Dear Rosan
I intended to continue my television show by a conversation between Ollie
Sacks and Tony Damasio deciding who would dispose of Glenn Gould like: -
“J. Gibson could “afford” him”… But I think it is better to clarify where
I stand:
You can address this design cognition thread in two ways (with
ramifications, of course):
1. Cognition is a human process describable as an ability that leads
to understanding necessary for design (verb).
2. Cognition is a human process describable as an ability that leads
to understanding necessary for recognizing design (noun)
On the middle we can place cognition as a condition for perpetrating
objects designed for cognition and for perpetrating objects for design
recognition. (I like the word perpetrating, it has a dangerous flavour…)
Surely a part of general theories on cognition are interesting and useful
for design, design teaching and design research as in medicine, medicine
teaching and medicine research as in football, football coaching and
football research and so on. Since I’m, fundamentally, a drawing teacher, I
ate a lot of cognition and visual arts or art cognition if you like. When
you open that field is very hard to stop because you are dealing with
comprehension of art. I feel very appeasing the institutional theories of
art because they tend to put some systematic logic on the discourse about
art letting aside a sort of profound speculations about the nature of art
or their percipients. Since I never felt an aesthetic emotion (or all my
emotions are aesthetical), an institutional theory about art leads us to
questions that I should put in the domain of Social and Cultural. Like
Klaus wrote a few days ago: Design is not logically explainable. But that
doesn’t mean that the discourse about design (noun or verb) shouldn’t be
(sometimes) logical.
If we try to build an institutional theory of Design we will determine
(like Nelson Goodman did for Art) a whenification of design instead of a
whatification of design.
Asking when is design instead of what is design shifts the observation of
objects and generators of objects to the observation of what institutional
mechanisms are labelling something as design (noun or verb) on timely and
provisory bases.
That’s why I’m more interested in design recognition, which I believe is
possible to exist, especially from the Cultural point of view. But that is
matter for further discussions.
Best,
Eduardo
PS: The Coca Cola bottle is like Christ on mount Tabor. The Apostles had
the confirmation of Christ’s divinity because of His transfiguration. They
could not label Him through his formal appearance so the logic conclusion
was divinity.
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