ABSTRACT
Implicated as it is in almost every aspect of contemporary urban life, playing fundamental roles in supporting and sustaining the political economy of urbanized capitalism, ‘design’ involves multiple activities, professions and occupations. At the broadest level, design can be thought of as the process that links the desirable with the possible. The heart of design is in conception and planning, first generating an idea and then embodying that idea in a product, whether an object, building or environment (Margolin 1998: 87). Design is about considerations of both form and function in new products, buildings, images and landscapes, drawing on technical, aesthetic and market considerations. The principal contributing disciplines and occupations include architecture, graphic design, industrial (product) design, interior design, fashion, landscape architecture, and urban design and planning. Other contributors to design include multiple aspects of engineering; event, exhibition and set design; and advertising and branding. There are complex
interdependencies among all these activities. Innovation in design requires the combination of a wide range of different types of knowledge; it emerges from interactions among different actors who synthesize and recombine knowledge. Some of these activities involve higher levels of aesthetic work than others. Industrial design, for example, can typically involve significant levels of technical and scientific input. As a result, it is common to make a distinction between ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’ design: between what is evident about an object and what is concealed from view (Dormer 1990). Styling, packaging, branding, advertising, as well as the product, building or setting itself, are above the line; market research and interpretation, models, prototypes, contract drawings, planning specifications, engineering and tooling are all below the line. Meanwhile, distinctions can also be made (Campbell 2008) in terms of ‘hard’ design categories (architecture, urban design, civil engineering, consumer durables, furniture, etc.) and ‘soft’ design categories (fashion, advertising, graphic design, magazines, etc.).
