Dear Ken,
thanks (again) for your excellent new references – never heard of cliodynamics before, surely must take a look at it. And I share your reservation about the easiness of modeling development of designed artifacts using mathematics over a large sample. But what sort of research then is possible with historical material, and what sort of questions one can ask? Your pondering is a great springboard to elaborate this a bit more -- perhaps the number of chairs in the sample will not be such a problem. This is something I have been musing over a bit, so I must jump in again -- hope not ending  in the front of a firing squad... :-)

Ken Friedman kirjoitti 29.8.2012 kello 2.04:

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann (2011) discusses the broad range of issues, challenges, and problems facingresearchers who want to model regularities in human affairs. The kinds of issues Gell-Mann raises suggest that it might be possible to model specificproblems in the development of designed artifacts – with a rich enough library of exemplars. It is probable, however, that this would only be true if we could identify enough exemplars of the designed artifacts in question to model the specific aspects we wish to examine with an appropriate sense of context. We can model languages, travel routes, or credit card transaction patterns because we map them to a relative degree of certainty. How would we know when we had accumulated a library of chairs sufficient to map the evolution of chair design with respect to specific design questions? This is quite a different problem than modelling the general evolution of the chair.

(Chairs may, BTW,  not be most fruitful starting points for a couple of reasons. First, chairs must be one of the most general artifacts in existence, because supporting a human body in a seated position is ubiquitous (although most Japanese do fabulously well without chairs...), and that generality may make it difficult to find distinctions. Secondly, a large part of current chair design is apparently devoted to items whose main purpose is to impress one's peers by a show of design skills, something that has a bit nastily been dubbed as "vanity design" -- perhaps "self-expression" might be a nicer word. A lot of self-expression in a sample for an evolution study will surely make waters muddy, so to say...)

Cooking up new metaphors is notoriusly unrewarding sport, but let's give it a try anyway. A geologist is not interested in any particular hill, lake, gorge or bay (that would be a geographer!) just because of their locality and particularity; he or she is trying to understand the formation and transformation of earth's uppermost crust over eons of time, and these are just unnecessary details in that picture. But to get any data to ruminate upon what may have been happened, the only possibility is to return to those local and particular hills, lakes, etc., because every one of them can give a witness account of what has happened to it over the course of time. True, these accounts are partial, biased and distorted, but by collecting enough of them, some hypothesis can be formed, and from that on any new witness is no more selected arbitrarily, but due to its capability to bring more light to issues relevant to the hypothesis under development. The end result will be an explanatory account of a transformation process, supported by a sequence of material witnesses of particular hills, lakes etc., selected because of their capability to illustrate the existence of a certain phase in the process.

Metaphorically, something similar might happen with artifacts.

Artifacts are, however,  half-muted witnesses; the further (geographically and historically) they are taken from practices they are used, the more feeble is their voice, and eventually it dies down. The museums around the world are full of artifacts nobody has a clue what for and how they were once used (the weasel word for them is "cult objects":-)). Artifacts reveal themselves fully only in  human practices, and correspondingly they should not be studied separately.

Thus it may be difficult to talk about a "general evolution of the chair" beyond the objects of art sequence of egyptian, renaissance, modern, postmodern etc. chairs. I am not sure how much can be said about the chair in general, without any reference to the practices where it has been and is used. And there the question is not about evolution of an isolated artifact but an artifact serving in a purposefully human practice, and co-evolving with that practice. So we have a number of evolutionary sequences, and it does not necessarily help much to make comparisons across them. Speaking from the artifact point of view, we have the evolution of street cafe chairs, dinner table chairs, thrones, dentist chairs etc.; sequences of artifacts each of which can give a witness account form a moment frozen in time. They are each results of an attempt to get practical, economical, and cultural factors favorably balanced at that moment, and by studying  the sequence it might be possible to reveal what were the most important factors pushing the move from one to another, and to understand some of the dynamics involved.

The number of data points needed for such analysis is not necessarily large; we are not in a need of a statistical proof but plausible hypothesis as a starting point that can then be further refined (or refuted). Look at the Norman & Verganti paper: how many data points they have, just a few. But is is an eye-opener: even if in the future we would have to decide that the analysis was only half-baked, they show that such analysis is possible and can produce thought-provoking results. Enough for the first harbinger.

What sort of questions would one be able to ask from such a material? Certainly not "specific design questions", but more general education: given this and this conditions, this and this has happened; it seems that designer interventions might be more successful if these factors would be better taken into account -- the general fold of the sediments, so to say.

But even the artifact-practice pairs may still be too local and particular to serve as a foundation for a discipline; we would  need the "transformation of the uppermost crust of earth" of our own. My vote goes for "dynamics of materially-mediated relationships between humans and world" (of which supporting a person in a seated position -- corresponding artifact: a chair  -- is one). That is grand and general enough :-)

Long enough, I was a bit carried away, sorry...
--Kari Kuutti
Univ. Oulu, Finland

PS. Don, no offence taken if you have misspelled my first name; I'm bit  more concerned when Ken is misspelling my family name – they are using family names to count citations, aren't they...