Dear Ranjan,

My apologies for my confusion about your name. I did know - I got it the wrong way round while writing sleepily. Please take it that I was writing MP fondly.

The preprint of that paper about Damasio and design theory I've now put up 
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/Damasio.htm

I agree with most of your comments and I'm aware that different people get different utility out of the different theory perspectives. I agree that we need new exemplars of ways aof looking at design cognition.  My interest specifically, though is in building sound theory with ggod integration to  other disciplines rather than creating easy to understand concept models that designers and non-designers might use. 

For me, the theory issue is that in pushing the design theory limits it seems we've come pretty well to the limits of what can be gained from the traditional cognitive science models, ditto for social constrictivism and constructionism, social analysis, information analysis, and for critical analysis of human design activities.. I'm not saying that we have finished exhausting them in terms of overall utility. I am saying that they are proving to be limited in building a coherent body of theory for design. In the main this is because they don't address the issues of consciousness, ideation, judgement, motivation, feeling and emotion on anything other than an externalist and relatively superficial way. I feel it is important to address these areas because they seem to be the functional foundation that we use for designing. In other words, I'm suggesting that those interested in the cutting edge of design research and theory making may find significant conceptual,  explanatory  and theory making benefits from moving on from the usual thery perspectives and focusing on the insights given from the findings of neuro-cognition, particularly as it relates to feelings, consciousness, motivation, ideation and judgement. The more interesting areas  for me are the causal loops relating feeeling, emotion and imagogenic process, the amygdala loops for fear, and the  differences between the pleasure and pain loops and their associations with external and internal interactions with situations/objects/people. I think also that there are strong benefits in looking ethologically at the ways that human functioning has been shaped by evolutionary selections. It seems there are many other fascinating openings to increased understanding of design activitiy that are really quite poorly or even faultily addressed by the models we have used so far.

Bets wishes,

Terry

-----Original Message-----
From: M P Ranjan
Sent: 14/05/2004 6:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: some questions on design cognition


Dear Terry

The name is Ranjan. MP is my family name, short for Mundon Pandan, which
is on my Passport, but rarely used , if at all, although I do have some
students who do fondly call me MP, so the choice is yours.

I would love to see your paper explaining the biological and
physiological aspects of cognition. Our understanding of the phenomenon
is being driven by work in at least two major fields. The first in the
area of experimental Cognitive Psychology and the second by new insights
and break-through in the field of Neuro Sciences and brain research.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (thank you Bateson) or a journey to The
Universe Within (thank you Morton Hunt) are but facets of a search that
has brought us so far, and the journey has just begun.

While we all know that our bodies are made up of more than 90 percent
water and a number of trace elements including a large dose of Carbon we
are still interested in that elusive quality called the fluff of  "Life"
which cannot be explained fully by any amount of research on water or
chemical compositions, although this would give us  useful data to shift
our paradigms of what we believe, or try to unlearn what we thought was
the gospel truth, since it had worked for us all our lives.

As children we were told that the human lung is like a baloon and it
expands when you inhale and shrinks when you exhale, it works for us and
we believe it to be true. Many teachers and doctors still believe this
to be true, since it works for them with that pesky little kid who asks
difficult questions. (Rosan are you listening). Many of these teachers
and doctors have not yet heard of the concept of fractals made popular
by Mendelbrot using computer based models to make fantastic images of
recursive structures. Now with a fractal description of the lung we
could use the metaphor of an upside-down tree to model the lung, with
multiple branchings leading to a maze of very minute tubes at the the
tips of its branches. Now if you visualise both these models, the first
accomodates any gross violation like smoking very easily since there
seems to be pleanty of space for smoke and impurities as long as we do
not puncture the baloon it seems all right, however with the second
model it becomes very clear that there is very little space for the
exchange of oxygen to the blood if smoke particles and tar clog up the
lower branches, shocking new insights become very clear. The long and
short of the story is that all of us live with our incomplete models of
the real worlds and it works for us till we are shocked into new
paradigms, by new concepts. Human cognition and in particular Design
Cognition is one such space that now needs new paradigms and this may
not just come from the bilogical and physiological space of research but
also from the little kids asking pesky questions when they are trying to
understand the phenomenon called Design, which is not scientific by any
streatch of imagination, and this fact does confuse and delight, due to
its complexity and difficulty in understanding the phenomenon, but also
the ease with it is practised.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my office at NID
14 May 2004 at 11.45 pm IST

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, NID Centre for Bamboo Initiatives
Project Head, Bamboo & Cane Development Institute, Agartala
Faculty Member on the NID Governing Council
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380007
INDIA

Email: <[log in to unmask]>
Fax: 91+79+26605242
Home: 91+79+26610054 (or) 91+79+26639692 ext 4095
Work: 91+79+26639692 ext 1090
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Terence Love wrote:
>
> Hi MP,
>
> You describe well a traditional model of design cognition -
>
> "Cognition is a complex process that involves imagination and
> visualisation. Imagination includes the internal constructs in
> "cognitive space" such as maps, diagrams, forms, models etc., held in
> the mind, that can combine with memory and existing knowledge and it is
> aided and reinforced by the external manifestation in the form of
> external models , visualisations and numerous forms of external
> representations that are created during the process of design
> development, as iterations that inform the growing and transforming
> progressive internal model. At each iteration some decisions are tested
> and the resulting synthesis is examined as a whole and in its details in
> a process of "Informed Synthesis". Groups can participate in this
> process due to the effectiveness of the external models that help bring
> coherence and congruence to the various cognitive models held by the
> individuals in the group."
>
> This moves things along nicely.
>
> The reality, however, seems to be that this is not how cognition works biologically and is now being replaced by physiological models  that give a much greater role to the physiological body-based proicesses of consciousness, feeling and emotion. The cognition you describe are based on what we appear to see inside ourselves when we focus on outr own thinking. It appears that that it has limited validity as it seems that we a re not too good at seeing how we think (oops false consciousness again!)
>
> The physical reality is that it is the somato-sensory-motor system running our homeostatic management that is the main show with the imagogenic processes (thoughts in the mind) dictated by it and perhaps best regarded as the fluff on the top! This is not to ignore it or demean its role, simply to point out that it is these other deeper body-based physical systems that do most of the design cognition, creative thought making, allegory, judgement and optimisation etc.
>
> I put together a  precis of Damasio's findings in this area  and a short analysis of how they relate to design cognition for the Design Sense and Sensibility Conference at UNIDCOM/IADE in Lisbon last year. You might find it interesting? The preprint should be on my website - oops, just noticed its not there yet. I'll sort it out overnight.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Terry