The Appearance of the Form (1985)

The Appearance of The Form - N. John Habraken, bookcover

The four essays in this book consider how the countless physical objects that we live with appear in our human culture. For millennia use and making were inseparable, even when the latter knew specialization. In that age old mode of working things emerged as the product of collective understandings and shared images. Only recently what we now know as 'designing' appeared as a specific professional intervention. Designers produce 'appearances' of new things - in the way of drawings, models and descriptions - to arrive at an instruction for the making of them. As such, designing places itself between use and inhabitation on the one hand and making on the other. Evidence suggests that designing cannot replace the historic mode of creating objects, and is most beneficial when likewise rooted in a social body.

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