Rethinking design: From the methodology of innovation to the object of design

Abstract

The design literature theorizes design as the methodology of innovation, supposedly required for mediating the world’s separate entities, such as theory and practice, the human and the material, and subjective and objective knowing, coming “naturally” with the designer’s ways of knowing. But instead of taking such naturalizations for granted, we argue that through such positioning of design the specifics of design activity are obscured, along with the locations designers take within them. We propose that “design as a methodology” is an object produced by design. Investigating this object of design, and how it is made, will make visible what design activity is, and what locations the designers take within them.