From Representation to Rhizome: Open Design from a Relational Perspective

ABSTRACTOpen design is a new design paradigm that creates a lot of dilemmas for designers to deal with. However, these dilemmas are mostly being discussed from within the design sector itself and from very polarized perspectives which do not provide much depth to create ways to deal with this new paradigm. This paper considers open design as a philosophical position that relates to broader cultural developments and puts the way we deal with design in the perspective from our attitude to identity which can be described as a performance. To create a new thinking space to reconsider openness, the non-representational thought model of the rhizome is applied to examples from Dutch design culture which will offer a more thorough understanding of where the true innovative power of open design lies.