Epilogue to Thinking About Design: The Collected Writings of Kimimasa Abe (1978)

Design as Scholarship

The primary considerations of the texts in this volume are: what in fact is design and whether the field known as design can be established as "scholarship." It is thought that when university design education underestimates or ignores the real circumstances of society, it escapes into facile utopianism, or conversely, if it fully accommodates the actual societal conditions, it cannot but come to a halt, having accommodated the ideology of the establishment. For me, this remains an important unresolved problem. To begin, I would like to recall a passage that I wrote several years ago on design as an academic field.¹

Today, the area covered by the word "design" (dezain) is rather broad; it is seen as a formative activity that determines the forms of things seen and used, therefore nearly all things involved in our modern lives. Yet, as can be imagined, in tracing the development of the field of twentieth century design, one understands that design has, amid technological development, sought after social change, and mixing with art and architecture movements in particular, its own significance and its own methodologies. Accordingly, can design be conceived as an academic discipline like art or architecture? Is not design in fact something that can stand as "scholarship" (gaku)? Or is the field of design in the end at most an "applied art" (ōyō bijutsu) and its conception as scholastic (gaku) mistaken from the start?

Naturally, not all cultural expressions that appear in life are necessarily things whose significance or value depreciates if they cannot be labeled "scholastic," so there is no need to try too hard to think of it as such. But with design education having reached the university level today, it would be a strange phenomenon were the field to be regarded fundamentally as but an effective technique (waza) for dealing with reality. Of course, much is written on the theory and history of design by Western, especially European, scholars. However, it cannot be denied that compared to academic research in the fields of art history, aesthetics, and architecture, theoretical work on design is generally not yet sufficiently solid.

First, across the last half-century the word "design" itself has been used to mean a great many things. To me—to put it in general terms—design refers to the process of deciding in advance the formal organization of something to be produced in relation to function and structure, and in so doing solve individual problems while considering the human relationship to the environment of the resulting technological product. Therefore, whether dealing with production or the transmission of information, design involves not only aspects of the applied arts but many other aspects as well, such as the social, the economic, and the technological.

In the Japanese language, there are rather elegant words that seem fitting [as a translation of the English word "design"], such as zuan (図案) or ishō (意匠). However, these tend not to fully cover the meaning I have given here. Moreover, calling it simply sekkei (設計) would only elicit the engineering sense of the word.² Of course, in fields with a long tradition like architecture, the problem could be properly resolved with the words sekkei (設計) or keikaku (計画) planning, and since in mechanical engineering, incredibly significant ideas even to the layman such as the "design of design" (sekkei no sekkei, 設計の設計) are gathering attention, I think much can be expected from these theorizations of sekkei.³

This semantic problem surrounding the term "design" is not something that arises from special circumstances in Japan. For example, words usually used for "design" in German are Gestaltung or Formgebung meaning "shaping" or "forming" but in the last several years there have been many instances in which the word "design" is simply used instead because of the unavoidable slight disparity between "design" and these words.

These issues should not be cast aside as just superficial, linguistic problems. In the past, for instance, in 1894, Itō Chūta published a text called "Debating the True Meaning of the Term 'Architecture' To Choose Its Translation Word in the Hope of Changing...