Designing Designing

Description

designing designing is one of the most extraordinary books on design ever written. First published in 1984 and reprinted with this title and cover in 1991, the book was the product of ten years of auto-critique, reflection and experimentation on writing on designing. Offering a savage auto-critique of his own work on "methods", as well as of the wider methods and ends of advanced industrial societies as a whole, this book challenges the traditional product- and progress- orientated focus on design by insisting that the world now coming into being requires designing to be understood as 'a response to the whole of life.' But designing designing is also unique in modern design thinking in its exploration of what writing on designing might be. Combining essays, interviews, reflections, performances, plays, poems, chance procedures, photographs, collages and quotes, Jones experiments with both form and content in an attempt to make a book which 'is not simply about designing but is instead itself an instance of the ideas and processes explored within it.'

John Chris Jones was born in 1927, in Aberystwyth, Wales. Jones studied engineering at the University of Cambridge, and went on to work for AEI in Manchester, England. In 1962 he instigated an influential conference on design methods, which led to the formation of the Design Research Society which he chaired from 1971-73. In 2004 he was presented with the Society's Lifetime Achievement Award and from 1970-74 Jones was the first Professor of Design at The Open University, UK.

Designing Designing is a particularly redemptive text ... not only because of the immense self-awareness and epistemic humility Jones demonstrates, but also because it explores in both its content and its form what else design and designing could be. In stark contrast to the predictable and stolid reification of design methods, principles, and practices today, this open-ended flexibility and responsiveness in design practice reflects in the structure of the book itself: a diverse collection of essays, personal reflections, anecdotes, conversations, interviews, and poetry. * Design and Culture * Foregrounding the performing of designing as an ongoing experimental lived practice that is at once personal, social and institutional, this astonishingly prescient book offers fresh insights into how design expertise can be mobilized to address contemporary challenges. This re-issue should inspire a new generation of designers to think deeply and critically about designing, what makes it possible or constrains it, and its positive and negative unfolding consequences. -- Lucy Kimbell, Director, Social Design Institute and Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at the University of Arts London, UK