ABSTRACT
Despite obvious methodological and formal differences, the digital, post-critical and advocacy movements represent a twenty-five-year project to assert the importance of design over the edicts of theory. No longer willing to cede disciplinary sovereignty for theory’s gift of legitimacy, these movements emphasized instrumental design processes that legitimized the production of objects for soliciting unequivocal results affecting contemporary socio-economic and political realities. However, this emphasis on production masked the return of text in the form of theory or critique. Therefore, it is not just that instrumentality risked depoliticizing design decisions as pragmatic, axiomatic responses to context. Paradoxically, instrumentality continued the predominance of text over drawing. If one accepts that the relationship between text and drawing is a necessary precondition of making, then it is possible to reapproach designing by using text as a playful, even deviant, mode of design thinking. This type of approach to the inevitable return of text recalls philosopher Georges Bataille’s more general call for thought to “to lose its head.” The subversive or deviant mode of breaking convention co-opts criticality to replace instrumentality and the politics of production as the basis for design action.
