Introduction
Design has recently gathered intellectual momentum. Stanford based design consultancy IDEO and its brand of ‘Design Thinking’ which draws on what enterprisingly successful designers do and encourages empathy for the needs of clients may, according to its CEO Tim Brown in Harvard Business Review, help firms compete better in the neo-liberal, globalized future (Brown, 2008). New institutions in Asia, such as the Singapore University of Technology and Design in partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have sprung up and admissions began 2013, and there is little doubt this is part of the nation-state’s economic planning, motivated by the hopes that design can give its students a competitive edge.
But what really might be the opportunities that ‘design’ can open up for human civilization, if we grasp ‘design’ thoughtfully, and reflectively? Rather than merely and narrowly service neoliberal economic agendas, can design or more broadly design theory also further develop new cultures of thinking? In this paper, I want to explore how design theory has the potential to further what in recent semiotic scholarship is called “semio-ethics”, viz., research and theorizing focused on relating signs with values, and which is a research focus that comes with the strong recommendation of no less than two Sebeok Fellows, John Deely and Susan Petrilli (see Deely, 2010).
Just to be clear, I understand design theory to mean, amongst other things, the theorizing about what “design” is or is not, and this is what is at times called “design research”. Such design research may, in order to be complete, adjudicate methodological approaches related to such research, and identify preferred methodological approaches towards design-relevant conceptual signs that entail discussions of how and under what conditions something fails to be “design”. In this respect, design research, I explain, is a kind of semio-ethic and hence, diagnostic analysis. This I show in Part 1 of this paper.
But insofar as design theory qua design research successfully works out a rigorous account of “design”, then it also theorizes about how designers ought to design, and the things designers can or should design. I.e., it works out an account of designers who shape particular design artifacts. In this way, designers, I also argue, ought to instantiate through their designing, the ‘semio-ethical’ stance, whose “special vocation is to evidence sign networks where it seemed there were none” (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2010: 162). This semio-ethical stance, I demonstrate below under Part 2, thinks hard about ways to design so that important meanings are retrieved and re-discovered, not least ways of designing all beings so that they can sign and recall God’s comforting presence. With its argument, this paper also retrieves Aquinas’ metaphysics for furthering both current design theory and semiotics, whilst it locates the places where design theory and semiotics converge and mutually inform each other, and so pushes the interpretation of what both design and semio-ethics is or can be even further.