All,
Artefacts are complex translations of understanding and knowledge, at
once of the human world they address and seek resonance with, and of the
conditions of their own manufacture and realization.
In respect of the former consider Elaine Scarry's discussion of the
"knowingness that surrounds us everywhere in the recreated external
world.' Scarry takes, as an instance,
a child-proof Asprin bottle. What is it she asks, that this little
bottle knows about the human world? "It knows about the chemical and
neuronal structure of small aches and pains, and about the human desire
to be free of those pains." And she continues, "It knows about the size
of a hand that will reach out to relieve those aches and pains. It knows
that it is itself dangerous to those human beings if taken in large
doses. It knows that these human beings know how to read and
communicates with them on the subject of amounts through language. It
also knows that some human beings do not yet know how to read or read
only a different language. It deals with this problem by further knowing
how human beings intuitively and habitually take caps off bottles, and
by being counterintuitive in its own cap, [. . .] it contains within its
design a test for helping to ensure responsible usage that has all the
elegance of a simple three-step mathematical proof." (The Body in Pain,
p.305)
Any configuration is the embodiment of, and a proposition about,
complex understanding. This means that artefacts are repositories of
"knowledge"--though the term understanding captures much better the
complexity of what is deposited (as consciousness) in the artefact,
since the “knowing" embodied is not simply factual or given but is a
knowledge also, and indeed most importantly, about relations. Put
another way, things are translations, even when what they embody as
knowing has never previously existed as such.
This is why it is possible for artefacts to embody new “knowledge.”
If they were simply the deposit of facts things would simply mirror the
existing state of knowing. But things do not simply mirror given facts
or categories. On occasion they propose radical re-configurations of
knowing. Much of what we tend to value, historically, in design, as
exemplars of the craft, are such re-configurations; such embodied
questions which we continue to try to answer.
Are then things themselves knowledge? No. Things are the occasion of or
for knowledge (or better, knowing). To become again knowledge or knowing
the thing has to be translated. This is why, to come back to the PhD,
pure practice, or practice without translation, is not the production of
knowledge but (only!) the production of what could be the occasion for
knowledge.
The true fun for design knowing—which so few have yet dared to
attempt—is to seek to deduce new patterns of knowing and understanding
from new forms of artefacts. This is in part, I think, what Simon
attempted to get at, though by no means convincingly, in the sections on
“Understanding by Simulating” in Sciences of the Artificial (p.
13-17 of 3rd edition).
This is also why configuration is key. Configuration in artefacts is
the particular patterning that “knowing” takes in an artefact.
Changing configuration changes patterns and relations of knowing. The
intellectual adventure of design—the adventure in terms of knowledge
and knowing—is here, in fathoming the relation between configuration
and modes of knowing.
Best wishes from a Thanksgiving New York
Clive
Clive Dilnot
Professor of Design Studies
Parsons School of Design/
New School University
Room #731, 7th Floor
6 E16th St
New York
NY 10011
T. (1)-212-229-8916 x1481
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