Hello Chris,
Like yourself I cannot follow all of the messages coming to this list
as I am a busy member of staff of an ID department with undergraduate
and graduate programmes (MSc and PhD). The following note may be
irrelevant to the previous posts but I want to share it with you anyway.
I am not sure whether we have "western" or "eastern" discourses, but I
think we have different perspectives. I think the design community needs
a balanced representation of different perspectives. I will try to
explain why our perspectives are different from where I stand.
I am both involved in design teaching (industrial design to be exact)
and design research. I am involved in these in Turkey, a country
considered to be neither "Western" nor "Eastern" totally. We are trying
to do our best in both teaching and research fronts with limited human
and financial resources. Our research students are mostly self financed
and corporate funding of ID research is scarce. We don't get
government/corporate financed bright students from all over the world to
work in our research projects. We are only allowed to be full partners
in EU projects in the 6th Framework programme and the learning process
of becoming partners in these projects takes time. We are too busy in
managing such projects anyway. We produce good quality graduate work but
as they are mostly in Turkish, they need to be translated into English
to be known worldwide. As you may know there is no such thing as direct
translation. To transform this knowledge into English takes time and
some students as they are working students don't take the time for such
a rethinking process. As we are in a developing or a newly
industrialised country (as Turkey is defined one), the issues that we
deal might be too peripheral to be published in the mainstream journals.
As members of state funded universities in Turkey which are short of
financial means at all times, only one participation to a major
international conference is supported by universities that is only if
you have a paper. Having gone through the reviewing process, you then
have to deal with the visa applications to enter into the country of
destination trying to prove that you don't plan to immigrate to that
country (and believe me to be a university professor may not be
sufficient at times to prove that). I can continue but I won't. Perhaps
other people on this list have similar experiences and face similar
problems. What I try to say is that there are different contexts where
design research is produced.
If there is to be a "one" discourse, it needs to be a rich one covering
these different perspectives.
Best wishes,
Ozlem Er
Associate Professor Dr.
Istanbul Technical University
Department of Industrial Product Design
Istanbul, Turkey
http://www.design.itu.edu.tr
http://www.tasarim.itu.edu.tr
Christopher Kueh wrote:
> HI Rosan,
>
> You said: 'the world is in need of a counter-discourse to balance, not
> replace, the
> dominating western discourse'.
>
> Can you explain more on 'counter-discourse' and 'western discourse'?
> If to balance western-discourse, what of it that we are to balance? Is
> there also such thing as 'estern discourse'?
>
> Sorry if these were already being explained in the earlier posts. Have
> not been reading in details on the recent posts as I'm completing my
> own PhD thesis :)
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Chris
>
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