Design Languages

By Stefano Caggiano

Most of the people who work in the field attain an implicit knowledge of design languages through exposure to design discourse, that is to say, to the ecosystem comprised of products, companies, showrooms, trade shows, events, exhibitions, magazines, and blogs that deal with design. And just as there is no need to study grammar in order to speak effectively, so too can one learn to “speak” design proficiently without necessarily studying its “grammar.” Yet, as more and more people enter the field of design, the bar is raised in terms of the skills required to be groundbreaking in design field—both from a cultural and from a market perspective. Direct exposure to the evolution of objects remains fundamental to work within the design system, but passing from an empirical to a strategic knowledge of design languages requires a specific understanding of the ways in which the different aesthetics embodied in objects refer to the cultural meanings underlying them. With this in mind, this book aims to provide a guide to the “grammar” of design languages, with an emphasis on the contemporary scene. It cannot and in no way intends to replace direct exposure to design languages. Instead, it tries to make explicit the aesthetic-cultural pivots of such languages and thus aid design professionals in their passage from being merely familiar with the aesthetics of objects to being able to understand and use such aesthetics strategically.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stefano Caggiano
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9786050406474

Book preview

Author

INTRODUCTION

A Grammar for Design Languages

Children learn to speak by participating in the linguistic practices of a cultural community. Exposed to language well before school age, they adopt the patterns of linguistic behavior they observe in adults. These regularities are the rules of grammar. They function less like a list of orders than a set of pivots through which one can give shape to the linguistic mass. The mastery of language thus involves an implicit, operational form of knowledge that can sometimes be explained explicitly in terms of grammar (e.g., at school), but works just as well without such formal instruction.

A similar distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge applies to design languages. Most of the people who work in the field attain an implicit knowledge of design languages through exposure to design discourse, that is to say, to the ecosystem comprised of products, companies, showrooms, trade shows, events, exhibitions, magazines, and blogs that deal with design. And just as there is no need to study grammar in order to speak effectively, so too can one learn to speak design proficiently without necessarily studying its grammar.

Yet, as more and more people enter the field of design, the bar is raised in terms of the skills required to be groundbreaking in design field—both from a cultural and from a market perspective. Direct exposure to the evolution of objects remains fundamental to work within the design system, but passing from an empirical to a strategic knowledge of design languages requires a specific understanding of the ways in which the different aesthetics embodied in objects refer to the cultural meanings underlying them.

With this in mind, this book aims to provide a guide to the grammar of design languages, with an emphasis on the contemporary scene. It cannot and in no way intends to replace direct exposure to design languages. Instead, it tries to make explicit the aesthetic-cultural pivots of such languages and thus aid design professionals in their passage from being merely familiar with the aesthetics of objects to being able to understand and use such aesthetics strategically.

INTRODUCTION

What a Design Language Is

Design languages do not arise out of nowhere, they evolve over time. Accordingly, this book traces the pre-linguistic paths in the history of design, as they have shifted from the origins of the field in the second half of the nineteenth century, up to and then through the two World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century. It then charts the design languages of the second half of the twentieth century, until turning finally to contemporary design languages in the last and longest part of the book.

But to begin: a few clarifications. First, it should be immediately clear that no object is able to make up a language by itself. A flock of birds illustrates the point well. None of the birds know the overall shape to be kept as a group, yet their interaction produces striking aesthetics that belong to the flock as a whole. A design language takes shape in the same way. It is a language insofar as it is shared by several objects, each of which has its own design, but which constitute and convey together a specific aesthetic, an emerging property belonging to the group as a whole.

A second point (which flows directly from the first) is that a language is not the style of a single designer. In fact, whereas a style is individual and deliberate, a language is inherently transverse and, as argued above, engendered only by a group of objects.

A last clarification is that the term language is not used here as synonymous with aesthetic. Instead, a language is comprised of an aesthetic connected to a meaning or set of meanings, to which it refers and by which it’s given shape and content. Put another way, a design language consists of aesthetics + meaning, and what gives a language its peculiar morphology is the specificity of the aesthetic-semantic pivot it puts in the field of design. When we speak of a design language we are focusing neither on the personal style of a designer nor on any one individual object, but to a peculiar connection between an aesthetic and a cultural meaning characterizing a group of objects as a whole.

Through what channels and how quickly an aesthetic might take root and circulate has clearly shifted in this digital age, but the compelling question is still why certain aesthetics propagate more than others. The reason, I argue, lies in the very definition and form of design languages. Designed objects and aesthetic forms do not exist within a void but draw upon and express specific meanings. So, instead of beautiful objects, it is more appropriate when speaking of design languages to talk about aesthetically meaningful objects. As such, the book’s concern is not what makes designed objects look good, but what makes them look meaningful—how cultural meaning is embodied in them. To offer a final analogy, a design language can be compared to an iceberg: there is its above-water, visible forms—its aesthetic, and a submerged, imperceptible body—that deeper cultural content upon which the aesthetic is based and only thanks to which that aesthetic can even be perceived as meaningful, and, sometimes, meaningfully beautiful.

Pre-linguistic paths in design from the origins to the Fifties ↵

Design languages from the Fifties to the Eighties ↵

Design languages from the Nineties to the present time ↵

1. Pre-Linguistic Paths in Design from the Origins to the Fifties

From a Representative Aesthetic to a Conformative Aesthetic

Rationalism

Organic Design

1. PRE-LINGUISTIC PATHS IN DESIGN FROM THE ORIGINS TO THE FIFTIES

From a Representative Aesthetic to a Conformative Aesthetic

The world expositions that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in Europe, put on display for the first time an entire new landscape made up of machine-made objects. Immediately, a split emerged between those who enthusiastically greeted the dawn of the