An UnDisciplined Discipline: Design Operating Along the Borders

Often proliferating in far territories and always placing itself within the track of innovation, between material and immaterial matters, product and service, design has never built a clear and defined field, to be historicized and “hardened” during years, as on the contrary several disciplines did along the time, while acquiring a better recognized and “disciplined” theoretical apparatus. Design always had the power to build relations with technology, materials, but also innovation, social practices and therefore its cultural evidence: then its specific complexity constantly implied a spread net of theoretical and methodological contaminations flanking design thinking through time. If innovation has to face the unknown, often hybridizing different factors and making connections which seem unlikely, design challenges the disciplines opening structures and blurring the recognized borders of knowledge, often falling beyond the recognized conventions. Then, along with the end of the “grand narratives” (Lyotard, 1979), as we’re living an era of redefinition of the meaning of ‘knowledge’, at the same time we state the collapsing of the categories, the scales, the fields: can we consider the project of a Nike shoe an industrial product, communication or fashion? Moreover, can we consider a website as a big or a small scale? From a didactic and research experience started at Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), and now developed at Carleton University in Ottawa (Canada), the paper here outlined is a theoretical contribution elaborated also through case studies and an interdisciplinary net of references, such as anthropology, social sciences, cultural studies, semiotic, to witness the accomplishment of design as an academic discipline, while sketching its complex character in contemporary post-industrial societies facing knowledge, as well as scientific concepts and technological processes.