Georg Trogemann (Ed.): The Unknown in Design, Art, and Technology

Today, we not only design and produce artifacts, but also subjective experiences, life models and social change. This active shaping of our life circumstances is usually seen as a plannable and methodical activity. However, practice shows that a multitude of uncertainties, non-conceptualizable actions and forms of not-knowing are involved in these processes. The contributions in this volume are dedicated to dealing with the unknown in design, art, and technology.

With contributions from 

Tobias Bieseke, Chistian Heck, Mattis Kuhn, Steffen Mitschelen, Zahra Mohammadganjee, Christian Rust, Somayyeh Shahhoseiny, Georg Trogemann, Natalie Weinmann.

(…) With this book we bring together a series of essays highlighting individual ways of dealing with the unknown in various design situations. The ‘poetic stance’ outlined in the Introduction above – which has its roots in philosophy – forms the background for the very different points of departure in teaching, research, art, technology, everyday life, and even military policy. In contrast to scientific reflection, in which the material side of a topic is regarded as insignificant and pushed as far into the background as possible in favor of the conceptual side, we are striving for poietic reflection here. Although the scientific text refers to something outside itself, it claims to be conclusive and contain everything essential. It is based on logic and rationality and aims at secure knowledge that is repeatable and universal and can predict future events. On the other hand, poietic reflection is based on the inseparability of action and notion and refers to habitual knowledge and experience. It is aware that texts, i.e., linguistically formulated reflection, cannot replace vibrant experience and our sensual being in the world. Since they are texts in a book, the articles presented here therefore necessarily contain only one side of the coin, namely the reflection of the absent other side. At the same time, language is a very powerful tool to depict the knowledge that arises when we reflect on our experiences and actions. These reflections do not have to be strictly rational and logical – as in purely scientific representations – but refer to research oriented towards action and embodiment, which only brings about the event that it reports through its own actions. This inevitably means that the contributions do not deal with current issues of industrial design processes but instead focus on experimental approaches to design challenges in academic environments. In this sense, the articles are to be seen more as contributions towards a yet-to-be-developed philosophy of making than as the presentation of building blocks for a design theory.