Julier, Guy , and Anders V. Munch. "Epilogue: Towards design culture as practice.

" Design
Culture: Objects and Approaches. By Guy Julier , Anders V. Munch , Mads Nygaard Folkmann ,
Hans-Christian Jensen and Niels Peter Skou . London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 227–230.
Bloomsbury Design Library~Bloomsbury Design Library 2019 Collection~. Web. 16 Apr. 2020.
<http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474289856.0025>.

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Epilogue: Towards design culture as practice
by Guy Julier and Anders V. Munch

DOI: 10.5040/9781474289856.0025
Page Range: 227–230

The contributions of this book demonstrate the complex configurations of design culture by
approaching very different layers and topics through various disciplinary and multi and
interdisciplinary approaches. This underlines the consideration in our introduction on Design
Culture[1] as a multi and interdisciplinary field of enquiry. The investigations follow the changing
nature and constant development of its objects, these being contemporary design cultures.
They necessarily stray across disciplinary demarcations, therefore.

The sections have explored how Design Culture has developed as an emergent discipline to
understand current cultural changes and challenges; how design is being positioned between
market and society; how designers have to position themselves ideologically and professionally
as many other actors now promote their services as design; and how design culture unfolds in
and across various places, spaces and geographies. It therefore stands that these themes invite
a range of disciplinary pathways that were followed both in discreet and amalgamated ways.
All these fuzzy borders, tensions, logics and ideals mean that the many actors in and observers
of design culture have to keep manoeuvring in this contested field. They also have to develop
overall understandings of its cultural interrelations and compositions.

Beyond its academic investigations and interpretations, the deployment of the term ‘design
culture’ also becomes a tool of professional practice or civic aspiration. This describes a shared
set of understandings of and enthusiasms for design at the centre of an organization, firm, place
or other assemblage of interests. Building a design culture may involve a set of consciously
enacted actions in establishing shared understandings and values. These might include the
identification and establishment of specific infrastructural support, common linguistic tropes,
key personalities and support systems.

Here, the task is often that of translating and mediating between different understandings of
and interests in the notion of design. Design is now promoted as a tool to organize innovative
processes within management and introduced to employees of many professions as strategic
design or design thinking. It then becomes an increasingly wicked challenge to explicate
diverging notions of design and establish an operational, common understanding across
multidisciplinary teams, not to speak of larger organizations or publics. Finding ways of
establishing a design culture within a government department, a city or a tech company is a
process of articulation and communication as much as producing design things (Julier and
Leerberg 2014; Lawson 2015). The process perhaps refers to a somewhat linear, results-driven
and problem-solving approach that recognizes a particular need in a defined context and a set
of steps to address this through a design sensibility.

However, more complex parameters for design culture are also apparent. Manzini (2016)
identifies an expanded societal field of design culture that aligns with a transition of design
itself. This transition to, what Manzini calls, ‘emerging design’ means that it undertakes a more
consciously active role in the general contexts of everyday life, well-being and ‘the socio-
technical eco-systems in which we exist’. This would be in contradistinction to responding to
more specific demands that are focused on ‘the brief’ and ‘the project’ within commercial
parameters. In Manzini’s conception, designerly attention shifts from objects for industrial
production to ‘ways of thinking and doing’. He describes these as meaning ‘methods, tools,
approaches, and … design cultures’ (Manzini 2016: 53). In this, design culture becomes not just
the thing that exists but as an intention towards cultural and societal change that is framed
within a designerly sensibility. The outcomes here are ‘hybrid, dynamic entities’ (56) that
incorporate multiple interests and intentions. A new design culture is expected to unfold here
that may be more holistic, participatory and complex. A number of questions would
subsequently arise from these. What kind of everyday assemblages do we want to live in? What
material systems can be engaged to give voice to citizens in this? How do we align socio-
technical devices and varying discourses?
In such an account, a concept of design culture is shifted from something that is aspirational for
a brand, company, location to a process of thinking and conceptualizing within broader societal
narratives. This might be compared with earlier design visionaries as László Moholy-Nagy or
Victor Papanek, who saw, how design seeped into all aspects of modern society, and how it
ought to enable us to organize everything appropriately. A totalizing notion of design is
revealed through these words from Moholy-Nagy stated in 1947: ‘There is design in the
organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labour relations, in city planning, in
working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one
great problem: “design for life”. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his
special task with the wide scope of a true “designer”, with the new urge to integrated
relationships’ (Moholy-Nagy 1969: 42). Such visions have been repeated frequently through the
twentieth century, but instead of asking all of us to perform as designers, or just the ‘creative
class’, we ought to question, how this ‘empowerment by design’ might be encultured among us
as users and consumers, entrepreneurs and citizens.
What seems to be missing so far in this argument is a sense of an empirical grounding with
which these aspirations entangle. What, specifically, are the power structures, the economic
interests, the social norms, the cultural practices and the artefactual fields that define an
assemblage that makes a design culture? And how do we mobilize a fine grain understanding of
these to build meaningful practices that extend them towards defined goals (e.g. reduced
carbon footprints, better social inclusion and well-being and healthier populations)? Perhaps
this is where a more rigorous form of design culture as a practice, born of out of academic
disciplinary development and enquiry, may emerge.
This is a distinct consideration as compared with ‘design thinking’ in that the latter is largely
assumed to exist within a project-based context of problem-solving (e.g. Lawson 1997).
However, they might be linked. Kimbell (2011, 2012) opens the possibilities out for thinking
about design thinking by re-aligning it with the materiality of its own processes. Visualization
and prototyping within design thinking involves the production of stuff that mirrors a wider
sense of the entanglements of human and non-human actors in the world.
The emergence, or reinvigoration, of design thinking from 2005 is not without coincidence with
a re-emergence of concerns with regards resource scarcity, economic recession and climate
change and how traditional management teaching was not equipped to deal with these
complex contemporary challenges. These all demand rigorous and focused enquiry into the
interlinkages of humans and things, people and systems, populations and structures. Kimbell
asks for much more specific investigations of the situated, embodied practice of design thinking
to critically qualify the notion within an interdisciplinary form of understanding. In short, this
involves attendance to the socio-material practices – and potential ones – within specific
contexts. This situatedness might be extracted from the conditions of an overarching notion of
design culture. Meanwhile, embodiment might be studied close-up against the background of
the specific design culture of a locality, a governmental organization, a firm, an institution and
so on (Deserti and Rizzo 2014).
Beyond design thinking, we therefore offer Design Culture as a more reflexive form of practice
that investigates not only the machinations of context but challenges the assumptions –
including its own – of the world. Thus, we see it as an object and discipline, but also as a way of
acting in and intervening on the world. As the processes, aims and outcomes of design culture
become more apparent and more known, so we suggest that a different kind of designing and
design happens as a result. In this, we anticipate that the outcomes of a ‘Design Culture
practice’ might reveal and communicate the structures of its own making. As part of this, we
envisage a cross-disciplinary sensibility where new ontological and epistemological states
surface. These may be disruptive of previous understandings, embodiments or cognitive
processes and, indeed, their disciplinary counterparts in ways that we can only begin to
imagine.
The chief aim of this book has been, through the contributions of its various authors, to provide
a series of focal points that suggest tools and concepts for Design Culture. They are multifarious
and unlikely to present a coherent whole. Indeed, we see this heterogeneity as part of the work
of Design Culture: to broaden, deepen and even re-conceptualize our understandings of design
and society. But we hope that this heterogeneity holds the power to open out new forms and
formats for acting in and through design and society.
Note

References
Deserti, A. and F. Rizzo (2014), ‘Design and the Cultures of Enterprises’, Design Issues, 30(1):
36–56.Julier, G. and Leerberg, M. (2014), ‘Kolding – We Design For Life: embedding a new
design culture into urban regeneration’, Finnish Journal of Urban Studies, 52(2): 39–56.Kimbell,
L. (2011), ‘Rethinking Design Thinking: Part 1’, Design and Culture, 3(3): 285–306.Kimbell, L.
(2012), ‘Rethinking Design Thinking: Part 2’, Design and Culture, 4(2): 129–148.Lawson, B.
(1997), How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified, 3rd edn, London: Architectural
Press.Lawson, S. (2015), ‘3 Simple Ways To Create A Culture Of Design At Any Tech Company’
https://www.fastcompany.com/3052979/3-simple-ways-to-create-a-culture-of-design-at-any-
tech-company. Accessed 1/6/17.Manzini, E. (2016), ‘Design Culture and Dialogic Design’,
Design Issues, 32(1): 52–59.Moholy-Nagy, L. (1969), Vision in motion. New York: Theobald.

[1]
In this Epilogue we revert to the distinction between ‘Design Culture’ (upper case) as a
discipline and ‘design culture’ (lower case) as a phenomenon.