Kari-Hans Kommonen wrote:

While the quest for academic credibility and accountability etc. is
important, it must not happen by sacrificing the identity, experience and
the future of the field! We need new, appropriate designs for the education
and research in our field.

John Broadbent wrote:

It seems clear that the transition from the "paleoteric" to the "neoteric"
will be one of great magnitude, challenging - as Kari-Hans observes so well
- the tendency humans have to contextualise the future from the past. Both
he and Dick imply that we are opening up very different horizons and
societal roles for design, with which I fully concur.
__________

I fully agree and want to add some comments:

The scientific research process (the process!) is comparable to a design
process. Scientific facts are created by completely separating this context
of production and presenting the purified rest as something labelled
objective knowledge.
Scientific research, for the most part, has the great advantage that its
subject matter is stable (the human body, the solar system, etc.).
This is not the case in design. Its subject matter is the fluid artefact of
socio-cultural evolution. The subject and the means of observation are
permanently changing in design. Any stability that might emerge there has
to be a highly dynamic one which is probably different from those versions
of stability that have been established in the sciences.
Adhering to scientific form might lead to academic credibility. That is
true. But is it appropriate for our discipline? Does it contribute to
developing an identity? And does it support neoteric thinking?

To go further: We can observe a kind of convergence of sciences and the
"sciences of the artificial" in the past decades. I do not refer to the
struggle of design aiming at scientific standards, but to the sciences.
They are approaching design. More and more scientific activity (even or
especially basic) has to do with creation instead of observation.
New insights into natural processes and the invention of technical
artefacts and mechanisms open up a new dimension, which is situated beyond
the well-known separation of "nature" and "culture" or "society", of
"natural" and "artificial". Phenomena that do not occur in nature are
artificially created there. See the practice of bio-genetic modelling or
nano-technology etc. Nature is more and more designed.
Imagine a nano-scientist trying to bring some atomic structures into a
certain shape. Which is basic nano research but clinical or applied design
research (just to mention that I don´t agree with the distinction of
clinical / applied / basic research in design which was put forward here
some time ago).

This means that a further borderline is questioned, which has been
constitutive and self-evident and very momentous for the natural sciences
in the last 300 years: the separation of objective nature and subjective
representations which has been the foundation for the radical distinction
of "facts" and "values", i.e. the distinction of the scientific recognition
of what is and ethical considerations of what should be.

We are now experiencing very clearly the permeability of these and other
separations. The hybrid interfaces are multiplying much more rapidly and
are more effective than the rescue operations trying to save the clear
separations / interfaces.

We might call the ideal, purified version of knowledge production: mode 1.
And the heterogeneous, transdisciplinary, project-oriented version: mode 2.
The 2 versions have always co-existed during the past centuries. There is
no either / or. Moreover we can say that mode 1 is an important rhetoric
instrument of defense that all those are using who are necessarily working
according to both modes.
Mode 1 is the definition of moral values and intellectual ideals that are
to make us forget how widespread and necessary mode 2 is in fact. The
discourses which argue that mode 1 describes the production of scientific
knowledge have been a means to present modern western thinking as superior
to all other ways of dealing with reality. They claimed that it was the
only means to distinguish facts and fictions, reality and inventions. And
they were the argumentative basis to relieve scientists of social and
political responsibility. Etc.

So: let´s talk in mode 1 about mode 2. Or: let´s do research ABOUT research
THROUGH design...



Jonas


Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Jonas
Designtheorie
Hochschule für Künste Bremen
Am Wandrahm 23
D-28195 Bremen
Germany