On Displacement, Blind Immediacy, and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Review of Design (plus) Research Conference, Politecnico di Milano, May, 2000

Abstract

Towards a Research Culture Sometimes, beginnings are beginnings. In his opening lecture, Tomas Maldonado pointed to the current shift in direction of industrial design and the displacement of really happens today in the practice of design, brought about through the international increase in Ph.D. studies in design. Such studies, he declared: Leave less and less room... for a design without research, without theory, immersed in the blind immediacy of the market and fashion. Ever present at the conference, current Ph.D. candidates made their difference obvious as they delivered papers, questioned from the floor, and established connections based on issues central to their work. Whatever the status of design plus research before Milano, it was successfully displaced by the engagement of these new members of the design research community. Beyond such new difference, the old differences remain to be addressed. Theory and practice will have it out with each other at every opportunity. Acknowledging the ease with which such polarities maintain themselves, Maldonado reminded the conference of deeper philosophical concerns that often are disguised in the politics of battle. While recognizing the concreteness of making and doing, according to Maldonado, design must reject pseudo-concreteness, the rhetorical pretext of concreteness. As design researchers, we must guard against was once called 'the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.' Redetermining the concrete, and redetermining the status of the concrete, requires that design be redetermined; questioning the nature of human and the human of nature must take its place in the discourse of design along with the already recognized concerns of making. Within this expanded rhetoric, no object will suffice as an answer and no action will equal conclusion. Having raised such strong issues from the start, the opening lecture by Maldonado ensured that what followed was guided by a 1 M. Heidegger in John Salis, ed., Radical Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Martin Heidegger(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), 3.