The Idea of Environmental Design Revisited Yongqi Lou The Confusion of Environmental (Art) Design China’s “Environmental Art Design (环境艺术设计)” specialization was borne of the interior design discipline, mainly developed in the fine arts schools.1 The practice has grown to include environ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 mental art, interior design, landscape design, and even some areas of urban design. After decades of development, environmental art design has become a large-scale discipline.2 However, teachers and students in China are often puzzled when trying to clearly define it. It is inextricably linked to urban design, architecture, interior design, and landscape design—but it does not belong to any of them. “The work areas of environmental art design involve land- scape design, interior design and public art design. Environmental art designers… from the cultivation point of view, should be ‘gen- eralists.’”3 In today’s era of globalization and collaboration, culti- vating generalists is a nearly impossible task. Going forward, trying to be all things to all people will not help environmental art design develop as a discipline of the future. Ten years ago, to better address the new opportunities and challenges, some schools in China started to seek the development of the discipline in the con- texts of design and innovation, rather than in the contexts of art 1 This article was modified and developed and crafts. For example, the “environmental art design” discipline from Yongqi Lou, 全球知识网络时代 at Tongji University was renamed “environmental design” in 2007. 的新环境设计 [New Environmental The shift from environmental art design to environmen- Design in the Era of Global Networked tal design contributed significantly to reducing the wide-rang- Knowledge], Journal of Nanjing Arts Institute (Fine Arts & Design) 40, no. 1 ing ambiguity. In the rest of this article, I mainly focus on the (2017): 3–9. latter—on the design perspective—even while recognizing that 2 According to the Report on the evaluation the concept of environmental design is still a bit vague and loose. of Chinese universities and disciplines I can see two reasons for the continuing ambiguity. First, for a 2017–2018 by Research Center for long time, people were unable to clearly define its theoretical basis Chinese Science Evaluation (RCCSE), more than 500 universities and and research goals and hence were unable to clearly define its colleges in China are now offering an boundaries with regard to other, related disciplines. Second, the Environmental Art Design Program. job of an environmental designer has yet to be distinguished 3 Weiguo Hao, An Introduction to from the more (socially) recognizable design professions.4 Environ- Environmental Art (Beijing: China Con- mental design, as it exists today, does not have a clear core—the struction Industry Press, 2007), 172. 4 At present, architects, landscape archi- principal cause of the ambiguity that characterizes both its theory tects, interior designers, and fashion and its practice. The resulting confusion impedes the discipline’s designers are all recognized as design further development. professionals in the Chinese job market. However, what an “environmental designer” does is not as clear. © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00518 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 23 New Perspective and New Opportunities Every academic domain has its own set of ontologies and meth- odologies. Through these unique lenses, researchers observe and study the world. Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, sociolo- gists, writers, and designers might see the same object but interpret what they see based on how they have learned to look at it. Because every discipline tries to explain the world in its own way—cross-disciplinarity notwithstanding—researchers’ perspectives will always vary. At the core of a discipline is the object of its focus and the questions it inspires: the whys, whats, and hows of the subject in the world. Each discipline expects to be able to explore the entire world from its perspective. Although any disciplinary field can be covered by various other specialties, the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 footholds and perspectives of different specialties are also differ- ent (see Figure 1). Environmental design, as a discipline, must ask and answer the fundamental why, what, and how questions for itself clearly. Understanding the environment is innately connected to the language we use to explain what we see. Notions, definitions, examples, and connotations are the result of linguistic interpreta- tion. Chinese language has a unique way of conveying the mean- ing of words based on symbol, pronunciation, radical, origin, and strokes. In this sense, the Chinese definitions of the word “envi- ronment” differ significantly from one another, which might explain differences in the word’s conceptualization. In English, the word environment comes “from the Middle French preposition environ ‘around,’” and “its most basic meaning is ‘that which sur- rounds.’”5 In Chinese, however, the word for environment is , 环境 which is composed of the words “surrounding ( )” and “condi- 环 tion ( ).” If we put these two characters together, means 境 环境 “surrounding the conditions.” This definition allows for multiple interpretations of the two characters. Consequently, what is implied when environmental design is discussed, communicated, and implemented in the Chinese context can vary wildly, and this variance enriches and indicates new ways of thinking. Changes in the design field keep pace with changes in tech- nological, economic, and social developments and needs. In partic- ular, the flattening of social and economic forms of organization and the global sustainable development movement infuse with new meanings our notions of what constitutes an environment. Contemporary institutional knowledge and occupations are offer- ing inadequate ways to meet the new needs inherent in new ways of living. The changes in this era increasingly have exposed the limitations of the discipline’s conventional positioning—for exam- ple, in the professions related to architecture, interior design, and 5 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “environment (n.),” landscape design. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dic- tionary/environment (accessed October 30, 2017). 24 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Figure 1 Most of the design disciplines already mentioned—such as Relationships between the field of architecture—are defined according to the object of their applica- research and domain-specific perspectives. tion, and their methodologies and approaches correspond with the © Yongqi Lou. vocational training required by the job market. Over time, these disciplines form a more stable professional ecological circle, unburdened by the ambiguity of the discipline’s positioning. In this regard, environmental design has been in a rather awkward situation. Either the discipline is challenged for lacking subject matters of its own, or the practice is considered all-encompassing but ultimately without real substance. Perhaps what is required is for us to change our manner of thinking. If we abandon the prac- tice of defining the discipline by its field of application and instead define it in terms of a mindset and a process, a more relevant understanding suddenly emerges. Let us turn away from design to discuss a seemingly irrel- evant career: the marksman. During the Stone Age, a marksman was the person whom everyone trusted to throw a stone accu- rately. Later, a marksman was the best archer, and then the best rifle shooter, and so on. In modern warfare, who is the marksman? He or she is the person who programs best. People in front of computers enter encryption keys and use game-like controllers to guide weapons, rather than squeezing triggers. Over the course of history, the task of hitting the mark with precision has not changed—but the specific tools, techniques, and methods certainly have.6 6 Yongqi Lou, “设计的疆域拓展与范式 转型 [The expanding scope and para- digm shift of design],” Time Architecture no.1 (2007): 11–15. DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 25 If we echo the original Chinese meaning of “environ- ment” to convert the object—the mark—of environmental design from a physical space to a condition, then environmental design might be able to transcend its competition with other disciplines— especially architecture, product design, interior design, or land- scape design. Environmental designers create, accommodate, facilitate, foster, enable, instigate, or restore conditions that interact with other conditions. In this way, environmental design can address more effectively the building of an ideal socio-spatial eco- system—an undertaking that architecture-based disciplines are unable to address alone. In this context, the ambiguity that once dogged the efforts of environmental designers—and the develop- ment of the discipline as a whole—becomes an advantage. To Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 achieve this transformation, environmental design needs to explore new perspectives and methodology to better deal with the relational and connective