To design means to literally involve oneself in a practical experience with signs. To design means to express, in various signs, thoughts, feelings, and intentions pertinent to human communication, as well as to project oneself in artifacts appropriate to human practical experiences. In the remote age of direct practical experiences, there was no design. The practice of signs entails the possibility to transcend the present. In nature, future means insemination; in culture, future is in-signation: putting into sign, i.e., design. In its broadest definition, design is the self-constitution of the human being as an agent of change. This change covers the environment, conceiving artifacts (tools included), shelter, clothing, rituals, religious ceremonies, events, messages, interpretive contexts, interactions, and more recently, new materials and virtual realities. Shakespeare, who would have enjoyed the intense fervor of our age, gave a beautiful description of design: "…imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown" (Midsummer Night's Dream). Although design contains elements ensuing from experiences involving language, design is essentially a non-verbal human activity. Its means of expression and communication are grounded in the visual, but extend to sound, texture, odor, taste, and combinations of these (synaesthesia), including rhythm, color, and movement.
To the human being involved in practical experiences of self-constitution, the realm of nature appears as given. In counter-distinction and in retrospect, human nature appears as designed. In some cases, design is an act of selection: something is picked up from the environment-a stick, stone, plant-and assigned an a-natural function through implementation: mark territory, aid an activity, support a structure or the human body, trap animals or humans, attack or defend against attack, color skin or clothing. In other cases, selection is followed by some form of framing, such as the frame of the ritual around a totem pole, animal sacrifice, mourning, and celebrations of fecundity and victory. Selection and framing are related to efficiency expectations. They embody the hope for help from magic forces and express willingness to pursue goals that support the individual, family, and community. Between the present of any experience and the future, the experience of design bridges in the form of new patterns of interaction (through tools, artifacts, messages), recurrences, and extensions of consequences of human activity from the immediate to the future.
The projection of biology into an experience of long-lasting consequences implies elements of planning, no matter how rudimentary, and expectations of outcome. It also leads to new human relations in family-based interactions, education, shared values, and patterns of reciprocal responsibility. Random sexual encounters that reflect natural drives are not designs. Awareness of reciprocal attraction, shared feelings, and commitments extending well beyond the physical encounter can be identified as a design component present even in sexuality. Between the design component of sexual consequence of the evolving human being and the design of offspring by selection of a partner, by selection of genetic traits catalogued in semen banks, by genetic splicing and mutation, and by all that is yet to come upon us, there is a difference that reflects the altered human pragmatic condition.
Of real interest here is how the future is captured in design. Moreover, we want to know how it unfolds in practical experiences of design by which human beings extend their reality from here and now to then and there. In ways different from language, design gives the human being another experience of time and space. This experience is for the most part coherent with that of language. But it can also make individuals constituting themselves through design work aware of aspects of time that the language experience misses altogether or makes impossible. Designs are expressed in drawings and eventually complemented by models testifying to the experiences of volume, texture, and motion. The anticipated time dimension is eventually added in simulations. Design liberates the human being from total conditioning through language.
Within the convention of design, signs are endowed with a life of their own, supported by the energy of the persons entering the convention. This is how human symbolism, of confirmed vitality and efficiency, is factually established. Symbols integrated in human experience are given the life of the experience. The entire heritage of rituals testifies to this. Today the word ritual is used indiscriminately for any habitual preparation, from bathing to watching TV to after-game celebrations. Initially, rituals appeared as dynamic designs centered around episodes of life and death. Their motivation lay in the practical experience; their unfolding in connected interactions acquired an aesthetic quality from the underlying design.
From the earliest known experiences, the implicit aesthetic component is the optimizing element of the experience. This aesthetic component extends perceived formal qualities found in nature to the aesthetics of objects and activities in the realm of human nature. The language of design expresses awareness of these formal characteristics. Practical experiences display a repetitive pattern: the optimal choice (of shapes, colors, rhythms, sounds, movement) is always pleasing. The quality through which pleasure is experienced is not reducible to the elements involved, but it is impossible without them. Selection is motivated by practical expectations, but guided by formal criteria. Individuals involved in the earliest pragmatic framework were aware of this. Other formal criteria make up a generic background. One of the recurrent patterns of the practical experience of design is to appropriate the formal quality associated with what is pleasing in nature and to integrate it in the optimal shaping of the future. This is how the aesthetic dimension of human practical experiences resulted within such experiences.
Notation systems (e.g., the quipu, representational drawings on stone or on the ground, or hieroglyphics) that eventually became writing can be classified as design, not lastly in view of their aesthetic coherence. Only when rules and expectations defined by verbal language take over notation does writing separate from design and become part of the broader experience of language. We can now understand why changes in verbal language, as it constituted a framework for time and spatial experiences, were not necessarily reflected in changes in design. By the time literacy became possible, the underlying structure that led to it was embodied in the use of language. This is not true, to the same extent, in the practice of design. It is at this juncture that design is ascertained as a profession, i.e., as a practical domain with its own dynamics and goals. By no coincidence, engineering design emerged in the context of the pragmatics that began with building pyramids, ziggurats, and temples, and culminated in the Industrial Revolution in the design of machines. The broad premise of the Industrial Age is that everything is a machine: the house, the carriage, stoves, the contraptions used in literate education, schools, colleges, institutions, art studios, even nature.
From a relatively focused and homogeneous field of practical experiences within industrial society, design evolved, in the civilization of illiteracy, as an overriding concern that extended to many specialized applications: tool design, building and interior design (architecture), jewelry design, apparel design, textile design, product design, graphic design, and to the many fields of engineering (including computer-aided design), interactive media and virtual reality, as well as genetic engineering, new materials design, event design (applied to politics and various commodities), networking, and education. Technologies, from primitive to sophisticated, supporting visual languages made possible complexities for which the intuitive use of visual expression is not the most effective. Consequently, the scope of design-oriented practical experiences changed. Design now affords more integrative projects of higher levels of synaesthesia, as well as experiences involving variable designs-that is, designs that grow together with the human being self-constituted in practical interactions with the designed world.
In the pragmatic framework based on the digital, design replaced literacy more than any other practical experience has. The results of design are different in nature from those of literacy. As optimistic as one can become about a future not bound to the constraints of literacy, it takes more to comprehend the sense of design at a time when evolutionary progress is paralleled by revolutionary change.
Drawing the future