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(De)sign: materiality rehabilitation in the age of economy of signs

Student: Terekhina Yuliya

Supervisor: Ilya Inishev

Faculty: School of Cultural Studies

Educational Programme: Bachelor

Year of Graduation: 2014

<p>Nowadays we can observe such a phenomenon as aestheticization of everyday life, the key part of which is a blanket pervasion of design objects. Being a ubiquitous part of our everyday life, design seems to be a self-evident social and cultural phenomenon, whereas it appeared only at the boundary of 19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> century. Today every item of goods can be considered as a designer in the wide sense of this term, especially an item of consumer goods.</p><p>Despite this fact, there are no clearly defined and adequate scientific approaches to design investigation. Existing approaches to the everyday aestheticization show its inability to deal with the functions of the contemporary design.</p><p>This investigation will clearly attempt to answer the next questions: what the aestheticization of everyday life means and how it can be investigated, what role design plays in this process, what disadvantages have existing approaches to design and how alternative approaches can be formulated relying on specific features of the design.</p><p>All approaches, which we analyze in our investigation (semiotics approach, art appreciation approach, design history approach, Marxists approach, visual culture approach and anthropological approach) ignore the fact that design does not just reflect meanings, which are inserted in it intentionally or spontaneously, but also produces it in a special way. Designing is a process of the implantation social-important images in the material form, but the key aspect is that it has the unique specificity, which lies in its ambivalent nature. Design can tightly bind material and iconic together. In this way, meanings do not simply &laquo;cover&raquo; the material form, but they penetrate with the materiality and cannot be analyzed severally.</p><p>Substance sends messages that we can perceive only in the light of the language. However, in this way we lose some important meanings, which are generated by substance itself, and it was highlighted as a problem of the language by philosophers during the second half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Design provides an opportunity to interact with substance in a different way &ndash; it foregrounds sensorial perception and encloses meanings in the self-consistent image that cannot be reduced to only linguistic message.</p><p>By the medium of design we perceive the outside world through images, which bundle sensorial and conceptual. Therefore, design, not art, produces the most powerful and stable social meanings, being at the same time a less noticeable sphere for the culture research.</p><p>In spite of potential of this theme, there are no clearly defined ways to analyze how we can talk about images in design without falling into a trap of language conventionality. For this reason, our further research should touch upon the problem of methods of design culture taking into account the necessity of elaborating absolutely new approaches, not just borrowing them from other disciplines.</p>

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