Dear Harold,
A belated responose to your email of 18th April.
My inquiry into the evolutionary nature of Participatory Action
Research(PAR) has been most interesting. I have been surprised that the
PAR practitioner community seems satisfied with empowerment or
emancipation as a satisfactory outcome to their process. It is, of
course, but I suspect that the empowered individuals or communities then
experience resistance or oppression at the next systemic level, so that
their emancipation is limited or challenged.
I believe that evolutionary systems thinking can contribute
significantly to this existing situation, by encouraging participants to
recognise and strategically work at multiple systemic levels and thus
achieve a more fully evolutionary process. I think this view conforms
with the last paragraph of your email.
I am hoping we may have an opportunity to trial our ideas in practice as
Sydney has just elected a City Council based on participatory rather
than representative democracy. 'Old' politics will have its knives into
this 'new' politics at every turn, so an evolutionary strategy for the
latter could be highly beneficial, even if probabilistic at best!
Best wishes,
John
Dear John et. al.
Your last post brought some thoughts together for me that began to
emerge when the discussion turned to design 'programming' and
'predesign'. Erik Stolterman recently sent me a web site for a beautiful
'visual thesaurus' with the suggestion that I search 'design'. A three
dimensional network of concepts and terms emerged that tangentially
brought to mind an evolutionary tree diagram (triggered by your comments
on the importance of an evolutionary perspective).
It occurred to me that our understanding of design evolves and has
evolved in the same way that we believe our artifacts evolve including
our social constructs. At the moment there are several active branches
in the evolutionary tree of design i.e. design as craft, as an applied
art and design as applied science etc. For example the conflation of
design and science has led to the development of design as a
'discipline', a subdivision of applied science—a form of 'techne' (know
how)—based on technical knowledge formulated as method. Design as a form
of 'phronesis' (know why)—pragmatic knowledge—is much less developed. An
important point I discovered working as an architectural designer /
programmer and a teacher of architectural programming, was that
programming does not supply the 'know why', it just attempts to ground
the 'know how' in 'science'.
The limits of this evolutionary branch is revealed in the example of a
brand new, multimillion dollar 'museum of art' recently built near
Seattle in the State of Washington. The building was rigorously
'programmed' to be a museum and was designed by one of America's leading
architectural form-givers. The 'museum' was closed almost immediately
after opening with no certain day for reopening. The problem was that
the 'museum'—the cultural institution itself—had not been designed and
does not exist in reality. The same challenge confronts other types of
designers as well. For example, web designers discover they need to
advocate for the redesign of the organizations they are tasked to
represent on the web. The artifact's purpose is always embedded in a
larger context that is beyond the scope of programming or predesign as
practiced in the US. The design 'problem' / 'opportunity' is often
misrepresented because it is not developed within this larger context.
An emerging branch of design that myself and others are exploring looks
at design as a social institution at the same level as 'science', 'art',
and 'religion' etc. This approach reconstitutes technical and pragmatic
knowledge as an integrated approach to inquiry and action allowing
design the possibility to play a strategic role in a much broader array
of human intentions.
Harold Dear H
--
UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F
DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain
confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not
read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If
you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately
and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the
individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority,
states them to be the views the University of Technology Sydney. Before
opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects.
|