How Designers Think

How designers think? Wrong question: they think like everybody else. How designers think when they design is the correct one. I am afraid, the works of Cross, Rowe and Lawson answer the first question. Kant, Fiedler and Philippe Junod answer the right one which is much more complex, I'm afraid again.

Algorithms and Form Creation

Delanda’s lecture at Columbia clarifies the philosophical roots of algorithms in form creation. To begin with, you have to accept that there are two forms of considering the world: Rationalism (what Delanda calls European Idealism) and Empirism (what Delanda calls Materialism).

The thing is that that duality was the one Kant had to overcome and what allowed the birth of modern art more than a century later. Actually, the whole postmodern philosophy flourishes from the nostalgia of those days when pure reason ruled the world and Idea and Matter were one. In modern times (our time) that harmonious synthesis only occurs in art: no truth or desire can do so with complete legitimacy.

Manuel Delanda’s arguments are exposed in a rather attractive way, and are quite useful in order to relate form creation (generation?) to current philosophical debate.

Formalism and reflexivity in Economy, not in Architecture

Krugman, by Alan Cordova, Flickr

Georges Soros, adam kesher2000, Flickr

A good thing of current global financial crisis is that it promotes attention to how the world is ruled. Last century John Maynard Keynes said that "little else" than Economy and Political Philosophy does (General Theory, 1936).

It has always been obvious to me that Art and Aesthetics is lacking in this list. Actually, I find surprising that "formalism" and "reflexivity" are terms of great interest in economical debate. Brand new Nobel Prize Paul Krugman and George Soros defend each concept in that arena.

At the end of his book "The Enlightenment´s Wake", John Gray bases his hopes for the future of "western cultures" in the introduction of "some varieties of poetry and mysticism" in modern modes of thinking. Wouldn´t be easier to re-shape our idea of modernity and to include the third aspect of human constituttion Kant discovered in his third Critique: the aesthetic autonomy againt reason and ethics?