Dear Jerry

In response to your post below a few days ago, here are additional thoughts.

First, although Architecture, Planning and Urban Landscaping is not the
area of my expertise, let's nonetheless consider, as an illustration, a
piece of land meant to be turned into a recreational artifact. Jut to help
us understand better some nuances in the concepts of "motivation and
purpose",  "wants", "desires", "preferences", the "need to know", and the
practice in Design and in Design research (your diagram is entitled:
Research, Knowledge & Practice)

For example:

1. The 'assembled' (in Bruno Latour's extensive sense) City Council decided
to purchase a piece of  land to use it for recreational purpose. Obviously,
the councilors 'need to know' (Feibleman) many things prior to giving the
order for purchase. For instance, are there around the land many families
with young children? Or perhaps may old age citizens?

2. a) Neighborhood children and old pensioners 'need to know' how the new
land vocation will allow them to play more and to relax better in a safe
environment.

   b) Whether consulted or not, prior to the purchase decision, once the
dedicated vocation to the piece of land is aired, neighborhood dwellers and
landowners 'need to know' how the new land vocation will affect
economically their neighboring properties, and socially their daily life.

3. However some among the neighbors to the land are concerned by the noise
of children playing, and most probably by the increase in automobile and
pedestrian traffic around the land. Therefore they 'need to know', which
concrete measures have been or will be envisaged to alleviate the
anticipated nuisances.

4. Workers in charge of maintenance of City recreational areas 'need to
know' about citizens attendance, presence mode, and exact workload required
of them.

5. Administrators within the City Recreation Services Department 'need to
know' the same data as their workers, plus management knowledge related to
providing safe, adequate, and not too costly recreation services.

It is further worth noticing that the 'need to know' in each of the users
above belonging to the five classes (respectively class 1 = purchasers,
class 2 a) and b) = beneficiaries, class 3 = counter-beneficiaries, class 4
= operators, and class 5 = para-operators*) may not be 'reduced' (and not
'met' or 'fulfilled', as Marketers and Psychologists would respectively
say) through personal "experience" and/or acquired "tacit knowledge". The
degree of acuteness and complexity of each user's 'need to know', as well
as that of the entire group of users' in all classes, may eventually lead
to hiring experts commissioned to conduct research in order to provide most
appropriate and most 'relieving' basic, applied and/or clinical knowledge.

One among the potential experts that may be called in is the Designer.

Whether an individual person or a team of Designers, this class of experts
would also 'need to know' as much as possible about the recreational
facility 'project' in order to come up with the most 'relieving
prescription'. The Designer or team of Designers would 'need to know' about
all the above users' needs in order to materially shape in the most
appropriate way the designated piece of land, either into a playground or a
flower garden, a memorial site, a wild greenery, a community vegetable
growing garden, etc. It is worth reminding us here that the team of
Designers may include those who, after 'hearing' the various expressions of
'needs' (Feibleman) or 'concerns' (Latour),  would develop and 'edict' the
concept of a recreation facility, and then decide to call it a park, a
garden, etc. The next phases of the designing process consisting in
handling over the concept or named artifact to another group of experts who
would specify it (Specifications Drafters), and finally to those who would
draft instructions for implementation (Draftsmen/ladies) prior to handing
'blue prints' to workers also in 'need to know' how to execute the designs
into a real artifact.

According to Feibleman, the different kinds of needs ('to know') above are
brought to the conscious of respective individuals through 'drives' that
are triggered by both natural and man-made 'stimuli' ("Compound conditioned
stimuli", or artifacts). And once consciously aware of the nature and
magnitude of felt 'needs', only then in concerned individuals arise
'desires' that motivate them to seek around ("discovering, selecting or
sorting" = search and research) means, both strategical, practical,
material and psychological, most appropriate to 'reduce' those needs. "...
knowledge as such is the name for the content carried by the intermediate
processes which are characterized by a long delay between stimulus and
response.” ("Mankind Behaving", p. 93). Those 'intermediate processes,
arising both in the mind of either the needing layperson and in the mind of
the expert called in to devise means reducing the need felt.

Feibleman reminds us also that the ultimate aim of those various processes
is to 'reduce' the most compelling need, the need of how to 'continue to
be'. And in his "Bioecomics" theory, based on thermodynamics and evolution,
Georgescu-Roegen would say the same thing in different words. That
individuals, like any other terrestrial entity, constantly seek to reduce
or slow down the inevitable entropy. In short, living is simply a process
by which one strives to making existing on earth as long as possible.

Now, let's refer specifically to your diagram. Following this reasoning
above, one may be led to think, contrary to your statement, that "human
motivations and purposes" are not the primary movers towards "cultural
actions, policies or products". Prior to "motivation and purposes", any
action, purposeful or not, by any living entity is indeed triggered by the
intensity of the needs felt, only eventually expressed as "wants",
"desires", sometimes up to cravings jusqu'à la folie.

So, dealing with artifacts as "cultural actions, policies or products", we
are here on a different track than the one usually followed by
Psychologists, Psychoanalysts, and Marketers when they deal with
"motivation and purpose", "wants" and "desires". "Wants", "desires", and
"preferences" are usually related to many elusive psychological and
psychoanalytical 'lacks', and often confusedly linked to needs, as well as
to means (most of time frivolous, for lack of appropriate and more
efficient knowledge) of 'reducing' each of those respective needs.

Whereas in Feibleman's perspective, as I understood, "motivation and
purpose", "wants", "desires" and "preferences" are aroused only once needs
have been experienced, eventually brought to consciousness, and eventually
expressed consciously or not. "Wants", "desires" and "preferences" are
directed towards already known and envisioned "cultural actions, policies
or products". And "motivation and purpose" do arise only later, in order to
bring about those "cultural actions, policies or products" meant to
'quench' the need. Both the beginning and the ultimate aim of the entire
psychological process is the need felt, and the  thrust to reduce it. And
particularly for the human species, the 'need to know' seems to be
paramount, as you so forcibly state in your diagram. The force of your
statement lies in your repetition at all the 4 phases of your development,
of "needing, wanting, desiring the making of cultural actions, policies or
products", as well as the repetition of the respectively needed knowledge.
But what about the core?

In my humble opinion, it is neither enough nor appropriate, as briefly
illustrated above in the case of piece of land to be turned into a
recreational facility, to base practice of Design merely on "motivations
and purpose", "wants", "desires" and "preferences". 'Needs', not as poorly
conceptualized by Marketers (Maslow) and classic Psychologists and
Psychoanalysts, rather as expounded by James K. Feibleman, are and should
be the prime concern in Design practice: with the sole aim to find the most
appropriate, safe, and not too costly means to reduce those needs. Starting
by reducing the 'need to know' of Design researchers themselves.

And how to 'reduce the need to know' of Designers? As stated in your
diagram, basic, applied, and clinical research will provide ample data
reducing Designers' 'need to know'. But drawing on Michel Jullien and his
partners*, I submit that, additionally to knowledge provided by
Psychologists and Psychoanalysts on "motivations and purposes" "wants",
"desires" and "experiences", by experts in various other disciplines as
well, Designer researchers 'need to know', more specifically and more
practically, about 'use and utilization' of artifacts. Jullien et al.* have
conceptualized the process of 'use and utilization' of artifacts in 12
steps as follows: selection of the most appropriate artifact, acquisition,
insertion of the artifact in the context of use, its utilization (developed
further below), maintenance, recycling; the nested utilization process
comprises the following steps: accessing the artifact, getting it ready for
use, putting it into operation, enjoyment of - or suffering from - both the
entire process and its outcomes, preparation for future use, and storage
when not not in use. Knowledge developed through researching these 12 steps
above will certainly 'reduce' enough the 'need to know' of both the
layperson concerned as well as the expert Designer in charge to bringing
about the 'needed', and not merely 'desired' artifact.

In the illustration above, Designer researchers will need to know first and
foremost how existing recreational facilities are currently used and
utilized, prior to devising and eventually recommending news ways to use
and utilize existing or new recreational facilities. And if needed further,
on the basis of thus compounded knowledge, Designers will then specify,
draw, make, and install, the facility as newly projected by all concerned.

To me, the "valuing process" of material artifacts, tools and signs as
elaborated by Feibleman** (you don't say much on this concept of "valuing",
neither in the diagram nor in your "Essay on the Meaning in Design
Thinking"), will be not effected only in its capacity to respond to
"motivations and purpose", to "wants", "desires", and  "preferences". More
comprehensively, "valuing" the capacity of artifacts, or as you call these
"cultural actions, policies or products", this indeed is a process to
'reduce the need to know' as well as all the other needs extensively
expounded by Feibleman. A process that would derive first and foremost from
precisely determined and compounded 'use - and utilization - value'.

Best wishes

Francois
Montreal

* - JULLIEN, Michel: Le Domaine de l’usage : Relations
Objets/Usagers/Milieu, IF (Industrialisation Forum), Vol. 9, (1978), No.
2-3 ; Cahier de l’Isuc No. 1.
  - Concepts relayed in English in: The SIP System: A Design Research
Concept at the Paris Centre Beaubourg, 1973-1992. Design Issues: Volume 26,
Number 4 Autumn 2010, pp. 57-70.

** FEIBLEMAN, J. K.: The Philosophy of Tools. In *Social Forces*, Vol. 45,
No. 3 (Mar., 1967), pp. 329-337. Published by: University of North Carolina
Press.










On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Jerry Diethelm <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Dear François,
>
> Thanks for referring me to James K. Feibleman's "Mankind behaving: human
> needs and material culture",
> Thomas 1963, in response to my speculation to Terry about the origin of
> needing or desiring to know.  I had written:
>
> The short answer is that I think it has to do with the early advantage of
> being able to draw on accumulated knowledge in survival situations. The
> cultural making path has its origins in actions for survival and then
> evolves to emphasize life support and life enhancement actions, policies
> and
> products as external threats to culture making diminish.
>
> I¹ve been using the Lakeoff and Johnson (1987) Source->Path->Goal image
> schema to represent designing, and thus in the diagram:
> Purpose & Motivation-> leading toward Cultural Actions, Policies and
> Products.  Whether true or not, I have represented the knowledge image
> schema as a separate path ­ or mental organization ­ because it has its own
> distinctive scientific goal of reliable theory and fact.  I  wrote desire
> to
> know->knowledge.  My additional point was to try to show how the second
> path
> is related to and serves the first.
>
> You suggested need was a better term, referring me to Feibleman.  He writes
> that human motivation can best be explained on the basis of animal needs
> and
> drives when these are properly transformed and extended.   He also says
> that, ³There are no creative powers proper to the human individual, What is
> referred to as Œcreation¹ usually proves to be discovering, selecting or
> sorting. But knowledge as such is the name for the content carried by the
> intermediate processes which are characterized by a long delay between
> stimulus and response.²
>
> I¹ll admit to both not knowing how knowledge is accumulated and not finding
> this behavioral explanation enlightening or satisfying.  I¹d like to think
> we have managed after 50 years to come out from under the cloud of B.F.
> Skinner, but some still stubbornly persist in this pigeon-pecking point of
> view. It¹s hard to discuss a goal-oriented process without any connection
> to
> human consciousness.
>
> Re Purpose & Motivation: Need to know probably refers best to motivation
> and
> animal evolutionary origins.  Purpose, however, yields desire to know, a
> product of human consciousness and culture, something beyond ³discovering,
> selecting or sorting.²
>
> Consciousness is ³the fruit of the evolutionary tree.²  (Holms Rolston III)
> ³Man is the valuing animal.² (Nietzsche)
>
> Best to all,
>
> Jerry
>
>