Just a brief reaction - I believe that we need to respect life as a
whole. Whether one wants to design only a thing, affects will also
emerge, and to design affects you proably need things as well.
Why shouldn't they be kept together?
I think that design of all fields is about integrating things into
wholes. To study or theorize design by dissecting it into manageable
components is troublesome - seems to me that the most relevant things
are easily simplified away.
However, if one wants to simply produce an academic product (paper,
thesis?), it becomes understandable that the problem needs to be
constrained enough so that its academic qualities can be established
and assessed - according to our current day academic system,
standards and understanding.
kh
...
At 11:42 +0100 19.3.2003, Jean Schneider wrote:
>Here, - I hope I do not reformulate badly- Tiiu argues that she/we design(s)
>a thing (i.e. : a (material) device that other beings can appropriate), but
>that we shouldn't look at it as a thing, but as affects.
>I respect that position perfectly, but the question then is : when we make
>theories, shouldn't we clearly declare whether we theorize design from the
>perspective of thingness, or from the perspective of affects?
>Because we can afford (many) theories, at this stage. And it seems that when
>we are mixing both, we don't get very far.
>Or, if we refused radically to split up between the two aspects (which I
>find very interesting), then shouldn't we clean up our language and concepts
>seriously, because most of our models and expressions are cribbled with this
>division.
>
>After all, the same debate has been going -and still is- in the field of art
>: analytical philosophy holds a very strict view on art as a material
>production, and opposes any neo-Kantian or Heideggerian perspectives.
>
>Regards,
>
>Jean
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