نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
عنوان مقاله English
نویسندگان English
Up to the past decades, the knowledge of “industrial design” was considered the fundamental component of every manufacturing process seeking the goal of manufacturing for meeting the users’ basic needs. Nowadays, it is not enough to only meet the needs. Rather, it is so important to consider the way of meeting the needs, its quality, and expectations of all the relevant agents. “Technical design” and “scientific research” can both lead to knowledge generation. However, they are different. Designers can simultaneously generate knowledge as they use that, and they cannot make the scientific knowledge merely applied. Technological knowledge results from an almost artifact-oriented, profitability-centered, and implicit designing process. Meanwhile, it should be noted that technology cannot be considered as only a set of technological products. Technology is an indicator of the human agents’ efforts for making these products usable for their intentions which lead to their surrounding world’s transformation. Therefore, “technological action” can be considered as a kind of purposeful human behavior that is mainly aimed to resolve the practical problems, and “technical artifacts” can be also called the most tangible results of this effort. The mentioned artifacts can play a mediating role, and designers can predict or arrange the relationships that can be created between the products and users. In this way, they can try to persuade users to pay attention to products. However, the function of artifacts has been paid less attention than the biological function, so that there is no philosophy of the “material culture”. Although philosophical studies have paid attention to some special aspects of artifacts, their functions have not been investigated as a significant subject. So, as a technological activity, the basis of industrial design has moved to the three functional values of technical, aesthetic, and symbolic functions that aim to create a sustainable relationship between the products and users. Each of the three values of industrial design can be assessed in terms of determining factors, and it is worth mentioning that a single object can have several function each of which can be studied in the area of the designer and user agents. This goal will be achieved in technical function regarding the material aspects of the artifact. On the other hand, industrial design includes different processes such as “designing” and “usage-related” processes (Use, maintenance and repair, maintenance and rehabilitation) that respectively belong to the capability and/or intention of the “designer agents” and the “user agents”. The “user action” plays a more important role than the “designer action” in determining the product’s technical type, and the “users” (rather than the designers) attribute special functions to an object to make that a proper artifact. Therefore, industrial design processes prioritize the preparation and arrangement of the relationships between the designed technical artifacts and the users. In this regard, this conceptual research aims to investigate the industrial function of industrial design artifacts in manufacturing processes, and it includes two sections. The first part explains the concepts and the research works studying the issues of “function”, and the second part describes the technical function of industrial design products focusing on industrial design processes based on the analysis of the findings of the first part. So, three types of function have been identified including the “design-derived function”, “situation-oriented function”, and “usage-oriented function”. In each of the mentioned types, this study has investigated the agents’ capability, their intention, the function, industrial design-related processes, the function status, and the relevant phenomena. Accordingly, it is inferred that the “action” performed in “industrial design” which depends on human agents’ efforts is “technological”, and it aims to resolve the practical problems. “Technical artifacts” are considered the main result of this effort, and their major components include the function, the use plan, and the physical structure. On the other hand, functional values in industrial design can be classified into technical, aesthetic, and symbolic functions. However, the contribution of the agents of the technical artifacts and especially the “users” to realization of the technical functions determines their type and creates a sustainable relationship with the artifact in terms of the material aspects (rather than the efficiency or concept). The mentioned contribution can be realized in different processes of industrial design including the design-related (the designers’ capability) processes and the use-related (the users’ capability) processes. This research has also explained how to create a sustainable relationship between the agents of these functions and technical artifacts. These findings will be effective in preparation and arrangement of participatory relationships. However, as the agents of technical artifacts, users can play different roles such as a justifier, a passive user, a supervisor, a technical analyzer, etc. each of which can be studied in future research works. Meanwhile, the issue of “technical function” is only one of the three values involved in industrial design. So, the future studies can investigate the aspects, dimensions, and the components of the other functions i.e., the aesthetic function and the symbolic function in terms of the different areas of the agents’ capability.
کلیدواژهها English
منابع
References
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0890060413000206
URL(8): https://www.red-dot.org/project/window-timing-26417 [Accessed August. 2023]
