The sentiment is somewhat also expressed in the
first half of Slavoj Zizek's short piece about
the current financial crisis:
"Don't just do something, talk"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v00/n03/zize01_.html
Cameron
On 10/11/08 9:22 AM, "Clive Dilnot" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> All,
> I have been reminded in this last round of posts by Terry of a line in
> one of Heidegger¹s late essays² ŒPerhaps there is a thinking which is
> more sober-minded than the incessant frenzy of rationalization and the
> intoxicating quality of cybernetics.¹
>
> What has surprised me in the long and interminable debate about
> ³information² is the lack of attention to understanding.
>
> If the question is the possible transformation of the situation‹and this
> is after all the question for a designer faced with or standing in
> relation to a situation in which there is a consideration of change of
> change or creation or renewal‹‹then what is operative, what matters, in
> relation to the whole is not information but understanding. What is
> required is understanding of the possibilities or potentiality contained
> in that situation.
>
> To reduce understanding to information, to give weight only to
> ³information²; these tendencies, rampant within technology and all
> too present within design, point also, somewhat sadly, to the endemic
> uselessness of most ³design research.² If ³research² is reduced to
> information-seeking (in the manner of undergraduate students doing
> ³research² for their projects, then this simply means that all that
> is significant about design takes place outside of research for its is
> only here that understanding happens.
>
> The problem however, and we are all aware of it, is that displaced back
> out of research‹which we can also, at best, define as a zone of design
> work that attempts to bring design to articulate self-consciousness of
> itself‹then understanding has little recourse other than to stay in the
> realm of intuition.
>
> What is doubly self destructive about the ipso facto equation of
> information and research is that it destroys, in the same moment, the
> possibility of articulate understanding (which means an understanding of
> the possibilities of a situation and of the ways in which the
> capabilities that design accesses and puts forward may or may not be
> deployed in that situation) and denies itself, as ³research² a
> meaningful role in all that truly matters.
>
> Regards
>
> Clive
>
>
> Clive Dilnot
> Professor of Design Studies
> Dept. Art and Design Studies, Rm 609
> Parsons School of Design,
> New School University,
> 2w 13th St.
> New York NY 10011
>
> T.1-212-229-8916 x1481
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