Reading both Rosan's and Kari-Hans posts, my impression is that there is a
confusion between "theory" and "model".
Or am I misinterpreting ?
It can be rather easy and fast to develop models; but -at least to me-
theories are not exactly that easy to build and drop.
If you decide to observe a designer/a team designing (I think it was your
example?), what you will do is observations, and possibly construct a model
of the process.
I am not even sure that "generalization" (I mean : finding the commonalities
between different sets of observations, for instance) will ever construct a
theory. It will make a more general model.
This model might in turn be productive (change education, softwares,
practice or whatever), but this might be a rather narrow manner to validate
it, and extremely debatable when it comes to declaring that it would be
theoretically sound.
In my understanding, theory requires that you declare a frame [and, most
probably, but this would require more elaboration, a frame for
interpretation (hermeneutics)], define your position [where do I stand as an
observer, am I in or out the picture], what you observe [the limits of the
scenery observed], and the tools used to classify observations [what do I
retain, drop, consider as significant connections etc.]. You will thus
include something from the "outside", something alien to what you have
observed.
As I am taking some minutes to respond to the list, let me comment another
point about "visual aspects".
May I suggest that we do not confuse creating "forms" in the sense given to
that word by morphology, and aspects (the shape of things as they appear to
our senses). This could allow us to dive under the surface, where we
probably are actually ;-).
Regards,
Jean
Jean Schneider
|