The Aesthetics of Design: Between Style and Function

The Aesthetics of Design: Between Style and Function

Date: 24 April 2013 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:30pm
Venue: Room 7.58, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus

In this paper, I address the concept of design and the implications of its aesthetics. Contemporary claims of the ubiquity and breadth of design require qualification and development. There have been two distinct trends: the appearance in the last 20 or 30 years of an adjectival use of “designer”, and more important, a much earlier process, the increasingly self-conscious and professionalised status of design that arises with the development of a consumer society. My overall thesis is that design exhibits a fundamental duality: solving functional problems, and improving the look or feel of the product through style and decoration and both involved. A consumerist definition of design is rejected, and broad and narrow senses of design distinguished. My conclusion is that design essentially involves “useless” but valuable work – an ancient and enduring feature of the aesthetic as such.

Speaker: Andy Hamilton 

Andy Hamilton teaches Philosophy, and also History and Aesthetics of Jazz, at Durham University, UK. He is also Adjunct Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He specialises in aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, J.S. Mill and Wittgenstein, and recently completed Aesthetics and Music (Continuum, 2007), and Lee Konitz: Conversation on the Improviser’s Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is a long-standing contributor to “The Wire”, “Jazz Review” and “International Piano” magazines, interviewing and writing features on jazz and classical musicians and composers such as Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Elliott Carter, Kaija Saariaho and Christian Wolff. He is also a jazz pianist.