Dark Matter & Trojan Horses Highlights

Odd that I hadn’t gotten around to blogging these notes from Dan Hill’s brilliant book, but here they are then finally:

This is all underscored by an optimistic belief in progressive change, that the current conditions are changeable for the better, that the present can be transformed into multiple positive futures.

the mental agility to generate ideas — to see design as cultural invention — is directly linked to the craft skills of design practice

As stated earlier, design’s core value is in synthesising disparate views and articulating alternative ways of being.

Yet such temporary interventions are often accompanied by claims as to wider significance; that an installation, say, can suggest a new way of doing, of living.

to understand the pixel and the platform.

The problem is in taking clear design intent — the stage where “smart city”concepts are rife — into development, procurement and commissioning, and emerging from the other side with the intent intact, perhaps even improved by the process, such that further strategic outcomes can be realised

zooming back and forth from matter to meta, and using each scale to refine the other, is core to strategic design.

The collapse of knowledge, of authority, of institution can leave a dizzying sensation, a kind of vertiginous drop into an abyss of uncertainty.

design must make clear that its remit is expanded from simply problem-solving to context-setting.

You simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set; you can’t challenge its premise.

There are either well-known technical solutions, and the real problem may be a lack of commitment, funding, skill, or motivation, or they are at least clearly defined problem spaces, that process improvement, nuanced analysis, elbow grease and the odd bit of luck could easily solve

And if it was designed in one way, it follows that it can be designed in a different way.

prototyping and heuristics in a space of “unknown-unknowns”

Matter matters, in this respect

All these struggles are about the profound social injustice in our societies — whether in Egypt, Syria or the US and Spain.

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