Dear Heidi,

Sorry, I seem to have slightly, but significantly, misfigured my own frolicking.

The sequence was Heraclitus, Heidegger, Bob the Builder.

Zeno featured in an earlier post that is interconnected but not directly.

So, in the Zeno post I mentioned terms that PhD design students might need to define. One of these was “thing”.

Heraclitus is important as the father of process philosophy. That is, there are no things (fixed and permanently determined entities), there are just processes that can be discerned at various time/space points such that yes, you can put your NOW foot into this NOW river but you will never be able to do that again because, even if your foot is relatively stable, the river is more obviously continuously changing from moment to moment. E can situate ourselves in this thought experiment very directly. Go to a river. Put your foot in. Think about what Heraclitus had to say. (In the film, Pushing Tin, the suggestion is made that the student should jump into the river. The student doesn’t and learns nothing but how to block knowledge.)

Moving along the historic plane, we then come to Heidegger who wrote a very interesting essay on What is a Thing.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5577cb2ae4b049f9488d4c04/t/5637e14fe4b07fb2f7b9a6e6/1446502735298/heidegger_1967.pdf

For help with Heidegger see:

An Analysis of Martin Heidegger's What is a Thing?
by Eugene T. Gendlin, University of Chicago

“In citing the housemaid who laughed at the ancient philosopher Thales when he fell into the well while observing the stars, Heidegger agrees that philosophy can look like a laughable endeavor of no particular use; while searching for the ultimate grounds of things one can easily fall into a well, and in a well one falls a long time before hitting the ground. (We are searching for the "ground" or basis of how anything appears and is approached and studied.) Also, the maid is right in that it is best to look carefully at the ordinary things around us before looking far away.” https://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2041.html

I would love to set this Heidegger piece as a required reading and a required seminar presentation for all graduate students and staff. Imagine a collection of hundreds of interpretations. Go into your kitchen. Start the questioning.

Next we come to Bob the Builder. As the song goes: “Bob the Builder - can we fix it - yes we can!”

Here, in the world of a child, we find a prototype for a designer in a world of already made things. We even find Herbert Simon’s model of making things better through acting on things in the world - that is, design as fixing. We are all thrown into a world massively dominated by existing human things, each with its place and function described in some way. Is this the journey we went on?

Ok, so we started the sequence with Ancient Greek philosophy and fundamental questions that still remain to be answered/addressed/pondered. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, is currently writing a book titled, I think, There are NO Things. From his other writings I am sure he will be talking about Heraclitus and the philosophy of flux and Hegel and his dialectical process and Whitehead Time/Space/Identity logic. These questions persist.

Then we looked at Heidegger and shook up our everyday world of things. Maybe we fell down a well?

Then we went further and looked at some of the identity issues arising for designers. Just who do we presume we are as things called designer? As we put on our tool belt and strut, who are we?

If we were doing this in a seminar, it would take around two hours to tease out enough to be going on with.


Cheers


keith


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 [log in to unmask]> on behalf of Heidi Overhill <[log in to unmask]>

Subject: Re: On the Topic of Topics

Dear Keith,
I think I can assume why you mention Bob the Builder. Clearly, the character is relevant to design as an example of the financial value of branding in toy design.

But why Heraclitus?


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