Thanks for the responses. Apologies for a rather terse responses below,
arriving rather late. It's tax time in the UK.
Michael:
I believe users are makers as much as those who design objects. I
insist we all make meaning ourselves and we never communicate our
meanings: rather, we construct our own meanings that seem to us to
work like the meanings of others. I believe we invent, and we don't
discover. Not, I think, that that matters too much here, except it
makes us all designers. In this way f thinking, ambiguity is endemic
between people. We try with language to trade off convenience for
individual precision. But that's not really for this list.
An example of an object without a function, in the normal sense, is a
folly.
More than necessary: if I want a house I can ask a builder. I ask an
architect because I want something extra; that's why architecture (and
all forms of design) are based in generosity.
I don't know the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Sounds great. Details, please! I
have had students working on these things: for instance, furniture that
offers opportunities without specifically answering any functional
problems. The furniture is explicitly waiting for us to find a use for
it.
Tiiu
I agree with the notion that functionally adequate solutions may not
actually work. We could argue about why: is it inadequate briefing,
understanding, what? I like your example of lighting. It seems to me
you are showing what I am trying to refer to: a sense of generosity.
What gives quality in a design is not in the functional adequacy (by
the way, adequacy is, I believe, what designers do, not perfection:
though there are sometimes outcomes that so fit together that we gasp
at their perfection) but what we might call the quality we invest.
You also introduce purpose (intention). Very cybernetic concepts. Being
purposive is, however, a property the system that observes attributes
to the system it is observing. Even as a cybernetician, I am very wary
of these notions: they are often used to suggest a wilfulness and
automatism within the system observed that is not always appropriate.
You talk of how we use paper. In my view, I think it's not so much that
we communicate head to paper (and then making instructions for
realisation), but rather that we converse with ourselves through the
paper. Designing involves some sort of conversation, usually through
paper in this manner. I am not sure what happens with computers.
Although I have introduced them in several places and write about
them,. I am not sure our use at the moment is likely to be productive.
But that also is another point for another place. Klaus has written
about conversation and design, following on from Gordon Pask, who
developed a whole theory based around conversation and, later,
interaction. I was a pupil of Gordon's!
I see social and cultural determinants as part of the functional
description, so I allow a rather wide understanding of what functional
might be. It's a matter of our decision.
I quite like your quote from Ornstein. Thank you for that. However, I
am deeply suspicious of notions like evolution and emergence when seen
as forces in nature, rather than ways we chose to make patterns. I'm
not a born again Christian, but I think scientists need to be wary of
the language they use, specially when they take a description and treat
it as the actuality. And we, who are perhaps not scientists, should
pull them up on this. The thing described and the thing describing must
be different. But that's also another point for another place.
I am sorry if these responses seem under explained or imprecise. They
are rather broad points and, as I wrote at the outset, it's tax time
here and I should be writing nothing till I've got all that done!
Ranulph
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