Also I was puzzled by the Forklift Design mention.
Mainly because I didn’t know what the hell a forklift is.
Note that my ignorance derives for not using English as my native language and, alas, forklifts are not part of my usual social international relations.
Since I know that English is a very straight forward Language that creates neologisms from composing different words into one, I imagined a forklift as a special aid tool for people with difficulties in eating. "You just let your fork be lifted by your forklift and food will arrive to your mouth, smoothly".
I then though that such utensil, that I had never heard about, would be very difficult to produce, and most of all, so limited in its production that hardly would be an example in this discussion. So, I thought that forklifts might be entities of metaphorical designation like a derivation of a road into two roads, one going straight and the other going up. People would say: “Then you arrive to the forklift and take the upper road, then take the second exit in the nearby roundabout (another example of a composed neologism) and my place is 200m on the left”. In that sense forklifts required some design concerns namely on placing traffic lights and signs.
For a moment I also thought that a forklift might be a statistics entity when medians go straight and averages go abruptly up. Then a forklift could be designed in social design enterprises.
A forklift might also be a move in olympic fights or in judo, but that also would make them irrelevant for this discussion.
In a way I was using the word “forklift" in my mind in the same way lots of people use the word aesthetics (in fact in a more elaborate way) with don’t really knowing what was its origin but imagining one.
Aesthetics was the word that Alexander Gotlieb Baumgarten used (for the first time, it is also a neologism) to designate a science that he was proposing in 1750’s.
Our first conclusion (in this forum) should be that we should not use the colloquial version of the word in the same way as if we were using it as a scientific proposition. Like Physics and physical that went to gyms downgraded from its scientific meaning.
Baumgarten wrote in Latin, and his treatise was only translated in German and Italian.
I suggest two papers to understand it better: Salvatore Tedesco’s (Baumgarten translator to Italian) http://www1.unipa.it/~estetica/download/TeBau.pdf and Esthetica_- and _On_aesthetics_aisthetics_and_sensation__reading_Baumgarten_with_Leibniz_with_Deleuze_-_2011-03-29[1].pdf by Birgit M. Kaiser.
According to Baumgarten Aesthetics may be summarized in the following definition (quoted from Baumgarten): Aesthetics (as the theory of liberal arts, as gnoseology of the inferior faculties, as the art of thinking in a beautiful way, as the art of thinking analogous to reason) is the science of sensate cognition.
In my most recent research on the subject I learn that during the XIX century the word was repelled from English elites. See for instance: The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein
By Timothy M. Costelloe (find it in google books) Apparently Sir William Hamilton even suggested that the term Apolaustic should be applied instead of Aesthetics. But he gave his own definition of Baumgartian Aesthetics as: (…) the doctrine which we vaguely and periphrastically denominate The Philosophy of Taste, the theory of the Fine Arts, The Science of the Beauty and the Sublime, &c” (p. 3)
The firs course named “Aesthetics” was taught by Jorge Santayana in Harvard in the end of that century. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana/#2 . I presume that most of our American colleagues opinions on Aesthetics derive from his book “The Sense of Beauty” (forty years before Dewey’s "Art as Experience". Whereas Aesthetics in the Baumgartian was mostly and Intelectual endeavor, Santayana (one of the fathers of Naturalism) may have introduced a definition of Aesthetics more “naturalistic” that become coherent with the American Pragmatism of William James and gang.
Nevertheless, Aesthetics took two paths (maybe in a forklift road), one related with Psychology, in fact a philosophy of taste, (rooted in Naturalism), the other related with Art as the theory of the Fine Arts (rooted in Intellectualism).
However, the initial project was Baumgarten’s one.
Best regards,
Eduardo
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|