Dear Jonas,
It seems to me that the way you define scientific thinking is
inadequate. This has come up several times before.
You seem to suggest that design thinking involves adaptability,
flexibility, and constructive evolutionary contribution to human
development.
In contrast, you describe a vision of scientific thinking that seems
to be the rigid and invariant description of existing phenomena.
There is a moral tone in your posts. Your description of design
thinking seems to represent life. Your description of scientific
thinking seems to represent dead facts, if not death itself.
This resembles the kind of conversation in which scientific thinking
is summarized as "the failed Enlightenment project." It is as though
the enlightenment and modern science were specific responsible for
the worst ills of the twentieth century.
The argument appeared in one of your earlier posts. Since scientific
thinking is value free, you suggested that scientific thinking must
lead to unethical behavior.
The confusion is obvious. Scientific thinking may be value free, but
scientists are human beings. Human beings should not be value free.
What the scientist learns, and what the scientists does with his or
her knowledge involve different ranges of choice.
The aim of science is to generate knowledge. This requires describing
the world as it is. To describe the world as it is, we must observe
and report. Observing and reporting honestly requires us to report
what we see without regard to preferences. We must report what we see
without making value judgments. Science does not require us to ACT
without values.
Mario Bunge clarifies this in relation to social science, but the
issue involves the in other forms of science contrasted with design.
Bunge (1999: 307) writes, "A classical controversy in social science
and its methodology is whether the study of society can and ought to
be value-free. Whereas Marx thought that it couldn't be, Weber taught
that it must be. The distinction between basic science and technology
helps to solve this dilemma. Whereas basic social science is
value-free (even when it studies valuation), social technology is
not, because it is triggered by socials issues involving valuations,
and because it recommends social policies whose implementations are
likely to be evaluated differently by different social sectors."
This touches on one of the reasons I disagree with your challenge to
the three levels of research - basic, applied, and clinical.
Misunderstandings of science arise from a failure to understand the
rationale of basic or descriptive research in contrast with research
on the technical application of basic research.
A second misunderstanding arises in the argument that science is bad
because it is value-free while design is good because design acts on
values.
The design process (as contrasted with design research) is a social
technology. It always implies value judgments and choices.
The policy choices that designers implement are not good merely
because they are value-based. There are bad values as well as good
values. The quality of goodness and badness in many design choices
rests on the values that motivate design choices and the acts that
follow from those choices.
It is sometimes suggested that the Holocaust or Hiroshima were the
products of science. This is not so in a direct sense. The Holocaust
and Hiroshima were technological and engineering applications. They
were political decisions applied by civil and military authorities.
The Holocaust was designed. The technology required was a modest
advance on the technology available by the late nineteenth century.
Genocide in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Bosnia required even lower
levels of technology. The deeds and mechanisms of implementation were
designed. Politicians and other actors made value-based decisions and
ordinary human beings carried them out.
To say that science is value free while design implicitly acts on
values ignores the fact that some values are evil.
Science and design have different purposes. Nevertheless, some design
activities require science if we are to determine the best means to
reach ethically appropriate goals.
If you are going to describe science in your posts, it would be
helpful for you to describe the range of sciences and scientific
thinking as they are. Right now, you are setting science up to wear
the black hat in a Sergio Leone western.
A real case from current design will illustrate the issue.
All of us - every human being and all the governments that represent
us - want to reduce the spread of AIDS. We also want a cure, but a
cure is not yet available. In contrast, we CAN reduce the spread of
the disease.
The governments of the world have a number of policy choices open to
them to do this.
Some governments emphasize sex education, distributing condoms, and
large-scale public information programs on the causes and prevention
of AIDS. Other governments accede to religious lobbying against these
kinds of programs. Still others object politically to the scientific
analysis of cause, and therefore allow folk wisdom to select among
such choices as prayer, sleeping with a virgin, or hiring a magician.
Each of the three political responses to AIDS involves values. Each
of these political choices leads to a different policy design.
One design outcome is informed by science. One is informed by
religion. One is informed by folk wisdom. All three designs seek the
same end.
Which do you think works best?
From my perspective, the outcome that has done the most to reduce the
spread of AIDS - pending a possible cure - is the series of
politically designed choice informed by science.
You are also overlooking the fact that complexity theory, systems
thinking, and evolution theory are also forms of scientific inquiry.
They are scientific, and rigorous, without being invariant.
If we are going to address the contrast between science and design
then we ought to describe science properly. This requires more than
shorthand descriptors that slap a black hat on science and place the
white hat on the cowboy with the smoking gun of designerly potential.
Best regards,
Ken
Reference
Bunge, Mario. 1999. The Dictionary of Philosophy. Amherst, New York:
Prometheus Books.
--
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 13:32:56 +0100
Reply-To: Wolfgang Jonas <[log in to unmask]>
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhDs in Design
<[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Designerly potentials
To: [log in to unmask]
Dear John,
you made me very curious about the joint text with Nigel Croos which
you mentioned some weeks ago.
I am struggling with complexity theory in design for several years. I
think it is necessary for mapping / describing the topology of the
field and, further, to operationalize design thinking in a way that
goes beyond sequential approaches. And of course this goes beyond
Dick Buchananīs concept of fourth-order design, as you mention.
Only recently I am trying to include evolution theory in order to
introduce the process aspect.
In my view the concept of evolution with its sequence of variation -
selection - re-stabilization - ... is able to describe / maybe
clarify the differences and the relations between scientific
knowledge production and design thinking / designerly ways of
knowledge production.
Design thinking is situated in the vicinity of the bifurcation points
in the evolutionary process. It has to do with variation and
selection. Design is aiming at variance. Scientific thinking is
aiming at re-stabilization, at adapting its findings to predefined
standards or at fitting them into existing knowledge structures.
Scientific thinking aims at invariance.
Dickīs notion of paleoteric and neoteric thinking seems to be closely
related to the evolutionary model. What comes out are two
fundamentally different types of knowledge. But they are related in a
complementary way. Their difference has to be acknowledged in order
to be able to connect them.
Of course design research is different from designing. But design
research has to take this into account. Otherwise it will be
inadequate, too rigid, in its function as a reflective position for
design practice. It cannot be completely subsumed under the standards
of scholarly research...
Jonas
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University
|
