Cooperation and Individualism in Design

Individualism encourages designers to be incommunicative, protective of their ideas, and unable to work as a team or involve clients and the community in the process. Design requires effective collaboration. The argument is advanced here that exhortations to collaborate and cooperate are often frustrated by the current commitment within academic and professional circles to the legacy of Descartes. Design as an activity of the individual emerges from both the Cartesian rationalistic tradition and the Romantic countertradition that is focused on spirit and genius. Counter to this assertion of the primacy of the individual is the argument that reason is a product of shared experience. This does not mean that reason is accomplished through conformity to consensus. The inference of conformity can be circumvented by recourse to Gadamer's metaphors of effective historical consciousness and participation in the hermeneutic circle. The conclusion is that the metaphor of the individual as the focus of reason and hence the source of design genius is appropriate in particular contexts, but needs to be seen against other more helpful metaphors of participation and involvement.