David,
It seems you are not alone several times over.
It is, I am afraid, much easier to engage in abstractions than to confront
concrete everyday things - at least in a focused way. This is an academic
problem. Higher educations tend to value abstractions over the concrete
world. Designers seem to suffer from theory envy.
Abstraction works only when participants can use it to operationally engage
the concrete world about which they are theorizing. There are both a want of
and a search for such groundedness in these threads. Much of the discussion
is a bit like wandering in a wilderness.
Without some determinacy such as a consensus on frames of reference (or a
set of contending schools), operational methods which we can use to either
agree upon or dispute findings, and, most importantly, individual confidence
in those frames and methods, focused discussion may not be possible.
Certainly this does not apply to all postings, but it is a problem for me.
Perhaps, I simply fail to grasp. Perhaps, there really is a gulf between
product design and communication, or I have just made up my mind on these
points. Perhaps, it is a matter of focusing on research and citing concrete
examples from experience rather than abstractions.
Peter Storkerson
----
Peter Storkerson M.F.A. Ph.D.
Communication Cognition
http://home.tiac.net/~pstork
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