MAN.MAD.SCIENCE

“What designers need is knowledge ‘for’ changing the world not knowledge ‘of’ what it is. Scientists want knowledge of what it is. They want to tell us how things are. Designers want to change it. Design is not interested in describing what it is but in changing what it is.”

Ranulph Glanville

MAN.MAD.SCIENCE aims for a culture of performing design research, mastery of techniques, and persistent practice in opposition to conception, story telling, atmosphere and image. The potential of a skill as the driving force in the design process. The technique is mastering the creative process, whereas the degree of mastery of the field is secondary. The explorative design process challenges its potential, personal limits and technical restrictions. The strive is to incorporate a culture of execution, exploration, application, reaction, and counter reaction of a skill to achieve a personal visual language that is identified through the process of making.

“The digital revolution, the great Bit Rush, is over. The question whether something is analogue or digital does not matter anymore. Everything we do is influenced by digital technology. (…) However, the way in which this post-digital world is translating itself in our daily lives is not unequivocal; certainly not now that the digital is beginning to migrate from the screen to the real world of physical objects that surround us. (..) How do you integrate the digital, the screen, the computer and the internet with the physical world? What role could designers play in this field?” Unfold, After the Bit Rush, project description, www.unfold.be One symptom of a post-digital world is the rediscovery of the tactile, traditions, and craft. The choice of field can be rooted within this tendency, but might as well surpass it. It should be informed by and formed through an aggregation of trans-disciplinary and poptechnological approaches. The choice of material will be an important parameter in the development process of the designs. Material is not neutral: certain ideas can be easily implemented and expressed through the use of one specific material, but others run into opposition. This resistance can be used as a generator to transform and distort the traditional loathing of a material or field and should lead to new views on the subject.