Gewollt – Ge’-volt (adj.)
- deliberate, intentional, intended
- (piece of art) contrived, awkward, cheesy
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Gewollt occurs when art, which is supposed to be the exhibition of concrete, tacit qualities, is produced by explicit and general categories.
Nietzsche said it well: “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.”
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Corporateness is a species of gewollt — the effect of production by predominantly explicit processes. This form of activity is effective for engineering processes, but as soon as it is applied to anything meant to seem human, anything produce by it will have hollow and soulless ring to it.
What makes a design compelling are concrete, tacit qualities that make it into the design — the capturing of something impossible to convey with language — the je ne sais quoi of the design that makes it irreplaceable by anything other than itself.
It is the art in design that makes it inexplicably resonant and desirable beyond its function and convenience.
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Artists have an advantage. The work of artists takes place between the individual and the material.
With designers things are more complicated. Designers are usually working in teams, and the work is for others. The only way to infuse a design with art without allowing the design to become the personal expression of the designer and to devolve into art is to allow the designers to directly experience the people for whom they are designing, and their environments, their activities, their language — their world. Tacit empathy that cannot be conveyed through explicit findings reports are key.
The design of research approaches must not be understood solely in terms of data gathering activities, but rather the production of encounters between designer and worlds.