Abstracts:In this article we demonstrate that and why Aristotle's four causes are essential for a scientific articulation of designerly knowledge. We show that properly understood, Aristotle's notion of a cause, including the final cause, is not in conflict with modern science. Rather, when it comes to understanding living beings as such, all of the four Aristotelian causes are still crucial. We argue that this implies that design research, too, must appeal to the four causes, because artifacts must be understood in terms of the role they play in the life of living beings.

Abstracts:We describe the COVID-19 Online Visualization Collection (COVIC), its goals, how it came to be, and why we propose such a collection as a new path for design research. The COVIC database contains a collective visualization response to the COVID-19 pandemic gathered from approximately 3,000 articles, each containing one or more visualizations (about 12,000 in total). We have sought to create a resource for design research—a boundary object—that will be useful to any of the disciplines brought together through their response to the pandemic event.

Abstracts:In this article, I examine the foundations of design knowledge and how they have been disrupted as the design discipline moves progressively away from industrial production. I consider design knowledge as a collection of different cognitive processes for developing artifacts for the human-made world. Adopting David Kolb's (1984, p.38) definition of learning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience,” I discuss the change in design knowledge by examining how the characteristics of designed items have changed. Building on theories by Neri Oxman and Richard Buchanan, I identify relevant areas of design practice in which creativity is breaking free from disciplinary silos to flow between physical, digital, metaphysical, and biological layers. I then propose an updated map of the orders of design as a thinking tool and compass. I read the evolutions of design as it enters the Fifth Order of concerns, characterized by the centrality of data both as input and as output to a design process. Today, design deals with relationships and perceptions; it dialogues with people and all species ranging from machines to micro-organisms, all of which actively participate in reaching objectives. Here, design creates conversations to achieve several goals, including engagement, discovery, and decision making. Finally, I propose a shift in the traditional principles of designing, moving away from the idea of perfect solutions and toward learning systems that are good enough for now.

Abstracts:Prince Rogers Nelson (1958–2016) was an innovative American musician whose life and work defied categorization. His music combined the spiritual with the sexual while spanning funk, rhythm and blues, soul, rock and roll, and pop genres. Prince embraced nonbinary gender performance and, as a Black artist of enormous celebrity, exemplified what W. E. B. Du Bois named double-consciousness: a sensibility gained from looking at oneself through the eyes of others; a “two-ness” derived from being both American and Black. Prince used multivalent signs, symbols, and codes to craft an enigmatic personal mythology. In this essay, I use Roland Barthes's poststructuralist theory and Stuart Hall's writing on stereotypes to examine Prince's semiotic world. By studying recurring motifs in his lyrics, fashion, and visual communication design, I show that Prince's signifying practices constitute a sensual text that, through illegibility, catalyzed emancipatory cultural expressions.

Abstracts:In this article I explore the challenges faced in design practice, where the approach to inquiry depends on understanding the context as a whole with all of its interconnected parts, and its successful transformation from one developmental phase to another. The specific goal of this article is to reflect on the meaning behind and the significance of the Issue Mapping Strategy in the exploratory research process of problem finding and discuss challenges encountered in the process of discovery that might lead to invalid topics and thus to design process fallacies. Therefore, this article explores three major areas of concern—places of invention, process of invention and product of invention—where the risk for design process fallacies is greatest. The significance of discovering commonplaces of arguments and the process of reasoning that help to identify issues in problematic situations is discussed and examples are given. The Issue Mapping strategy is useful in all of the cases that focus on problem finding in complex environments and situations of uncertainty in human experience.