According to an old view the world as such does not exist. That's why we had to invent it, over and over again, in order to be able to live in it. Behind the problem of habituation lies the world we live in, a construction of self-evident things, however which in itself remains essentially opaque. Blumenberg's philosophical anthropology reconstructs this being-in-the-world as the ongoing process of a conceptual self-habitation: the path of human development leads from the primeval forests via the (...) savannahs and caves to the first houses, the end of which development once seemed to be marked by a firmly established architectonics of reason. However, as we are bound to experience in the wilderness of digitalization, this abode was not to be permanent, for homemade reasons. Did we drive ourselves out of the world or did we fall into the trap of our own world designs? (shrink)

The paper proposes a morphological approach towards a philosophy of design. Beginning with the question: what is “Gestalt”? it argues that there is a crucial difference between the concepts of “Gestalt” and “form”. I will proceed in three steps, beginning with the Aristotelian doctrine of the four causes and its implications for the concept of nature. Secondly I will briefly discuss Goethe’s notion of “Gestalt” within his “Morphologie” and how it was used among his successors (including the “Bauhaus”), which leads (...) straight into contemporary debates about computational design. Finally, and in conclusion, I introduce a morpho-logical “Gestalt”-thinking as a distinct and original kind of design-philosophy, beyond common design-history, or mere design-thinking. (shrink)