Dear Don and all,
Don, I'm wondering how would you actualise (manufacture, build, implement
etc) a gestaltung? Would you need something like a design (specifications,
drawings, etc)?
If so, does that mean that the gestalter's job is a pre-design process?
On your other point, I read Divid Kirsh's paper and realised how much in
advance of a lot of current thinking in design it is. I really enjoyed
reading it. Thank you David for making interesting material accessible and
thanks Don for pointing to it.
At the same time, I realised how much out of date it is. Though to explain
why takes us into other territories of design research and design theory.
'Abstract until it ceases to be useful' was part of the design thinking
advice by Prof Michael French in the early 70s.
It means to start with trying to see a situation and its causal factors and
relationships and their dynamics (usual systems approach to designing
things) .
Then, to go more abstract and look at the characteristics of the causal
factors and what causes them, and causes *their* dynamics.
Then to look at how to characterise and explain those causes of the
behaviours and dynamics of the causal factors that affect those previous
characteristics of causal factors, relationships and their dynamics
Then abstract further and further and further - until it ceases to be
useful. Which is often at many levels of abstraction above the situation
being considered.
Same applies to interactions and theories about relationships between body
and thinking, and its effect on design activity and user behaviours.
David has usefully gone up a couple of levels of abstraction to look at 1)
how individuals actions interact with their thinking; and 2) how individuals
mental and physical representations of their actions (e.g. by marking)
affects the ways their actions and thinking interact. He then offers and
explanation of this phenomena. There are other explanations of this e.g.
from martial arts where marking is used to enable one to exceed the usual
limitations of movement reaction time and physical speed and limitations on
thinking ability at highest speeds. There are also alternative explanations
in performance. I remember doing analyses in the 80s on jazz guitarists'
speed in responding to errors (if the calculations were correct their time
to response to and correct error is faster than the time for the neural
processing from audition of the error).
There's a bunch of different explanations like David's at this level of
analysis. All of them are likely to be wrong.
The reason is visible if you move up a level or two of abstraction and
look at the roles of variety, variability and error signals in enabling the
body-brain thinking processes of dance, design or whatever. A short simple
starting explanation that points to some of the main concepts is at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652347/ Its worth reading to
see the differences to David's analysis.
The more full explanation is that bodies (including brain and the highly
limited processes of conscious and sub-conscious thinking that we are
capable) are implemented by and implement through even more abstract
systems that manage and are processed by systems whose main variables are
the dynamics of variety, variability and error signals rather than the
factors we usually think about. It strongly suggests we need to move several
layers of processing and abstraction of theory above the theories about
movements, feelings, thoughts and all the stuff that psychology and design
normally focus on.
Now to understand and theorise about this kind of thing necessitates going
up even more additional levels of abstraction beyond the above (Ashby's
Law etc).
It means the body and our explanation of design activity need to be in
terms of processes that operate at much higher levels of abstraction and
greater distances from the behaviours, feelings and thoughts that we see,
including at more distance and higher levels of abstraction than David has
described. David's work offers a bridge to seeing the underlying processes
involving error signals, variability and variety rather than outputs of
thinking, feeling, emotion, and behaviours. Bridging that gap seems to be
both important and useful.
In all of this, my experience has been that it seems to be really useful to
see humans as very biologically limited in their abilities to think, feel,
intuit and behave, yet managed by underlying very complex feedback systems
operating in complex ways on highly abstract phenomena that result in the
observed outputs. A problem is we tend to see the situation and make
theories about it the opposite in which we erroneously assume human
abilities to creativity are infinite and the underlying processes simple!
For a few years, I've been working on establishing and publishing theories
about the dynamics of variety in complex socio-technical systems design. In
one sense, this seems way too abstract to be useful. It focuses on the
dynamics of changes in the amount of variety at different locations in a
situation (not necessarily real) and the dynamics of their dynamics. It
doesn't matter what the amounts of variety are about. That is it ignores
everything , every variable, factor and function that one would normally be
interested in. It doesn't even require the situation to have boundaries or a
defined problem(!) Yet, it offers a way of predicting shifts in power and
control.
I suggest it is theorising about design at all these higher levels of
abstraction that will offer the way forward.
Best wishes,
Terry
--
Dr Terence Love
PhD (UWA), B.A. (Hons) Engin, PGCE. FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
--
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Norman
Sent: Thursday, 30 January 2014 10:15 AM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design
Subject: Re: Designing With A Theory of Design Thinking
Hi Terry (and others)
On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Wondering, would the output of the activity of a Gestalter be a 'design'?
No, that's the point: The output would be a Gestaltung.
> In which case, is what we are seeing simply an increasing shift
> towards systems design approaches and away from more traditional ways of
designing?
>
That would be my strong preference. We need to stop designing isolated
things (or even services) and recognize that they are all part of larger,
more comprehensive systems (and we should be designing the entire system).
And the tools are part math, part science/engineering, and part art,
intuition, and creativity.
As an aside, just got off the phone with a good friend (David Kirsh) who
explained how he was trying to develop the science of thinking by doing.
Designers claim that they (we) think by drawing and by making: David is
showing why this is true.
Kirsh, D. (2013). Embodied cognition and the magical future of interaction
design. *ACM Transaction of Computer-Human Interaction, 20*(1), 1-30.
https://quote.ucsd.edu/cogs1/files/2012/09/Kirsh-Final-acm_reading.pdf
For me, this is a great paper.
Don
Don Norman
Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO Fellow
[log in to unmask] www.jnd.org http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/
Book: "Design of Everyday Things: Revised and
Expanded<http://amzn.to/ZOMyys>"
(DOET2).
Course: Udacity On-Line course based on
DOET2<https://www.udacity.com/course/design101>
(free).
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