Dear Tim and Klaus
>"so, we can talk about design without knowing
>whether we can do it. but what is it that
>one is then describing?"
A couple of quick points on this:
1.. Design may be something we all do as part of being human, and to do something is to have an understanding of it. A subtle point in one sense, and I accept that what we are trying to discuss here is perhaps a more disciplined/sophisticated concept of design.
2.. To talk about design IS to have an understanding of design. To know the word is to have a sense of its meaning from the context of its engagement. That understanding may be relatively primitive, it may even be counter to common understanding of the word, but it is AN understanding nevertheless.
3.. To talk about a form (the disciplined/sophisticated form of interest here) of design (to describe some thing) is to represent that thing through language (talking about design is not the same as doing design). To represent some thing that we do not have first-person experience of is to represent another’s representation of that thing. To talk about design without knowing (first-person understanding) design is to describe some other persons representation of design.
>This second-order first-person engagement (watching),
>as you say Sid, gets us a kind of understanding
>(a kind of knowing), but, as you ask Klaus, an
>understanding (a kind of knowing) of what?
Well, I suggest it provides a useful engagement in several ways:
1.. It presents a set of activities we can personally reflect upon as representative of what people do when they are doing what we believe to be design. By relating those activities to our own (or our student’s) embodied understanding activities, we can modify what we consider to be our design activities in light of the activities we determine are representative of good design. Watching others provides a basis for self-reflection.
2.. It presents a set of activities we can talk about to the designer themselves in order to explore the meaning such activities have to the designer themselves. How does our representation of what a designer is doing relate to how they themselves would represent what it is they consider they are doing when they design. Watching provides a basis for discussion and (legitimate peripheral) participation in what it means to design.
3.. It presents a representation that the designers themselves can use as a point of their own personal reflection on what it is they are doing when they design. Reflection needs a position against which to reflect, and the observations of others is a useful device in this regard. Watching prompts the observer to represent what it is they observe, and that representation is a useful device for the person being observed to reflect on what they believed they were doing compared to how it was perceived by others. Difference is an essential quality of knowing.
4.. It requires the observer to take a position, or a perspective on what it is they are looking at/for. Every observation is afforded certain features by the bias of the observer, and in the watching, the observer is well placed to self-reflect on what sustains the object of interest as an object of interest. In other words, when we look we select what we look at, and reflecting on what drives the selection process can be very revealing about what positions us as an observer.
>So, Sid, I think I understand, and accept, what
>an sofp-based understanding of the workings of
>cogs (and similar things) is about, but what
>is an sofp-based understanding of designing about?
I dispute your classification of first-person understanding as being soft, if this suggests that first-person understanding is somehow secondary to (not as good as) the explicit knowledge I presume you would class as hard understanding. I subscribe to the view that our primary form of understanding is the first-person, embodied understanding gained through doing. To represent that understanding in some explicit knowledge form (to talk or write about it) is a mere representation of what it is we understand by doing. I accept that embodied understanding in a certain sense could be described as being less robust (I would say more dynamic) than explicit descriptions, but all representations of understanding are simply that – representations. We may need representations (knowledge) for other reasons (communication, a corpus on which to build), but these remain a secondary form of understanding to the doing.
>If you respond by saying it's an understanding about
>designing, then how is this understanding different
>from the first-order first-person engagement (doing)
>based understanding the designer or designers have
>about designing?
This is going to be a mouthful. It is different because it is a representation of how those designers represent their doing to others. It is a more direct representation because it is first-person, and can be directly related to your personal understanding of how the doing of others might be represented.
In summary:
First-order first person is doing, and the primary form of understanding (embodied experience)
Second-order first person is watching (physically or through the mind's eye), and is a representation of doing derived from personal experience (the representation is drawn from your own perspective and can be personally interrogated accordingly)
Second-order second person is talking and reading, and is a representation of some other persons’ representation of doing (the other person’s representation you are interrogating is less accessible than a representation derived from your own understanding)
The difficulty in extracting the understanding that lies behind and motivates some other person’s representation of a thing is precisely where the power of science comes from. Science provides a framework that governs how a person might form a representation of some thing, and makes this framework more explicit to the subsequent reader of that representation. Explicit representations are incredibly powerful devices in rendering how you represent your understanding to others (and your self) more robust, but they are not the primary source of your understanding.
--Sid.
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Associate Professor of Design Studies
School of Design [log in to unmask]
University of Western Sydney, Nepean tel: +61 2 9852 5430
PO Box 10, Kingswood, NSW 2747 fax: +61 2 9852 5424
Australia http://www.design.nepean.uws.edu.au/
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