Discontented: actions and tactics of a design studies practice

This PhD focuses on and investigates how a practice of design studies affects the development of new and challenging frameworks in design history and design culture in Canada. Using methods of curation, writing, and public discourse in order to refute "how Westerners have distinguished, named, sorted, grouped, gathered, and subsequently deployed material things in order to make knowledge claims about both them and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them" (Ulrich et al, 2015), my research proposes a departure from the privileged spaces of Art Historical concepts such as originality, location, pedigree, and authorship in design history in order to build an inclusive and equitable approach to understanding design history. My research question guiding my work, asks: How might the use of unconventional theoretical frameworks disrupt existing structures used to critique design and establish networks of knowledge? <br><br>In order to explore this proposed approach and methodology for a design studies practice I have used Canadian design history - a generally unrecorded and unacknowledged field - as a case study for my research. Combining the knowledge that can be captured through material biographies and autobiographies with a desire to include anonymous and everyday design creates a potential for a recorded history that contemporary designers understand and see a way in which to contribute. At the core of this interrogation is the ongoing tension and conflict between the need to redefine frameworks and paradigms to suit Canadian design, and the dominant forces of the political economy of design, which benefits from stasis, or status quo of traditional historical frameworks. I propose that theories from other fields, particularly literature and narratology, can be more useful than the paradigms of Art History to investigate the contributions of ordinary and anonymous design to histories and canons. More specifically, theories of adaptation as well as frameworks of folklore, borrowed from narratology and media studies, provide useful typology to position design within a historical context. "[Mobilizing] a wide vocabulary of active terms [including] version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo" (Sanders 2005), allows the much-needed conceptual space to discuss the contributions of Canadian design in its own way, within its own cultural context. <br><br>My design studies practice is represented by a framework of five actions and tactics - piercing, consigning, pivoting, transmuting, and spamming - each applied to four goals of conceptual findings - de-trashing, consigning, filtering, and constituting. This framework is populated by twenty projects of varying scope, resulting in an ongoing and active contribution to a body of work. It is intended to be interpreted by other design studies practitioners, adopted or adapted in order to build future networks of knowledge to '[contend] with what we have made' (Dilnot 2015), and to subvert the problematic categorization of design into inflexible design history canons.