Design, Development, Culture, and Cultural Legacies in Asia

The very idea of writing on contemporary or "modern" design issues pertaining to any country or civilization seems to evolve around two methodological assumptions. The first assumption is that there exists something called design as ontological equipment. If not, at least a belief that design exists as a full-fledged discipline in quite the same way as economics, sociology, or history exist, distinct from the specifics of disciplines such as current monetary policy of the People's Republic of China, analyses of football hooliganism in Britain, or the causes of World War I. This broad rubric then could accommodate architectural, industrial, communications, and fashion/garment design, woven together as it were by a common methodological thread. Constituted thus, it could form the basis of teaching curricula. The second assumption is that nation states have identifiable cultural, socioeconomic, and esthetic aspirations and predictable patterns of lifestyle, which despite all their variegated heterogeneities, exhibit at least a certain identifiable common cultural substance and provide the necessary tabula rasa on which modern design may be projected. When these general assumptions are applied to Asian design, new problems emerge. Despite dissensions, the contemporary mainstream concept of design in the West is in some vague manner connected with new sources of energy, technological breakthroughs, mass production, minute specializations, and global quest for markets. It is perceived as a visible tool of both commerce and industry, carrying with it other legacies of nineteenth and early twentieth century ideals, for example, that design could act as a leveler of society through more equitable accessibility to mass-produced goods as well as introduce a sense of clean, rational, impersonal order. This sense of rational order is a direct descendant of the Enlightenment ideology, which in Weberian terms produced the Western brand of capitalistic transformation of society. There were, no doubt, several variants to this historic Western model, but underlying it all were two central principles: The first was that modernization, of which design was but a tool, was endogenous, that society was capable of transforming itself from within, and where there was inadequate endogenous impetus, such as in Germany, the state would become a central agent in the transformation of society. The second principle was that this