Design and aesthetic-expressive rationality

On the idea of modernity, it is possible to say that the rupture with the medieval tradition which will, little by little, inaugurating another way of thinking and to act in Western society, increasingly focused on the principle of the autonomy of reason, Expressed in developments ranging from economy to culture, it constitutes an object of analysis and reflection for those who want to understand the forms of organization of western culture.

It is true that the apology to modernity as the place of reason, seems to attribute to it a survival that dissociates from other theoretical constructions that see modernity as a finished stage and announce the arrival of another paradigm in replacement to this one, post-modernity is a good example of it. However, the life and death of a paradigm do not occur in the same way in all places of the planet and obeying a linear and universal chronology. In some places it is possible that the modernity has already fulfilled its role and that its breath has already been exhausted, elsewhere its principles are still maturing. In other words, there are places on the planet in which modernity does not materialise, this is the finding that, in a way, moves our reflective effort.

The project of modernity that gives support to the field of design is part of a discursive structure that, if at any moment was adolescent, begins to show signs of maturity. If we observe, for example, the productivist logic that permeates the domains of the market, the state and the community (Santos, 2006: 91), the condescension, interlocution and dominance of the first two through the forms of rationality that they own, namely: the cognitive-instrumental rationality of the market and the moral-practical rationality of the State and the apparent disbelief that the principle of community (and its aesthetical-expressive rationality) was subjected, are indicative of paths toward the legitimization of a particular idea of advancement and progress in the field of design sought to respond (Spark, 2010; Forty, 2007; Baur, 2008; Souza, 2008; Cardoso, 2008).

However, the principle of the Community and its form of the aesthetical-expressive rationality (Santos, 2002: 71), given its porosity and difficulties for conformation to the dictates of the usefulness and the modern functionality, even though it has in many instances been successfully coopted, still presents in its processes a dialectic voluntary of criticism, originating in the mistrust that is imputed to him on account of the ideas of scientificity that arise as dominant. This is due to the fact that, in spite of the aesthetical-expressive rationality have been invaded by the cognitive-instrumental rationality, its permeable, unfinished and changing constitution does not allow the imprisonment in the technical-scientific automatisms, a factor that, in the field of design, instead of being seen as a potentiality,, in contrast, it has caused unease state and in our understanding, and it constitutes the epistemological boundary of the field. Thus, let us advance a little in the identification of these forms of rationality present in the field.

Flüsser constitutes one of the thinkers of design that addressed the duality between natural sciences and the social sciences. These distinctions, which for him and in his time, begin to make no sense, are still the basis of what by convention we call nature and culture, or the predominance of the natural sciences over the social sciences. The nature for Flüsser (2010) is the place of clarification, the place in which modern science has coined the methods of understanding of reality, according to the philosopher it is the realm of simplicity and regularity of where it is possible to observe and measure accurately/with rigor. In another strand is the conception of culture as the location of the arbitrary and of human production. It is the place where customs, beliefs and institutions such as art, law, religion, techniques of material life are forged. In this sense, for Flüsser, the culture is linked to the human capacity to make and to transmit this to others, till resides in the acceptance and absorption by the group, so that this set of skills are perceived as the cultural matrix of a particular social group.

Thus, the questioning of Flüsser (2010: 95): “still makes sense to distinguish between nature and culture when it comes to guide us in the world-real environment?” puts in check these two poles which are permanently placed in opposition, the material world, of all things, the artificiality and culture and the world of nature, fixed and immutable laws. However, Flüsser goes further when he argues that creating a new categorization would not account for the scenario in which society is/was immersed, which would involve transforming uncontrollable things (nature) into manageable ones (culture), resulting in “production” and the illusion of “progress” until it comes to the inevitable. In this course, Flüsser puts the “things” as the raison to exist of the human path between life and death, and then indicate “non-things”, the information, as supplanters, as creators of a new social order. Even if they were still linked to and associated with things and taking them as support, the information would tend to be, contradictorily, increasingly fluid, intangible, automatic and abstract.

On the other hand, some examples of this malaise may be elucidative about what we are postulating Let us look at the question of rhetoric built around objects of design that exceeds the technological reasoning involved, requesting other premises to justify the persuasion exercised by an object next to the user and the mechanisms used by people to interact with objects would be, for Buchanan (1989), similar to the form used for interaction with words.

For the philosopher of design, production in the field can be equated from the construction of a discourse about things. It is an argument which aims to highlight the role of creator and proposition of the designers to persuade, by means of a determined rhetoric. Centered on the figure of the designers in the process of convincing about their products, Buchanan (1989) seems to emphasize the importance of the justifications for the object in the processes of intermediation between the designers and the public, however, he understands that this resource has been little explored in the field. Thus, the author defends the importance of the rhetoric for the field of the design understanding it from its capacity to affirm attitudes, ideas and values present in the projected objects, confirming its relevance of use. Allied to the question of rhetoric, the questions that surround users’ experience with products have generated repeated discussions in the field constituting a constant challenge for designers, before focusing on designing objects, environments and communication products, having their activities expanded to processes, services, structures and systems. If during a considerable period the main topic of design speech would be the integrity of materials, the form, the craft versus mass production, the relationship between form and function; the relationship with the products passes to be the main focus. Thinking about the experience and issues of subjectivity corollary to them involves constant learning about how experiences with products influence our lives, As well as learning curves that need to be developed for the learning of relationship with new products or even As well as learning curves that need to be developed for the learning of relationship with new products or even adherence, assimilation and rejection by users, and a gap remains with regard to investigations into the social, psychological and spiritual processes involved. (Margolin, 2002; Norman, 2006).

Linked to the issue of experience, the perception of the symbolic strategies that govern the collective use of artifacts and unites them within the culture installs another one for the field of design. In this aspect, Krippendorff (1995) proposes the idea of design is centered on the human, through the study of the meanings that particular artifact has to establish a connection between men in a magnified and complex way. According to him, this web of meanings can be built through the different uses to which an object can have, such as the name of this object behaves in the communication, the life cycle of the product, designed through an ecology of artifacts. In this context, the design presents itself as an activity that deals with the assignment of senses/meanings to things. In this perspective, the success of the activity is measured by cognitive impact evidenced by the relationship with the products, which leads us to think, together with Krippendorff (1995), on the existence of a network of diverse meanings and knowledge and intertwined in the process of designing and receiving the products.

In another strand identified the notion of social production of design (Cipiniuk, 2014) as part of this set of theoretical reflections that, somehow, reinforces the idea that the aesthetical-expressive rationality can still be thought of as a possible project. Cipiniuk (2014: 72), part of the observation that social values (individual and collective) manifest them-selves from specific conditions (geographical, historical, social, cultural, among others) of individuals in the context of their social practices. Such practices are organized through both the concrete activities and relationships that men establish among themselves, as well as through spiritual beliefs that are mediated by myths, memories and traditions, that is to say, through the complex symbolic and imaginary apparatus that gives meaning to society. This way of seeing the field of design is committed to a social production and culturally situated and which justifies the human performance, not as a result of ethereal ordinations and of innate creativity, or even an action based on principles of scientificity that are justified by themselves. The idea of social production of design, according to Cipiniuk (2014: 75), occurs through a gradual process of apprehension/ assimilation/ reproduction of “social values” that so much involve the concrete practices, as consequence or resonance of the symbolic activity, as through the social construction of the subjectivities, in a dialectical perspective between individual subjectivities/humanities, social practices and the production resulting from these clashes.

The ideas presented here, in our understanding, seem to indicate the existence of premises that indicate a tendency to think the field of design from a form of rationality that is not limited to the adoption of instrumental cognitive rationalities and moral practice. On the other hand, we understand the impossibility of separating the influences, interferences and constraints that such forms of rationality, once the aesthetical-expressive space that we are attributing to the design, the structures do not behave in a fragmented and disjointed way. However, our argument is to show that, even in the face of the regulatory impositions exercised by canonical forms of rationality (instrumental and cognitive), it is observed that these determinations did not inhibit or exhaust the full possibilities of expressive aesthetic bias in the field of design. Here lies the yeast and/or fissure needed to think the design from instances such as the imagination, the imaginary and the myths, while deeper structures that give ballast to social extract, emphasizing its capacity to generate knowledge and credible knowledge.

The imaginary in Bachelard and Durand

It is lucid and at the same time provocative Baudelaire’s (1993: 53) statement, “(...) once the imagination that created the world it rules it”. Here the philosopher of modernity presents us with a concept of imagination which, following the Baudelairean tradition of investigation of complementarities and “correspondences”, seeks to unite apparently antagonistic poles which are the mundane sensorial/spiritual and materiality/concreteness. This encounter mediated by imagination allows the analysis and synthesis between what is apprehensible by the senses (colors, shapes, sounds, textures, perfumes) doing emerge metaphors and analogies that compose it, by means of rules from the “depths of the soul” (Baudelaire, 1995: 804), a mosaic of the world such as the (re) know, in this way, Baudelaire considers that it is justice to allow/credit to this instance the regency of the world.

The way Baudelaire thinks the imaginary is the fruit of a poetic vision of the world conceived by universal analogical relations. In contrast to modern science the philosopher seeks to explain by means of pleasure, the dream, of the tragedies and above all, by sensoriality, the interconnections between sensitivity and material world, through non-linear associations based on a vision of the world as a mystery. For him, understanding and mediation of these processes, which has its occurrence in the material world, will only be possible by means of imagination.

In another aspect, a moment in when new questions are being asked of science and its absolute truths, Bachelard (1996) proposed a critique of scientific principles and methods in the web of scientific revolutions of the early twentieth century, advocating and indicating the emergence of a “new scientific spirit”, renewed, invented and unfinished in opposition to the empiricist conceptions in vogue. Thus, the epistemological stance assumed by Bachelard is not satisfied with empirical approaches to the objects, for him, the experiences are not made in the theoretical void, but constitute the theoretical achievement for excellence.

Despite the epistemological rupture proposal, is in its nocturnal phase, which Bachelard will develop the principles related to the poetic imagination, having the four material elements, water, earth, fire, and air, as the revealing matrices of the material imagination. The philosopher enhances and expands the concept of imagination since for him, the imagination has a founding role both in the science creation, such as the processes that develop in the artistic-poetic field. In his reflections he draws the distinction between formal imagination and material imagination, such classification is in contrast to what Bachelard (1991: 14) called “addiction of ocularity”, given that “(...) since the ancient Greeks the thought is always understood as an extension of the optics, the vision exercising hegemony over the other senses”, which requires the rupture because in the formal imagination there is a certain simplification of what is apprehended, resulting in a dematerializing operation, reducing matter to the object of vision and man to a mere spectator of the world, that is, the mute seen as theater, spectacle, panorama, exposed to idle and passive contemplation indeed.

Bachelard (1991) draws attention to the fact that the Western intellectual tradition was built on the basis of what he calls the “philosopher-voyeur” who conceives the image as a mere simulacrum without its own life and essentiality, such conception is a corollary of the traditional view of imagination while “(...) merely copier faculty, subordinate and without autonomy” (Bachelard, 1991: 16). This conception of image devalues the other forms of apprehension of the real, subjugating the imagination to an inherent formalism. However, the innovator in Bachelard’s rejection of such conceptions consists in the exploration and valorization of images derived from reverie, poetry, and the unexplored recesses of a subjectivity emanating from nature and therefore linked to founding matrices: air, water, earth and fire, which regulate both the imaginary material and formal.

However, in the imagination material there is a need for active intervention of man, in contrast to formal imagination, in this process it is evident the necessity of mandemiurge, craftsman, manipulator, creator, phenomenological technician¹, laborious in both science and art. Here the philosopher retrieves the concept of world not as stage, or staging of life, but as a space of concrete provocation, resistances and therefore unfinished, leaving the men the function to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct. It is in this context that Bachelard (2009) repositions the role of image and imagination from the condition of reproduction of reality elevating them beyond reality, overcoming it.

In this way, Bachelard rehabilitates matter and materiality, more than this, highlights creation as an act more subversive than contemplative and therefore imaginative. To give an account of this undertaking challenges us to think with the hands because, “The working hand, the hand animated by daydreams of work, engages [...] it only thinks by compressing, kneading, being active” (Bachelard, 1991: 116). Through the earth he invites us to think by the senses, by human doing, by that path that is nearest to us, our materiality. Pessanha (1991), commenting on matters relating to the material imagination and the presence and pervience of sight, which, when contemplating seems to anticipate our relation with the world, emphasizes the subalternity of the material imagination at hand and the possibilities of transformation and modeling that such action makes possible.

Another approach about the imaginary comes from Gilbert Durand (1921-2012). A disciple of Bachelard, he developed an epistemology based on the polysemy of symbols, in the different processes of apprehension by social groups, In search of the resonances that the constructions of the imaginary are at the cultural level and the dissemination of symbols in different socio-cultural logics (Durand, 1997). The theory of the imaginary developed by him is based on the premise that the processes of social, historical and cultural significance, Developed from a collective basis founded on the symbols, myths and archetypes that constitute the deeper structures of human communities.

For Durand (1995), the anthropological structures of the imaginary aim for balance in the man in its constitution, biopsychosocialculture in the face of the consciousness of temporal finitude that permeates the human trajectory. For this, Durand (1997: 25), in his phenomenology of the imaginary, rehabilitates the image as inductor of the imaginary, diverging from the positive-mechanistic thinking that insists on reducing the image and therefore the imagination, to the content-based perspective of a “weakened perception, to the memory recall” (Durand, 1997: 27). Durand argues, in the field of imagination, the image while the bearer of meanings constructed from what it has of most significant, the “figurative sense” (Durand, 1997: 29).

Thus, it is from an indepth study of cultural production expressed through mythological images and narratives, still considering artistic and literary works, that Durand will trace an “anthropological path” of the imaginary, from three dominant gestures or reflexes: the postural, the digestive and the copulative. The postural or heroic gesture, through the movements of ascension, rise and elevation, refers to the idea of regaining a lost power, in a representation of victory over fate and death. The symbols that refer to overcoming, descent and sovereignty are defining the heroic desire to superimpose themselves to death. The ascensional symbolism presents itself as the act of reconquering. Here is the exclusion of contradictions toward homogenization, structured through geometrizations, symmetries and ordinations that found a paradigm based on purity, separation and distinction. (Pitta, 2005; Durand, 1999).

The digestive or mystical gesture refers to the construction of a harmony, the concretization of a desire for union through the symbols of inversion and swallowing, of rest, of the isomorphism of the enclosure, among others. Faced with existential anguish and death, the mystical structure is concerned with denying its existence by creating a world in harmony through images of protection, protection and intimacy. There is an inversion or euphemism where, for example, symbols of fall and abyss, for example, transmute into descent, the abyss becomes a cozy cradle (Pitta, 2005; Durand, 1997).

The copulative or synthetic gesture aims at the harmonization of opposites, that is, they constitute the synthesis between the heroic hope and victory over time and the mystic of fear and anguish in the face of death. If in the heroic and mystical gestures the prevails in the perspective of the clash and the contrary, synthetic polarity tends to keep them in balance. Symbols such as those related to the lunar cycle, the calendars, for example, the rhythms of nature, the fire that brings death and rebirth, are some examples of the constellation of symbols that refer to synthetic structures of the imaginary (Pitta, 2005; Durand, 1997).

In addition to the dominant reflexes, Durand classifies these sets of symbols as Day Regime and Night Regime of images. The Day Regime encompasses the heroic structures (or schizomorphs) which has the postural gesture as dominant. This scheme has in its essence, in accordance with the philosopher of the imaginary, has the tendency to oppose darkness, animality and fall, in short, against mortal time. The daytime scheme emphasizes, through the light that allows the distinctions, the polarities of time through structures such as, high and low, left and right, good and evil, among others (Pitta, 2005; Durand, 1997).

The Night Regime, in turn, refers to the night that unifies by conciliation. This regime covers the mystical and synthetic structures composed by the digestive and copulative gestures. At night occur the antiphrase (mysticism) and the synthesis of images, that is, the perception of finitude in the face of death and the grave, is transmuted by the mystic into reception by descent to the cradle or to the new residence in the life beyond the grave. The synthesis by its turn, associated with the images of the Night Scheme, establishes a juxtaposition between death and the anguish face to the present time in mythic structures, with the perspective of victory over death and the time desired by the heroic structures (Pitta, 2005; Durand, 1997).

It is important to observe yet, in the theoretical construction about the imaginary undertaken by Durand, a tendency to understand the human not only from a sensorial perspective or even only taking into account his psychic apparatus. The socio-historical, environmental, biological and psychical conditions that govern the human journey, and they integrate the structures of the imaginary proposed by the philosopher. In this way, it is possible to understand, along with Durand (1998: 90) and the anthropological path for he proposed, the importance of the symbol in human development, transiting the representations of the sapiens to the “several innate interpellations of cosmic and social environment”. This path of complementary nature illustrates very well the interdependence among the sensitive experience, the images, while “(...) the capital thought as homo sapienes (...)” (Durand, 1997: 18) and the surrounding reality.

Imagining the future of design

Supported by a triple challenge, at the same time deconstructive, constructive and reconstructive, this reflection is anchored in the proposition that imagination is a dynamic power owner of such an ability to deform the images provided by perception, and it can establish translation processes that are products of both the environment and biopsychic substrates inherent to the human condition.

Such an undertaking is placed on the frontier between theory and practice and aims to both foster reflection and to indicate assumptions that allow thinking about the future of the oxygenated design by the emergence of the imaginary. Thus, given the set of ideas and concepts here exposed, the challenge to which we propose consisted in thinking about the future of design from theories of the imaginary. We emphasize, at first, the difficulties to think the field of design, its actors and its production, the fragmentary fashion of positivist matrix theories, or their congeners that view design only in one of its aspects, informational, discursive, experiential, production of senses or of social production, such fractionation seems to us a tendency to be overcome toward a “thinking with”, “thinking together”.

Because of the traditions of thought that developed in the West, which we have been scoring throughout this discussion, there is a tendency to value a way of imagining and, consequently, to act in the world taking it from a formal perspective or from the moral imagination as noted by Bachelard (1998). Oriented from the theoretical-mathematical and logical-empirical models of the natural sciences, such a tendency both for its capillarity and hegemony as for its ability to present answers and solutions to the problems of its time, has consolidated itself as a paradigm whose heroism and transforming power conformed states of knowledge as we perceive today.

However, despite the visionary character of the field of design and based on the paradigm of light-vision-knowledge, it forgot the ballast of darkness that accompanies it in its course because, in order to deal with enlightenment, it was necessary to shed light over darkness and this implied the denial of forms, knowledge, images and ideas which could not be explained only by the dictates of pure rational ascension. Its objective and heterogeneous representation, based first on the antithesis then on the synthesis, led to the emergence of paradigms and rhetorical as a place of justification by itself and that in its totalising desire prevents other possibilities for discussion.

On the other hand and considering that the heroic tendency constitutes one of the facets of the imaginary projections that give support to the constructions and human ordinations, it is observed that the mystical structures with its tendency to conciliate and harmonize opposites try to absorb the other in order to assimilate their essence. We observe that the objectifying tendencies do not disappear, they are euphemized and merged seeking to the integration and coexistence through processes of analogy and enhancing the similarities in this way, they conceal the differences.

Thus, the recognition of information as the third element aggregator of material, and the sensorial, the discourse of experience that subjectively conciliates the conflicts of technique by technique or the limitations of the binomial form and function, or even the expansion of these perspectives to aggregate the symbolic strategies that are configured between man and objects indicate, in our understanding, the tendency towards the conciliation between rationality and spirit while places a reconstructive pedagogy in the field of design. Before the speed and energy of heroic thinking, the mystical movement tends to go the opposite way in search of a self-preservation that represents the eternal desire for conciliation.

However, it is important to emphasize, in the same way, the presence of a thought of synthesis in the field of design. Tending to highlight the elements of a dialectic of opposition, such proposition considers the symbolic and imaginary apparatuses in the course of the different processes of assimilation, reproduction and apprehension of social values. From specific social practices, lay in discussion both of a historical reality as required by other matrices that account for explaining the phenomena that present themselves as challenging to social reality. The synthetic thinking is not concerned with the reconciliation between the opposites, their motivation is not only by the pursuit of a reverse movement, a halfturn or even a halffault.

The stimulus comes, both of the prospects for progress and future, without supplanting the criticism to this, as if to recognize the need for a “return to first things.” In this sense, this is not just a matter of balancing the contrary to its normative coexistence, but it accepts its symbiosis and androgyny as a necessary power to balance the different structural elements of reality. In his eagerness to develop contradictions, synthetic thinking indicates the constant need for rebirth (death and life), as a way to emerge new ideas and ways of solving problems. In this way, this is a constantly request for the humanization in their creative capacity that drives successive recreations, in a movement that harmonizes opposites, but it does not nullify the distinctions and oppositions. In this way, it maintains among them a dialectic that signals the direction to a doubly lucid walk, anchored in social practices and at the same time poetic, magical and imaginative.

Final Considerations

It is from these premises and key concepts that articulate different forms of thinking in the field of design. Taking into account the needs and perspectives of the future of design, which we believe to be the imaginary a field that conjugates reflection-action, While needed to an activity that is inclined to think in their social insertion and make the society its ground, its ballast its beginning and its end. Note that our approach does not under-stand the relationship between imagination and design under a utilitarian perspective or technique, but it proposes to think the field of design from the critical-poetic capacity that this branch of studies makes possible. Thus, in order to think about the future of design, it is necessary to develop projects of this nature that rescue the imaginative capacity on the ways of thinking and to design in order to approach, increasingly, the theory and practice of the places where the vitality of design comes from, that is, different concrete realities, mythical, imaginary, poetic as a projection of a symbolic reality that gives the ballast, the base and the mainstay for coexistence in its most bitter, conflicting and discordant dimension but at the same time sweet, warm and cozy.