Nature normative : the Design Methods Movement, 1944-1967

Abstract

In the mythic construct of the West, nature, for a considerable era, has served as a seminal broker in basal underpinning discourse. This is despite nature's commutative, convertible and contradictory disclosures. As the antithesis of socio-culture, nature has been the arena of the given, of necessity and compulsion, and a zone of constraint. As "Nature" it has worked as the precipitate of humanity and ministered as the model for human activity. To violate the norms of nature, to be unnatural, has been considered unhealthy, amoral and illegal.Following the Second World War, constructs of nature, socio-culture and norms were altered in design education and practice. Postwar, an emerging discourse of computer-related technologies contributed to reconfiguring representations of architecture, engineering, product and urban planning in the US and UK. The collective driving these changes became known as the Design Methods movement. Together with trajectories of thought in psychology and psychiatry, discourses materializing from such fields as cybernetics, operations research, information theory and computers altered design processes and education.This dissertation ranges from examining the politics of funding surrounding an urban planning research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts to elucidating conferences concerning, architecture, engineering, urban planning and product design in the UK. Taking from media theorist Friedrich Kittler that technologically possible manipulations condition what can become a discourse, this dissertation is structured around two threads.

(cont.) One thread concerns how computer-related technologies configured a re-conceptualization of nature and socio-culture in design practice and education. A second thread examines how psychology and psychoanalytic concerns were reworked for design through a lens of computer related technologies. A line between the natural and the normative is questioned concerning concepts of abnormality and deviation.