I am reminded of Herbert Simon, not that he spoke of design that is not goal oriented, but he did suggest that design can be without final goals, in the sense that design can be open to new (previously unforeseen) goals different from the original goals (becisely because rationality is bounded, and you cannot have foreseen everything), and is so then design can be pursued not so much to achieve the original goals but to emerge new goals (this design becomes a strategy for searching new preferences, a way of responding positively to our limits of reason). He had some help from James March when he came up with this in the 3rd edition of the Sciences of the Artificial, but by the time we come to March, in organizational design or better the design/engineering of behaviors, theres the talk not merely of design without final goals, but of the need to stimulate, for design/decision making, a kind of logic of appropriateness, which is contrasted with the goal oriented logic of consequences. Basically a kind of deontology that looks to the duties associated with one's identity, then the utilitarian end goals one wishes to pursue. Thus his Don Quixote example: I am a knight, and this is what I do -- a kind of altruistic foolishness, but which is useful because it fosters exploration, when the typical tendency is to be locked in on exploitation. This seems prescriptive but it may well be not too far from the truth as a kind of descriptive account of the world. Perhaps there are these altruistic knights all around, because most of us are in organizations, and are docile enough to be taxed without being aware of it. Like Don Quixote, we think we are doing ourselves a whole lot of good by subscribing to moral logics of deontology, when in fact we are sacrificing our own fitness for the greater common good. A kind of "invisible hand" thing going on in organizations.
J
-----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 Ranulph Glanville
Sent: Monday, 06 January, 2014 3:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Non-goal-directed design
I think it's not so much a matter of whether design is goal-oriented or not, but of how we chose to describe it, and what we want to get out of this description. It seems to me that, on this list, we all too often confuse a "thing" described for the description we make of it, and vice versa.
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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