Dear Ken and all,
The discussion was enlightening and threw light on areas which we need to
address as members of the Design community...
I just want to add one point. In his first response to David, regarding the
use of the word "Terra Nullis", Ken mentions that colonial powers did not
steal craft knowledge from the natives. "No one has stolen craft knowledge
from its practitioners.".......It may not be entirely true. Colonial powers
may not have stolen it, perhaps in the modern way of 'stealing', but they
did destroy the craft sector and its accompanying knowledge and practice at
various geographical parts of the world. Very often deliberately with
specific political, economic intentions. I wonder as to how much of it has
been researched, studied and documented across the globe.
Ken gives the example of India under British rule. But he does not mention
the destruction of Indian traditional craft sectors under British rule. It
is coming to light as to how the ancient famed Indian craft of weaving,
clothes making, textile got completely destroyed under British rule.
British powers used all means possible to destroy Indian traditional
textile sector and its accompanying skills and use the country as a place
to gather resources for their developing industries. So the statement "No
one has looted craft knowledge, taking it away, and forcibly subjugating
craft practitioners using threats, violence, and military might" may not be
entirely true in the Indian context. Extensive studies would be required to
find out more details and data.
As this is not my area, I checked wiki for reference. Here is what I found
in the sections on Calico. A small segment from the write up......
"In 1764, 3,870,392 pounds (1,755,580 kg) of cotton-wool were imported.[6]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico#cite_note-6> This change in
consumption patterns, as a result of the restriction on imported finished
goods, was a key part of the process that reduced the Indian economy from
sophisticated textile production to the mere supply of raw materials. These
events occurred under colonial rule, which started after 1757, and were
described by Nehru <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru> and
also some more recent scholars as "de-industrialization".[7]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico#cite_note-7>"
The textile mills of Manchester and other British cities required cotton in
large quantities. And it was sourced from india. The finished products and
textile goods were dumped back in India. In order to ensure the
availability of raw cotton, the traditional weaving and textile craft
sector of the country was systematically destroyed. The destruction of
native industry ensured a ready market in India for imported finished
fabrics from Britain. This systematic destruction was made possible by all
means of the power available to the colonisers. Craftsmen became
marginalised labourers who no longer could keep the traditional knowledge
alive. And the traditional craft sector collapsed within two centuries and
the skill and knowledge of sophisticated textile production got lost for
the world.
Colonisation is not just economic exploitation... There could be deliberate
destruction of indigenous knowledge and skills by the colonisers.. The
conflict between university education and tradition of craft education is a
modern phenomena.
Leenus
On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 4:14 AM Ken Friedman <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Thanks for the replies and comments in the thread on how to deal with
> claims of terra nullius in the academy.
>
> While I saw a lot that I agreed with in the comments by David Sless, Heidi
> Overhill, Lubomir Popov, and Pradeep Yammiyavar, I want to post a few brief
> clarifications.
>
> In my earlier note, I made no claim to cover the total nature of the
> problem. Rather, I pointed to the fact that the problem involves multiple
> phenomena, some quite different from others. David misread me on one point.
> None of the examples I gave covered ALL cases. They were each examples of
> SOME CASES. I wrote that “IN SOME CASES, authors such as Jonassen are
> correct. Even though craftsmen and artisans did conduct research of
> different kinds the information was never rendered systematic.” In some
> cases this is true. In others, it isn’t.
>
> David prefers the metaphors of colonisation and terra nullius. I would
> choose different metaphors for the reasons I stated. Everyone has the
> choice of the metaphors they prefer.
>
> With respect to Heidi’s note, I wasn't conflating secrecy and tacit
> knowledge. I gave examples of different kinds of knowing and practice.
> Again, that’s why I was careful to write “in some cases” before most
> examples. Each example applies to some cases, but not all. Heidi is quite
> right to say that one cannot easily render skills knowledge explicit. This
> is the knowledge of how to do things. Precisely because that kind of
> knowledge is rarely documented, it’s not reasonable to claim that people do
> not refer to it. It’s hard to refer to what has rarely or never been
> written.
>
> In calling for a richer understanding, I pointed to both kinds of
> knowledge. I wrote: “Perhaps it is time for us all to become more realistic
> and generous about the different ways of knowing things and what each of
> these ways can afford. There are many kinds of useful knowledge and
> information. Some constitute forms of research. Others provide the
> foundations of practice.”
>
> I agree with everything that Lubomir wrote in his elegant and well
> informed comment. His observations are quite right: “tens of fields ... are
> reinvented, renamed, reinterpreted (in a worse way), and so on. … many
> concepts ... have been abused, misused, bastardized, and so forth. Many
> concepts are fetched only by using the word with which they are signified
> and then filled with the (mis)understanding of the new user, without any
> respect or understanding of the original nature of the concept. People just
> like the wording, pick it, and then use it in a completely different way.
> And fight for their own (mis)use of the word. This creates a lot of chaos
> and commotion in the scholarly communities. The same word is used for
> different concepts. And when the same word is used for concepts that are
> slightly or somewhat different, the confusion is very big. Everyone used
> the same word, but they mean somewhat different things. The worst things
> come when the same word is used to signify somewhat different concepts used
> in different scholarly domains, and in particular in the comparatively new
> domains. And the conflicts start. We all have experienced such situations.”
>
> He states, correctly, that “In most cases, the reinvention of new concepts
> and disciplines is a result of poor education, poor doctoral training,
> incompetent doctoral advisors, skipping the original sources, and so forth.
> Instead of referring to the originals from the 1960s, people refer to a
> paper from 2018. Well, you can expect that in that paper the original idea
> is bastardized and presented as a personal invention and achievement.”
>
> My thoughts here are simply to place some of this in context. When David
> discusses the problem that he labels terra nullius, he is stating that
> people do not give sufficient credit to prior literature. My response asked
> for better and deeper literature reviews. But this request is no easy thing
> — the first research journals date to the 1660s. These journals began to
> appear three centuries before the first journal in the design field. The
> amount of material one can find in looking for information well organised
> and rendered systematic depends on the discipline. I’m not going to go
> through a list of fields and disciplines. I’ll simply note that most of the
> natural sciences, many of the social sciences, and many of the humanities
> have journals dating to the 1800s, and some date back earlier. In contrast,
> the organised literature of the design field is far more recent.
>
> The document that David cited was published in 1982, probably written in
> the late 1970s. Some of the tools we have today were still relatively new,
> and none of them were accessible in digital form. These include RILA and
> ARTBibliographies Modern, as well as Dissertation Abstracts International,
> Wilson’s, and ERIC. It is worth noting that even design history was still a
> young discipline, generally seen as part of art history rather than the
> independent discipline it is today. Design anthropology did not exist, and
> there was very little organised research on design written by designers.
> Other tools were new, and they did not yet include design or design
> history. This includes the tools that expanded, and evolved to become the
> Web of Science — AHCI, SSCI, and SCI. Lexis and Nexis were still new.
> Scopus and JSTOR didn’t exist. For that matter, none of the great digital
> archives that we use in today’s university existed in a world before
> digital libraries, web-based research tools, and so on. That was a world
> before the thirty or so major search engines we can use today, along with
> even more minor engines. Today, we can consult the Library of Congress, The
> British Library, WorldCat, and others online. In those days, one had to
> trawl volume by volume through a massive set of more than 750 oversized
> volumes titled The National Union Catalogue — and that was only available
> on microfiche after 1983. There is another massive series of more than 120
> books published serially since then. When we can’t find books in the
> standard catalogues, we can also make use of Amazon and other web-based
> bookstores, as well as a dozen or so used book services that locate and
> sell books online. Then, we have different parallel search systems for
> books and articles both — Google, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar,
> Microsoft Scholar, Academia, ResearchNet.
>
> There were different kinds of journals for art and art history, design and
> design history, and for various crafts and technical arts — but they were
> not usually indexed and it was difficult to learn much about the contents
> of back issues. There were also trade journals and trade papers, but they
> were even less likely to be indexed and documented.
>
> So people who wanted to study the literature of design faced two problems.
> First, it was generally not accessible and what was accessible wasn’t well
> structured. Second, most of the tools we use today did not exist. And it is
> still difficult to find out much about the content of old and often
> inaccessible books that have never been prepared for search ability using
> current tools.
>
> Filling in these gaps takes real work. That’s a job for an historian for
> for a specialist in library science. David relies on his many years of
> experience and his long memory to say that an author has missed something.
> I’d say that isn’t entirely fair for someone who wrote a book in the early
> 1980s — and even today, it may not always be fair.
>
> It is my hope that people will fill in the gaps. That said, it’s long,
> arduous work, and I’m certainly no prepared to fill in gaps outside my own
> areas of interest. As a doctoral supervisor and an editor, I work to ensure
> that doctoral candidates and authors fill in the gaps for which they are
> responsible by teaching them how to use today’s tools. For some issues, at
> least, it is possible to avoid the problems that David and Lubomir identify.
>
> As Lubomir concluded, however, “This can become a great project in history
> and philosophy of science.” But he notes, as I do, that he doesn’t have
> time for it.
>
> There is good news on a couple fronts, though.
>
> Philosophy departments are indeed studying the proliferation of junk
> science. This is also a topic of interest in departments with history of
> science programs.
>
> There are also design and technology colleges with philosophy departments
> where faculty work on design and technology issues to support a new kinds
> of design and design education. At universities in the Netherlands, serious
> philosophers engage with design. These include Pieter Vermaas and a couple
> of others at TUDelft as well as people at TUEindhoven and other schools.
> There are also people with solid philosophical training at US universities
> who work with design, generally as a branch of philosophy or philosophy of
> technology. These include Richard Buchanan — he started as a philosopher
> before moving into design — Carl Mitcham, and others. Clive Dilnot has been
> working on topics that touch on these issues as well. Also Glenn Parsons in
> the Department of Philosophy at Ryerson University in Canada. In Australia,
> Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis have been working on philosophy of design.
>
> There are also interdisciplinary people like Nikos Salnigaros — a
> mathematician and architect who works with philosophy of design, among
> other issues. And there are people who came out of design to engage
> seriously with philosophy like Per Galle.
>
> But please don’t complain about all the people I’ve missed. This isn’t a
> journal article. These are A FEW EXAMPLES.
>
> For those who wish to know more, the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
> has a good article on philosophy of technology with useful references, as
> well as other articles relevant to the philosophy of design.
>
> I’ll give the last word to Lubomir:
>
> “We can’t develop design further by simply designing. We need to reflect
> on design, to reflect on the outer layers of design environment/context
> (society), and much more.”
>
> Yours,
>
> Ken
>
> Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The
> Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji
> University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL:
> http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
>
> Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and
> Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Visiting Professor |
> Faculty of Engineering | Lund University ||| Email
> [log in to unmask] | Academia
> https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
>
> --
>
>
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