Dear Colleagues,
My posting is general and since I wrote it early this morning (it is now
evening) it may be out of sync. David Slessıs comments are not entirely
popular, so I add a voice. In substance, I am in agreement with his
concerns, as I understand them.
Unless the concepts are put in question, one can indeed spiral into
abstraction. The usefulness of an idea is not merely a kind of vulgar
pragmatism but a measure of its power and integrity. Ostention is the
measure of concept. If I have an orange in one hand and its definition in
the other, in my view, the orange wins. It seems to me that speculation
about ideas is very important, but it needs to be looked at as a way to
critically examine those ideas in the light of their correspondence to the
world, throw out the ones that are unproductive, and make a concerted effort
to figure out what should be in their place. In postings, it sometimes
appears that the opposite view is taken.
It seems to me that design has a fundamental problem in that there is no
agreed upon consistent frame of epistemology and ontology to give a base for
the field. Designers borrow concepts and methodological tools from other
fields, which, in itself, is great. If we use them without rethinking them
in terms of our situation, and if we formulate our research questions
largely on the basis of problems-results, then it is not so great. Our
categories may remain in the reifications of everyday thinking or in
traditional concepts of other, incommensurable fields.
Without a clear understanding of designıs own conceptual point(s) of view,
its knowledge used lacks integrity; it is syncretic. We cannot really know
the status of research findings: what they mean, the regions in which they
are operative, their relations to other findings, etc.
There is the view that design is defined by a kind of irreducible ambiguity
or vagueness: i.e. that designers attack ³ill defined² problems to
creatively discover solutions. Defining the field in this way is, it seems
to me, is self-defeating and fundamentally intuitionist. Others argue that
design problems are by necessity to ³complex² to reduce. This seems to me
simply to reflect the lack of an appropriate taxonomy. The schematic of a
television looks very complex, until you understand how to read it. Once the
devices and taxonomy are understood, it is quite simple. You can see the
power supply, input stages, if stages, etc., find your way around it,
diagnose its problems, predict performance and make redesigns. I see no
reason why taxonomies cannot be built in design. Moreover, the use of
taxonomies is not reductive, unless we choose to make it so. There is a
difference between construction and indication.
In a former life I studied Sociology, which was at that time in a situation
not unlike that of design. Robert K. Merton described it this way as the
overwhelming gap between ³the practical problems assigned to the sociologist
and the state of his accumulated knowledge and skills.² Merton wrote this
not long after world War II when the dominant theories in the field were at
a high level of abstraction. There was no way to operationalize them. They
could often be used as post-hoc symbolic interpretations of whatever
observations were made, rather than descriptions: i.e. as ideologies or
³spirals of abstractions.² The situation in Sociology changed quite
radically in the following decades. The field remains heterogeneous, but it
is a healthy heterogeneity, consistent with the human beings it studies and
the human beings who do the studying. It has an ³intelligible topography.²
The various schools of thought and areas of research can be made sense of
with respect to each other. The situation in Sociology is not ³rational² but
³reasonable² in Stephen Toulminıs terms, and in his view, reasonableness is
a higher form than rationality. I do not appeal to him as an authority, but
I think that he has it right. Rationality operates within specific frames
(intuitionism or computational mechanism). Reasonableness is the larger
context around and between them.
It looks to me that Design where Sociology was, in something of a confusion.
There is no reason to believe that it must remain there. There are ways to
bring order, though it will take time, and we know that as a practical
matter, if this is not done, the profession will be far the worse for it.
While ³consilience² will never really be achieved (and is probably not
desirable), it represents an important value: to make the fabric of
knowledge intelligible.
Certainly, design is not the same culture as science, thus the skepticism
of ³computational² metaphysics, whether explicit or implicit. Computations
are certainly required, but, the computationalism that was so popular in the
1960ıs 80ıs has ultimately been found unsatisfactory to even some of itıs
ardent adherents. Hilary Putnam is eloquent on this. On the other hand the
notion of ³creativity² has within it an intuitionist redolence. It often
appears as a residual category : i.e. whatıs left when rational theory is
exhausted, or when a ³process² cannot be analytically decomposed. For
example, ³The spontaneous flow of his [sc. Shakespeare's] poetic
creativity.², or ³A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great
statesman is a mere politician.² (both taken from the O.E.D).
Designers need to build appropriate orienting models of their field: models
that makes sense, can be operationalized and tested. There are promising
ontologies and epistemologies out there. Of the range that are currently
available, it seems to me that some sort of constructivism offers a way of
understanding reasonableness and limitations of knowledge: neither purely
foundationalist nor coherentist but ³Foundherentist², a term coined by Susan
Haack. This general perspective has informed social sciences (G.H.Mead,
Blumer, Garfinkel, Goffman, Heise and MacKinnon, etc.) and psychology
(Piaget, Mahoney, and Damasio come quickest to mind) for a century. It
demands empirical study and gives an account of what it is good for and what
its limitations are. One of its requirements is that if you think people
accomplish something, you had better be able to account for how they do it,
and be able to test it (no classic Chomskian linguistics here) (see Yngve,
Victor "From Language to Science").
Parenthetically, this leads to a discussion of research, theory, the
development of scholarship, the validity (or lack thereof) of the "practice"
oriented Ph.D. and a healthy academic sector, but those are other questions.
Whether or not this particular frame in any of its flavors works in any
particular field or sub-field of design, one needs to have scaffolding that
is operational, intelligible, and consistent with its objects of study, in
this case cultural, social, cognitive human beings. ³Spirals of abstraction²
seem to come often from the use of concepts that do not conform to the
specifications above, i.e. they are not formulated in human terms, cannot be
made operational, or define phenomena in ways that make them unrecognizable.
In short, they come from not being critical enough of the concepts by which
we classify and observe. Certainly, difficulties in testing theories are
indicators of problems with the theories themselves.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
I have been studying cross mode cognition to get a handle on how concepts
become ³marks on a page², and how physical structure constructs objects as
apprehended by receivers. The largest part by far of this job has been in
studying models of communication to decode knowledge acquisition, and the
experience of knowing. It was immediately clear that the available theories
of knowledge were categorically inadequate to form a study of sensory and
symbolic communication. It has required that I reconstruct the problem of
communication, define its ontology and epistemology, then come up with an
apposite model for empirical study. After that, experiments examine the
model. I think that this sort of work is "Job 1" in my area: the kind of
work that Ph.D.s are needed for. It may not so for others in other areas.
(see <http://home.tiac.net/users/pstork/ and select Cross-mode Communication
in Multimedia)
Finally, it is not clear to me that design fields are all that alike in
their problematics. Product designers, for example, discuss artifacts in
ways that donıt make sense in communications. I may entirely misunderstand
other areas of design. I simply propose this for consideration.
Peter Storkerson
--
Peter K. Storkerson, M.F.A. Ph.D.
CommunicationCognition
http://home.tiac.net/~pstork
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