An UnDisciplined Discipline: Design Operating Along the Borders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Often proliferating in far territories and always placing itself within the track of innovation, between material and immaterial matters, product and service, design has never built a clear and defined field, to be historicized and “hardened” during years, as on the contrary several disciplines did along the time, while acquiring a better recognized and “disciplined” theoretical apparatus. \nDesign always had the power to build relations with technology, materials, but also innovation, social practices and therefore its cultural evidence: then its specific complexity constantly implied a spread net of theoretical and methodological contaminations flanking design thinking through time. If innovation has to face the unknown, often hybridizing different factors and making connections which seem unlikely, design challenges the disciplines opening structures and blurring the recognized borders of knowledge, often falling beyond the recognized conventions. \nThen, along with the end of the “grand narratives” (Lyotard, 1979), as we’re living an era of redefinition of the meaning of ‘knowledge’, at the same time we state the collapsing of the categories, the scales, the fields: can we consider the project of a Nike shoe an industrial product, communication or fashion? Moreover, can we consider a website as a big or a small scale? \nFrom a didactic and research experience started at Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), and now developed at Carleton University in Ottawa (Canada), the paper here outlined is a theoretical contribution elaborated also through case studies and an interdisciplinary net of references, such as anthropology, social sciences, cultural studies, semiotic, to witness the accomplishment of design as an academic discipline, while sketching its complex character in contemporary post-industrial societies facing knowledge, as well as scientific concepts and technological processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.032 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".