If we call the use of technology to help humans live well as a whole human-centered design, its origins can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy. According to Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, while specialized carpentars can make parts of a house, it is a higher level of technology that integrates such skills that ultimately produces well-being for humans. Aristotle defines the technology as “ the work of the master carpenter,” and the master who engages in this work as “the carpenter of carpenters” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a19). The metaphor of the master carpenter is also developed in the beginning of the Metaphysics (981a30). Aristotle claims that the specialized knowledge …

Advertising design is the planning and production of advertising expressions to inform a wide range of audiences about the products and services offered by the advertiser (client), or about the advertiser itself. It refers to the overall design of communication that works on the audience’s consciousness through various media expressions based on design technology, such as copy (words of advertising expression), images, movies, sound, and in some cases, naming and packaging. The creative director organizes the advertiser’s issues, clarifies where the problems lie, formulates concepts, and directs the entire advertising communication. At the same time as planning the advertising expression that will be the final output, it is necessary to …

It is not possible to determine in advance the essence of a concept. In the system of design, truth is something that is updated by experience, and to have a clear concept of something, it is necessary to observe what actions can be taken and what effects are produced on that something. Therefore, through the proposal of a product, design changes the form of the environment that surrounds the consumer and is composed of things and consequently explores how the consumer acts and what kind of meaning and value is found between the consumer and the environment. In the 1960s, James Gibson, a perceptual psychologist influenced by the ideas of …

Algorithms are an important concept in the field of computer science, including the field of machine learning. An algorithm is a means of solving a computational problem using well-defined instructions, and it must be designed to satisfy various conditions, such as input/output specifications of problems to be solved. Formulating computational problems like optimization and inference problems is also part of the targets of design in computer science. Once an algorithm is designed for a computational problem, a computer program is designed to implement it in practice. Therefore, we can say that computer science is the activity of designing various objects and producing products like softwares. The creation of computational problems, …

Where does the starting point of design activity lie? Today, the distinction between those who commission others to design facilities such as buildings (clients) and those who undertake such commissions as design professionals (designers) has forced designers to be aware of the starting point of their design activities and the preconditions before they begin designing. When a designer designs and constructs a house for himself to live in by himself, he or she seems to be able to practice his or her design activities freely without worrying too much about the starting point of his or her design and its preconditions because the client and designer are the same. However, …

The word “architecture” is also used in computer and social science, and it means a design idea or framework as well. Similarly, the word “architecture” has the duality of being both an entity and an idea. The history of architecture in the West is, on the one hand, a history of evolution as an object and development as a technology, but on the other hand, it is also a history of changes in the expression of ideas in each era. The latter type of historical expression is called “style.” Styles such as Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, and Modernist were movements that inherited the ideas of …

The term “designer babies” refers to the attempt to give a baby a specific ability or appearance by genetically modifying the fertilized egg before birth. Of course, there are several ethical issues involved in artificially altering life before birth, and the practice will inevitably be criticized. However, prenatal diagnosis to prevent certain genetic diseases is underway, and cryopreserved sperm and eggs can be grown as fertilized eggs in test tubes. Considering these examples, it is not surprising that the idea of “designing” a child before birth has appeared. But what does “design” mean in this case? Even if not related to a prenatal human being, the activity of designing life …

The form and function of living things are the result of a spontaneous process of evolution. In the “absence” of a designer, there are many aspects of biological design that we are still unable to understand or imitate. It is amazing, for example, that a single fertilized egg develops into the system with complex forms and functions. The mechanisms that enable us to receive external stimuli through our senses and to move and think as humans do are still under study and difficult to imitate. It is both natural and naive that we had come to expect this to be due to the reactions within a cell which is unique …

As modernization progresses, “makers” and “users” gradually separate and turn people into “consumers.” Barriers between disciplines have been created in various fields, and the concept of design with specialized training have become firmly established. At the same time, it has become difficult to see the various interconnections in society, and many complex and troublesome problems that cannot be handled from a particular, specialist perspective have emerged. In response to this current situation, projects are being created by actively engaging users and stakeholders rather than by the design of a limited group of designers and specialists. Co-design is not confined to a closed environment but rather inhabits an open one as …

Color plays an important role in the design of visual displays. In visual displays, color is used in letters, signs, and figures, which are the basic components of visual information, and color itself can also convey emotions and impressions. In this way, color is used as a means of communicating information. However, it is known that there is a diversity of color vision, and not all people see the same colors. This means that senders must consider their recipients’ color vision characteristics when designing color. For example, people with dichromatic color vision (so-called “color vision deficiencies”) have color combinations between which they cannot distinguish, called confusion colors ― the ability …

Is design not becoming a mere tool to maintain the existing social system? This critique has led to a reflection on the profession of designer itself, which has functioned as a “pawn of industry” since the industrialization of the 19th century. This became the background for a series of design movements that attempted to reconsider the social meaning of design itself. Typical examples of such trends include a series of “critical design” movements led by Ingo Maurer and “des-in,” the Italian “radical design” movement that opposed the “elegant” aesthetics glorified by consumer society, and the “anti-design” movement represented by Sturm and others. The tradition of these critical design movements can …

Design is thought to be something that improves human life and society. However, in the light of global issues such as global environmental problems, widening disparities, capitalism and consumption, and the devastation of humanity, it seems that design, while purporting to provide benefits, is helping and even accelerating the current state of society, which as a whole is heading toward destruction. This critical consciousness is pushing today’s design itself into a critical situation. The adjective “critical,” originating from the Greek kritikos, means to be able to judge in the light of something, and in that sense, to be able to criticize or critique. In modern usage, the adjective has the …

The central role of design is not to create something new from scratch but rather to create new economic, social, and symbolic values by combining, adjusting, and processing existing ones in various ways. If this is the case, design can create richer possibilities by considering a more diverse background of values. In cultural anthropology, we believe that each individual culture constitutes its own value system. The “value” here refers to the criteria for judgments such as “good vs. bad” or “beautiful vs. ugly;” the “standard” for such criteria differs among cultures and there is no universal value standard. Therefore, just as SMAP sings in the song “Sekai ni Hitotsu dake …

The term “Cybernetics” comes from a word originally meaning “helmsman” in Greek. How could we operate a ship to its destination while maintaining a stable situation with changes in the surrounding environment, such as raging waves and winds or sudden changes in the weather? Similarly, cybernetics, which aims to design a way to flexibly respond to an infinitely changeable environment, has become a general term for academic disciplines since the 20th century that have attempted to comprehensively understand the relationship between living organisms in general and nature and society from the concept of information. Its main focus was to make it possible to control the communication circuits of objects ranging …

The design is to envision a structure related to creativity. At this time, what kind of structure does creative act have in art? Marcel Duchamp once defined the “Art Coefficient” and explained that the creative act is the gap between what the artist intends and what is realized (Duchamp, 1957). Conventionally, the Art Coefficient has been understood to be required by the chance encounter between a work and a viewer, as Duchamp mentioned the encounter between a work and a viewer as a concrete example. Only the inevitability that a work is interpreted independently of the artist’s intention has been focused on, and it has been taken as the significance …

The term function refers to the practicality of a product, while design refers to its aesthetic aspect. When this terminology is used, the beauty of a product is understood as an ornament or added value to its practical function, and design is interpreted as constituting beauty as an ornament. Tracing the genealogy of this interpretation of design, we come to Kant’s concept of attached beauty. According to Kant, there are two kinds of beauty. One is ‘free’ and the other is ‘attached’. Free beauty is the beauty that does not presuppose any concept of what the object is, while attached beauty presupposes such a concept and is subordinate to the …

Design for Diversity and Inclusion refers to the design of products, services, and social systems that contribute to the realization of an inclusive society, and in particular the design of “mechanisms” that enable people to make their relationships with each other diverse and inclusive. Diversity and inclusion (or “social inclusion”) is a term widely used around the world, but Design for Diversity & Inclusion was conceptualized when the Design Initiative for Diversity & Inclusion, affiliated with the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University, was founded. In the 1970s, the idea of “normalization,” which aimed to enable people with disabilities to live in society together with other people (without differentiating between people …

Design Thinking was proposed by IDEO, an American design firm, and spread throughout the world. IDEO, based in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, started its activities in 1991 as IDEO Product Development. In the midst of the spread of the Internet and information technology that developed from the latter half of the 1990s to the first half of the 2000s, IDEO made the creation of innovation in business a major corporate challenge. Design Thinking emerged in the early 2000s against this background. Design Thinking has spread not only in business but also in education, with the establishment of the d-school at Stanford University in 2003 and the i-school at the University …

After the Romantic period in the early 19th century, England saw the emergence of a technological mindset influenced by Romantic ideals. This perspective on “designing” was articulated by designers such as Ruskin and Morris. Romanticism had opposed academicism in the arts, social institutions like salons, and bourgeois societal norms. However, in the late 19th century, post-Romanticism faced new adversaries in the form of the impersonal mechanisms of industrialization and imperialism. Ruskin and Morris emphasized that the value of design lay not just in the final form of an industrial product but in the process of making it, the act of creation, and the human relationships forged in the process. The …

While the modern concept of design includes the industrial aspects of planning and engineering, it also implies a rough sketching of the contours of objects by hand. The latter aspect can be traced back to the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century and later. According to the OED’s description of design in English, “disegno,” the Italian word for drawing or design, developed as a core concept in the plastic arts in the Renaissance and later periods, and has had a major influence on the English word “design,” via the French word “dessin.” It is said to have had a great influence on modern design. Alberti, who established the methodological principles …

Sim van der Ryn and Stewart Cowan first used the term “any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes”(p. 18), in their 1996 book titled Ecological Design to emphasize the importance of integrating human activities in various fields with natural ones to curtail destructive impacts to the environment. Historically, the field of ecology can be traced back to Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 manual Walden, or, Life in the Woods where he introduces self-reliance and living in harmony with the natural surroundings from his cabin in the woods. It has seen many changes in the interpretation of ecology from Naturalism which is referred to …

Exhibition design is the planning and creation of a place where the audience can appreciate the exhibits. The objective is to create an information environment that allows visitors to confront the exhibits, create dialogue, and realize communication. Exhibits in this context refer to works of art, museum materials, etc. The curator (chief curator or director) who oversees the exhibition formulates the concept of the exhibition design and selects the exhibits based on his or her academic and cultural knowledge of the exhibits. The curator plans how to present the context of the exhibits as a whole, considering the balance between exhibition methods and related information. Ideally, the audience should be …

The further development of mechanization with industrialization had various negative effects, such as the destruction of nature, alienation of humanity, and widening social disparities. In response, systemic designs to eliminate these problems by pushing the mechanization of industrial products and production to the limit were developed from the latter half of the 19th century through the 20th century. A representative example is the design of automobiles and production systems proposed by Henry Ford. In 1908, he developed a mass-produced model called the Model T Ford. Automobile production was realized through the division of labor using a line system rather than by craftsmen finishing each car one by one. The entire …

The purpose of design is both social and utilitarian. For design, the usefulness of created forms is critically important. However, at the same time, the form must be beautiful. Taking this into account, what does it mean to be beautiful ? The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant defined ‘free beauty’. The word free here means to be free from the purpose defined by a concept, and a typical example is the beauty of nature, because nature (e.g., a flower) is beautiful and pleasant in its own right, apart from any interest in what it can do. The reason why its form is beautiful and pleasant is that the elements that make …

The term “hacktivism” is a combination of the words “hack” and “activism” and refers to intentional hacking for social and political change. Here, a hack is an act, often performed in design, that intervenes in an existing system (technology) to create a new value beyond mere rational improvement. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the birthplaces of hacking, has constructed a system of a unit of length called a smoot (one smoot is 67 inches/170.18 cm), which is attributed to the height of a real person, Oliver Smoot. This system was used to calculate the total length of the nearby Harvard Bridge (364.4 smoot + an ear) in the …

In ancient Greek and Western culture, craftsmen had lower status than those in the humanities. Even in the modern age, mechanical arts were considered inferior and were excluded from prestigious universities in Europe due to their specialized character. Greek mythology, as exemplified by Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing, portrays craftsmen as intellectually, morally, and aesthetically inferior. Hephaestus, born to Hera without mating Zeus, faced rejection because of his disability. This symbolism suggests that craftsmanship, tied to the practical needs of life, is deemed impure for divine beings who should be free from such concerns. Despite being a member of the Olympian gods, Hephaestus is depicted as a second-class figure tasked …

The Kyushu Institute of Design, established in 1968, was Japan’s first national university with a single design department, emphasizing the relationship between technology and humanism. The university’s first president, Shinji Koike, penned the institution’s guiding principles. In the university’s official guide, he explains the purpose of the institute as follows: Purpose: To establish a higher level of design by integrating science and art in a holistic manner, and to advance academic research and education in this area. In the mission statement titled “Mission of the Institute,” Koike elaborates on why the synthesis of science and art is essential and what constitutes “higher design.” He observes that while modern science and …

One of the great characteristics of human beings is the ability to create, use, and develop tools. In every age, we use tools not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but also for various activities such as work, study, leisure, and communication. In recent years, tools have also enabled us to freely manipulate various environmental elements, such as light, visual, sound, and thermal environments. However, devices and artificial environments, especially those created by modern technology, are often harmful as well as beneficial to humans. Here, I will use the example of the personal computer (PC), which is used by many people in modern society. To utilize the functions of a …

When we think of human-centered design, there are two main types of design based on the target: private design, which targets individual interests and tastes, and public design, which targets optimal relationships among a larger number of people, mainly in public spaces. In the case of public design, because the target is a public space such as a train station, hospital, library, park, or school, the people who use the space can have diverse genders, nationalities, ages, and disability statuses. In other words, public design should be flexible enough to accommodate more “people.” The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in …

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the industrialization of society reached maturity, people began to agree with scientism. The advent of this industrialized society also had a profound effect on the arts. One of the best examples of this was Italian Futurism. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his “Futurist Manifesto” in 1909, in which he instigated that what artists needed was courage, daring, and revolt. He praised the automobile, the steamer, the locomotive, and the airplane as machines of speed and motion; he praised the modern energies of labor, the factory and the multitude; he praised all warfare, militarism and patriotism, the subversive actions of the …

If we think of media as a means of communicating information, such as newspapers, television, and the Internet, then it may seem that the relationship between media and design is only partial. However, if we take this term not only as a traditional information medium, but also as the artifacts that surround us in general, such as architecture, housing, clothing, vehicles, and even information devices, they overlap greatly with the realm of design. From this perspective, Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media actually developed a discussion that could be called a classic of media theory. One of the best-known assertions in this work is the thesis that “the media is …

There is a notion that scientific design should be justified by correctly recognizing the problem situation through research, devising a means to solve the problem based on experimentation, and verifying the extent to which the means actually contribute to solving the problem. In other words, the conceptual aspects of design, concepts, plans, ideas, and thoughts are ensured by the degree to which they correspond to the reality of the world. This way of thinking, which guarantees the correctness of ideas by their correspondence with the reality, is called positivism. The origins of positivism in this sense can be traced back to the Renaissance and the periods that follow it. In …

If something designed is evaluated not only by its objective specifications, but also by how it appears, the meaning it exerts, and the value it has for human beings, then the relationship between design and psychology becomes essential and inseparable. If phenomenology is one of the philosophical foundations of psychology, then at least one of the core philosophical aspects of the design can be found in it. This is because it is an approach to understanding the existence and meaning of things in relation to consciousness, which is always the place where they appear. According to 20th-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of phenomenology, any acoustic or visual …

Making something is not only a mechanical way as a means to achieve a specific practical purpose, but also an organic process that is deeply related to the development of the mind and body of the creator and user. By engaging in making, people simultaneously draw out their own physical and mental potentials, and at the same time, this growth leads to the intrinsic development of society. This organic theory of production has its origins in Aristotle’s theory of poiēsis in ancient Greece. Later, the lineage was carried over to the Disegno theory of the Renaissance and subsequent periods, to William Morris, who was at the origin of modern design, …

In many cases, a designed object points out its meaning to the people surrounding it. If this is the case, the object of design becomes a symbol. The idea that the ultimate goal of design is not to construct a real object, but to construct meaning through it, is called “semantics” in design. In his famous 1984 article “Product Semantics: Exploring the Symbolic Qualities of Form,” Krippendorff argues that the meaning of the elements that make up a product is first realized through the physical and morphological characteristics of the elements, but that it is also determined by the relationship with the users of the product and the technical, psychological, …

Public design is a field of environmental design that deals with the design of public spaces. According to the Kukan-gaku no Jiten (Encyclopedia of Spatial Studies), “Environmental design is the act of giving basic planning and form to natural elements such as the sun, water, wind, greenery, and soil, and to artificial physical elements such as urban architecture, from a human and ecological perspective.” In addition, the Paburikku Dezain no Jiten (Encyclopedia of Public Design) states, “We consider environmental design to be the formation of a better ‘place of interaction‘ between person and person, and between people and people. Public design, or design of public spaces, is one area that …

Design is a series of processes that involves “finding a purpose, making a plan to achieve that purpose, and realizing it.” In many cases, the beneficiaries of design are “people,” and it is no exaggeration to say that designers design mainly for “people.” In manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution, which made mass production possible, triggered a shift from design based on individual orders to design that anticipates potential needs before orders come in and provides a large quantity of the same product, which led to the rise of designers who design as a profession. In this era of globalization of economy and logistics, the target users of a particular product may …

Design, as an industrial reproduction, does not keep an unchanging and unique meaning as an isolated object, but rather always has a meaning in relation to the other objects, people, and things that surround it, and thus its meaning changes as the context changes. Walter Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was the first to theoretically clarify the situation-dependent nature of industrial products. Benjamin argued that the machines involved in expression, such as the photographic machine and the phonograph, do not produce simply degraded copies (Bild) of the original, but technical reproductions, Abbild, that detach (ab) the nature of just copies. According to Benjamin, …

Design knowledge is not generated at a desk or in a laboratory, but through actual practice in a workshop where hands, bodies, and intelligence are put to work. Christopher Frayling, former dean of the Royal College of Art in London, defined design knowledge unique to design, different from the natural sciences and humanities. The background to this definition is that in the 1980s, there was a wave of reorganization of art and design universities in Europe, and art universities and other institutions of higher learning in the practical arts were given the status of independent universities, rather than merely schools for training practical skills, and as a result, they were …

The Russian avant-garde is a general term for the artistic movements that emerged in Russia from the 1910s to the early 1930s, which included a wide range of activities in literature, theater, art, music, architecture, film, and design. Notable among these were the Suprematism painting of Kasimir Malevich, the Russian Constructivist movement of Vladimir Tatlin, and the establishment of the VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Workshops). Malevich, one of the most important painters of Suprematism, aimed at absolute freedom of mind and space, and created purely abstract paintings without any object, such as Black Square (1915), in which the real-world object was completely excluded. This was one of the milestones …