Warning: long post.
I have never regarded (rightly or wrongly) design thinking as something
that focuses on the object, instead, design thinking became design
thinking, Heidegger asked me “What is called thinking?”, and away I went
down the rabbit hole wrapped up in a portmanteau.
To reiterate: we are “design thinking”, and it “we” that must change (our
way of thinking, our ways of seeing) before we can change “design”.
*A likely story concealed in a portmanteau*
Life itself is both simplified and complex, as Jakobson’s Ladder shows, and
it is quite feasible that the outcome we seek should resemble an ongoing
story more than it does an established fact, especially when that outcome
is the identity of our enduring self6 and the identity of our discipline.
The only reality is in the telling of the story, in the experience we have
of being alive, in the flow, in the bubble. Not the photograph, not the
designed object, not the painting, but the experience of these objects and
events, this is where we can find ourselves, and if we are lucky we
experience the migration of the aura of whatever we are interacting with
from out there to in here, which only, really, happens when the other
crosses the border between out there and in here, and seeing that we are
the border, our changed consciousness reacts to the flowing story that
tells itself. As human beings that thrive on communication, we are not
simple conduits for information flows, because “We ourselves are
portmanteau Signs of a complex order. We are packing cases of multiple
meaning large enough to make a human being a Sign of itself” (Kauffman,
2001:109). When [A] implies [B], meaning when [A] implies [not-A], that
becomes a “convenient sign for implication”, and it is “significant to see
the sign of implication as a complex sign composed of other logical signs”,
according to Louis Kauffman (2001:84), and since this complex sign has an
underpinning of simplicity, we arrive at inference as a portmanteau sign
that “glues” the disparate “meanings into a coherent whole” (:84).
The self + implication + inference, these are portmanteau signs, therefore
it seems reasonable to compare this view to von Foerster’s (1972) idea that
the information that can be extracted from a description depends on our
“ability to draw inferences from this description”, and I would add, to
make inferences to the best explanation, also known as abductive reasoning.
There are deductive and inductive inferences, both complex signs derived
from necessity and chance, respectively, and these concepts cannot be made
applicable to the world except as our efforts to describe that world (von
Foerster, 1972), while Peirce (1998:233) spoke of deductive necessity, of
inductive probability, of abductive expectability, and wondered where these
came from? How does inference work, and what is its form? I interpret that
to ask, how does abduction work, and what is its form? Well, according to
Kaufman (above), abduction has a portmanteau form, and this portmanteau
sign is used to glue all other meanings into a coherent whole; inference
travels across borders between inner probability and outer necessity, and
it does so as abductive expectability.
However, Peirce (:233) also states that inference cannot be conceived by us
if by inference (and here the term includes inductive, deductive and
abductive inference) we mean something that has already been settled, and
so can be adopted as part of the system of knowing. When asking, *where
does inference come from?*, we must remember that we are the portmanteau
sign of complexity, but we also have the character of self-control, “which
distinguishes reasoning from the processes by which perceptual judgments
are formed, and self-control of any kind is purely *inhibitory*”. Our
portmanteau form, in order to work as it should, is also a
*holding-oneself-back
*form (above), i.e., inhibitory, and as such originates nothing, and yet
*holding-oneself-back* *is but part of the portmanteau*, which can only be
a portmanteau if it straddles both sides of the *sive* border and functions
within the fields of force, within a full abductive argument. “What can our
first acquaintance with an inference, when it is not yet adopted, be but a
perception – a perception of the world of ideas?” (:233), i.e., the
fluctuating fields of force we take as social universes, and where reason
is generated, and also where “you must make arguments, demonstrations,
refutations triumph in them” (Bourdieu, 1998:138).
“Therefore it cannot be in the act of adoption of an inference, in the
pronouncing of it to be reasonable, that the formal conceptions in question
can first emerge … It must be in the first perceiving that so one might
conceivably reason” (Peirce, 1998:233). Inference does not emerge in
reasoning, but in perception, in participation, in an immersion,7 i.e.,
when we are delivered over to entities which we need so that we can be what
we can be, which is our potentiality-for-Being (cf. Chapter 5:224). During
this process of giving-over, this total immersion, we are no longer
holding-back but become part of the process itself, and we are *in the flow*
of experience. Yes, it is true that self-control, or rather, inhibition,
cannot introduce inference, but “when an inference is thought of as an
inference, the conception of inference becomes a part of the matter of
thought” (Peirce, 1998:233). When we become a portmanteau of the complex
sign, we are the ice canoe that is made of the very material we are trying
to sail on. Only if we spend a lot of energy can we succeed in keeping our
ontological self frozen, and keep ourselves from becoming our own means and
outcome, in collaboration. The very flow of survival has a narrative
structure based on the story that tells itself, which story becomes the
story of us, while, in the process, turning education into an ice canoe
sive the pond. Even though I stated (above) that one can think of knowledge
[our developing self] as an ice canoe, in context we cannot and should not
identify our learning selves as either the ice canoe or the pond,
exclusively, but we can and should identify our continually learning and
developing selves with the experience of the interaction, in the flow,
between two topics, with our own form as the third topic. In Chapter 4:118
I wrote,
Glanville‟s (1997a) description of the characteristics of Pask‟s
Conversation Theory is applicable here, in that the process of learning is
described as “a process of conversation about and with Topics”, and the
fact that “any one Topic entails at least two others”, a triad that
engenders meaning. I see the observer and the observed as acting the roles
of two Topics in conversation, which, by their very interaction, engenders
the becoming of the third, and virtual, Topic. Design students, it has to
be said, find this a problem, since they are expected to find ways of
dealing with their individual creative input contextualized by socially
communal creative inputs, aka a social stock of knowledge.
A conversation between the two topics of the ice canoe and the pond designs
the third topic, namely our continuing virtual (and only ‘real’) selves,
which of course means that any one Topic (us) entails at least two others
(ice canoe and pond), which further means that the new hybrid Topic One
(the new us) again entails at least two others (new ice canoes and new
ponds, new contexts with other actors contributing force fields to interact
with).
I used the term *a defining moment of recognition*, because everything
hinges on that phase transition between the old and the new space of
understanding, when the student suddenly finds herself wearing new lenses,
and *everything* is different, when she is dancing with this invisible
partner, this *as if* member of Pask’s Topic trio in a dance of infinite
entailments that immediately negate themselves in appearing, and it is as
if each dance invents itself but also renews itself, and uses the humans to
do so, in the same *as if* sense that Gadamer claimed that education uses
us. (Chapter 4:131)
Perhaps it is that defining moment when the artist sinks into the pond that
has now swallowed up his ice canoe that understanding emerges, and when
“the relation disappears that the elements have with each other within the
bounds of understanding”, and the new self absorbs the old self, i.e.,
“Understanding swallows up whatever is understood. As soon as I understand
who I am, I have swallowed myself up” (De Zeeuw, in Kooistra, 2002:125).
*Understanding* then becomes a form of necessary negation or alienation
from the old self, if we allow this dance of infinite entailments to use us.
………………………………………………………………………………
6 Needless to say, *enduring *posits survival and not law.
Sive: Richard Jung (2007:19) uses the term *sive *to denote “a descriptive
conjunction-disjunction, that is as and/or or as either/or” …
“constructions on the left side of *sive *and constructions on the right
side of *sive* are neither one nor another, but have certain
characteristics of both.”
7 This is the user experience in the planning of interaction design.
………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Kauffman, L. H. (2001). The Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce. *Cybernetics
and Human Knowing *8(1-2):79-110.
Von Foerster, H. (1972). *Notes On An Epistemology For Living Things*.
http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/heinz/epistemology/epistemology.pdf
Peirce, C.S. (1998). *The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings
*Vol.2. N. Houser, J.R. Eller, A.C. Lewis, A. De Tienne, C.L. Clark and
D.B. Davis (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). *Practical Reason*. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Glanville, R. (1997a). *Gordon Pask*. http://www.isss.org/lumPask.html
Kooistra, J. (2002). Flowing. *Systems Research and Behavioral Science *
19(2):123-127.
.......................................................................................................
Johann
--
Dr. Johann van der Merwe
Independent Design Researcher
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