Dear Eduardo:
I am rereading yours again because much as I disagree with it in certain respects, I think it has very important ideas. I want now to engage your second part of the post.
Yours, MP's and Klaus' and then Don's reminds me of a thread that died after a while some time ago: one on Heidegger and design. Hubert Dreyfus' Heidegger was an attack on his appreciation of Herbert Simon's scientistic cognitivism, if I may, which grasps thinking in terms typically of a type of propositional thought (very positivist). Of course, there's quite abit later elsewhere ein Simon about intuition, but let's put that aside. Reading Eduardo's post again, there's the emphasis there on design thinking as a kind of thinking in art. In Heidegger therein is the idea that one needs some kind of activity, some kind of skillful doing, which art is , to unconceal meanings, and perhaps in relation to that, new ideas. And sketching, drawing, and even reading (the medieval used not to read as we do now, but actially READ ALOUD, esp Augustine), and that opened up areas of thinking that a kind of arm chair Cartesian contemplative or theoretical rationalism could not, and perhaps that could be imported into the discussion that criticizes Simon. So perhaps the question is not merely, is design thinking unique to designers (designer understood in your sense, covering the kind of people whose practice you think more focally design and designing), but is there a kind of thinking-doing unique to Design? And perhaps it has to do with this skillful doing, rather than primarily scientistic cognitivism (whether rationalist or empiricist): in that sense a theoria, (not theoretical thinking), but a kind of unconcealing doing - the gazing at the gods who gaze back at us (thea harao). It seems to me there a kind of abductive thinking, a kind of creativity. Perhaps the "thinking" is really a kind of doing, a doing that leads to thought, and meaningful ontologies. I'm still trying to get a more complete sense of why amongst the professional Design community is this rejection of Simon's thinking and employment of the word design to cover the things he does. Sciences in the 3rd edition, I actually found refreshing, and stimulating. And also Simon does not say that medicine is design, but rather that medicine is a profession (doing things, rather than modeling and describing things) and a profession is centrally design (but not merely design obviously). If Descartes sat in his armchair and holding his cup of cocao thought out in a series of meditations a "first philosophy of furniture design", intended to guide furniture design practice, would that kind of meditation still be design for you?
Also the question whether design thinking is unique to design is important for another reason (not just for recognition of the specialist knowledge professional designers have), and is one we have to unpack further. If we ask whether design thinking is unqiue to design, do we mean to ask if it is a thinking that is unqiue in the sense that it is found only in design and relevant only to design, or do we mean to ask if it is found only in design and relevant not only to design but to others as well, which seems to me to suggest that it cannot in the end merely be something unique to design (since in principle, being relevant to other non-design fields, it would be transferable into those fields). One of the exciting things, Simon says, is that design is something common in various arenas outside of say graphic or furniture design, and so relevant in ways that graphic designer may not envisage, and THEREFORE a case may be made for the university to TEACH DESIGN (specially design focally understood, not design willly nilly) AS part of the Core of the curriculum, say as part of one's liberal (arts) education in a university. This seems to me a very exciting idea: not merely design that makes one a graphic designer, but design that if focal or normatively abstracted, that is taught and reflected upon, and relevant for students generally. This helps broaden up the potential and relevance of design as a discipline.
Jude
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From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eduardo Corte-Real
The distintction between hard sciences and professional training and the prevalence of the first in university that HS complaints about is never confronted with Design as discipline of Art in a broad sense except in the riesling and cigar episode. Plus, I think that what HS calls "intellectual activity" is the kind of processes that we use to play sudoku and not the activity of reading Proust or watching Visconti. If you care to take a look at the authors he refers to we could hardly say that the sciences of the artificial is a book on Design. But yet it is a book on a human capacity that English speakers also call design. Although Francisco d' Hollanda in 1540's put in Michelangelo's mouth that desegno is the source of all sciences, it would be ridiculous to say in Portugese: "um medico faz design" or "as escolas de arquitectura, educacao, gestao, direito e medicina estao na sua essencia dedicadas ao processo do design". I'm only saying this to stress that the word Design that become global is the same that you (in English) use to designate specific professions ( that isolated normally means either graphic or product Design) or some attributes in some objects.
So in that sense saying tha t all professions design is not helping to answer the question is design thinking unique to Design ? because do not inquires about the nature of design thinking that only designers use. In a sense is similar to say that all professions think.
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National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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