Hi all,
three minor footnotes.
1. The inevitable consequence of playing the definition game is that
something important gets left out. Lest we all get carried away with
our collective sense of worthiness in changing existing situations
into preferred ones, may I remind us all that sometimes as designers
we just make new things for the joy of making them. Sometimes we find
a use for these new things and can retrospectively claim that we
changed from an existing to a preferred situation. But sometimes what
we make creates new situations--desirable and undesirable--that did
not exist before we made them. We have to accommodate 'creating new
situations' into a definition of design, that is if one thinks
playing the definitional game is worthwhile.
2. I'm not sure that Lubomir's proposal is entirely new or novel. In
the 19th Century Karl Marx said:
> The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways;
> the point is to change it. (Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach, 1845)
Before Ken gets too wound up about Uncle Karl, I'm not suggesting
that Karl did any more than articulate and and help us mark a change
in thinking that was going on in the 19th Century, from the idea that
thinking and research were a means of revealing the world, to an idea
of the world as something we should change through thinking and
research: a change from revealing god's work, to changing the mess
that we have made of the world; seeing the world as something to
celebrate and reveal in all its detail through science, to seeing the
world as full of problems that need to be solved by science.
3. Given the many messes we have have made, and the few successes we
have had in changing the world from existing situations into
preferred ones, we probably are at a useful moment in history where
we might take stock of the limits of our ability to bring about
desirable change in the world. Design 4 the world.
As I said, just some minor footnotes.
David
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blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au
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