Thanks Klaus!

And welcome back all to the "swampy lowlands", 
which - in design - were probably first mentioned 
by Donald Schön (1983: 42):

"The dilemma of "rigor or relevance" arises more 
acutely in some areas of practice than in others. 
In the varied topography of professional 
practice, there is a high, hard ground where 
practitioners can make effective use of 
research-based theory and technique, and there is 
a swampy lowland where situations are confusing 
"messes" incapable of technical solutions. The 
difficulty is that the problems of the high 
ground, however great their technical interest, 
are relatively unimportant to clients or to the 
larger society, while in the swamp are the 
problems of greatest human concern. ..."

I am smiling in the back, since meanwhile this 
debate reminds me of the fierce struggles more 
than 5 years ago on this list and elsewhere about 
(existing or not-existing) design foundations. 
Extensive and unhurried feedback (learning?) 
cycles are showing up. From swamps to wetlands to 
...

Best wishes,
Jonas



Wolfgang Jonas (2003) "Mind the gap!  - on 
knowing and not-knowing in design. Or: there is 
nothing more theoretical than a good practice", 
in Proceedings of EAD05: Design Wisdom - techné, 
the European Academy of Design, Barcelona, Spain, 
28 -30 April 2003

Schön, Donald A. (1983) The Reflective 
Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action 
Basic Books


__________


At 3:50 Uhr -0400 12.08.2007, Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
>dear ken
>
>i grant you your definition of interdisciplinary as long as you say it is
>yours.  i am less concerned with defining the word than with what i
>practice. to me it is pointless to argue that the english "inter" does not
>only mean "between" and that you prefer the meaning "among" and "together
>with." i doubt that many english speakers would interpret "inter" that way,
>but this is an empirical question.  you can read its latin origin your way
>but you run the risk of being misunderstood (which you often are).  if you
>insist on your meaning, why don't you call it "among-disciplinary" or
>"together with-disciplinary" or use the more familiar word
>"multi-disciplinary. that i mentioned earlier as fitting your meaning better
>than inter....
>
>i didn't attribute any motivation to your use of dictionaries, so i could
>not possible be mistaken on why you use it, as you suggest.  but what i
>object to and we have struggled earlier about the same issue, that is your
>absolutist claim that a particular word means such and such, as if this were
>cast in stone and because someone wrote it into a dictionary it has to be a
>true definition from which nobody should deviate or else be wrong.  i wished
>you would own your reading and not hide behind an objectivist facade.
>language is never that definite - unless some institution insists on it.
>
>as i said in my earlier response, you characterize my use of
>inter-disciplinary = between what disciplines normally address as "a barren
>no-man's-land where nothing happens." don't you think it would be fair to
>say that this is your metaphor fitting your experiences and accepting for me
>to say that it just does not fit mine which i exemplified in the case of my
>involvement with cybernetics.  if you read, the macy proceedings, you may
>notice that the participants gave a damn from where their members came from,
>but much whether they pursued certain often vague but challenging and
>unorthodox ideas about circularity, learning machines, self-reference,
>self-organization, even god, golem and design.  they could do that precisely
>because these ideas had no disciplinary homes, at least not how they treated
>them.  to escape the meanings that you want to attribute to the word
>interdisciplinary, i like to leave you with them and propose a term that
>fits my meaning better: "heretic."
>
>since i know you will immediately go to a dictionary to find the "true"
>meaning of the word, let me give you mine: "a heretic is willing to make
>choices that others (the orthodox, including those committed to particular
>disciplines) do not dare to consider.
>
>klaus
>
>p.s., i leave the trail of our responses so that there is a reduced chance
>that others take you out of context
>k
>
>p.s., by the way the cybernetician you cite is norbert wiener, not weiner.
>(in german, weinen means crying and he was everything else but a cry-baby,
>whether his family originated in vienna, i cannot say)
>k
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
>research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken
>Friedman
>Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 2:28 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Interdisciplinary Discourse and Knowledge Ecologies
>
>Dear Klaus,
>
>This is a reply on discourse more than a reply on the subject. Your note
>seems a bit grumpy -- and you've explicitly reversed what I wrote by quoting
>something out of context and misattributing to me a meaning where I wrote
>the exact contrary.
>
>You're mistaken on why I use the dictionary -- I've written on this topic
>several times in exactly this kind of debate. The Oxford English Dictionary
>and Merriam-Webster's preserve old definitions but continually check current
>usage to reflect and exemplify current usage.
>
>Meerriam-Webster's uses a citation file of some 16 million words and
>exemplars and a computerized corpus of over 70 million words and exemplars.
>The Oxford English Dictionary draws on a massive base of quotations and
>usage exemplars -- I can't seem to find the number, but the current edition
>of the dictionary USES 2,436,600 exemplars to illustrate words and their
>meanings. Over 20% of these words come from the 20th century.
>
>Editors at both dictionaries continually review usage to ensure currency.
>The first OED citation for "interdisciplinary" is to 1937.
>The latest is 1972. The first OED citation for "interdisciplinarity"
>is 1970, the latest 1988. These words have not substantially changed
>meanings over the past to years. In fact, even though cultural attitudes
>toward interdisciplinary research has shifted several times, the usage
>examplars remain quite consistent over time.
>
>You're writing as though lexicographers work on etymology and medieval roots
>rather than current meanings.
>
>Etymology does play a role, but you've looked at one meaning of the prefix
>among several, and not the relevant one.
>
>The Latin preposition and adverb "inter" means "between, among, amid, in
>between, in the midst." As an adjectivial prefix used in English, "inter"
>means, "Between or among other things or persons; between the parts of, in
>the intervals of, or in the midst of, something; together with; between
>times or places, at intervals, here and there." You focusing on the meaning
>BETWEEN when the relevant meaning in this case is AMONG and TOGETHER WITH.
>
>Interdisciplinarity doesn't mean that many disciplines participate, though
>-- of course, this MAY be the case, and in some cases it is.
>It means that one may draw on concepts or practices from two or more
>disciplines and arts (i.e., professional practices). Whether you agree with
>me or not, I've used the metaphor of a wetlands, a lively place, and I have
>not experienced interdisciplinarity as a no man's land -- I didn't even say
>that you experienced territory between disciplines as barren, but rather
>that your description of the word made it sound so. But then, combining what
>you write here with what you wrote to Francois suggests that you, too, are
>working in what you call an interdisciplinary way -- working in the
>no-man's-land that you praise in your note to me.
>
>Look, it seems to me that we agree on much of the ideological substance in
>your note, and we certainly agree that disciplines have turf wars and that
>disciplinarians try to enforce local codes of culturally accepted behavior
>within their fields.
>
>Where we disagree is on whether the concept of interdisciplinarity can
>function by drawing on ideas, concepts and practices from many sources
>depending on the needs of the interdisciplinary work, or whether it
>necessarily entails suffering the disciplinary controls of the people and
>cultures of each discipline on which a project may draw. Now the historical
>experience of many interdisciplinary projects is that this does sometimes
>happen -- and when it does, things bog down and little growth takes place.
>
>It also happens quite the opposite. And HERE, I'll give you exactly the
>example of cybernetics. For all the freedom it allows, and it allows much,
>you'd have to agree that cybernetics does not have one institutional home
>but many. People work in cybernetics in and from bases in several locations,
>usually the university departments that pay their salaries and sponsor their
>work ... the discipline is communication in your case, biology or
>engineering for many, mathematics for Norbert Weiner, anthropology for
>Gregory Bateson, complexity science for many today.
>
>You might know Mary Catherine Bateson's (1972) lovely book, Our Own
>Metaphor, describing a conference that Gregory Bateson organized in
>1968 bringing experts together from different fields to discuss the world
>through a cybernetic perspective. She describes interdisciplinarity at
>several points in a warm positive way -- and it seems to me that her
>understanding of cybernetics -- based on Gregory Bateson's understanding --
>involved an interdisciplinary approach. Now you don't have to believe Mary
>Catherine Bateson or even Gregory Bateson, but as the Bateson Professor, I
>think it's fair to acknowledge that some people see cybernetics as an
>interdisciplinary approach or field.
>
>Norbert Weiner (1973: 2-3) opens Cybernetics by discussing the "boundary
>regions of science which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified
>investigator." This is close to my metaphor of the wetlands, and Weiner goes
>on to describe the opportunities and the problems that confront anyone
>involved in this kind of research.
>
>Substantively, I agree with you on the important contributions of
>cybernetics that would not have been possible elsewhere or (perhaps) in
>specific fields. I certainly recognize the value of your ideas and work in
>design and elsewhere from a cybernetic perspective.
>
>But I'm going to disagree with you still on two things. The first is what
>the word interdisciplinary means. The second is that [cybernetics] in NOT
>interdisciplinary -- it may not be for you, but it seems to me that Bateson
>and Weiner might have had a different view, speaking warmly of work with
>colleagues from two or more disciplines, and -- in the case of Weiner's
>(1973: 3) Cybernetics, even giving specific examples of the positive value
>of disciplinary knowledge to work by teams of colleagues from several
>disciplines.
>
>This is not a note on interdisciplinary discourse and knowledge ecologies,
>but it is relevant nevertheless to examine what words mean. It seems to me
>that in refusing to recognize the contribution of people who study the
>meaning of words in the context of contemporary, active usage, you risk
>building the rigid kinds of academic barriers you warn against.
>
>As for the "pipe dream" of my wetland, I didn't think I needed to persuade
>anyone to give up their turf wars to join me. If people want to enjoy their
>turf wars and disputes, who am I to say no? I'd rather let them fight with
>each other than bother me. If I can avoid them, I prefer to do so.
>Admittedly, it is not always possible, but many people do work in a robust,
>interdisciplinary way, and they are the ones I like working with.
>
>Nevertheless, I want to suggest that I did not invent the wetlands -- I
>joined an ongoing enterprise in the boundary regions of science." I read
>Weiner long ago, and I thought that I was joining him and his colleagues,
>not as a cybernetician, but as someone willing to understand the world and
>our human place in the world with tools from more than one tool kit.
>
>Yours,
>
>Ken
>
>--
>
>Reference
>
>Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1972. Our Own Metaphor. a Personal Account of a
>Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New
>York: Alfred A. Knopf.
>
>Weiner, Norbert. 1973. Cybernetics. Or Communication and Control in the
>Animal and the Machine.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
>
>--
>
>Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
>
>ken,
>
>i know you like dictionary definitions, but most of them are old and not
>necessarily reflecting the use of terms.  what your dictionary describes as
>"pertaining to two or more disciplines or branches of learning" or "
>benefiting from two or more disciplines" sound to me like multi-disciplinary
>= many disciplines participate.  you characterize my use of
>inter-disciplinary = between what disciplines normally address as "a barren
>no-man's-land where nothing happens." well, that is your metaphor and no
>doubt describes your experiences, not mine.
>
>much of my life i have worked in this no man's land and found it enormously
>open, unconstrained, and providing a creative space that most other
>disciplines do not offer. as you probably know, i am also a cybernetician
>and cybernetics was from its beginning without an institutional home, which
>has enabled it to make the most astonishing proposals from putting purpose
>into a feedback loop, favoring  non-authoritarian forms of organization
>(self-organization), developing a human (observer) centered epistemology,
>radical constructivism, for example and more.  this was precisely because it
>was relatively free. perhaps non-disciplinary would be a better term, and i
>stand to my previous warning that inter-disciplinary means working between
>disciplines.
>
>another example, according to the dictionary you consulted, you identify
>disciplines as "academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines." no problem
>with that, but it does not shed light on the fact that disciplines have
>something to do with how a discourse community disciplines its members,
>imposes norms, celebrates exemplary practices, certifies its members and
>withdraws their licenses when they do not conform.  in academia, disciplines
>compete for students, resources, funding.  it is not a logical distinction,
>not a wetland.  no problem with your preferring this metaphor but you have
>to convince others to abandon their fields and their turf wars, which are
>quite real, and join the pipe dream of your wetland
>
>there is nothing wrong with borrowing concepts from discourses other than
>one's own, provided you do not thereby abandon your professional mission.
>for example, if you borrow the concept of design that is common in
>marketing, namely that design is a way of adding value to a product and part
>of a marketing strategy, then you allow design discourse to be colonized,
>taken over, and subsumed by marketing conceptions of it.  to me, this would
>be a sell-out.  to me, design is more than sales and designers have to
>import concepts that subvert design.
>
>klaus
>
>
>Klaus Krippendorff wrote [to Francois-Xavier Nsenga]
>
>--snip--
>
>inter-disciplinary -- working on a problem that lies between disciplines, in
>no man's land, so to speak
>
>--snip--