Design Agendas and Answering Voices

Four alternative, hypothetical redesigns of a politically significant landscape are presented to a selected sample of sixteen planning and design professionals (eight male, eight female), considered representative of the sorts of ‘opinion leaders’ likely to respond (in support or indignation) to any such redesign. Additionally, a series of different political agendas are posed, and the respondents are asked to say how well or badly each redesign might meet these various agendas. At a first, superficial level there are affective responses to the designs (like/dislike); these relatively easily expressed attitudes, however, would seem to mask, at a second level, a more diverse pattern of meanings or semantic responses elicited by the redesigns. Such meanings are complex and multidimensional. At yet a further level, both affective and semantic responses emerge from far more complex and varied processes whereby new meanings are formed in the interaction of presented images (the redesigns) and the answering agendas and underlying ‘worldview’ of the observer. A sensitive reading of the voices carrying the various responses can yield significant insights into these processes of the production of meaning, and a key to understanding environmental design and its critical reception. The authors raise problematic issues of privileging particular representations, and of authenticity in representation.