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Dear colleagues,

I liked Ricardo's reflective contribution to this thread very much.  The
quote from Kuhn could be seen to allude to the existence of patterns in
our implicit or tacit knowledge.  These patterns often, in time, become
explicit - as someone finds a way to express them.  If we relate this
view to design theory, then we can express the task as identifying
patterns which most effectively conceptualise the phenomenon of design.
 Several members of this discussion group have commented in the past on
evolution as a pattern by which we may better understand design.  In
this context, I use the term 'evolution' in the manner proposed by
Fracchia & Lewontin(2002), "generative laws or mechanisms whose
operations produce the actual histories".

Fracchia, Joseph & Lewontin, R.c. 2002, Does culture evolve?  In Pamper,
Philip & Shaw, David. G.(Eds) The return of science: evolution, history,
and theory, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland.

Kindest,
John Broadbent

Ricardo wrote:

> "As the student or the practicing designer moves from one problem
> situation
> to the next, the student discovers, with or without the assistance of her
> instructor, a way to see her problem as like a problem she has already
> encountered. The law-sketch functions as a tool, informing the student
> what
> similarities to look for, singaling the gestalt in which the situation is
> to be seen. The resultant ability to see a variety of situations as like
> each other is the main thing a student acquires by doing exemplary
> problems. She has assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of
> seeing.
>
> Designers solve projects by modelling them on previous project-solutions,
> often with only minimal recourse to symbolic generalisations.
>
> Members of a community share few rules by which they make the transition
> from law-sketch to the specific forms demanded by individual problems.
> Exposure to a series of exemplary problem-solutions teaches them to
> see in
> a gestalt. Before this, the law-sketch was to them little or no more
> than a
> string of uninterpreted concepts. Though they shared it, they did not
> know
> what it meant and it therefore told them little about design. This
> example
> displays a paradigm as fundamentally an artefact which transforms
> problems
> into projects and enables them to be solved even in the absence of an
> adequate body of theory.
>
> What I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each
> other,
> as subjects for the application of the same law or law-sketch. To borrow
> Michael Polanyi's useful phrase, what results from this process is 'tacit
> knowledge' which is learned by doing design rather than by acquiring
> knowledge for doing it."
>
> This excerpt, as many may have recognised it, is an adapted version of
> Thomas Kuhn (1970). I think it is relevant because today designers
> seem to
> share something but are unable to articulate a definition of design
> due to
> the lack of theory building.
>
> I think many on this list would agree that today many design students are
> being trained in Universities mostly by 'riding the bike' of design, that
> is, by doing it and only marginally drawing knowledge from theory. Odd
> that
> (like Ken suggests in his post on bycicle riders) a professional athlete
> today benefits more from theory building than the people who shape our
> built environment. If this is so, it means that the discipline of
> professional design will exist only when designers build theory
> (during my
> bachelor degree I was surprised that most of the relevant publications
> were
> not written by designers -and yet more surprised at the reluctancy of my
> colleagues to read them). Until that day the formation of designers will
> not defer too much from the workshop apprentice; it will continue to be
> difficult to claim that design disciplines deserve University
> education and
> to convince anyone that they have surpassed the level of a trade. Nothing
> wrong to be a shoemaker, a locksmith or a Photoshop craftsman: lots of
> skill and no reading involved! Just software manuals and glossy
> magazines.
> Until then 'design' will be something that people do without knowing what
> they are doing, something that people with the ability to draw and a
> flagrant aversion to anything related to numbers and text in standard
> fonts
> choose to do for a living. And 'creativity' I'm afraid, will continue
> to be
> something mysterious and inextricable that no one should inquire
> about, it
> just happens inside some people's heads.
>
> Yet, this is obviously an exaggerated depiction of the situation.
> There has
> been for a long time a strong and increasing interest within design
> circles
> for knowledge and thinking that directly and indirectly advances the
> materials, tools, and skills with which shoemakers and pixelcarvers are
> able to work.
>
> I find the thread on "Theory" extremely useful and valuable to foster
> discussion and would like to thank those who contribute. At the same
> time I
> would like to contribute to the creativity thread making explicit some
> basic assumptions: a) that design research is valuable for theory
> building,
> b) that theory is essential for design practice, c) that design can and
> should look into research originated from other disciplines that could
> give
> insights into what is design, d) that creativity -as in design- is a
> human
> activity that is subject to formal inspection the same way every other
> psychological and social activity is, and e) that creativity is not
> solely
> a mental process carried out by an individual in a black-box or any other
> way but is a construct shaped both by individual and social processes.
> Two
> quotes from (intellectually opposite) scholars carry special significance
> under the previous assumptions:
>
> <<"Marvin Minsky about creativity: when creative people simply show us
> the
> outcome, we can view it as creative; if we observe both the process of
> doing it and the outcome, the creativity is gone.">> Liu, 2000
>
> <<One can only be surprised by a result if one does not have entire
> access
> to the complete historic sequence.>> Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1987)
>
>
>
> References
>
> Kuhn, T.: 1970, Reflections on my critics, in Lakatos, I. And
> Musgrave, A.
> (ed), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge University press,
> Cambridge, pp. 231 278.
>
> Liu, Y.: 2000, Creativity or novelty?, Design Studies 21 (3) 261-276.
>
> Maturana, H. and Varela, F.: 1987, El Arbol del Conocimiento: Las Bases
> Biologicas del Conocimiento Humano, Debate, Barcelona.
>
>
> -- Ricardo Sosa
> PhD candidate, 3rd year
> Key Centre of design Computing and Cognition
> Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney
> http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rsos7705
>




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