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Hi Ken, David and others
Designs short shelf life
Your quote
I'm not saying that it does not
work at all, but rather that it often does not work as it is intended
to do. It is for this reason that so many design projects have a
short shelf-life. One can make the counterclaim that one cannot say
this since one major reason for short shelf-life involves such
changes as changes to taste in the market, acquisitions that require
new corporate identity programs, etc.
My thought
In fact my intuition is that many design products simply lack the kind of scope to ever have anything but a short shelf life. Architecture and the built environment even environmental engineering has so much more scope and space to address long term economic, social, political, ideological issues which, to put it crudely, you will never find in the (product) space of a cup, chair or car. While there are exceptions, these objects are quite simply transitory. Product design has no (need for) intellectual depth or scope. This is not to say that such vulgar pragmatism is out of order in some absolute sense - we need to drink tea, coffee, whisky - but just that critical pragmatism is only possible when the object and its social networks and dependencies is sufficiently large.
The value of ethnomethodology for design
I note that you're using the sample size argument raised against micro-sociology
Your quote
Even so, single cases are tough. This was the major argument many had
with Erving Goffman's microsociology
In fact, there is a huge body of work, including in design beginning at least with Lucy Suchman, that shows how valuable the ethno methodological perceptive is to design. Activity theory and a range of other situated action models (distributed cognition, etc) also trade on a move away from the 70s cognitivist tradition in a range of fields and back towards a Wittgensteinian and broadly pragmatic approach (Dewey, James) to how life is done and how it is done with technology as well.
Two bobs worth
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