Grundstück
The most interesting part of design is the way the foundational principles defining a thing are approached. These are questions arising before the thing’s thing-ness is considered: Which infrastructures govern this thing’s objective expression? Where in the world will this thing be placed? How and from which directions will it be approached? Is it large? Is it small?
Answering these questions defines boundaries and lays out a foundation. Within them lies the opportunity to propose structural difference, a priori any decision about form and function. The foundation is by nature unrelated to novelty, decorative difference or aesthetics of radicality.
This way of approaching a problem may be called foundational design, to underscore its concern with the principles and decisions governing the design process it precedes, rather than design itself. In this sense, it relates to design as landscape architecture and urban planning relate to the architecture of buildings.
Applied to industrial design, graphic design or web design, this way of thinking results from and furthers a desire to design as little as possible: By prescribing more specific principles, environments or materials, design execution is free to follow a rational path of problem-solving. This way of approaching design is by nature inductive, and mostly uninterested in general public attention and economic maximalization.
In my work, I strive to ask simple, big, essential questions. There should be more alternatives for everything. They should be as clearly differentiated as possible to foster insight into universal contigency.