Design, power and identity

We are at the threshold of the design century. Design has always existed, since the dawn of society, design has always accompanied men.
Design takes form of a particular power: it’s one against-an Other at the same time that –is in continuity-with an Other. Which means, it’s a way to configure a constellation of elements that constitutes an identity that differ from an-other at the same time that it’s only way of true existence is only possible with others.
Design is a powerful way to generate identities that goes from the most rancid individualism to the most wide and plural cosmopolitanism. It can generate individualities only when others can observe the difference between this from the others. And at the same time it can articulate common elements to generate a transcendent identity to the structured family, the city or even the nation.

Societies who closed themselves had maintained in general a status quo with regards to their designs. On the other hand, those societies which through commerce and war as a medium, have made contact with other societies that could reach other dynamic forms of design. Nowadays societies had speeded their contact. Their identities are confronted, united, colonized by other identities, etc. Design plays a major role in all these forms in which society build their identity.

The matter would be to generate a superior focus of design over its mere estheticism and understand it as the architecture of identities. This means, to empty design from its nihilist weight which conducts to the frivolous banality and understand it its deep form of power and builder of identities. This is what this blog is about.

If the XIX century was the century of the jurists and the XX century was of the economists, let’s make sure that the XXI century will be the century of designers. We will have to understand design, to understand the world.

"DNA of the Mind" - Ignacio Porretti | www.drvanhardisk.deviantart.com