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MATRIX
Design is a complicated subject where everything matters. Humans are fundamentally designers, humans create artefacts, shelters, communities, and landscapes. Design involves conceiving, representing, and executing constructions across a wide range of scales. Traditional, or pre-modern, cultures tend to develop well-established design practices that evolve slowly over time and reflect cultural and often religious practices. Modern culture, since the Renaissance, has emphasized individual human creativity resulting in the cult of celebrated ‘designers’. Postmodern culture uses a wide variety of traditional, modern and contemporary techniques. Design can be subjective and/or objective, artistic and/or scientific, structured and/or unstructured, borrowed and/or original, material and/or immaterial. Ultimately design is creative and technical and satisfies the needs and aspirations of culture in that it creates culture. Increasingly, designers are faced with the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Design draws from what some scholars have called practice knowledge (Cross, N., 2006. Designerly Ways of Knowing. London: Springer London.). The designer makes this his/her own process, taking control of it based on an individual judgment that makes sense in the broader narrative. As the designer, you take ownership of and responsibility for a process that evolves through a string of decisions.
