On 24 April 2013 06:10, Jinan K B <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

"Toulmin advocated a return to humanism<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism>
 consisting of four returns: a return to oral communication and discourse,
a plea which has been rejected by modern philosophers, whose scholarly
focus is on the printed page; a return to the particular, or individual
cases that deal with practical moral issues occurring in daily life (as
opposed to theoretical principles that have limited practicality); a return
to the local, or to concrete cultural and historical contexts; and,
finally, a return to the timely, from timeless problems to things whose
rational significance depends on the time lines of our solutions."

I would like to support this approach, since I wrote:
"In the article on cybernetic conversation (above) I state that
*systemic *thinking,
which implies the inclusion of the person or the group that commissions the
design in the first place, used to be a taken-for-granted and *integral *part
of the ‗design‘ process when design was still looked upon as a craft, and
the term design had much more value as a process than it did as a product.
As such, as I do in the paper above, we could speak of design without
beginning and without end, or, more practically speaking, the next good
beginning came from the previous ending; each copy, say, of a chair or a
cabinet was its own original, each its own beginning that stemmed from the
lessons learned during the process of making the previous one. The aura of
the original idea was migrated to each new ‗copy‘ as the craftsman
developed his art. Very unfortunately, with the development of disciplines
came the differentiation between complex beginnings and endings, and they
seemed to turn into simplified black and white things, each its own
original with no links to any other, and rationality and reason came to
symbolise the facticity of empirical detail. ―From the mid-seventeenth
century on … an imbalance began to develop‖ between reason and
reasonableness, between human adaptability and argumentation and the
rigours and proofs of formal argumentation (Toulmin, 2001:14-15), just as
an imbalance gradually came to be established between mass production
(begun with the Industrial Revolution, c. 1750) and a craft sensibility. "

Toulmin was arguing (as indeed Prof Slamat of Stellenbosch University is
arguing at this moment, i.e., to put humaneness back into 'rationality')
for the "reason" that can emerge during dialogue ... in a new type of
orality (called Dialogue by David Bohm).

Our design students benefitted much more from group work (dialogue within
the group, dialogue with others, including the end-users), since, very much
like small children, they were finding out what they needed to know "on the
spot" - they were learning to learn ...

Johann





In the article on cybernetic conversation (above) I state that

*systemic *thinking, which implies the inclusion of the person or the group
that commissions the design in the first place, used to be a
taken-for-granted and *integral *part of the ‗design‘ process when design
was still looked upon as a craft, and the term design had much more value
as a process than it did as a product. As such, as I do in the paper above,
we could speak of design without beginning and without end, or, more
practically speaking, the next good beginning came from the previous
ending; each copy, say, of a chair or a cabinet was its own original, each
its own beginning that stemmed from the lessons learned during the process
of making the previous one. The aura of the original idea was migrated to
each new ‗copy‘ as the craftsman developed his art. Very unfortunately,
with the development of disciplines came the differentiation between
complex beginnings and endings, and they seemed to turn into simplified
black and white things, each its own original with no links to any other,
and rationality and reason came to symbolise the facticity of empirical
detail. ―From the mid-seventeenth century on … an imbalance began to
develop‖ between reason and reasonableness, between human adaptability and
argumentation and the rigours and proofs of formal argumentation (Toulmin,
2001:14-15), just as an imbalance gradually came to be established between
mass production (begun with the Industrial Revolution, c. 1750) and a craft
sensibility.



-- 
Dr. Johann van der Merwe
Independent Design Researcher


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