Ken
I agree with your primate reference - apes have the ability to not only use tools in quite imaginative ways, but they can also reason conceptually - i.e., "see" things that are not there, yet.
This is part of design thinking, when an ape can "fore-see" and build a "tree" (thing to use for climbing) from boxes to reach a bunch of bananas hanging from ther ceiling.
Squid & octupus can "reason" their way out of what seems at first enclosed places ... planning is "design" thinking ...
Second, actor-network theory works extermely well for design thinking and the design process, as long as we do not forget that the non-human actors (the designed objects, events & systems) were designed by US in the first place, so the non-human actor is in a sense the proxy for a human actor, and our interactions with, and relations to, the designed object, is in fact those with humans, or at least their intentions (even lack of ...).
You are correct, it is not the machine that "acts" but the human via his extensions ... even at a great remove.
Thirdly, apologies for not making myself clear.
When I argue that “design thinking is not done by the mind” I am referring to a state of the world (the way we think it works) that correlates with your view that, "For the rest of us, the profession of design generally involves design as
service for others. In this sense, design and design thinking are distinctly
human processes, often social, and always lodged in systems of some kind."
Normally, when people speak about anything "done by the mind" they mean by a single, individual mind, as if the planning and intricate concept for a designed system could originate and develop within one single "mind" - that is not so.
Design thinking CAN be done by a single "mind" but then it is called artistic license, and I will have nothing to do with such indulgence.
Design is always a social act, and design thinking is done by multiple "minds" interacting ... the thinking act is only possible, consciousness in only possible because of some form of interaction, with "the other".
There is no "self" as such.
The only design-by-single-mind aspect that exists is the inevitable and necessary, final, individual interpretation (and translation, cf. Actor-network Theory) of those interactions ... and then only if you are the boss and can make that decision, otherwise it remains a group decision, a group "think" as it were.
Johann
Johann van der Merwe
HOD: Research, History & Theory of Design
Faculty of Informatics and Design
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
South Africa
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