Dear Francois

This is an important thread.

Already in Simon and March one sees them arguing for a broader repertoire of preferences and engineering/designing curriculum and organizations to help us discover new preferences. Design itself becomes an important heuristic or technology of foolishness to search for new preferences: experience drinking wine, you might like it! Design, and then you might emerge new effects which can then become new goals, if these effects are desirable. Says Simon and March. Simon in his later pieces spoke of a new reason to satisfice: because our final newly discovered goal-preferences are inter-alia incommensurable. Therefore one cannot maximize by comparing across options. Already here one sees Simon edging away from the value-monism of the typical GDP measures of growth.

One here needs to connect up with work in ethics and welfare economics. Sabina Alkire, John Finnis and Amartya Sen's work all come to mind. These authors try to develop a list of incommensurable goods worth seeking, intelligible goals grasped by reason to be normatively choiceworthy (i.e. desirable in themselves and not merely desired) conceived as dimensions of happiness. But design is also important. Could design itself be a kind of dimension of happiness? I think it can and must. That creative, abductive capacity now lost in University education, is part of what it means to be a human perhaps? Human flourishing includes our capacity to make something of ourselves, to realize, to design, perhaps our conceptions of ourselves, or of ourselves through our work, etc, by shaping what we have around us creatively, exploiting the affordances of our everyday objects, and overcoming constraints, Designing (in Kress's sense) reshaping perhaps even signs to communicate these new notions of who we are. Finnis lists one basic goods a skillful play--perhaps that's what he is getting at: creative designerly constructivity--even a violinist can design in this sense: although he or she is constrained by the score he or she can still exploit the affordances of tone, speed, rhythm, etc to Design the composed piece towards his or her interested intention.

The tricky thing here is to articulate this creative capacity well, and to give a very precise account of what kind of designerly (if I may) creative knowing is valuable. The traditional GDP measures may have some very strong neoliberal roots, and as a whole betrays affinities with certain conceptions of the human that belong to a kind of world view we would call secular. In this secular world the human person is to be valued for this capacity for arbitrary willfulness, and everything that he or she shapes is purely his own artificial making (factum), and all that we have that bind us are contracts which we create amongst ourselves. Here too man is on his own and decides for himself according to his preferential whims, and for this reason measures of success are his own inventions, and justly so: because he likes it that way. This secular worldview with all these corollaries has been exposed as a theological thesis, a result of Franciscan voluntarist theologies gone wrong, a heresy (Milbank) which celebrates a God of arbitrary will (think Occam, who insinuated that God could will us to hate him), and therefore man, who is imago Dei, and hence like God is self-creative, arbitrary will. Simon and March, in my judgment were still trapped in this paradigm, because both seem to endorse the humean idea that reason is and ought to be the slave of one's passions--Simon explicitly, and March to this day seemingly still introducing in final analysis mere new preferences *but not moral reasons*.

But an alternative, and more consistent with Finnis and Alkire, is the account which sees the creative human-design as an image (imago) of a God who is logos, reasonableness, and who shares his reasonableness with his image. Hence Finnis whose moral theory draws heavily on Aquinas, speaks of our capacity for practical reason as a certain participation of God's own reason, or in his words: the natural law is merely a certain participation of the eternal law. I think it would be very interesting to explore and develop the kind of designerly knowing that would be thomistic, and which sees creative designing as fully infused and guided by ethical precepts and ideals, and precisely as a kind of participation of the transcendent. Here man realizes, through his designing work, not only that work which he designs transitively, but his own value qua imago dei.

In other words design needs to be fully involved in this discussion, but it must I feel, find the right allies.

Jude

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Francois Nsenga
Sent: Monday, 12 March, 2012 7:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Change of Paradigm for Design

Dear all

Just sharing the following link:

http://www.isisacademy.com/resources/

with those among us who have not yet heard about an interesting report by Alan AtKisson of the AtKisson Group (http://www.AtKisson.com<http://www.atkisson.com/>),
recently commissioned by the Tokyo based 'Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy, and Society' (http://ishes.org/en/). AtKisson's report is a broad overview of the current paradigm change, slowly away from the centuries old Political Economy "Growth" paradigm, towards a "Gross National Happiness" hopefully deriving from an already burgeoning "Green Economy".

Whether in academy completing a PhD, teaching or researching, or in business practice, I thought important for us all to be aware and to explore further how our field of Design would fit in, and eventually actively contribute to the implementation of the new paradigm.

Best wishes

Francois
Montreal
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg

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