Interview with Metahaven. 'On Design and Research'

'Research' could mean different things. It could mean research 'for' design and research 'by' design. If you are looking for a more effective way to have research inform your actions, then it is the investigation adjacent to designing. Research 'by' design means that the process itself is a type of research; if the way you work is committed to getting outcomes which appear different then the research needs not to just inform but also form to work.
...Research traditionally is not part of what designers have provided as solutions. What we have inherited from this situation is a discipline where just about anything has become a stylistic capsule, where you find that disagreements over typography, 'mentality', color, form etc., prevent any larger discourse from emerging. On a larger scale, the corporate end of the profession, involved in branding and identity, no longer offers new ideas but provides mainly 'hollow shells' as brand identities. The hollowness is becoming apparent especially that banks, financial institutions, and car brands collapse, or merge, and no one knows anymore which logo applies to which entity.
(Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice - The Reader)


Radicals and Radicants, Nicolas Bourriaud.

...It is above all, our modes of representation that are called into question by globalization. More precisely, globalization is the locus of a complete and total shattering of the relations between representation and abstraction. For it is precisely at the level of the representation of the world that modernism is linked to the capitalist machine - on the plane of where our general image of the world is produced, and then the various images created by artists, which ma echo, confirm or invalidate that general image. As the propagating agent of an abstract virus (a "deteritorializing" one to use a Deleuzian term), globalization substitutes its logos, organization charts, formulas, and recodings for local singularities. Coca Cola is a logo without location; by contrast, every bottle of Chateau Eyquem contains a history based on a particular territory. That history, however, turns out to be mobile; it comes with the bottle, which is a portable sample of the region. The moment humans lose all living contact with representation is the abstract moment by which capitalism consolidates it's holdings.
(Radicals and Radicants - The Radicant by Bourriaud)