Hi  Germán,

I admire your sentiment towards focusing on the human social aspect, but I
would extend your thought by arguing that design can be seen as a broad
human *activity* that transcends the reified categories we call disciplines.
However, I also think that responding by minimising the roles artefacts play
seems limiting, rather than opening.

Human beings think within contexts; thinking can be defined, along a
Deleuzian path, as a "violence" that is done to the thinker. The thinker is
identified as one who is forced to reconfigure concepts; thinking thus
implies "external" engagements. In this sense, the definition of thinking
splits from that of memory, or recognition, or contemplation, and is
identified with conceptual reconfiguration. In this model there is a
collaboration going on, in which thinking constructs itself from the
interconnections of those events circling around and through the "self" (to
whom we conventionally ascribe thinking).

The best way I know to see this, as an applied insight, is to watch people
in their environments. In particular, I would watch how those environments
interact to shape cognitive process, especially conceptual reconfiguration.
The variety of artefacts in the space will affect the way people think, the
kinds of ideas they have when thinking, the manner in which they relate to
their own and others' intellectual activity. (Hence why learning spaces is
such a hot topic in teaching and learning right now).

To minimise the impact (as part of that environment) of the artefact in the
thinking process tends to anthropomorphise thinking. I'm not trying to say
that there isn't a cognitive process that occurs in body. What I do want to
point out is that, on this model, cognitive processes don't really become
thinking until they are being affected by things outside themselves. From
this perspective, to minimise the artefact is to minimise the territory
within which the observation of thought occurs. It is to study a fish by
considering how it flips and flops when landed on the beach. It tells us
something, but not the whole story.

One of the reasons people get agitated about disciplinary distinctions, and
about definitions in general (take a look at that cell phone thread for a
prime example), is that people tend to reify categories. I believe I agree
with you here that this is problematic. We confuse maps for territories, and
believe that someone with an alternate insight (as Bohm would put it) is
confused or wrong.

As I am sure you're aware judging by your work (interesting stuff btw!),
game design and interaction design have parallel concerns, but they also
have severe divergences. For example, game design that is meaningful for its
intended user base can break every single one of Shneiderman's 8 golden
rules. Strong interaction design normally tries to avoid making users uneasy
by removing ambiguity and ensuring things are what they appear to be; a
Silent Hill or similar will play every uncanny trick in the book to creep
the player right out. Yet both practices are concerned with effective user
experience. In both cases, user experience has wildly differing
expectations. It is clear that user experience isn't always the "same
thing"; we apply these transcending categories to assist with knowledge
construction, sharing insights and trying new techniques - it's pragmatic.

But it isn't just disciplines where this kind of reification can happen. If
we believe that a user's understanding, emotion, and social interaction are
monolithic entities that exist *as defined*, we run into problems. If we see
these words as handles we assign to reflect our own particular insight, and
which reflect only our own insight, then we will really get into the
scientific thought processes that the cell phone thread wants to develop.

(That's why I didn't stick my head into that thread, btw - I saw much of it
as pointless, unreflective scholastic argument about reified categories.
Though there was some good stuff in there too! From my viewpoint, we get
much more insight from considering experience as composed of events, rather
than things. I prefer verbs to nouns, they allow me more pragmatic action in
conceptual reconfiguration. Hence my distaste for categorical waffling.)

Cheers,
Adam

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 2:09 AM, G. Mauricio Mejia
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> There is something that bothers me. This idea of different design fields
> such as industrial design, graphic design, information design, game design,
> service design, and so on. I rather prefer to think of design as a broad
> discipline that produces different objects with visual, interactive,
> material characteristics.
>
> I assumed that the concept of industrial design that Don mentioned refers
> to product, graphic, apparel, interior design. And the new concept of
> interaction design is an evolution of industrial design that focus on the
> immaterial, visual, interactive qualities of contemporary design objects. We
> can say for example that game design or information design produce very
> different design objects, but their design methods are quite similar. As
> "researchers" we need to focus more on issues of human interaction and
> sociocultural effects rather than the objects. We are today trying to design
> for human understanding, emotion, and social interaction; and this can be
> accomplished with information, services, games, physical products, or a
> combination of them.
>
> Finally, I want to quote Victor Margolin (2002): "But even when we look at
> design from new positions, we must still ask ourselves whether we are
> studying a specific class of things that are stabilized in categories such
> as crafts or industrially produced objects or whether the subject matter of
> design is really much broader. I think the latter is true" (p. 227). "For my
> purpose here, I will simply define design studies as the field of inquiry
> that addresses questions of how we make and use products in our daily lives
> and how we have done so in the past. This products comprise the domain of
> the artificial" (p. 229).
>
> Margolin, V. (2002). The Politics of Artificial: Essays on Design and
> Design Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
>
> Best,
>
> G. Mauricio Mejía
> Assistant professor, University of Caldas, Colombia.
> PhD in Design student, University of Minnesota, US.
> http://mejia.disenovisual.com
>



-- 
Adam Parker
Senior Lecturer, Games Design (Melbourne)

Qantm College Pty Ltd (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne)
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South Melbourne VIC 3205

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