On Snow Dancing by Ina Blom
Some twenty years ago, the effects of an expanding regime of design were starting to be felt in the field of contemporary art. Increasingly, designers seemed to use art contexts as platforms for non-pragmatic reflection and expression. Increasingly, design was also becoming a catalyst in so-called "social" art practices, artistic efforts to engineer or test drive new social and/or economic relations. In the work of collectives like Superflex or Atelier van Lieshout, for instance, design was an all-important feature of their manufacture of innovative objects or technical solutions, as well as the branding of the groups themselves. Concerned discussions about the aestheticization of anything and everything abounded: design should, apparently, know its place. But this new design ubiquity might have actually been grounded less in a political appeal to the senses over reason than on rapidly expanding processes of informatization and a growing preoccupation with their social and economic effects. A wider concept of design thus established itself: defined as "the conception and planning of the artificial," design reflected the fact that, with computation, it was no longer the final outcome of a process, but an interdisciplinary activity embedded in all aspects of production. This was "design thinking," a systematic approach to a plastic environment that more than ever seemed subject to human construction and control.
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