Performative Aesthetic Properties in Everyday Design Practice

Chairs, cups, books, and utensils populate our everyday lives and are protagonists of much of our ordinary aesthetic experience.It would seem natural, therefore, for the philosophy of design and everyday aesthetics to constitute intersecting fields of inquiry.Yet the contemporary philosophical debate on the aesthetics of design, articulated through three main approaches -formalist, functionalist, and performative -has not offered a fully developed account of this relationship.This article develops a meta-theoretical critique showing how the functionalist approach risks being of little relevance to everyday aesthetics.Building on this critique, the article proposes expanding the performative approach by introducing a distinction between applicative uses, which realize an already given function, and constitutive uses, which institute new practical states of affairs through creative appropriation.This distinction allows for a new working definition of "design" better aligned with everyday aesthetics: one that focuses on the constitutive force of use as a legitimate source of aesthetic properties.