Papers by Peter M Buwert
Many of the professional organisations within the various fields of design activity publish profe... more Many of the professional organisations within the various fields of design activity publish professional codes of ethics in one form or another. This paper opens up a discussion of the role which professional codes might play in relation to the ethicality of design activity. A framework for understanding the roles and functions which professional codes may play is constructed using concepts drawn from the literature on professional codes. The content of fourteen professional codes issued by design organisations is presented and examined. There does appear to be a broad consensus across the content of the codes examined. However, the matter of whether this consensus reflects a profession-wide convention is debatable. The paper concludes with a discussion presenting possible critiques of the nature and operation of professional codes within the context of design, and reflecting on some of the implications of this analysis for how we might reasonably think about the relationship between professional codes and bigger questions of the ethicality of design.
This paper presents the argument that design is by nature an activity which extends and transform... more This paper presents the argument that design is by nature an activity which extends and transforms potentiality and that therefore, because of this, it is always an ethical activity. This foundational ethicality does not guarantee that design will always be good, but rather that it always possesses within itself the simultaneous potentiality for both good and evil. To demonstrate the practical application of this abstract thinking, two relatively well-known examples of morally controversial design – eco-friendly " green bullets " and " The Liberator " 3-D printed gun – are examined through this lens. Evaluation of the extensions of potentiality in such designs does not offer an opinion as to whether these designs are good or evil. Instead, an analysis of the ethicality of design prior to considerations of moral judgement offers perspective as to the scale and significance of the ethical impact which the design in question can be counted responsible for.
This paper presents a conception of aesthetic justice which builds on thoughts of Theodor Adorno ... more This paper presents a conception of aesthetic justice which builds on thoughts of Theodor Adorno and Wolfgang Welsch and attempts to reconcile design's relationships with both aesthetics and ethics. Where legal justice operates on a principle of homogenising equality, aesthetic justice recognises the full heterogeneity of experience and as such cannot tolerate the injustice of treating things which are not alike as if they were. Building on this theoretical conception a project of design for a blind-spot culture is outlined. Design, rather than contributing to societal anaestheticisation of the ethical can instead utilise its aesthetic influence to shine light on dark places, nurturing an atmosphere of sensitivity to differences, exclusions, oppressions and intolerances. Design's potential to act, and fail to act, in such ways is discussed through examples of aesthetic artefacts relating to the 2016 British EU referendum, U.S. presidential election, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Modes of Criticism 2 - Critique of Method, 2016
Our lives are habitual. We habitualise what is familiar in order to be able to function day to da... more Our lives are habitual. We habitualise what is familiar in order to be able to function day to day, and through this a vast chunk of our living becomes automatic. The process makes life easier by decreasing the confusion and tension of having to constantly develop new responses to previously encountered situations. The habitual way of thinking eases the stress of confrontation with the unknown, giving us a strategy to quickly disarm and digest it. Our default tendency is therefore to habitualise everything to the greatest extent possible.
In the essay Art as Technique (1917) the Russian formalist poet Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) describes habitualisation as an ‘algebraic’ process. Instead of paying precise attention to each object of perception, we skip over the details and assign it a rough placeholder symbol, as X or Y symbolises a complex number in an equation. Thus, rather than having to formulate a response to the unique encounter with the object, we can bypass conscious thought and simply deploy a learned response to the familiar symbol.
[…]
Full text now available on the Modes of Criticism website.
Article originally published in Modes of Criticism 2 – Critique of Method (2016).
theConversation.com
Short article considering some of the issues raised by the trailer for the forthcoming documentar... more Short article considering some of the issues raised by the trailer for the forthcoming documentary "Design Disruptors: How design became the new language of business". For longer draft version, see my draft paper: "Meet the Design Disruptors"
Design is often thought of as an activity seeking to change existing situations into preferred on... more Design is often thought of as an activity seeking to change existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1969). But how are designers to discern what the nature of this “preferred” change should be? What would it mean to truly design ethically? In the admirable but naïve quest to improve situations through design, it is possible to end up bypassing the ethical altogether. Design can aesthetically provide the appearance and sensation of ethicality without the inconvenience of actually having to be ethical. Ethical discomfort is anaesthetised through the process of aestheticizing ethics: an/aestheticization. Beginning with visual communication design, but maintaining a view to the applicability and importance of the argument for broader fields of design, this paper presents the case that there is hope for genuinely ethical design in an increasingly aestheticized world by drawing on German philosopher of aesthetics Wolfgang Welsch’s suggestion that the root of ethics can be found to emerge from within the aesthetic itself. Design, which for so long has been a principal contributor to an/aestheticization, contains within itself - precisely due its aesthetic nature - the
potential to return feeling to a society which finds itself constantly numbed to true ethical being.
Design is often thought of as an activity seeking to change existing situations into preferred on... more Design is often thought of as an activity seeking to change existing situations into preferred ones, which might suggest that it is ideally situated as a tool for responsible and active socially engaged citizenship. However designers often inhabit a conflicted ethical space, expressing a desire for responsible citizenship while often behaving in ways they themselves acknowledge do not live up to this standard. Understanding of the nature of these phenomena is of vital importance to attempts to support the socially responsible citizenship of designers. This paper briefly touches on some coping-strategies used by those caught in ethical conflict, before proposing a further suggestion of specific relevance to design, a concept of an/aesth/ethics: by which we anaesthetise ourselves to ethical pain by aestheticising ethics. This paper presents the case that there is hope for genuinely ethical design in an increasingly aestheticised world by drawing on Wolfgang Welsch’s suggestion that the root of ethics emerges from within the aesthetic itself. Design, which for so long has been a principal contributor to an/aestheticisation, contains within itself - precisely due its aesthetic nature - the potential to return feeling to a society which finds itself constantly numbed to true ethical being.
"""Design history is often marginalised in practice not because designers are not interested in, ... more """Design history is often marginalised in practice not because designers are not interested in, convinced by, or capable of engaging with the processes and methodologies of the discipline, nor because designers remain unconvinced of the value of the historical knowledge and understanding which design history can bring to our work. Rather, design history remains on the shelf due to a failure of the overall attitude and approach by which it is sold to us; a failure to inspire our confidence that the weight of history will be a boost to empower, not an obstacle to impede, our creative endeavours.
20th century playwright Bertolt Brecht developed a complex and sophisticated theatre practice and theory designed to actively stimulate an audience’s critical engagement with contemporary social and political realities by presenting all actions on stage – past, present and future - as historical moments. With all time seen thus historically, the present moment becomes strange to the viewer, no longer being thought of as an inevitable situation in which an individual is powerless to effect change. If history is the result of individuals’ aggregate actions, the present is returned to the viewer as a position of power in which to act.
This paper makes the case that such an active emancipatory historical approach is worth investigating as an alternative foundational narrative for design history. A Brechtian Design history could be an effective tool for better design, reorienting perception of design history from being only a knowledge based activity for pursuing understanding of past context, to becoming an active instrument in the designer’s toolkit; empowering design activity in the present and oriented towards the future, by providing perspective of the present as a historical moment; not fixed, determined or inevitable, but changeable and improvable: a much more appropriate starting point for design practice."""
Visual communication design is big business, and growing, as our society becomes ever more visual... more Visual communication design is big business, and growing, as our society becomes ever more visually literate and demanding. However, within the fields of professional image creation, comparatively little thought is given to the designer’s responsibility for the societal impact of their manipulations of visual culture. The unspoken and often unquestioned assumption is that visual form is merely a vessel for content. Any socio-political impact on the viewer derives from the received content of the message; therefore responsibility lies with the client not with us: “Don’t shoot the messenger!” This thesis is presented as an embodied challenge to the assumed separation of form and content. One cannot exist without the other. Form is not neutral. The document set before you is an experiment in using various techniques of visual manipulation to ‘defamiliarise’ the conventional experience of reading the text of an academic thesis. In summary, the design of this thesis aims to bring the content communicated by the experience of the visual form of the document onto an equal footing with the content communicated by reading the text. In order to achieve this, techniques of reflexivity designed to draw the viewer's attention to the constructed, manipulated nature of the visual form have been employed. The aim of this experimental methodology is to encourage the active engagement of the viewer in critically considering the complete experience of the content set before them. This goal is pursued by placing obstacles and inconsistencies in the way of the viewer's effortless consumption of ‘data’, forcing them, to some extent, to engage in critical thought as to what the content is, and what their response to the subject will be. In the unique case of this project, the sphere of content is doubly reflexive as it is the document’s own very form and manifestation which is to be questioned.
Teaching Documents by Peter M Buwert
Drafts by Peter M Buwert
Meet the Design Disruptors. From their unreasonably cool open-plan office spaces in San Francisco... more Meet the Design Disruptors. From their unreasonably cool open-plan office spaces in San Francisco and New York this casually dressed tribe of MacBook toting insurgents are orchestrating an international business revolution. These revolutionaries use design as a business strategy to undercut, outperform and ultimately overthrow incumbent market leaders. They’re powerful. They’re running rings around the establishment. And they want to improve your life. This is the story promised to us by the trailer for the forthcoming feature length documentary “Design Disruptors: How Design Became the New Language of Business”. But what lies beneath this tale, and how easily should we accept it?
Thesis Chapters by Peter M Buwert
Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis: "Ethical Design: a foundation for visual communication." Robert Gordo... more Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis: "Ethical Design: a foundation for visual communication." Robert Gordon University, 2016.
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Papers by Peter M Buwert
In the essay Art as Technique (1917) the Russian formalist poet Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) describes habitualisation as an ‘algebraic’ process. Instead of paying precise attention to each object of perception, we skip over the details and assign it a rough placeholder symbol, as X or Y symbolises a complex number in an equation. Thus, rather than having to formulate a response to the unique encounter with the object, we can bypass conscious thought and simply deploy a learned response to the familiar symbol.
[…]
Full text now available on the Modes of Criticism website.
Article originally published in Modes of Criticism 2 – Critique of Method (2016).
potential to return feeling to a society which finds itself constantly numbed to true ethical being.
20th century playwright Bertolt Brecht developed a complex and sophisticated theatre practice and theory designed to actively stimulate an audience’s critical engagement with contemporary social and political realities by presenting all actions on stage – past, present and future - as historical moments. With all time seen thus historically, the present moment becomes strange to the viewer, no longer being thought of as an inevitable situation in which an individual is powerless to effect change. If history is the result of individuals’ aggregate actions, the present is returned to the viewer as a position of power in which to act.
This paper makes the case that such an active emancipatory historical approach is worth investigating as an alternative foundational narrative for design history. A Brechtian Design history could be an effective tool for better design, reorienting perception of design history from being only a knowledge based activity for pursuing understanding of past context, to becoming an active instrument in the designer’s toolkit; empowering design activity in the present and oriented towards the future, by providing perspective of the present as a historical moment; not fixed, determined or inevitable, but changeable and improvable: a much more appropriate starting point for design practice."""
Teaching Documents by Peter M Buwert
Drafts by Peter M Buwert
Thesis Chapters by Peter M Buwert
In the essay Art as Technique (1917) the Russian formalist poet Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) describes habitualisation as an ‘algebraic’ process. Instead of paying precise attention to each object of perception, we skip over the details and assign it a rough placeholder symbol, as X or Y symbolises a complex number in an equation. Thus, rather than having to formulate a response to the unique encounter with the object, we can bypass conscious thought and simply deploy a learned response to the familiar symbol.
[…]
Full text now available on the Modes of Criticism website.
Article originally published in Modes of Criticism 2 – Critique of Method (2016).
potential to return feeling to a society which finds itself constantly numbed to true ethical being.
20th century playwright Bertolt Brecht developed a complex and sophisticated theatre practice and theory designed to actively stimulate an audience’s critical engagement with contemporary social and political realities by presenting all actions on stage – past, present and future - as historical moments. With all time seen thus historically, the present moment becomes strange to the viewer, no longer being thought of as an inevitable situation in which an individual is powerless to effect change. If history is the result of individuals’ aggregate actions, the present is returned to the viewer as a position of power in which to act.
This paper makes the case that such an active emancipatory historical approach is worth investigating as an alternative foundational narrative for design history. A Brechtian Design history could be an effective tool for better design, reorienting perception of design history from being only a knowledge based activity for pursuing understanding of past context, to becoming an active instrument in the designer’s toolkit; empowering design activity in the present and oriented towards the future, by providing perspective of the present as a historical moment; not fixed, determined or inevitable, but changeable and improvable: a much more appropriate starting point for design practice."""