alternative technological practices before and after the pandemic.

Carl Franz Bally founded a shoe factory in Switzerland in 1851. Within decades, the Bally name had achieved worldwide recognition for its high-quality footwear. The history of modern footwear can be traced through the lens of Bally's corporate evolution. This book brings together the results of research on such topics as the economic importance of fashion, Bally's fortunes in the US, the career of shoe design, the sourcing and use of materials, and the rise of strategic product display. The research focuses on the 1930s and 1940s: years of economic crisis and war, characterized by a wide diversity of designs and increasing variety in product range. Shortages also led to experiments with materials and technical innovations. Featuring numerous points of contact with adjacent fields of historical study, this publication marks a contribution to the history of fashion as the history of industrially manufactured products.

Building blocks are practical materials for playing, learning and working at kindergartens, schools, universities and companies. How did building blocks, which were primarily established as toys for children, come to be practical materials used in professional and educational settings?
This study explores the historical implications of particular sets of building blocks in the interdisciplinary consolidation and transformation of techniques, materials, discourses and subjects. By mapping the genealogy of building blocks from Fröbel's »gifts« to their current systematization as interlocked blocks, this study proposes that building blocks should be understood not exclusively as concrete objects, but as the materiality of a combinatorial program, which delineates a modular system characterized by a code of composition, a context-neutrality and a semantic component.

Design Dispersed pursues the complex and heterogeneous connections between migration and design in the 20th and 21st centuries. The edited volume gathers contributions by international researchers and curators on the question of how design practices and (historical) objects articulate, respond to and critically reflect on migration, flight and displacement: Besides a collage which highlights the aesthetic effects resulting from the networking, overlapping and mixing of forms, another strand of the book looks at the political and social dimensions of design. How are design objects material modes of a critical inquiry on movements of people and things? What role do object trajectories play in the émigré movements of the 1930s and 1940s? Other texts follow the question of how migrants and refugees form their experience and political fight for acceptance into design and architectural productions. A final essay contributes to wordings and projections – what vocabulary do we need in order to adequately think and write about a design dispersed?

Was soll ich anziehen? Diese Frage stellt sich jeden Morgen von Neuem. Die Möglichkeiten sind heute vielfältig. Durch die Globalisierung werden Moden aus unterschiedlichen Kontexten zusammengeführt und bestehen nebeneinander. Transkulturelle Moden sind das Thema des sechsten Heftes von Querformat und sie widersprechen dem gängigen Klischee: Globalisierung der Mode ist keineswegs vereinheitlichend und gegenwärtige Modeströmungen verlaufen nicht erdumspannend in die gleichen Richtungen. Die angeblich weltweiten Trends unterliegen zahlreichen Brechungen.
In Europa setzt die global agierende Modebranche auf das Spektakel rund um die Haute Couture. »Anziehen« hingegen denkt Körper, Kleidung und Raum zusammen, so dass politische, wirtschaftliche und technische Dimensionen von Kolonisierungs- und Globalisierungsprozessen in den Blick rücken.
Die Themen dieses Heftes reichen von Streetwear in Afrika über (Selbst-)Ethnisierungen von Designern, Mode als Reise und Sehnsuchtsort bis hin zu Hightech-Fashion.

What is the logic of design process? Departing from this question, Tiago da Costa e Silva investigates the characteristic feature of every projective activity, for instance, in architecture, design, engineering design, and in the arts. In opposition to predominant views that understand design processes as mechanical and deterministic, this study, with the help of the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, characterizes design activities as continuous and serendipitous interplays of esthetic and abductive processes that define rules and manifest forms. Tiago da Costa e Silva concludes that invention and discovery, manifested in the form of processes of abduction, actively pervade every development in any given context of design process.