Dear Ken et al,

My apologies too. In Australia there is an expression 'stirring the possum'.
Roughly translated it means to liven things up by creating a disturbance and
raising questions that others might prefer left dormant. The image to have
in one's mind is of a small vicious and irritable marsupial that gets very
upset if you poke it with a stick (I cannot imagine why!). Anyway, stirring
the possum is a national pastime. Obviously, some cultural practices do not
travel well. But seriously, I intended some light-hearted gentle prodding,
nothing more, and my apologies, if I have offended.

Moving to some of our recent discussions, I'd like to clarify two things
about the approach I'm taking. I think I may have been too cryptic so I'd
like to unpack some of the steps in my approach, in the hope that we can
discuss some matters of substance without too much misunderstanding.

First. The methods I use owe a great deal to the later Wittgenstein--his
writing from his 'Philosophical Investigations' onward, including his 'On
certainty'. (By the way, if you think I'm irritating, I'm a mere novice, an
amateur,  compared to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein could have irritated for
England.)

So, my approach to 'creativity' is to see if we can get along without the
idea, to query whether we need the term 'creativity' to do productive things
in the world. The method I use to do this is to look at how we use the term
in context and see if it makes sense, or whether we would be better off
without it--'letting the fly out of the fly bottle', to use Wittgenstein's
apt phrase.

Let me give you an example that might help. I'm a practicing atheist, though
an intellectual agnostic, by which I mean that I live my life as if god does
not exist, but I don't know whether or not god actually exists. If you
disagreed with me and wanted to change my mind, you would have to convince
me that I am wrong, that god does exist. There are, of course, many types of
argument you could use, some better than others. One poor argument would be
to point to all the people who do believe in god and the many churches,
synagogues, mosques, and temples that they have built so that they can
worship god. This is a poor argument because what it demonstrates is simply
that lots of people believe something I don't. The fact that they are
probably a majority doesn't help either. This fact alone doesn't tell me WHY
they hold this belief--the arguments or evidence they might offer to explain
their belief, and whether any of those arguments or evidence would be
plausible to me.  So, pointing out to me yet another house of worship packed
with worshipers does not move the argument forward.

When I said to Ken "I bow to your superior knowledge on all things.", I can
see that it may have seemed like sarcasm, but there was something quite
serious in my remark, which I think may have been missed. First, it was a
compliment (albeit a bit back handed). I don't know anyone on this list who
is better and more widely read than Ken. Ken's scholarship is extremely
impressive. Second, and in my somewhat irritable way, I was trying to say
that showing me lots of examples of creativity research of which I was
ignorant is not very helpful, just as telling me that there are lots of
churches I haven't visited is not very helpful in the argument about whether
or not god exists. I hope that helps clarify at least part of what I have
been saying.

Second, I want to make clear that I am making my remarks about 'Design
Research for Designers' in a very narrow context. I'm interested in the
question in a highly technical and specific manner.

I'll try to explain. What I have in mind is a task that all phd students
undertake, and most of us undertake subsequently as a normal part of doing
research: we undertake a critical literature review of the field we are
investigating.

As part of such a review, we try to sort out the good stuff from the bad
stuff, the central from the merely interesting, the different types of work
and schools of thought. One of the things we do, as part of this work, is to
make explicit the criteria we use to decide which pile particular studies go
into: the good pile, bad pile, etc. I'm interested in those criteria. In
particular, I'm interested in the set of criteria we might apply to asking
which research is useful in helping me become a better designer, when doing
this type of critical literature review.

I fully agree with Chris when he says:

>So let's reassert that knowledge is good and remember that its utility is never
completely transparent.

And I too would share Philippa Ashton's unease if I thought that my stance
> mirrors rather too closely what undergraduate students say about anything
other than studio practice in their course.... 'how will doing design
history make me a better designer?'

Faced with the task of doing a critical review of an area of research, we
all make choices about what is and what is not relevant. Not everything is
equally relevant. My question, and the one I have started to try and
address, is about the rules we might apply when undertaking such a review.

Best wishes from Canberra, porn capital of Australia, where, recording
naughty things on video is legal. Nothing prevents these naughty videos,
once made, from being exported to the rest of oz. Guess what our largest
export industry is?


David

--
Professor David Sless
BA MSc FRSA
Co-Chair Information Design Association
Senior Research Fellow Coventry University
Director
Communication Research Institute of Australia
** helping people communicate with people **

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