I appreciate your point, Heidi!
If you care to go beyond the rather swift (reptile brain?) reactions of pilots, Donald Schön studied the work of designers. How they build repertoires, reframe situations etc. I think it adds quite a bit to the information vs knowledge discussion.
The reflective practitioneer is the seminal work.
Med Vänlig Hälsning / Best Regards,
Lars Albinsson
Consultant - Innovation & Creative Processes
CEO & Ph D Candidate
+46 (0) 705927045
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Maestro Design & Management AB
www.maestro.se
Creating better ways to do things
25 juli 2017 kl. 17:14 skrev Heidi Overhill <[log in to unmask]>:
Dear Eduardo,
I love blathering.
Regarding emergence and information, J.J. Gibson (1979) defined "information" as something that organisms pick up directly from their environment, in the form of immediately usable meaning. If information pickup was not immediate, it would not be fast enough for life — his early work was with pilots landing on aircraft carriers, who had no time for mental processing of incoming "sensation." They perceived and acted instantly on the information.
This is to say that all creatures act only on what is meaningful to us, and, for literate people, media like print become in a way transparent, allowing access to their contents, though that access is not entirely straightforwards — remember "the medium is the message" (McLuhan, 1964). But that's another topic.
But I don't think the analogy with money works, though, because (Georg Simmel, 1900) money is a 'thing' that only exists when we all agree it exists. As soon as agreement ends, as in times of war, the stuff becomes useless. This is not true of information, which offers utility even when you are the only person who knows it (Robinson Crusoe, 1719).
Nelson Goodman is an entirely new source for me, and I shall rush off now to read all about him on Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, not to mention adding him to my bibliography. Oooo! New ideas! Thanks!!
Heidi
From: Eduardo A. Corte-Real <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 10:43 AM
Subject: Re: knowledge containers
Dear Heidi,
I am really interested in Nelson Goodman’s work. (since 2000, I think)
The thing is that, in the end, it all goes down to symbolization. There is no way that any thought, considering the existence of an external world, might happen without a form of symbolization.
If you like to add his work to your extensive literature review, I think it would not make any substantial difference but would add some flair to it. (especially “Ways of World Making")
I do agree totally with your declaration in the end:
"Books are NOT containers of information, Information is not contained inside heads”.
The reason I agree with you is that “information” is a conceptual device that reduced thought to a mechanical engineered process. Information relates with thought in the same way pennies relate with economy. In the same way as monetary units symbolize goods, thus creating the field of economics, information units are the bases of informatics, a feeble science of human thought, but a powerful science of producing stuff.
Books are containers of stories, first. Containers of imagination, containers, sometimes of propositions that we call theories, and most of the times, as Martin pointed out, of poetical elaborations. Hardly we can designate all of these as information because information is simply what it is: bytes. simple burps that combined can articulate what we have defined before: poetry, imagination, theories… knowledge.
Information is indeed emergent.
E.
Is this blathering?
Eduardo Corte-Real
PhD Arch.
Associate Professor
Professor Associado com Agregação
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Av. Dom Carlos I, nº4, 1200-649 Lisboa, Portugal
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> No dia 25/07/2017, às 14:34, Heidi Overhill <[log in to unmask]> escreveu:
>
> Dear Ken and Eduardo,
> Why do these discussions start from scratch?
> I ask, because I am an industrial designer writing a PhD thesis in a faculty of information (an "iSchool"), where I am part-way through a literature review of theories of 'objects,' sometimes known as 'things' or 'artifacts.' My bibliography is 39 pages long, single spaced in landscape format. After I finish this, I will embark on the literature of 'information,' to be distinguished from 'data,' 'knowledge,' and so forth (with a separate bibliography) and then head on to the literature of perception, focusing on J.J. Gibson, before returning to the literature of kitchen design, which is my starting point.
> While I have never written a PhD before, it seems that literature searches are routine in them. I also note from the title in the "To" section of this email that this list is apparently, in theory, devoted to PhD studies. While the extra garnishes of gossip are good fun, the let's-start-from-nothing-and-not-read-the-literature discussions of topics that have wide established backgrounds are less entertaining — as a past message about fork-lifts pointed out.
> It's very designerly to believe you have something to add to a discussion even though you've never met it before. Design schools in the 1970s stopped teaching history in hopes that ignorance would pay off in originality, that big goal. And, because design is a service, all of us who have worked in the trenches of designing have stepped into situations where knowledgeable clients could not solve the problem and the ignorant designer could. Design is what my librarian fellow PhD students like to call an "orthogonal" profession, by which they mean (abusing a perfectly good technical word) that, like information science, it crosses over all the other professions, dealing with everything, while also at the same time remaining itself.
> But if ignorance is part of design, what about PhD design? Could that perhaps try to be a bit better informed? Of course education means feeling safe to say dumb things in a safe place, but I think there is a difference between risking dumb explorations and making dumb grandiose pronouncements. The starting point for this discussion made perfect sense, because it was tightly situated:
> not only language mediates knowledge and knowing, but as well all other human artifacts do
>
> It stood on a real place, speaking from experience, and perhaps that might be the central point of my interjection here. I, personally, would like to hear less high-falutin' blather on this list, and more about what you-all really know, and/or are working on — not just what you happen to be distracted by.
> Heidi
> PS. Anyone else reading Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010)? It's all about the agency of material, which I think relates well to what I know about hominid stone knapping technology. I'm thinking that human agency spins on the perception of material agency; could we call this meta-agency?
>
> PPS. Books are NOT containers of information. Information is NOT contained inside heads. Information is emergent.
>
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