Sign, Design, Communication - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 25

of Drawing] was founded by Cosimo I de' Medici in 1563. The academy
represented artistic independence from the medieval guild.
With the rise of Aesthetics as a science in the eighteenth century, philosophical
arguments about the difference between the mechanical arts (mecahnishche Kunst)
and fine arts (scho ¨ ne Kunst) emerged again. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his
Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment] tries to classify “Kunst (art)”. If art,
Kant argues, is adequate to the cognition of a possible object and performs the actions
requisite merely in order to make it actual, it is called mechanical art. If art has for its
immediate design the feeling of pleasure, it is called aesthetic art. In addition, if
pleasure universally accompanies the sensation of the art, it is called pleasant art
(e.g., entertainment). If pleasure is a primary feature during cognition, a work is
known as beautiful art (scho¨ne Kunst). Beautiful art does not follow scientific
cognition, but extends cognition with free imagination to form an “aesthetic idea.”
This classification was adopted as a standard for arts and design (Kant 1790 , § 44)
On the other hand, the word 'disegno' was translated in the seventeenth century
into the French words 'dessin' (drawing) and 'dessein' (intention or project). The two
semantic dimensions of the word 'disegno' were separated. Design, as far as it means
'dessein', which implies intentionality and spirituality, fulfills this condition of art.
Following aesthetics, modern art identified itself with the original and creative
talent of the author and, at the same time, excluded natural beauty without spiritu-
ality. Therefore, traditional aesthetics tends to exclude the conception of natural
beauty. In his Aesthetics, Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel (1770-1831) says that aesthetics
is “the science which is meant deals not with the beautiful as such but simply with
the beauty of art ... Spirit and its artistic beauty stands higher than natural beauty”.
Therefore, aesthetics refers to “the philosophy of art and, more specifically, the
philosophy of fine art” (Hegel 1970 , Einleitung p. 13-14).
Design separated from 'dessein' means merely 'dessin', which references
the possibility of formal drawing, which is a building block of artistic expression.
This formal design (dessin), however, will lead to produce mechanical design.
By the end of the nineteenth century, with the birth of formalistic aesthetics, arts
and crafts movements, and modern technology, the two semantic notions could
again be united. Such circumstances gave rise to product and industrial design.
In fact, the English word 'design', as used today, emerged during the early days of
industrial capitalism. The word includes both meanings (drawing and intention) and
is usually used directly (i.e., not in translation) in non-English-speaking countries
(Kennichi 2004 ). In this sense, indeed, a rethinking of the history of design has led
to a rethinking of 'modernism' and 'postmodernism'.
3.3 Visible and Invisible Design
As detailed above, design means to mark out. Through marking or drawing, we
can visualize the form of an object and grasp its relation to a designer. In this way,
we can say that we come to have a point of view about a design. However, there is