De-signing Design

At a moment when the term "design" is used not only to designate acts of a designer - such as projecting the organizational, representational, technical, and material dimensions of an object, building, image or interface - but to reference any act of strategic or even managerial thinking, De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice offers welcome conceptual and discursive tools for thinking critically about the future. Demonstrating the complex relays between thinking and doing, or theory and practice, it marks out a variegated new ground upon which to operate beyond the purely instrumental. -- Felicity D. Scott, Columbia University De-signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice is a synthetic modernist handbook for de-signing design and for the city as design outcome. Its compelling narrative begins with Jacques Derrida's provocative placement of the hyphen in the formation of the term "de-signing". Thus equipped, we set off on a journey that leads from the production of the first atlas by Abraham Ortellus in 1570 all the way to the world of BwO (body-without-organs) and other entities "poised in potentiality". Strategies and outcomes that once seemed out of the world of Superfictions now appear tantalizingly real. This book will appeal to, will excite, and will inform artists, designers, architects, bio-engineers, narratologists, city planners, graduate students, and anyone with a keen sense of wonder about our future and how it might be "de-signed". -- Peter Hill, Deakin University

Elizabeth Grierson is professor of art and philosophy at RMIT University. Harriet Edquist is professor of architectural history at RMIT University. Helene Frichot is assistant professor of critical studies in architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

1.De-Signing the City: Interventions through Art, Elizabeth Grierson 2.Towards De-Signing: Narrative, Networks and the Open Work, Scott McQuire 3.Designations, Mark Jackson 4.Signs of Postmemory in Dresden: Restoring the Displaced, Marsha Berry 5.Posed Solitude: Signing a Poetics of Community, Maria O'Connor 6.24 Hours Noticing: Designing our Encounters with Place, Laurene Vaughan and Yoko Akama 7.Representing the City: Complementing Science and Technology with Art, William Cartwright 8.Embodied Encounters: The Photographic Seeds of Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr's Ten Canoes, Linda Daley 9.Mapping Modernity in "Marvellous Melbourne": Ada Cambridge's A Woman's Friendship, Harriet Edquist 10.Mapping an Ethico-Aesthetics for Wet Biotechnological Architectures, Helene Frichot 11.Digital Organic Design: Architecture, the New Biology and the Knowledge Economy, Karen Burns 12.De-Signing as Bio-technological Endosymbiosis, Stephen Loo 13.Design, Second Life and the Hyper Real, Lisa Dethridge 14.Hopeful: Biology, Architectural Design and Philosophy, Chris L. Smith 15.Design and New Materialism, Neil Leach