Gunnar's fascinating prediction
>How magazine. They asked me to predict what graphic design would be like
in ten years (i.e., four or five years ago):
http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writing/NextTenYears.pdf<
This reminds me of a much earlier attempt to predict technological change
in society and chemistry. This was the project 2000 carried out by ICI in the
1960s in an era when people believed in 'science' as the way forward and
when the DRS was founded by people who believed that design could be made more
'scientific'.
The ICI predictions were wrong - most notably, they failed to include the
possibility that ICI would have ceased to exist.
This stuff on predictions grew out of earlier chat on innovation and
someone saying that design was not 'scientific' because it does not make
predictions. THAT IS VERY SILLY!
The idea that 'science' makes successful predictions was demolished years
ago. There are four strands to this demolition (can demolition have strands?)
1.Biology is a science but it does not claim predictive powers. When people
say 'scientific', they are thinking of physics. There is more to science
than physics.
2. The uncertainty principle demolishes the classical ideal of physics
being a predictive knowledge system.
3. The ideal of classical physics is just that - an ideal. Real physics has
to cope with approximations.
Take the solar system, for example. By comparison with living systems the
solar system is pretty simple - yes? BUT even with modern computers, no one
can predict the future path of all the members of the system. Newton tried
and his approximations predicted that the solar system would fall apart in 700
years. He suggested that the system was kept going by God's finger giving
it a push now and then.
It is now known that it is impossible to model a gravitational system with
three or more bodies. So prediction is impossible.
4. The idea that science progressed through making predictions, testing
them in the laboratory and showing them to be right was demolished years ago.
Popper tried to resurrect something from the remains of the demolition by
saying that science progressed by making predictions and then finding out what
was wrong with them and not by proving what was 'true'.
Learning by mistakes is, of course, characteristic of most human activities
including design. If a philosopher of science says that 'conjectures and
refutations' are the stuff of science, who are we to argue?
John Z L
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