I think you are talking of the difference between a "good" house and a
"bad" house.
A good house is flexible and adaptable - a bad house is what it is.
Stewart Brand has shown this very nicely in "How buildings learn", even
better in his BBC TV series of the same name.
Full of excellent examples.
Artefacts provide the affordances you see in them.
It is indeed a dance ;)
A chair is only a chair because we call it that way.
Because we have this pattern.
We construct our realities ourselves. Every single person her own to a
certain degree, at some occasions they - luckily - overlap.
<snip>
On Jan 15, 2005, at 07:54, Ranulph Glanville wrote:
> What I had most in mind is how we adapt rooms. We build houses in which
> rooms are specified and often specially formed. Then, later, we adapt
> them, putting completely new functions in shells intended for something
> else. Or we "misuse" them, anyhow: the bathroom as concert hall! I was
> really thinking about the opportunism that is so powerful and effective
> in design: that we find new possibilities that transcend the original.
</snip>
That only works because we live in an artefact world.
Where the things we carry home from the shop come with predefined
functions.
If you had to build everything your own, your "things" would be
different.
If you were to build a house every time you move, your houses would -
probably - become better and better.
Meaning less and less rigid and more and more flexible and adaptable.
<snip>
> I see this as a key quality of what we do when we design: we propose
> something and then, examining it, often find something quite wonderful
> we had never thought of in our earlier proposal.
</snip>
This is your personal impression, i would say.
You can't define to all degrees what people see in your design, you can
only make suggestions.
Your "users" reinvent it. They even see something totally different in
it then you do.
And this "work" is solely done by them - not by the designer, IMHO.
(Norman? Forgot the reference.)
<snip>
> In designing, we do
> this. In deciding functions we do the same. How many ways can you use a
> chair, what can you use it for (I'm using one next to me as a table and
> a filing system). I wasn't really meaning to support the unfunctional,
> merely to suggest that functional determinism doesn't make much sense:
> and that dealing with the functional requirements is often relatively
> trivial: the novelty in design assumes that the result of the process
> is functional, but it is much more than that.
</snip>
I think the less "fancy" or predefined your chair is, the more flexible
it would be to use.
The same could be said about the house etc.
Heinz von Foerster: "Act always so as to increase the number of
choices" - we might extend this to some artefact designs as well.
But i think that demands a kind of clarity and humbleness that you
hardly find in our everyday consumer product world.
Steward Brand (1994), "How buildings learn", Penguin Books
Heinz v. Foerster: http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/HvF.htm
greetings from Sheffield, Michael
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Michael Hohl, PhD Candidate
Sheffield Hallam University
School of Cultural Studies
Art & Design Research Centre
Sheffield, S11 8UZ
United Kingdom
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.hohlwelt.com/en
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