Design Thinking: Iversity

We (and our ancestors) have been manipulating our surroundings for a very long time, through the creation of tools, buildings, sacred objects, stories and rituals, and so on — let’s call them “artifacts”: everything that we produce to make our life easier, more comfortable, more enjoyable and aesthetic. Throughout most of our history, our artifacts were pretty rudimentary — the stone age took a very long time. We’ve been adapting materials and techniques, as new technologies became available. Through ingenuity and our artifacts, we’ve been discovery and inventing in a continually accelerating pace.

Technological break-troughs (for example in the wide-spread use of bronze):
- led to new tools, objects and functions
- led to new formal vocabularies, in other words aesthetics
- led to new social organizations: nomadic cultures to settlements, to cities, to states, to the industrialization, to the information-based global society today

From the Stone Age until the Medieval, designers were at the same time craftspeople and artists.

We see Functionalism (or “form follows function”) as a design philosophy belonging to classic modernism of the 1920s. However, I would argue that we have always produced functional artifacts, although our definition of function has always been changing. Sacred symbols on tools, for example, had the extremely important function of appeasing the gods — something which we don’t expect of our tools today.

The fundamental characteristic of design in this early phase: production and design occurred simultaneously, meaning the designer/ crafts person/ artist designed an artifact through its production. The construction of buildings has always been a special form of production, as here many craftspeople have to coordinate their efforts. This coordination led to what we would call “design” in its simplest form: planning ahead, deciding what the object will look like before the production starts, communicating this to others.

In DE architectura, Vitruvius defined: solidity, functionality and beauty. This benchmark can be easily applied to all design objects, even today: as form, function and aesthetics.

The discipline of the designer in those early days was at the same time a craftsman, a producer. Regional and personal styles developed, however each artifact was individual and designed to last as long as possible. Even though we today look back on and we see an artistic masterpiece, for example this fresco by Ambrosio, art as in our understanding didn’t exist then craftsmen combined technical skill and aesthetic sensibility to create objects that made life easier and enjoyable — art was no more and no less than just that.

In summary: design took place simultaneously with the production of the artifacts although well-made and aesthetic artifacts from these early times could be viewed as art today, that was not the intention of the producer or designer.