Dear list

 

Thanks for some truly interesting and informative reading ... the levels
of sharing on this list are exceptional and valuable for us all. 

 

I think that the issues here for design are very familiar to me because
design is socially positioned as a lesser activity to science.  So
science may move in design zones and remain science while design cannot
be science. There are a lot of social codes at work here even though it
is very difficult to identify what this science is and where it resides
because most practitioners of science seem not to believe in it as
unitary concept.

 

I encounter the problems of social divisions between knowledge domains
on a regular basis and have a lot of experience in the ways that
knowledge domains attempt to secure their boundaries and maintain their
advantage. I work in an area that we describe as Indigenous Knowledge
(IK) ...this self description has been somewhat fraught because even the
most well meaning and supportive colleagues ask us to explain ourselves.
This not a problem except that they tend to want our explanation framed
in a manner that corresponded with their own basic assumptions
concerning knowledge.  The following extract describes some early
encounters with academics in other disciplines -

 

The most common demand from Western academics is for a clear definition
of IK. Such approaches to Indigenous Knowledge fail to acknowledge the
fact that a definition is a Western approach to understanding.
Indigenous Knowledge operates in a very different way in communicating
such an understanding and to be truly and verifiably understood it must
operate from its own ontological basis in explaining itself. Indigenous
Knowledge (IK) is based in an understanding that knowledge is
distributed throughout natural systems in many formations of Being. In
this way IK is primarily an ontological knowledge tradition because of
the focus on delineating and describing the many different and necessary
intelligent patterns of Being that are enmeshed in natural systems which
sustain and give life to the whole.

 

The World Bank (see http://go.worldbank.org/E58NW9DX70 ) explains how
Indigenous Knowledge may be shared. In order to enable others to share
what we know, we must share it in ways that are consistent with what
they know, and [in ways] that they will easily be able to access and
understand. Common language, culture and economic and physical
circumstances make this process more accessible. At the heart of
successful knowledge exchange processes is the bringing together of
peers who can identify with one another in a way that enables them to
learn relatively easily from each other. 

We did get a policy document accepted at this institution that
acknowledged IK and the difference in ontology and epistemology that is
a significant difference between cultures. See link below

 

http://www.uq.edu.au/hupp/index.html?page=63701#_ftn1

 

In my practice two things are evident: 

(i)   Modern industrialised social understandings tend to separate
practices and disciplines as if they are all elements in one production
process ... for me this is not good/bad it is just a cultural tendency
... so when we see this social idea science divided from us and perhaps
inaccessible we are seeing a cultural operation at work.

       

(ii)  Design is a successful knowledge exchange process which brings
people (from diverse areas) together so they can learn from/about each
other. In this instance I mean getting people draw/paint/visualize
together because the practice of design levels difference exposes
meaning and reveals culture - perhaps this is why science must dominate?
In this sense we employ the design makes sense of things model (thanks
Klaus).

 

Most significant in this process for me is the works of some social
scientists who investigate hidden patterns of interaction - if we are in
a culture then the behaviours that act on us are often invisible because
they are sequence patterns distributed in the everyday complex flow of
interactions. This is described by Magnusson and others as the hidden
structure of interaction discerned as repeated patterns in the temporal
flow. Anolli describes this as the hidden design of meaning evident
through repeated patterns of behaviour observable in the temporal flow
of communication events.

 

Anolli, L. et al. (2005) The Hidden Structure of Interaction: From
Neurons to Culture Patterns. IOS Press, Amsterdam.

 

This work is brilliant stuff but it is flawed in my opinion because it
is a single level observation - the pattern recognition process is
centred to an algorithmic schema - it is after all just science. 

 

A proposal integral to the Indigenous Knowledge approach is that IK is a
design research because it involves multiple level analyses so that
layers of observation take place in ways that contextualize and
re-contextualize meaning ... e.g. we may reveal hidden (cultural)
patterns in observables and also hidden (cultural) patterns in
observations ... then in observational schemas and then in the ways that
such findings are represented ...are presented and so on.

 

I think that design research - (enacting design as a research
methodology) has huge potential because science has great difficulty in
living context related problem spaces. Science traditionally seeks
solutions which are terminations in problem spaces - unfortunate when
the pressing problem is sustaining the problem space? In this regard
science may be moving closer to design as it reinvents itself for the
future.

 

I am also designing research processes.

 

Norm