Tradition and modernity / place and time The island of Murano: past–present–future

This chapter creates a rhythmic weaving of various critical theories of place- and time-based design through the writings from selected seminal texts. These themes range from larger scale, broad-based issues, such as the relationships amongst the past, present and future to more specific, smaller scale aspects with the inclusions of topics pertaining to presence, memory, meaning, experience, storytelling, narration, movement, and ritual. More explicit themes, such as layering and sequencing, are developed in the text. Importantly, they are visually articulated through focused design work exploring the various themes and a specific location. Time, movement, and change manifest in many rich and associative manners... including how relationships amongst existing and new places, people, and things may co-exist and change over time. This focused weaving, with a bias towards time-based references, gets further woven into a specific place: Murano, Italy. Murano serves as a sort of ideal case study location for this exploration. And it exhibits strongly that perhaps place and time manifest with the most resonance in the city and in nature, and that perhaps the most ‘natural city’ is an island-city. Also, the past, present, and future of Murano, including its fame and dependence in glass making and creativity, is explored, and design proposals are included to communicate opportunities of place- and time-based research and design. This work shows how time can be made more plastic and elastic with a progressive approach to the possible continuum of past, present and future time. This theoretical, locational, cultural, social, economic and ecological ‘starter-yeast’ that combines with the themes of place, time and presence has been research, explored, and transformed into design work on the island of Murano. The design work and the images produced, therefore, inherently merge Murano with these themes and with other important intentions. They manifest the ideas and paradigms into tangible, visual expressions and articulated examples; and they show how design can be transformative. The design work looks towards the future, while being steeped in the present and past. This work merges urban, spatial, interior, landscape, graphic, product, and system/service design. Lastly, the chapter briefly touches upon issues surrounding the relationship between design and research. It includes the basic paradigm positioning “design as research and research as design” in and beyond the academy. It calls attention to the importance of words and images. And it tries to advance the widely accepted position that research, scholarship, and creative work are fluid, interchangeable, and integrated entities... or that scholarship is both research and creative work.