Dear Alfredo
You asked and I forgot to give you the author of the book I mentioned:
Fiedrich von Borries (2016). Weltentwerfen; Eine politische Designtheorie. Edition Suhrkamp
As I mentioned its German is difficult to translate literally, but I am sure its topic resonates with you. It doesn't sound as well as in German but the primary objective of the book dwells on the observation that any design as much as it appears to liberate, it also oppresses -- dwelling on the grammatical relationship between entwerfen and unterwerfen. The book then explores the political implication of any design with chapters on survival design, safety design. Social design. Self-design, and world design.
The book is small in size, 143 pages and cost 14 euros
Klaus
Hi Alfredo
Your long response to my rhetorical question: " If theory is to predict the future from past observation: what is design theory to predict? " deserves a longer answer.
I just happen to catch an article from long time ago by J. Bronowski (1972). Technology and culture in evolution. In the American scholar.
It starts with this sentence: "There is no blueprint of the future: there is not even a modern bible of the future, of the kind that Karl Marx wrote--a compound of history and exhortation that might be read as a map to the promised land. Since the heyday of H. G. Wells, almost no one has written seriously about the future except the prophets of gloom, such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. ..." He goes on to say that every civilization has been grounded on the evolution of technology and concludes that science is only part for turning human imagination into action.
This is supported by the fact that all predictions of technological developments have failed. At several occasions, I have suggested that this failure of predictions based on past data is due to the to me essential human-defining practice of creating novel ideas in conversations, turn them into constructive social actions that succeed or fail and move on from there. I said in conversations not because I am also a scholar of communication but mainly because human beings cannot think alone. Our brain develops in interactions with others and so do new conceptions. Conversations are the fastest evolutionary processes I know.
Sure the past is always present -- but as you say correctly in terms we make sense of it. Technology is not an agent -- Latour is the one who likes to see it as such. Theories are not agents either, unless someone submits to them unquestionably and becomes a robot in the domain that theory describes. You can ignore theories and live with the consequences of ignoring them.
Yes, designers never start from scratch. However, whereas scientific theories generalize past observations to broader phenomena including extrapolating them into the future, it cannot add anything new. Scientific theories generalize constraints. Designers thrive on creating unprecedented (untheorized) possibilities, often circumventing the constraints of scientific predictions.
Now to the answer to my question: if theories generalize the past into a future, designers who pursue a design theory merely comply with what is already known. They may follow known trends or perfect their skills in making products more saleable. It would be a waste to educate people to be able to learn to comply with a theory of design and then do just what the design theory taught them to do.
Rather, I am suggesting design education to start with
* questioning the histories of design theories, understanding the consequence of enacting one to the design profession as well as to the society that follows
* teaching methods of eliciting opportunities for introducing changes for the benefit of communities -- what Ozge celikoglu and I called conducting ethnographies of unimagined possibilities
* providing methods exploring untried combinatorial possibilities of existing technologies
* preparing students to engage in interdisciplinary collaborations to work out realistic plans for proposed innovations
* developing communication skills to enroll existing or new stakeholders into networks of collaborations that could realize the proposed innovations
* engaging in post-design research to improve on current design practices in view of why some designs failed to become reality and others evolved into further innovations
* all of which with the aim of continually redesigning communicable design discourses by which designers can converse and change the socio-technological culture of communities and the society in which we live.
I didn't want to write such a long contribution but here it is
Klaus
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero
Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2020 3:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The uselessness of 'agency' in design theory
Dear Klaus and all...
If theory is to predict the future from past observation: what is design theory to predict?
Maori peoples have a *whakataukī *or ‘proverb’ that says:* Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua*: ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’... (Rameka, 2016)...
Well, if we understood past as one of several paths what are in front of us something that indigenous peoples are very aware of, and if we assume that we walk backwards into the future (towards the posterior times and the posterior part of our bodies), perhaps when we walk forwards into the past or look to the past... (towards the anterior times and to the front way of our bodies), depending on into what past we choose to look at, and what meaning we decide give to it... taking into account that in a Krippendorffian way *design is make sense of things* (to me, here being the past, that thing we are making sense of), depending on in what way we can make sense of the past, and what kind of past make sense for us in a specific time... new futures can emerge (we will continue walking backwards into the future but not the same one. in other directions, into other futures), so... some futures can become futures that past (futures that stop showing up), when we start looking in different pasts. And when we let that the future be inspired and shaped by and from other pasts, which we thus turn into future pasts, pasts that we will be considering tomorrow, then we would some pasts stop being in our future, transforming them into pasts that pass, and we place others there as pasts to come, pasts that we put in front of us to observe and propose different possibilities.
Beyond the apparent pun, I doubt the unique linearity of time, the uniqueness of the future, and the uniqueness of the past ... and by the way those of design and theory, too. In fact the disposition sometimes overflows the prefiguration. We know that in proposing possibilities when designing, paradoxically we expect the unexpected result, as Nelson and Stolerman say, but we only know for sure that when designing we expect something to emerge, and we try to achieve it, but it always escapes us, to some extent, to know exactly what is going to emerge. Well, as you stated Klaus, in your Semantic Turn: "Often, declarations come in the guise of predictions that, if believed true and acted upon, create the reality they state"... so depending on the pasts you decide to observe, and believe as true, and also to predict from it, likewise the futures also would change.
Of course that's not what it is, just what I think... on your provocative challenge.
-----
Rameka, L. (2016). Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua:‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’. *Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood*, 17(4), 387-398.
Warm regards, to you all.
Alfredo
On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 10:57 AM Krippendorff, Klaus < [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Intent is certainly not the same as agency.
>
> Why do you think agency is useless in design theory?
>
> Related question.
>
> If theory is to predict the future from past observation: what is
> design theory to predict?
>
> Kkaus
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Jul 5, 2020, at 3:31 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Hi David,
> >
> > The activity to 'do' is NOT restricted to people either in its
> etymology, technical definition or common use.
> >
> > Similarly to 'decide' is NOT restricted to people either in its
> etymology, technical definition or common use unless one is from that
> subset of people that assumes that it is.
> >
> > Ditto for to 'act' or undertake an 'activity' or 'action'
> >
> > Ditto for to make a 'plan'
> >
> > Ditto for to create a 'design'
> >
> > All apply as much to the acts of non-human objects as they do to humans.
> >
> > I'm not finding any reference sources where any of the above are
> defined as purely referring to human actions.
> >
> > If you have such a reference , please tell me.
> >
> > Best wishes,
> > Terence
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
> related research in <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of David
> Sless
> > Sent: Sunday, 5 July 2020 2:48 PM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: The uselessness of 'agency' in design theory
> >
> > Hi. All,
> >
> > A small distinction might be useful.
> >
> > I, like all of you make decisions, take actions, plan etc etc. This
> > is
> what people do. Only people do these things and we can talk between us
> about these things without getting confused.
> >
> > Sometimes we observe other organisms—my dog for example—doing things.
> When I make such a claim I am creating and using a metaphor. The same
> with machines, however complex. Machines don’t do things simply
> because they are not people, But there is nothing preventing us from
> applying metaphors to make sense of machines to say that they act AS
> IF they were people in some way doing things.
> >
> > Our ubiquitous use of metaphors can be illuminating, even inspiring.
> > It
> can also be profoundly misleading. Abstract nouns are often the
> carriers of such confusion (I am, of course using a metaphor. Abstract
> nouns don’t carry anything.)
> >
> > We were recently on this list talking about “need”. Without getting
> > into
> any confusion I can tell you that I need food to survive. But
> something goes terribly wrong when a psychologist tells me that I have 'A FOOD NEED’.
> To prove the truth of this statement scientifically, the psychologist
> must find the locus of this NEED and develop a theory about the nature
> of this need and its mode of action, alongside all the other NEEDS I
> have. In one sentence we have moved from a simple statement to the
> creation of a mental object. Need is being treated AS IF it were an
> object. This AS IF is a wonderful way for us to create new ways of
> looking at things. But we get into lots of trouble when we insist that
> these metaphorical usages are themselves real.
> >
> > Please try to use metaphors for what they are: fictions we create.
> >
> > David
> >
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