The debate on whether processes are a reliable way to understand the world spans many eras. A complete genealogy of the concept of a process is required to accurately comment on this debate. Being a practitioner of a craft that believes its primary monopoly to be “the process”, I am moved to comment on this concept. In this essay, I present some fundamental thoughts on processes and their relationship to practice while staying agnostic to any specific discipline. In tandem, I illuminate the issues with the rigid attachment to process that is prevalent in design practice today. Finally, I propose…

The title of this piece could be rather misleading, especially if the reader happens to be acquainted with me or my work. To avoid confusion, this piece is not a discussion of the place of the tangible three-dimensional artefact against the place of the digital two-dimensional artefact as outcomes of the design practice. It is a discussion of the actual and the virtual as discussed in Gille Deleuze’s short and hurriedly executed piece in the book Dialogues(1). …

Written as a dialogue between two parts of my own identity, this piece provides an insight into the necessity of art in society (through a Marxist-humanist perspective) while discussing the dilemma of a true working class aesthetic.

The poet and the artist sat at a table in the back of the café. They sat in silence awaiting their coffee. The coffee arrives in a carafe along with two cups, two saucers, two spoons, more sugar than was necessary and a little steel dispenser for cream.

The poet: These cups could very well be works of art exclusively but more so…

The word empathy has found its way into common lexicon and has established itself as having many semiotic functions. It is a lexical symbol that conveys affection, understanding, caring, a spirit of communality. But, above all else, the semiotic function that empathy now fulfils is that of an alibi. It is truly important to understand the function of empathy in our current socio-politico-cultural and business practices and understand how it is, essentially, another bourgeois construction suppress the guilt of oppressing the proletariat class. …

On design paradoxes and the poesy of three iconic chairs

“We are living in a time obsessed with actuality. People like immediacy, haste and actuality and poetry is, I repeat, timeless. This means it doesn’t correspond to what’s happening. It is out-of-the-moment”

— Jean Cocteau (Poet, visual artist, designer, critic and probably the first design poet)

Design praxis has continually evolved from a productised application of the arts (Arts and Crafts movement) to a professional practice that has numerous flavours (UX design, service design, design research, design strategy and so on) that befuddle the practitioners themselves. The volatility of “popular”…