The Origin of the Work of Design: Thoughts based on a Reading of Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”

This article takes Martin Heidegger’s well-trammeled essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” as an object of reflection, engagement, and redirective innovation in order to think design now. The approach taken rests upon reading Heidegger from the perspective of a very different context: our present. By implication, engaging his text becomes informed by contemporary political, cultural, and environmental circumstances and imperatives. Such a reframed reading of Heidegger is then able to be taken to the ongoing project of rethinking design, not least its relation to art.