Form Follows Form-giving: An Ecological Reading of Designed Things

A growing ‘turn’ within design theory, thinking, and practice is re-iterating the emphasis of material cultural studies on the significance of everyday designed things within human sociality. Whilst this ‘designerly’ engagement with thing theory provides a promising foundation from which to refigure design away from its entrenched rationalist humanist tradition, the focus nevertheless remains largely wedded to a concern with human-thing relations that thus overlook the wider entanglement of designed objects within webs of interdependence with other things. Rather than upholding the focus on human-thing relations, this thesis undertakes a theoretical investigation to extend the literature available to industrial design to better understand how designed objects ‘come to be’ within a form-giving field of forces, processes, and materials in flux (i.e., a meshwork). As such the thesis proposes an ontology of things that is contingent as part of what, within vitalist thinking of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, is described as a morphogenetic view of making in which the ‘growth’ of designed artefacts should be grounded.To this end the thesis asks not ‘what’ a designed thing might do or mean for a human user, agent or subject but ‘how’ designed things come to be as they are in terms of a complex and expansive meshwork of interdependence that thesis terms the ecological contexture of an artefact. An ecological understanding of how natural forms come into being is used to frame how the form and style of designed artefacts come to be via the coming together of materials, forces, process, and things in flux within a wider relational field. This provides a framework in which the emergence of things can be more fully understood as depending and being dependant (i.e., contingent) upon entanglements that sit outside and go beyond human-thing relations. Such an understanding of the contingent nature of designed things based on a more thoroughgoing ecological view of interdependence is proffered as a direct contribution to the growing body of posthumanist scholarship within design philosophy and is envisioned more broadly as contributing to the reform of a genuinely holistic and sustainable mode of design.