To browse Academia. The list of comfortable oppositions goes on. As an individual who has straddled the divide between the art and design world, these rigid areas of understanding seem to me, to function in relation to a desire to place finite points of origin and destination on disciplinary practice.
They do however preclude the juicy middle. Deleuze and Guattari have proposed that a rhizome has no beginning or an end and that in its morphology as a multiplicity rather than a singular, its organic trajectories of development rather than the structured and directional passage of the tree, much loved in Western thinking, the rhizome presents a model for rethinking our human condition.
In terms of design the rhizomes ability to rupture and reform, and connect and grow together with any point of another rhizome, to ostensibly become the other is of great importance to this paper, which explores the becoming art of conceptual design. In discussing this disciplinary co-mingling I employ a visual analysis methodology in reaching some accord regarding the deterritorializing and decentering of design practice.
I also undertake a comparative analysis of contemporary design and art in which I rhizomically and therefore in quite an organic and at times random manner point to intersections and migrating conceptual approaches in the field of art and design practice. This has lead him to question the historical pattern of design whereby the methods and epistemologies of other disciplines are used without addressing the differences between them and design.
Design is a complex activity enmeshed in many aspects of our lives. Roxburgh has written about these matters but his critique has conformed to the conventions of academic publishing and he has found articulating aspects of such complexity constrained by the limits of written language. Increasingly, in design, visualization is used to map complex relationships between things, ideas and actions.
