Responsibility of the imagination

Abstract

From a “manifesto” –textual genre of the “activist” or “revolutionary document”– we expect a declaration (often without any justifications) of aims and procedures to implement a “different” vision compared to a given situation, and we expect above all the indication of the actual stakes. Here the “given situation” is that of the studies on representation cultivated in design schools, studies that are documented by a vast scientific literature with its unstable boundaries between “design studies” and “visual (cultural) studies”, between “techniques of the (graphic and eidomatic) representation” and “sciences of perception and cognition”. But what is at stake in this dispute among knowledge boundaries on the practical ground of the technical and artistic project? I believe that these “stakes” consist, first of all, in knowing why our artefacts for aesthetic use have the shape they have, but I do not believe that a satisfactory answer may come separately from history or from the natural sciences. Anyway, we must give an answer here because the question has its own essential necessity: we cannot avoid it because it guides (in an ethical way) our design activity by modelling our ideation techniques. The answer that I present here is biographical and assertive: it proposes a “Simondonian” manifesto, that is, a horizon of the task that must be a matter, in our opinion, of the discipline of “Disegno”.