First of all, we ought to make a distinction between joke design and design joke. A design joke takes into account the subject of design in its own specificity. Contrarily, but not oppositely, joke design is the “set of methodologies” dealing with the construction of the joke in its generic manner. To sum up, joke design is generic in its specificity, while a design joke is specific in its generality.
Hence, if one wishes to joke design a good design joke, one must pertain to certain rules:
(1) A design joke should always relate to the socio-economic-political context in which it is set. Without an attentive consideration of the socio-economic-political context, the joke will not be funny, as every joke is in itself a socio-economic-political construct.
(2) When designing a joke, one has to take into careful account the set of scales on which the joke is dependent. It should always refer to the human scale of the protagonist of the joke. In the instance in which the joke’s protagonist is set in a cafe’, the joke should relate back to the scale of the cafe’, and, again, to the scale of the city. Nevertheless, ultimately the joke should refer back to the scale of the joke itself.
(3) A design joke should represent an all-encompassing taxonomy, like the one suggested by Patrik Schumacher, condensing everything in the “tectonics”.
To sum up again, once we have taken into consideration the different ways in which the different contexts and contents of a design joke are differently understood by different communities, we can now conclude that the practice joke design is actually, by its own definition, ahistorical and mono-disciplinary. Still, though, very interstitial.