Dear Lubomir,
I appreciate your concerns - there are many more than half a dozen theories
about this and I trust one is allowed, as a design philosopher, to generate
new theories about this and any number of other things that many people have
also thought about many times before. I appreciate the exasperation with
starting over again when so much is already there. However, genuine novelty
may arise from an innocent enquiry and an open mind. There is a major
component of ignorance in all discovery - some of this is ignorance that
arises because the researcher doesn't know (but someone else does), some of
it is because no-one knows, some of it is because what is presumed to be
known is incorrect or insufficient and so on. In the case of PhD study, one
presumes that all these avenues of ignorance will be gone down as far as
time allows.
Taking on a mantle of ignorance is a form of humility that survives its own
gesture.
keith russell
newcastle OZ
on 11/11/00 3:46 AM, Lubomir S. Popov at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> I follow the discussion with some astonishment that nobody refers to
> activity theories. The questions that puzzle our honorable community are
> resolved in other scholarly domains to a large extent and there are a
> number of theories that propose ways to look at thinking and acting as both
> autonomous, complimentary, and composite, depending on the level of
> analysis, the purpose of analysis, the goal structure of the activity
> studied, and the motivational context.
>
> We do not need to rediscover the wheel by asking whether or not thinking is
> an action. There are at least half a dozen theories about this. We do need
> to go too much streetwise about language because the street is not the
> brightest place in the world. Science (again, I do not equate science with
> positivism) develops its own conceptualizations, conventions,
> terminological systems, and communication patterns that do not need to be
> accessible to the streetwise, but should have heuristic advantages in the
> process of understanding the world.
>
> Regards,
>
> Lubomir Popov
>
> PS The present thread is one of the cases that show how much design
> researchers depend on the legacy of other scholarly fields. It shows the
> lack of understanding how to proceed when confronted with questions that
> are constitute the core thematic of approached much more successfully in
> other scholarly fields. Design researchers need urgently to understand
> what are the existential boundaries of design research, as well as how we
> can organize the information servicing of the design process and the
> development of a proper body of knowledge. Whatever we talk about, we
> always crash into metatheoretical/methodological hurdles. That indicates
> our field needs much more effort and time to mature.
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