Dear Ken,
You wrote,
'The first purposeful designed artefacts are hand-made stone tools that date back to homo habilis 2,500,000 years ago'
Is there any evidence that these were designed as distinct from being made without any design activity?
There is a fine, but I think important, point here in design theory terms.
Many, perhaps all of us, can create things without planning them in mind or creating a design from which we make the items.
So, do we have evidence, that the stone tools were designed as distinct from simply being made without constructing a prior design? If not, where is the justification to claim they were designed?
There is an alternative argument that everything we make or do is always the consequence of prior envisaging in mind. I'd challenge this but ignoring that challenge, I suggest the position leads to problems for design research.
If we claim it is true, and the existence of the stone tools (i.e. that they were made) is the evidence that they were designed then we have a much bigger design theory problem.
By claiming that something is designed because it has been made and necessarily has somehow in some way been 'envisaged it in mind' prior to the making, then we lose the definition of the term design because the terms making or doing then apply as equivalent to design across all and every human activity - as does the term 'thinking'. It leads to the theoretically useless position that 'all is design'.
Taking this point of view that designing always occurs removes any boundary (and hence terminological definition) between making and designing or doing and designing or thinking and designing.
Then, in theory terms, it is better to use the terms 'making', 'doing' and 'thinking' and drop the term 'designing' because it offers no distinction.
I suggest that to create a body of design theory grounded in a definition of design requires having some evidence of when designing has occurred and when it has not. The evidence that something was made, I suggest, is insufficient to proving it was also designed.
As an aside, any musician or dancer can make complex outcomes (that can be recorded as fixed evidence in the manner of a stone tool) without necessarily envisaging them prior. Are they also designed? How would you know? This comes back to the previous questions of whether the stone tools were designed or not? How would you know?, and ' What are the implications for design theory?
Warm regards,
Terence
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Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, PMACM, MISI
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
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www.loveservices.com.au
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