Dear Alfredo

I meant to respond to your mail earlier, but perhaps this brief reponse could do for now.  I think there's definitely something to the idea that designerly ways of knowing could include something more, shall we say, emotive? While I would myself have some reservations about equating design activity with mere feeling, I am at the same time weary of those in the Aristotelian tradition, or the Central tradition, where I see myself situated, to posit too great a divide between the intellectual and the emotional.  

One could say that part of designing is the attentiveness to the manner in which good effects emerge unplanned, and to adopt these causal trajectories for the next intentional iteration.  Herbert Simon talks about this, about design that is fluid and without final goals,  and I could also add Frederic Hayek.  Hayek's discussion of how the free market emerged is an interesting one: the free market has all kinds of benefits for signaling wants and coordinating exchange, but no one intentionally invented it: it's a kind of evoluationary accident, a kind of cultural remnant of natural selection - but now on hindsight we know its good benefits, we can promote the free market. Indeed the free market could have emerged for all kinds of non-rational, even purely emotive reasons. Indeed this was Adam Smith's narrative was it not: that it was the child of self-interest, yet the effect is that it serves the many. 

Indeed as we well know feelings of all kinds inspire interesting behaviours that unintentionally result in good effects, which can be then in a next iteration be welcomed: this in fact was Hayek's account of what morality is. Something that had a questionable or perhaps emotive cause, and then in a next iteration, intelligently welcomed or promoted.  For instance, I was infatuated with my wife when I first met her, and after the illusion wore off, I thanked God that the person I married is indeed very good, and if I had to do it, I might do it all over again - but she was a difficult lady to tame: and had I not been so emotively, confusedly foolish, perhaps it would not have been this happy ending.

Perhaps one might insist that the theorising, the later, clear headed thinking rather than the muddle headed emotive is not design, but merely design theory, but if design theory is meant to capture what design is, then design could well be the first emotive, muddle headed explorative search, as well as the later, intelligent exploitation.  

Its interesting that in the latest incarnation of the Aristotelian-thomistic account of natural law theory, John Finnis, who speaks of the first principles of practical reason, speaks of their grasping as "abductive insights" (cf CS Peirce!), and abduction, is of course a kind of logic that is quite, I would say, designerly.  But such abductions, are semiosic leaps from representamen-signs, via an interpretant towards the final insight/sgnified, and the representamen-signs, in this case, must be amongst other things, inclinations, and perhaps feelings of fulfilment when having accidentally enjoyed a good or opportunity. And, if design needs to be guided by morality, and in the context of the AT tradition, therefore, the natural law, then these abductions which constitute the ethics would be part of the designerly logic, or its criticality, and that means then there is a very important place for feelings, indeed, feelings like curiousity or desires to make us explore, and feelings which are appetitive and result in a kind of lust or addiction (hopefully not too serious) that leads to a kind of commitment to the act, long enough for us to enjoy, feelings of satisfaction, and from all these, arrive via abduction, insights that what is happening, is in fact, good: valuable, choice-worthy, and not merely preferable (even though it is immensely so) , and its opposite, bad / evil.  Perhaps to borrow March, emotions are part of the repertoire of technologies of foolishness, useful for desigining.

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

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