Design Culture and Dialogic Design

The question of culture is virtually absent from the debate on contemporary design and especially from what in this paper I refer to as emerging design : a problem-based, solution-oriented design, the defining characteristic of which is not the products, services, and communicative artifacts it produces, but the tools and methods it uses. The discussion on it dutifully covers environmental, economic, and social issues, together with those of participation and the environmental, economic, and social effects of its results. Certainly all these aspects are very important, but the absence of a debate on emerging design’s cultural dimension is a serious limitation that prevents it from becoming the agent of )cultural and therefore also social and environmental( change that it could and indeed should be. Meanwhile, although rarely dis¬cussed, emerging design also has its own culture- a culture that is rather limited and limiting precisely because of this lack of debate. In this paper I call this culture solution-ism and participation-ism .
To go beyond this somewhat reductive culture, we need to return to the discussion on issues that are or should be typical of design: from the criteria by which to orient and assess the quality of local solutions, to the broadest visions of the world toward which we work. This discussion must be undertaken through a dialogic approach , in which the various interlocutors, design experts included, interact as they bring their own ideas and define and accept their own responsibilities.