Pragmatism and Design

With their ability to analyse usages and needs, designers are at the crossroads of several disciplines. They develop an overall concept using personal and sensitive approaches and are, therefore, primary contacts to make structures evolve.

But there’s no need to create over-sized projects as it is mostly in crevices that they’re really comfortable and interact.

By small-scale experimentation in auspicious places, by shedding our individually predetermined roles, energies are federated and new ever-changing relationship networks are built.

It’s in this sense that I find a designer’s approach to be pragmatic: experience and action play an essential part. And since experiments change the experimenters by modifying and broadening their world-perception, they are able to participate more subtly in real life without a predefined and set doctrine.

I’m interested in the pragmatic as it’s a philosophy about research which touches all social, political and aesthetic fields — and which has a firm grip on the real world, preoccupied with the ordinary. The five principles I retain are like so many other efficient tools to confront the major challenges of the world today, meaning to understand and to act. They are about the plurality of cultural diversity, the primacy of method, of historical contextualisation, epistemology of research and experimentation.

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