Re: Projection before Analysis Not Act Fiirst, Do The Research Later
Dear Keith and Rosan,
With these careful limits on the concept of projection before analysis,
I think we have some common ground.
People project first in this sense. This is the essence of pragmatism,
and it is the way that human beings think and work.
This is a much clearer proposal than the earlier response to Derek
Miller. All human inquiry – and all research – begins in projection
in the sense that you both use it here. With policy design, one must
nevertheless engage in research before acting.
This is also different to Don Norman’s blog post. Don is specifically
calling for action first in certain kinds of processes. Where he speaks
of expert designers acting before engaging in research, he is saying,
“Let’s prototype on the basis of expert knowledge as the first
and quickest way to get reasonable results. Then we can get down to
deeper research.”
In a sense, this is Pelle Ehn’s approach for certain processes. When
it comes to prototyping and testing responses to web sites, it is also
the “prototype first, research later” approach that Ian Ayres
advocates in his book Super-Crunchers.
When we limit the term projection to such terms as guess, hunch,
conjecture, hypothesis, speculation, or scenario, the idea of projecting
first is not simply the way human beings think – it is also a process
that functions well in designing scientific experiments as well as
designing other kinds of processes.
Best regards,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia
--
Keith Russell wrote:
—snip—
I think the distinctions you make are useful as ways of watching what
we do when we do stuff. Catching ourselves thinking and acting requires
certain skills that can be employed with or without reflection on the
processes.
Phenomenology can assist in making us more aware of how we are always
more in the world and of the world than we bother to attend to.
—snip—
Rosan Chow wrote:
—snip—
Projection, as I understand how Jonas uses it to mean, is a form of
thinking and its outcome is a form of knowledge, although highly
fallible. (This fits well with what you have said.) It is so fallible
that people label it as guess, hunch, conjecture, hypothesis,
speculation, scenario, fiction and what have you. These would only earn
the title knowledge after we act on them. (You must see the shadow of
Dewey and Peirce here?)
With ‘projection before analysis’, I want(ed) to follow others (too
many to name, but Ranjan was my defender, so I must mention him in
particular) to say that the capacity to project about the unknown and
into the future is the chief competence of design(ers). Projection
might/should guide the analysis of the present (the province of
descriptive and explanatory research) and not the other way around as we
have been indoctrinated.
—snip—
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