Dear Folks,
I agree with Lubomir that arguing over terminology is silly without a rigorous theoretical base. Or is this debate a turf war arguing for the superiority of particular types of design?
Let me go sideways, and propose that design, all design, is nothing more or less than self-evolution. In a Lamarkian sense, we plan changes to our future selves. This is uniquely possible for human beings because so much our 'self' is 'extra-somatic' or outside the body — rather than evolving bigger teeth, we make better knives.
Richard Dawkins proposes that such technologies be called the "extended phenotype." Where the regular biological body or phenotype grows in answer to directions from the genotype, that same genotype also creates our species' inclination to build things, just like beavers and birds. And as Andy Clark argues, it makes little difference whether such tools are physical artifacts or intangible ideas. The plasticity of the human brain means that using such things will change our physical being, just as exercising builds muscles.
In addition, like beaver dams, technologies change our environmental niche, and therefore also evolutionary pressures on us and others. While the niche is not a biological thing, it acts as an "ecological inheritance" not dissimilar in action to the "genetic inheritance" of DNA (Odling-Smee et al., "Niche Construction Theory," 2013, 5).
As for beauty, might that be evolutionary as well? Bodily symmetry is well understood to serve as a token of health when selecting a mate (Brown et al., "Dance reveals symmetry, 2005). Babies' irresistible cuteness triggers a biological imperative to nurture them (Gould, 1979 and many others). If we toss in McLuhan and Freud, we can impose an id/ego/superego analysis on material culture. Thus, ego objects like cups and pliers extend our personal bodies. Id objects like dolls or the original VWBeetle appeal to our nurturing instincts. And the sofa is a superego object -- a lap for adults, where the thighs and arms of the ur-parental lap are topologically elongated to match the change between one's former round baby body and long adult limbs.
For those of us who just rolled their eyes, I'd be happy to share a longer version of this idea -- it will be published this fall in a book called "Inappropriate Bodies," from Demeter Press.
Bye!Heidi
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|