2. ‘Designers’ as Semio-Ethic Agents
2.1 Design’s New Core: Other than the Market
Let us take stock. I have explained how design research, when understood as the quest to uncover focal meanings of ‘design’ and ‘designers’, converges with diagnostic semio-ethics. But apart from the research of design, designing itself, and the thinking in such designing – specifically the design thinking identified as focal through design research – can also be understood as a semio-ethic activity. Similarly, designers (and not just design theorists or researchers) focally understood can be semio-ethic agents.
The tightening of the focal meaning of a “designer” by specifying his metaphysical commitments sets some designers in the periphery and shifts some others towards the center, where what we usually mean by ‘poor’ and ‘good’ designers respectively are to be found. I would venture in broad strokes to flesh out some of his design thinking and trajectories that have now relocated and become instantiations of designing in its central case, and hence, of what is ‘good’ (praiseworthy, important, critical, exemplary…) design for professional or vocational designers, as well as professionals who design and hence are designers broadly taken in the sense Simon (1996) meant it.
Put another way: if the desired criticality in design is opposed to the instrumentalist form of design thinking geared towards the satisfaction of market agendas driven by consumer preferences, then the alternatively labelled “criticality” in design in its focal sense is simply the “other-than” such an instrumentalist and mercantile form of logic, and by implication, the “critical designer” is just one who is open to all these alternative forms of design logics, trajectories and design subjects unrelated to market agendas, made available by these metaphysical reflections. What would such “central”, “good”, “other” or “critical”…forms of design look like, and what kinds of metaphysical reflections specifically are we referring to? Rather than rehearse detailed metaphysical arguments already articulated elsewhere, I will briefly summarize these.
Each design trajectory below within the focal sense of design has a trace of semio-ethics, through semiotically designing interpretative translations of signs anew and relating these signs to values for informing practice, although it is the third that I wish in this paper to highlight as especially interesting a semio-ethic activity. Firstly, clearly belonging to the focal design epistemology, as can be inferred from the discussion above, is: a metaphysics which defends the existence of a non-capricious God responsible for the intelligent guided evolution of human epistemic capacities relevant to the designer’s grasp of moral (first) principles. As has been demonstrated, such a theistic metaphysics is necessary in order to save moral claims from the charge of arbitrariness (Chua, 2006; 2008; 2012b: 395-397) or to save morality from being confused with the entitlement to arbitrariness (Chua, in press). Only such a metaphysical worldview would not be at dissonance with the critical in design. With these metaphysical commitments, design can coherently be an ethical activity, which with normative authority shapes both end-goals as well as means, critically – i.e., justly – engaging private whims or responding to market signals, employing sound practical reasons (sometimes called the natural law) to interrogate rather than placate share-holder preferences in Hume-an fashion (see Chua, 2005; 2012a; compare Simon, 1996), or conversely, to recognize as valuable what seems initially merely attractive preferences (see Chua, 2009a; 2009b; 2013d; Simon 2006). This design trajectory designs morally informed meanings of whatever tangible and transitive ‘goods and services’ one can design.
A second focal design epistemology is: design which shapes not merely transitive things, but also the intransitive “self”, and not for market or performative purposes, but for spiritual ends. A metaphysically informed design epistemology, as has been shown elsewhere (Chua, 2012a; 2013; in press), can help us shape our professional selves aesthetically: by ordering our designerly lives and discreet design projects (which arguably are ultimately always playfully free) towards an overarching transcendent goal viz. the eutrapelian participation of God’s play and hence, His friendship (ibid). Such a transcendent design trajectory is also made available through reflection on the putative normativity in designerly knowing in its focal – and hence, critically ethical – sense. Specifically, by tracing the conceptually implicit transcendental presuppositions of putatively normative first principles of practical reasons which feature so centrally in design thinking in its central case (above), one grasps as a corollary the need to believe as true the existence of a God at creative play in His ongoingly undetermined gift of existence; participating in such a God’s play becomes a possible goal for which all designerly plays are ultimately played, as a kind of ultimate end of professional and designerly activity (Chua, 2012a; 2012b; in press).This stands in stark critical contrast to the consequentialist-utilitarian types of professional selves ordered only towards clever money-making promoted by dominant business school curriculums and corporate cultures (see Chua, in press; also relevant, Chua, 2013b: 397-401).
Finally, there is a third design epistemology that also belongs to the central case. It is this third trajectory that I hope to detail. The same metaphysical reflections mentioned above can be pressed for ways they can be employed by designers to re-shape each and every being in the world meaningfully without remainder, radically exhausting even the existential principle constitutive of each and every being. The result of this is that new meanings of all beings are uncovered, signs of what is only gifted (rather than of what can be bought and sold) are recovered, with important implications for practice. It is this design trajectory that can most radically further our interpretation of what semio-ethics can mean.