Design Critique: between social communication and the subjugation of commodities

Reseña de "Una molesta introducción al estudio del diseño". Gustavo Valdés de León. Nobuko, Buenos Aires, 2011.

Abstract

As he indicates in his prologue, the author of this book boasts the dubious privilege of being the Design professor with the most years of uninterrupted teaching practice [in Argentina], having taken his first steps at the Escuela Panamericana de Arte in the late 1970s. 

The novelty of the teaching and learning of Design at university level is dealt with in the book broken down into sub-variants: Industrial -although there was practically no industry-, Graphic, Textile and even Audiovisual, such that it became a sort of film school at the University of Buenos Aires -which our author stubbornly renames the National University of Buenos Aires-). On this basis, it quickly established a populous field of interested parties. Among them, numerous contingents of students together with (relatively) improvised teachers, partly detached from the old agglutinating field of Architecture, to which Valdés vigorously objects by proposing that the question of communication and its design should not be inserted in more generic apparatuses such as Architecture or Art (institutional spaces that house them in Argentina and the region) but, in any case, in the Social Sciences, since this task would be more socio-scientific than that of those extra or para-scientific areas.