Exhausting Discipline: Undisciplined and Irresponsible Design

Modern design practice is a fluid, conceptual and discipline-breaking activity. This unpredictable creative practice regularly traverses, transcends and transfigures conventional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. As the fragmentation of distinct disciplines has shifted creative practice from being “discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based,” we present the argument that the undisciplined and irresponsible researcher/practitioner, who purposely blurs distinctions and has exchanged “discipline-based” methods for “issue- or project-based” ones, will be best placed to make connections that generate new ways to identify “other” dimensions of design activity and thought that are needed for the complex, interdependent issues we now face. We present the case that reliance on the exhausted historic disciplines as the boundaries of our understanding has been superseded by a boundless space/time that we call “alterplinarity.” The digital has modified the models of design thought and action, and as a result research and practice should transform from a convention domesticated by the academy to a reaction to globalization that is undisciplined.