Congress Innovation in Art, Istanbul

Guest speaker at the international student congress of Maltepe University in Istanbul, Turkey in 2015. I presented my research on the tools of the designer in the face of contemporary social and urban issues in a lecture entitled fragmentation and narration as tools for a parrallel design.

abstract:

Fragmentation and narration as tools for a parallel design

The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) communities growing online are challenging the professional design. In particular, graphic design is concerned as everybody has an easy access to the tools used nowadays in agencies. The number of skilled amateurs is increasing but an access to the tools does not make one a graphic designer. The professional nowadays has to bring an other kind of content beyond the commercial purpose, through experimentation, critical message, or alternative interpretations. The graphic designer cannot be considered as a technician anymore as his technical competences are not such an exception. He is the one who has to question both the tool and the project, to give his work a different kind of value.

I address the question of the narration and the design process through the idea of fragmentation. For a better differentiation of the designer from his technical competences, this question can be examined through the rapprochement of the designer and the author, based on the theoretical framework of Barthes.

Barthes’ theory about fragments is still topical as the reading behaviour has evolved a lot with the numeric technologies and is no more a linear reading but, due to hypertext, a fragmented one. I investigate the narrative experience in design, and the place of experimentation in design, based on the reading experience and the fragments, by transposing Barthes’s theory about the author in the creative process of design.

Thanks to the fragmentation the reader act as a scriptor and it is a key for an open text with multiple interpretations. By integrating the fragments in the process of design and therefore considering the designer as an author, the process could be the experimental field of design. The design process is in a constant dialogue, at each step of experimentations, the fragmentation as a part of it allow the meeting of thoughts and methods from distant fields. From a narrative point of view the use of fragments let a great space for interpretation and lead to appropriation. Transposed on a poetic or confused object it could lead to a collaboration between the user and this object, and from their singular relation create an other kind of narration.

This questionnement will be examined through a selection of works pursuing the aims of poetry and consciousness, from design experiments.

Keywords : designer - author - fragments - fragmentation - story - narration - reader - scriptor - experimentation - parallel - DIY - poetic