glossary

Auteur designers also referred to as ‘signature designers’ are motivated by their own unique vision. Mostly, they are not commissioned by nor obliged to answer to anyone other than themselves. They are responsible for defining their own project briefs, securing their funds and promoting their own designs. Unlike other designers, auteur designers can act more independently in expressing their particular design philosophies. An auteur designer is in complete control over his project.

Authorship is the source of a piece of writing, music or art. Unlike earlier, authorship is nowadays not necessary associated to writing. It can be any state or act of writing, creating or causing. An inventor, constructor, founder, ruler, director, commander can be considered an author. As Michael Rock states in his essay The designer as an author “the person who originates and gives existence to anything” is the author.

Decentralization describes a process, where control of an organization or government is moved from a single place to several smaller ones.

Diffuse Design is a term introduced by Ezio Manzini in his book ‘Design, When Everybody Designs’ and describes design, which is performed by everybody, meaning not only professional designers, but also amateurs, hobby designers and everybody else.

Supporters of this movement actively resist dependence on mass-produced goods and the multinational corporations that generally produce and distribute such goods. Instead participants encourage individuals to produce good themselves, thereby protesting corporate exploitative labor and environmental practices while empowering individuals to become producers rather than just consumers.

Electronic space, and particularly the space created by the global network described as the Internet, is an artifact of the consumption-orientated post-industrial information economy of the mid-1990s.

According to Ezio Manzini’s book ‘Design, When Everybody Designs’, expert design is design performed by those who have been trained as designers.

Cranbook Academy of Art director Katherine McCoy first used this term in 1990. The concept was used to explore a postmodern shift toward personal, expressive work. In the 21st Century, however, the term took on a new meaning as designers began to author texts of design history and theory, as well as initiate other entrepreneurial endeavors. Within this authorship model of graphic design the presence of a client is no longer key to the design process.

The property of a substance that makes it capable of being hammered or pressed into shape without breaking or cracking.

Methodology describes the science of method, or a body of methods, employed in a particular activity such as the research aspects of a project. It is a logical, predefined, and systematic strategy to undertake a graphic design project, to include methods of evaluation of experimental outcomes, a schedule for each stage of the project and a stated intention or purpose in relation to anticipated outcomes. It could also be employed to describe an approach to graphic design in general: a particular manner of working or a procedure used in the production of graphic design. Sometimes it is used in reference to organization or a technique of organizing and analyzing, or a scheme of classification.

This term typically refers to the distribution of information by digital means. However, as Lev Manovich notes in 'The language of New Media', the term can be more accurately broadened to include the transformation of all media, old and new, through using digital technology.

Non-linearity refers to a relationship, which cannot be explained as a linear combination of its variable inputs. Nonl-inearity is a common issue when examining cause-effect relations. Such instances require complex modeling and hypothesis to offer explanations to nonlinear events. Non-linearity without explanation can lead to random, unforecasted outcomes such as chaos.

Open Design is a design artifact project whose source documentation is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute and sell it. Open Design is a concept that completely revolutionized free software, challenged the idea of the author and refers to collective creativity.

Prosumerism is a composed term from the words producer and consumer, entailing the tendency towards a market where the distinction between producers and consumers decreases, where consumers are producing their own goods and services. This tendency takes place, because of individual, social, technological and economic changes, particularly caused by rapid advances in technology.

Tangibility describes the quality or condition of being discernible by touch.

The use of the word text refers to more than the printed word on a page of a book. It also encompasses a range of other activities and items related to cultural production. This would include for example a film, a wrestling match on television or a building – anything that carries meaning and that could be ‘read’ by an audience. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the French philosopher Roland Barthes began to challenge the existing idea that the author of a book could be considered as the central and controlling influence on the meaning of a text.

In his essays 'The Death of the Author' and 'From Work to Text', Bathes argues that whilst it is possible to trace the influence of the author in a text, the text itself remains ‘open’, encouraging the idea that the meaning is brought to an object – particularly a cultural object – by its intended audience. In this way, the meaning does not intrinsically reside in the object itself and cannot be reduced to an authorial intention.