Clive
Your reminder is refreshing. I would add that it is also important to
think about how understanding leads to action. I am not sure that a
science based conversation can or should lead to such explorations,
however. When research is the apriori design of inquiry framing
discussions there are limits to possible outcomes. This is apparent in
the conflation of the expected outcomes of D. Design. programs with
Ph.D. and other advanced degree programs in relationship to research-
based inquiry for example. The epistemic controversies around DKIW,
the Knowledge Pyramid and similar categorical models point to
difficulties using even the well developed scientific method. It seems
that maybe too much 'research' supporting advanced degrees in design
and professional design practice is not aware of such issues thus
reducing the real potential of good research and the effectiveness of
good researchers.
I was reminded by recent emails that Rittel introduced his students to
the idea of 'sachzwang' (German term) which he said meant "facts lead
to action". The belief that facts could define deontics relieved
planners, politicians and others from having to make difficult
decisions or judgments based on values, world views etc. That is why
he developed his methods for arguing issues (IBIS) rather than merely
researching issues. The push in the US by Federal agencies and
academic institutions to develop a 'science of design' is an example
of the desire for sachzwang.
It would be great to be able to have design-focused dialogues that
could further develop designs of inquiry that expand the boundaries of
scholarship and practice to include 'understanding' and 'action' as
outcomes.
Harold
On Oct 11, 2008, at 6:22 AM, Clive Dilnot wrote:
> 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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