Introduction
In the journal Organization Studies, researcher Kamil Michlewski
reflects upon his observations of the organizations that he has stud-
ied, in which designers are seen as cultural explorers, probing novel
spaces and new conceptual territories, often leading to new com-
mercial opportunities. The idea of cultural exploration could wel
serve as the organizing theme of this issue of Design Issues. Though
the articles, exhibitions, and books discussed in these pages are
exceptional y varied in subject matter and method of inquiry, they
represent the cultural space of human experience that designers
form and reform in progressive transformation of the human made
world and our lives within it. This is well il ustrated in Stephen
Boyd Davis’ article, “History on the Line: Time as Dimension.”
What is a “timeline,” and how can we (and how do we) use design
to probe the meaning and purposes of temporal mapping? Davis
discusses the history of time mapping, dating from the eighteenth
century, and then focuses on the design issues that temporal repre-
sentation must consider. He concludes with a discussion of a
research agenda whose pursuit would deepen our understanding
and capability of addressing digital representations of time.
Despite the economic, social, and cultural importance of
fashion and fashion design, there have been few articles in Design
Issues that address fashion as a design problem. However, the next
article takes on the chal enge of fashion and presents an important
perspective on a subject that is often seen as strikingly ephemeral.
In “Conceptualizing Fashion in Everyday Lives,” Cheryl Buckley
and Hazel Clark confront the dominant views about the meaning
and nature of fashion, including the idea offered by sociologist
Georg Simmel that “fashion increasingly sharpens our sense of
the present.” Buckley and Clark explore “the ways in which the
everyday use, appropriation, circulation, re-making and constant
re-modeling of fashionable clothes over time by diverse social
groups can be: anti-modern and non-progressive; exemplify conti-
nuity and tradition; responsive to regional and national subtleties
as well as global ones; and disruptive of fashion’s structures and
systems as well as its visual codes and norms of consumption.”
Through a careful y researched argument, they develop the idea
that the “ordinary” has been neglected in preference for designers,
celebrities, and sensational events. Readers should note the distinc-
tion and paral el between “fashion studies” and “design studies”
suggested by Buckley and Clark.
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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The next article takes up the legal problem of fashion design,
discussing the intent and variation of copyright and intel ectual
property laws in different countries while focusing on the design
of a Danish shirt. In this article, “The Fashion Designer as Author:
The Case of a Danish T-shirt,” Stina Teilmann-Lock discusses
the unusual case of the “Nørgaard T-shirt,” a garment that was
introduced in 1967 and remains popular to the present. In a 2009
court decision, Danish fashion designer Jørgen Nørgaard was
found, by one of the three judges of the Danish Maritime and Com-
mercial Court, to be –in a legal sense–the ‘author’ of an ‘original
work.’ The other judges, however, found Nørgaard not to be the
author and not to hold a copyright. The complexity of the legal
issues and reasoning are the subject of this article. It has general
interest for the design community at a time when “ownership” of
design ideas is very much in the news.
When discussing emotion in design, writers often focus
on the warm and positive aspects of experience, whether referring
to artifacts or to services. Not so for Steven Fokkinga and Pieter
Desmet. Their article, “Darker Shades of Joy: The Role of Negative
Emotion in Rich Product Experiences,” explores the question of
whether the experienced of mainstream consumer products can
be enriched with negative emotions. Their subject is not “critical
design”: objects deliberately created to chal enge, question, and
inspire reflection on situations of use in cultural or social life.
Instead, they focus on truly mainstream products, seeking to under-
stand the role that negative feelings may have in cultivating a richer
experience in everyday life. The goal of the article is to offer a frame-
work for understanding the conditions under which negative emo-
tions may be pleasurable.
In the final article of this issue, “The Visual Representation
of the Human Genome,” David Stairs makes an interesting distinc-
tion between “informatics” and “infographics.” For Stairs, informat-
ics is the scientific visualization of data, while infographics is the
popularized (and, according to Stairs, often rhetorical) presentation
of information in trivializing ways. He explores the idea of infor-
matics through the history of data visualizations in the study of
genetics and the human genome. In particular, he focuses on the
“inherent ‘design ability’” of scientists to represent complex data for
the advance of research. Whether or not one accepts a simple dis-
tinction between informatics and the graphical display of informa-
tion for purposes other than scientific inquiry, this is a useful and
interesting discussion of an important area of cultural exploration.
In addition to the articles presented in this issue, we also
offer reviews of design exhibitions around the world. Exhibitions
are a form of design discourse that is well represented in Design
Issues. James Steele presents a review essay, “Perpetuating the
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California Mythology of Progress,” where he discusses a series
of exhibitions that provide a backdrop for the exhibition “Living
in a Modern Way: California Design 1930-1965,” offered at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art. This exhibition is the first major
study of midcentury California modern design. Jonathan Mekinda
reviews three exhibitions of Soviet graphics arts in Chicago: “Tango
with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1917” and
“Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons” at the
Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University in
Evanston, IL, and “Vision and Communism” at the Smart Museum
at the University of Chicago. Jessica Jenkins reviews “Building the
Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-1935,” organized by
the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
We continue with a review by Paul Atkinson of an exhibition
at the Victoria and Albert Museum: “Postmodernism: Style and Sub-
version, 1970-1990.” Fedja Vukic reviews “Theory and Practice of the
Object: Niko Kralj Retrospective at the Museum of Architecture
and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia.” And, final y, Artemis Yagou
reviews “Cable Tangle: Energy Consumption in the Household,”
held at the Deutsches Museum, Munich—the leading German
museum of science and technology.
Book reviews are also an important section of Design Issues.
This time, Hala Auji reviews Cultural Connectives: Bridging the Latin
and Arabic Alphabets by Rana About Rjeily. Rafael Cardoso reviews
Into the Universe of Technical Images by Vilem Flusser, translated by
Nancy Ann Roth, as well as Vilem Flusser – An Introduction by Anke
Finger, Rainer Guldin and Gustavo Bernardo. Massimo Negrotti
reviews Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People by Philip Bal .
Suguru Ishizaki reviews the republication of Semiology of Graphics:
Diagrams, Networks, Maps by Jacques Bertin, translated by Wil iam
Berg. This last work was first published in 1967, and its republica-
tion is an important event, including some additional material.
Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carl DiSalvo
Dennis Doordan
Victor Margolin
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