Designers on the map! You exist if someone finds it necessary to investigate about you. The industrial designers' tribe in Israel is revealed in an ethnographic study conducted in design stylists. What they think, how they behave and why they design objects.
Jonathan Ventura, who wrote the book I want to present here, I met at the Van Leer Institute. We were both research colleagues in a group on applied anthropology. It was a full-fledged meeting of an anthropologist who studies design and a designer who studies the usability of anthropology. In the end Yonatan submitted the research as a doctoral thesis and I judged his work at the request of the Hebrew University. I am pleased to see Dr. Ventura's work as a book. In my opinion, a book recommended for designers. A book that serves as a mirror in which designers can see themselves from the perspective of an anthropologist, examine the ways in which colleagues work, how they perceive reality and what their role is. In the light of the revealed, they will be able to reinterpret their own ways and to consider ways of design that deviate from the accepted practice.
In this book we are introduced not only to industrial design in Israel, but also to the radical transformation that the anthropology discipline is undergoing. Jonathan deviates from the classical conception of anthropology as describing the other and the anthropologist as someone who is not involved and does not influence the field of research. Yonatan creates a "chavruta" with the designers with whom he stays during their work, examines and examines how they think, conduct and do throughout the design process. He makes another significant step that goes beyond the work of classical anthropologists and proposes a change in the work of the designers. He intervenes in the field of the interrogee in order to change it. Jonathan is not only involved, but also proactive, initiating a new understanding of design. Understanding derived from the integration of the disciplines of anthropology and design. He researches, describes and designs the design.
Three parts of the book, the first part reviews the different and changing worldviews of anthropology and design. The cultural and social background in which the designers operate, the meaning of their products and their methodology. The second part concentrates on the worldview of Israeli industrial designers as it is revealed when he has been with them for a long time. From their perspective, he describes those involved in the design process: the client (the project entrepreneur), the user (the one for whom the design was made) and the designers themselves who try to bridge the gaps between them all. The third part of the book goes beyond looking at existing and looking forward to future possibilities for understanding and actually design. The transition from designers who create objects as "educated carpenters" to designers as social-cultural agents - the designers of reality.
In the center of the book are seemingly "objects," the name of the book. The products of industrial design are objects that people desire. In fact, the book deals with designers from researching a number of Israeli industrial design stylistics, which Jonathan found different from each other, and therefore as a whole may represent the industrial designers' community in Israel at this time. From this point of view, the objects actually embody the relationship between the client, the designer and the user. These relations are the main issue of his interest and he brings them together with academic interpreters that broaden and deepen the understanding of the revealed. Jonathan presents the relationship from the point of view of the designers, before us descriptions of the client and user as the designers see them, and a description of the designers as they see themselves.
