All,
I have been reminded in this last round of posts by Terry of a line in
one of Heidegger’s late essays” ‘Perhaps there is a thinking which is
more sober-minded than the incessant frenzy of rationalization and the
intoxicating quality of cybernetics.’
What has surprised me in the long and interminable debate about
“information” 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
“information”; these tendencies, rampant within technology and all
too present within design, point also, somewhat sadly, to the endemic
uselessness of most “design research.” If “research” is reduced to
information-seeking (in the manner of undergraduate students doing
“research” 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 “research” 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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