Greetings,
If your goal was to understand what a computer CPU is and how it works, do you think you could if you studied its printer?
Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky (2017, p. 40) use this computer vs printer analogy to describe the difference between studying language’s “CPU” and studying language’s “printer” — the sensorimotor interface for externalisation, for instance, vocalisation or manual signing.
Can we say the same about designing? If we want to understand design cognition, then we should study the “CPU” rather than the “printer” — externalisations in manual design practices or introspections on those practices.
I believe this point resonates with Cross’s (2006) conclusion, from his survey of empirical studies of design cognition, that there are “striking similarities identified in design activity, independent of professional domain, suggesting that design cognition is indeed a domain-independent phenomenon” (p. 90). In their recent literature review of research on design cognition, Ball and Christiansen (2019, p.36) make the same point — that design cognition is domain-independent.
Berwick and Chomsky make several arguments that show why studying language’s “printer” is not very helpful if you want to understand how language’s “CPU” works:
1. The poverty of the stimulus argument “that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language.” See f.ex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus
2. The argument that human language syntax is hierarchical and is blind to considerations of linear order. I am not trained in linguistics, but I think this means that humans process sentences’ hierarchical syntactical structures rather than the linear order in which we perceive the words. (See Berwick and Chomsky’s examples at the end of this post.)
This explains why, today, any human baby can learn to produce the vocalisations of the language in their environment — they all share the same common genetic ancestor. This leads Berwick and Chomsky (2017) to claim that human language capacity appeared “sometime between the period when anatomically modern humans first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and their subsequent exodus out of Africa 60,000 years ago” (p. 36-37).
Language capacity appears to be unique to humans (Berwick and Chomsky, 2017, p. 70). But human ancestors made stone tools millions of years before evidence of language appears. And animals, for example, crows and apes make and use tools. On one hand, if we connect tool-making and designing, then designing probably precedes language. On the other, tool-making barely changed over the millions of years before language appeared. And once language appeared, the variety of human tool-making and designing seems to have snowballed. Perhaps the human language capacity “supercharged” the design capacity?
Is design capacity connected to language capacity, and how? (e.g., addition, substitution, modification… ?)
If design cognition is domain-independent, then what is the point in having so many terms for research that answers art and design related questions? Design research, architectural research, artistic research, performance research, practice research,… why not just use “research” without a domain related modifier?
Regards,
Luke
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Ball, Linden J., and Bo T. Christensen. "Advancing an Understanding of Design Cognition and Design Metacognition: Progress and Prospects." Design Studies 65 (2019): 35-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.10.003.
Berwick, Robert. C., and Noam Chomsky. Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. MIT Press, 2017.
Cross, Nigel. Designerly Ways of Knowing. London Springer-Verlag 2006.
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Linear order example:
Berwick and Chomsky (2017, p. 8) ask us to consider the contrast between two sentences:
-snip-
[…] “birds that fly instinctively swim” and “instinctively birds that fly swim”. The first example sentence is ambiguous. The adverb “instinctively” can modify either “fly” or “swim” — birds either fly instinctively, or else they swim instinctively. Now let’s look at the second sentence. Placing “instinctively” at the front is a game-changer. With “instinctively birds that fly swim”, now “instinctively” can only modify “swim”. It cannot modify “fly”. This seems mysterious. After all, “instinctively” is closer to “fly” in terms of number of words than it is to “swim”; there are only two words between “instinctively” and “fly”, but three words between “instinctively” and “swim”. However, people don’t associate “instinctively” with the closer word “fly”. Instead, they associate “instinctively” with the more distant word “swim”. The reason is that “instinctively” is actually closer to “swim” than it is to “fly” in terms of structural distance.”
-end snip-
Also, I found Andrew Carnie’s videos on "Merge" useful for understanding what Chomsky means by “structural distance” https://youtu.be/X0aRffkueUs
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