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International Design Journal

International Design Journal

Abstract

The Arab industrial establishments specialized in the manufacture of "street furniture" units are witnessing a crisis and a cognitive deviation; for example, the "Public Bench"” and “lighting poles”. First of all, the signs of crisis emerge through field surveys of Arab urban spaces in general, Tunisian spaces in particular, and the number monitoring of their manifestations. By raising the problem’s main roots within the Tunisian industrial establishments, we have been closely touched by the role of the Tunisian industrial designer, which is the role of the “marginalized”, at a later stage. It is no exaggeration to say that the designer himself has contributed to the deterioration of his own position. In fact, this is mainly due to the cognitive confusion that the designer is enduring as a result of the huge difference among the traditional academic knowledge that he had received in the past and the newly emerging knowledge that he did not keep up with. The whole design project was negatively affected by this confusion, as it fluctuated between the complexity of the design process and the problem of feedback within the real urban space. Therefore, this article underlines the problem ofinconsistency between the descriptive real practice and the margin of consideration within the institution related to it. Hence, the researcher adopted a specific, innovative empirical approach, drawing its essence from the tensive semiotics in order to employ it institutionally, in the service of our societies and the specificity of their practices. The importance of this research is due to the discovery of scientific and cognitive paths, the delineation of boundaries of tension between reasoning and practice in the field of furniture design in public spaces. From this perspective, the article sheds light on three paths of knowledge (perception, design, and semiotics), adopted by the researcher as an integrated holistic, and has intentionally employed them in our studies with the intention of redesigning city furniture. The use of these paths has dissolved the so famous wide gap between the known dualities between theory and practice, subjective values and objective conditions. In this vein, this article aims to solve the equation of tension between the duality of the knowledgeable self and the subject of knowledge. This empirical study is considered to be the first in the world to be applied to street furniture designs. For more accuracy concerning the explanation of the scientific method through which we employed the tension chart, two codes were chosen from the total of “street furniture” units, namely the “public seat” and “lighting poles”. This was established while addressing meaningful problems with one of the Arab cities, specifically the Tunisian city of Sousse, as an example. Hopefully, through our effective results, we will deeply research in the same semiotic field so that this practice will be generalized and implanted in Arab industrial institutions and global ones. The context requires mentioning that the researcher pursued the empirical approach, which in return required the combination of a set of tools such as observation, the scale of assessment, questionnaire / tensive modeling or tensive modeling.

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