This research presents a framework for the analysis of contemporary trends in digital commerce and business from the point of view of design and invention. In the process we are exploring the long-standing antagonism between design and commerce, and how these conflicts are brought into sharp relief in the information age. The framework for this discussion involves several metaphors and subjects them to treatment as matters both of design and economics. We are examining the putative grounding of economic
theory in considerations of the household (Aristotle), the claim by the romantics and Marx that labour is subjugated by the rampant machinery of capitalism, a consideration of economics as a game, the anthropology of the gift as a focus of theories counter to those of commercial exchange, and the putative participation of Internet enthusiasts in the 'gift economy'. Each theme is subjected to scrutiny in terms of how it deals in the threshold condition, the space between categories, in other words as it is scrutinised by the cynic or manipulated by the trickster and other dwellers of the liminal regions of e-commerce. Design readily identifies with the threshold condition, the site where its interaction with economics yields the greatest intellectual profit.
Richard Coyne