design’s origins in corporate identity, in which a brand is applied to some-
thing that has already been produced, only reproduced that perception. This
is a vicious circle. When design is applied to productions that have long since
been analytically conceived, the self-fulfilling unimpressive results can be used
to demonstrate the superficiality of design.
Now that circle is breaking. Widespread computation makes business
strategies based on reductive numerical models more or less available to every-
one. Because efficiency models become more of a prerequisite but less of a
competitive advantage, strategic emphasis shifts to design. The design of
industrial products such as shoes and automobiles has advanced considerably
as a result.
(McCullough 200 4 : 150)Design has increasingly therefore become interaction design: the design of
commodities that behave, communicate, or inform, if even in the most marginal
way, in part by making them into processes of variation and difference that can
allow for the unforeseen activities that they may become involved in or used for
which they may then act as clues to further incarnations. In other words, ‘the
success of a design is arrived at socially’ (McCullough 200 4 : 16 7 ), that is through
structured processes of cultural deliberation which massage form (Molotch 2003).
In a sense, the goal is to produce commodities that are as ‘natural’ as longstanding
commodities like books but to do so in an accelerated way by dint of various collec-
tive design processes that spill outside the organizational boundary, including not
just the full spectrum of qualitative methods now routinely used by corporations
(or at least by the consultancies that they hire) such as focus groups, ethnography
of various kinds, style boards, means-end chains, clinics, pre-launches, information
acceleration, conjoint analysis, and so on, but also fan websites, open innovation,
and so on.
Thought of in this way, more and more design activity is not defined in relation
to a final endpoint. Rather, the ‘production process has no final goals, no natural
target or final user, but rather continuously feeds on itself. Another way of putting
this is that through the activity of design the process of production provides
information for itself about itself ’ (Lury 200 4 : 52). This is another means of under-
standing co-creation of course, as a continual process of tuning arrived at by
distributed aspiration.
Thus, these three tendencies increasingly mean that commodities have become
extended architectures of onflow, designed as a process in order to capture process.
The commodity becomes like a Whiteheadian process micrometaphysics whose
aim is to generate and maximize involvement, however temporary that may be,
for example by placing the commodity in the context of an often heterogeneous
experience that has itself been designed as part of what constitutes the commodity,
and which has the power to redefine what the commodity is.
Re-inventing invention 47