Justine Boussard

Title of Dissertation: Design as Script in the Twenty-first Century, Towards a New System of Objects?


In product design of the early twenty-first century, a shift has been operated from the production of series of identical objects to the creation of systems that can generate a variety of outputs. These designers are producing systems that circumvent the standardisation of the object by focusing on the process rather than the final object. Among the advocates of that specific movement within contemporary design creation is French designer François Brument. In 2009 he created a software programme that produces digital renderings of vases according to the modulation of the voice. With Vase#44, Brument has created a system that has the potential to produce an infinite variety of outputs and invites the user to formalise the final design. Designers like Brument are engaging with ways of making that challenge the conventional role of the designer as author.


To tackle these issues of growing openness and evolving authorship, this dissertation has developed the concept of ‘script’, which addresses both the means developed by the designers to generate objects (design through script), and the design outputs themselves, which are scripts to be performed (design as script).


The design of systems of objects is not merely the fruit of emerging technologies, but rather the conceptual heir of experimentations in script-based approaches to making that find their roots in art of the 1960s and ’70s (i.e. the instruction works of Fluxus, and the computer-generated art works of the pioneers of Computer Art).