Hello all,
I am writing a book on design with a handful of colleagues in strategic design, professors in the emerging design program at Georgetown University, friends in analytic philosophy, and partners in my design design consultancy, Mighty. I’m hoping to use this list to source existing work that we missed on our topic (and later, as we get closer to completion, feedback on our work).
We are exploring an understanding of design that contrasts with the existing, broadest definitions of design – those that describe design as a variety of problem solving, or as an activity to move from an existing state to a preferred state. These definitions fail, we argue, not (only) because they are too broad, but because they are simply inaccurate. They are based on a mistaken assumption that design is, at its core, a goal-directed activity.
Our research and collaborative experience spans psychology of goal-directed behavior, sociology of action, philosophy of intentions and practical reasoning, research on creativity, research on problem solving, artificial intelligence research, and a variety of other areas.
Our foremost interest in these areas, and my purpose of posting here, is to find literature that provides a direct treatment of the assumption that all human action is goal-directed in nature. In some fields this is referred to as practical reasoning (of the instrumental variety), teleological / means-ends schemas (in sociology, mainly), problem solving (in a variety of fields influenced by what we call the paradigm of problematization), human intentions (not to be confused with intentionality, in the philosophical sense), and so on.
Our position is this: design is not a goal-directed / ends-focused / teleological activity. We are looking for literature or people who have formed similar or adversarial positions, or those who would like to form either position now for discussion.
Please feel free to reply off-list if you prefer.
Thanks,
Arjun
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