Hi João,
Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful reply.
There seems to be some confusion in your understanding of my reference to internal processes.
All of what we do is the result of our internal processes: from blood being pumped, distributions of muscle tonus, the dynamics of internal milieu, information passing down neural pathways, control and emotion management by glial-based processes etc etc. These are the processes that enable us to do things, think and feel.
The illusion we have is that we control our thoughts and decisions. In fact our body internal systems make the decisions BEFORE those decisions come into our thinking and feeling. We all have the illusion that it is the sense of self that we subjectively perceive that is making the decisions. In fact, it is not, it is our internal body systems that are making decisions and creating ideas before we perceive them. That is not to say that in our mental sense of self we cannot influence these internal processes (e.g. via learning) but even then, it is the internal processes that generate everything we do, think and feel.
In essence, our thinking and feeling is a superficial illusory process - helpful in many ways as an additional interface for the body to the world - but superficial to the underlying causal internal processes.
Trying to make theory about design in terms of people's subjective experiences is like talking with the monkey rather than the organ grinder.
I'm trying to be accurate with words. I specifically referred to 'design research' and 'creating design theory'. My comments apply specifically and only to them. I didn't refer to 'design education'. As an aside, however, following your introduction of design education, do you have any sound evidence of design education being the actual cause of people being able to design well - as distinct from say people spending the same amount of years autodidactically. The idea that design education is the cause of designers learning to be designers is open to question (as with any discipline). For example, there are many people on this list who are self-taught designers and have no formal design education. In new areas of design, the lack of contribution of design education can be taken as given because the curricula of design schools are often decades behind the cutting edge due to university systems of course development. Any idea that design education is a test of design theory or research perspectives seems hard to justify.
The 'tales for children' idea is a standard colloquial concept in education theory though perhaps the term is only around in the English speaking world? An example: when learning about chemistry, the teacher will explain about atoms as like planets with a central core of a positron and neutron with electrons circling round them. Next year, the teacher might say, remember how I told you about atoms being like planets, well its not actually like that, for example, the electrons don't simply circle they can jump from one orbit to another. Next year 'Remember how previously I first explained that atoms were like planets and then not actually like planets, well they are actually not at all like either those two but it was necessary to explain like that to get to this point and now you will be able to see that....' The next year the teacher then says' Forget everything you have been taught up till now about atoms, we need to think of them very differently...'
The stories such as 'atoms are like planets' or 'people use creativity to design' are 'tales for children' in the sense that we need them to move onto better understanding and more difficult theory.
Finally, how you interpreted what I wrote illustrates the habit we have of immediately viewing everything from a human subjective perspective. For example, when you comment ' I don’t think design is exclusively an internal physical process or it would be akin to meditation', it shows you are interpreting 'internal processes' from the human subjective perspective of someone trying to subjectively perceive those processes - that’s a bit like putting one's hand on the bonnet of a car to identify how the engine is constructed. The same habit of reinterpreting what is written in order to view i from a human subjective perspective is also shown in the reinterpretation of what I wrote into human experiences of design education.
Damasio is good on this separation of internal processes and mental subjective experiencing. I've tried to do a precis of some of Damasio's ideas and how they might shape design research in Love, T. (2003). Design and Sense: Implications of Damasio's Neurological Findings for Design Theory. Proceedings of Science and Technology of Design, Senses and Sensibility in Technology - Linking Tradition to Innovation through Design 25-26 September 2003, Lisbon, Portugal. A preprint is available at http://www.love.com.au/docs/2003/Damasio.htm
Thank you again,
Terry
--
Dr Terence Love
PhD (UWA), B.A. (Hons) Engin, PGCE. FDRS, MISI
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of João Ferreira
Sent: Friday, 18 September 2015 9:13 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subject: [SPAM] Re: Alan Turing on "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
Dear Terry,
I, for one, welcome our new cyborg-designer overlords.
I’m sorry I couldn’t resist it… anyway, I appreciate your boldness it makes for interesting debates. Your post read like a manifesto, with bold claims and paradigm shifting proposals. Bellow you will find some comments.
*"I feel there is a significant difference between 'creating a machine to pretend to be a designer' and 'creating a machine to create designs'."*
I completely agree with you on this point.
*"Underpinning the first idea, that a machine could pretend to be a designer, is the assumption that there is a single human way to design.I suggest there is not, or rather, that there are many ways that humans undertake activities of creating designs and NONE of them are the ways that humans perceive themselves to be undertaking the creating of designs."*
The second paragraph is somewhat unclear, but I think I managed to grasp its overall meaning. If I understand you correctly, you seem to suggest that humans are able to design (albeit rather poorly) but are unable to accurately describe designing — i.e. the activity of designing — at all. I would argue that the fact that human designers are able to teach how to design to human-designers-to-be is testament that some basic understanding has been achieved.
Unless you consider that what is being taught is not design at all, or is not as much design as it could be. In that case the burden of proof is with you to demonstrate better ways to design and teach design.
*"The reality is our internal physical processes by which we create designs are very varied and none are as we perceive them subjectively."*
I don’t think design is exclusively an internal physical process or it would be akin to meditation. Discussing and drawing, for example, are a couple of activities that often occur during a design process which are not exclusively ‘internal’. Of course, you might argue that discussing and drawing are ineffective and time-wasting activities and should be replaced by… here again you would have to propose and demonstrate the effectiveness of a couple of alternatives.
*"In fact, the 'stories about how we create designs' that we subjectively deduce are more like a 'tales for children' picture of the world. They are not true."*
A couple of examples would add weight to your claim that so far design theory has been no more relevant than The Hobbit.
*"We have to stop using human-centred and designer-centred perspectives as the basis for undertaking design research and creating design theory.It should have been obvious by now that it doesn't work but there seems to be a blindness about it."*
Again, we know enough to be able to teach design; some of those students than go on to design cutlery, clothes, and chairs that function fairly satisfactorily. And I’m only giving examples of the first things I see around me in my study (which was designed by an architect) so I wonder what you mean when you say “it doesn’t work”?
'best,
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*João Ferreira*
00351 967089437
0031 0619808750
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