Hello!
I can't keep up with the flow here, but I want to pickup on something
Terry said some days ago.
Winding the list back to
[17 Apr 2007 07:36:54 + 0800] Re: Wicked Problems, Tame Problems;
From: [log in to unmask],
at the start of the Stakeholder discussion, Terry wrote
TL: "I've find [sic] it much better to use the term
'constituencies' rather than 'stakeholders' in exploring the
social human interactions and communications that are the essence
of design activity."
The essence of design activity is the social human interactions and
communications? No way!
Essence means, to me, and I think most others, the intrinsic nature or
indispensable character determining quality of something.
Even if you insist that designing cannot be properly considered or
discussed, let alone investigated and theorised about, in the absence
of the people doing the designing--as Terry and Klaus do, and perhaps
others here--the essence of that designing is NOT to be found in the
social human interactions and communications. You can observe
essentially (and I mean essentially) the same social human
interactions and communications in many other kinds of human activity
as they are practiced. So, such interactions and communications just
might be the essence of being human, but they are not the essence of
designing: they do not pick out designing from these other things we
do.
The best we might say is that social human interaction and
communication is necessary for designing, but it is not sufficient.
But I'd suggest that it is a necessary consequence of designing, not a
necessary input to, or producer or driver of the designing.
Doesn't this thoroughly distorting claim by Terry worry anybody else
here? I'm surprised that nobody else commented on it! Few of us are
social scientists (I imagine), and few of us think (I imagine) that we
need to be to do design research. Or, is my imagination at fault
here?
Perhaps if others here (not just the usual contributors) more often
said more about what makes designing design activity for them, we
would see more easily the real richness of real designing, and
appreciate more fully the need evident for a transdisciplinary (*)
approach to researching the essence designing; for design research.
On a more personal note (with reference to Terry's more recent [06:08
25/4/07] post) I can at least say that my (people-free, and thus
improper) Knowledge Level theory of designing, which makes no [wicked
for Terry] use of the term or notion of wicked problems, can happily
explain what is going on in the kind of designing that people often
describe as dealing with a wicked problem. It can even predict under
what conditions this can happen too. But it's got nothing whatever to
do with social human interactions and communications though.
Tim
Donostia
The Basque Country
* References
Klein J Th, Grossenbacher-Mansuy W, Häberli R, Bill A, Scholz R W, en
Welti M (eds), 2001: Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem-Solving among
science, technology and society. An effective way of managing
complexity. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag.
<http://www.springer.com/dal/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=1-40109-22-2118936-0>
Gibbons M, Limoges C, Nowotny H, Schwartzman S, Scott P & Trow M,
1994. The new production of knowledge. The dynamics of science and
research in contemporary societies, pp. 179. SAGE Publications Ltd,
Stockholm.
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