Design with meaning

Landscape design is an interventionist act. In a way that ameliorates the act, we frequently-and correctly-refer to landscape design involving a mediation between art and nature. Designers may (indeed should) see themselves as enticing users to share or experience the designer's artifice and discover meaning. As part of this connection with underlying reasons for design, words like 'context', 'meaning' and 'significance' occur in our design language. Our engaging with these terms as metaphors for understanding design has become a focus for enquiry in landscape architecture. This engagement is accompanied by a welcome resurgence in discussion on landscape architecture as an art form and parallels the post-modern focus on the arts and humanities (see Simon Swaffield Editorial: languages of landscape architecture, Landscape Review, 1995:2). This essay looks at these issues from an Australian perspective. It uses a number of designs as illustrations of context, meaning and significance after attempting to tease out definitions of the terms. They are difficult terms to define, but because we use them increasingly we need to reflect on their meaning