But what is a design configuration?

But what is a design configuration? What does it do? The "fifty shades" of the London Underground Diagram (1931-2015) 

Internationalising Design Seminar Series

This session from Professor Clive Dilnot is themed around explanation in design. It asks about the historical explanation of designed things in terms of the analysis of thing configured (the seminar: What does the configuration of the diagram achieve and how do we grasp this?). Can history stop at a thing’s happening or its coming to be? Or does it also need to extend to the deeper project of design understanding? In this case the explanation of how it is that things "work", this term being taken very seriously as that which casts light on the wider work of design configurative action.

Clive Dilnot is Professor of Design Studies at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York. Clive has worked on the history, theory and criticism of the visual arts in their broadest terms. Although his teaching and writing have focused on design history, criticism and theory, his scholarship includes the study of ethics—a subject he addressed in his book Ethics? Design? published in 2005—and the role of design capabilities in creating a humane world.