Original post on LinkedIn here.

“Bonsiepe’s career may serve as a signal of where design is heading or even as a model for a new generation of designers — a model of how designers may explore the ‘space’ of design and also expand that space as they adapt to a continuously changing world.”

This is how Hugh Dubberly introduces the expansive career of the designer and design teacher and writer Gui Bonsiepe in an article included in the 2021 book “The Disobedience of Design: Gui Bonsiepe”. Indeed, through his career, Bonsiepe has had successive involvements in initiatives that have made vital contributions to the understanding of the possibilities of design, and that have transcended traditional boundaries and expanded the relationships between design and other disciplines.

In this sense, perhaps the three aspects of Bonsiepe’s career which Dubberly emphasises – his association with the HfG Ulm, his work on Project Cybersyn and his book ’Interface: An Approach to Design’ – are not so idiosyncratic after all; all three engagements involved explorations of alternatives to how we make sense of our worlds. As that “model for a new generation of designers” which Dubberly alludes to, Bonsiepe’s career offers invitation to speculate over both what-could-have-beens and what-might-bes – what might alternative futures to those for which we are on track look like?; what might alternative models to our social, environmental, political and economic systems look like?; how does new technology change the way we think about design, and how might design help us understand the meaning of technology?

In ‘Interface: An Approach to Design’ Bonsiepe introduces a conception of the interface as the central domain connecting users, tools, and purposeful actions. Extending beyond “traditional” computer interfaces to encompass physical objects, communication tools and services, Bonsiepe’s model emphasises a transformative potential of design in shaping human experiences, while providing a theoretical basis for a new design discourse. As Bonsiepe proposes:

“The interface is the central domain on which the designer focuses attention. The design of the interface determines the scope for action by the user of products. The interface reveals the character of objects as tools and the information contained in data. It makes objects into products, it makes data into comprehensible information… The interface creates the tool… Without interface there are no tools”

Link to Dubberly's article here.