Rethinking Design: On Configuration

In these four volumes, leading design thinker Clive Dilnot addresses key issues for our understanding of design and its place in the world. The individual volumes deal respectively with history, configuration, ethics and knowledge.

On Configuration opens with a discussion of configuration as the essential ‘moment’ of design work. Dilnot examines what is particular to designed configurations, differentiating them from technological arrangement and exploring the presence in design of the negotiation between in-commensurable demands. This theoretical discussion is explored through an extended case-study of the famous London Underground diagram. He moves on to address the poetics and speculative structure of configuration, the interior structure of artifacts, the ethical truth of design and the concept of situated ethics.

This is an important update of one of Dilnot’s seminal theoretical works, and it should be of interest to all design scholars and practitioners.