dear eduardo,
ok, i may have misread shades of your earlier post responding to terry.
i am glad you agree that information isn't there to be picked up and
processed for what it is, that it is created in the process of attending to
something, like reading text or doing experiments.  true, there are
conventional ways of readings which seem to displace the human creativity
involved.  what about:

(1) (re)search is the creation of information.
information is what someone believes to be arguably correct and is committed
to take it as such.  the arguments involved may well include the use of
acceptable methods.  the emphasis on arguability renders information a
social phenomenon, not an exclusively cognitive one, one of con-sensual
coordination with others

(2) design is creatively extending, elaborating, questioning, and overcoming
existing information in view of the future realities promoted for others to
live in.
in my experiences design needs to find a delicate balance between accepting
certain information and violating what everyone seem to take for granted and
convince stakeholders in a design of its virtues. 

klaus   

-----Original Message-----
From: Eduardo Corte Real [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 11:01 AM
To: Klaus Krippendorff; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Design as Research?

Dear Klaus,



It wasn't me that used the term gathering.

In fact I responded to Terry saying that his axiom could not be an axiom.

I wrote the two axioms you read in order to show the absurdity of such
gatherish start.

I resented specifically the verb gathering. It seemed not to serve a vision
of Design as Creative activity with a particular History (initiated long
before the Sciences of the Artificial).

I think we agree in general because I also don't think that information is a
tangible object, that's one of the reasons that I prefer the term
organization to the term gathering.

I would rephrase Terry's Axiom as:

1. All design methods are methods of organizing Information.

I hope that does not collide with your human centered stance. Also hope that
I'm allowed to organize non-tangible things.

The good thing about Terry's axiom is that it links Design with information
in a very simple way.

As you very well put, reading a book creates information. that's why we
cannot say in the first axiom that all design methods are methods of
creating information since there are a great lot of design methods that are
defined as not creating information, such as listing information. You may
say that even that creates information. Yes it creates, but the nature of
that method would be by definition non-creational and, as such, a design
method. I would say that creating information, as you so well remarked,
corresponds to a way of organizing information. The "created" information
cannot be else than a reconfiguration of the existing (read) information
with the existing individual information. In fact, the created information
is organized information.  I'm not saying that the created information is
like a centaur, a sum of man and horse (although intangible also) but more
like a mutant (and all yet-to-exist mutants are intangible too).

While I was writing this, Terry was writing too. Gaining information is
better. Intuitively, I can see that his axioms are working very well in
linking information with methods but not so well with linking design methods
with information. The vastness of other methods that serve to gain
information other than design methods seem to make this axiom rather
useless. We can also say with any doubt that All Designs Methods are
Methods. If you imagine that information is intangibly overwhelmingly in
every biological social animal's mind as well as before him/her, all methods
have a relation with information.

Hour question here is to choose the particular action, verb, whatever, that
may describe totally, because an axiom requires it so, what design methods
are, related to information.

I think that if we postulate or deduct that "by praxis and intentional
action in design methods we gain information" we are contradicting the fact
that evidently by praxis and intentional methods we decrease information
until we reach a Design for something. In fact the act of
organizing/creating information is an act of discarding information at some
stage of most design methods and this is the usual cost of creating "new"
information which in fact is what Designed stuff is.

Best, Eduardo