Dear
Klaus,
Design researchers may be mistaken in placing so much emphasis on the 'thinking and feeling' of designers and users. Before you get me wrong on this, I'm suggesting improvement on this partial view and comes from focusing on us humans in a more holistic way, rather than using mechanistic or bio-deterministic approaches.
We humans are
complex organisms that interact with our environments. Our sense of self,
conscious thinking and feeling are a very minor and frequently flawed part of
our functioning in these interactions. In spite of it hurting our personal
vanity and ego to accept it as so, our thoughts and actions predominately result
from our physiological functioning that is substantially outside
our consciousness
You say:
'explanations aside, there is no way for any outside observer to ever know what
someone thinks or feels, ...and to say whether i see, read, think, or feel the
same way as an other human being'
I feel this is relatively irrelevant to understanding how designers design, and how users understand and use designed outcomes, because it is only a tiny part of the situation - and rarely the most dominant aspect.
Individuals'
self reports of internal states (their 'movie in the brain' and associated
feelings) are relatively superficial pictures of what we are and what is going
on for us - and there is substantial evidence that self reports are frequently
inaccurate (although they might be consistent!).
In the main, the central aspects of our interactions with environment, and this includes issues of judgement, desire, intention, emotion, agency, motivation, feeling, creativity and design are mostly driven by processes outside the 'dreamworld' 'movie in the brain' that we play in in our heads and which provides us with the nebulous basis of a 'sense of self' - and gives us the illusion that the 'me' seen in this 'movie in the brain' is a self that decides, does, designs etc.
To go behind
this illusion and superficial
picture primarily requires understanding the actuality of our human
existence as expressed in the physicality of our bodies and our interactions
with our environments.
This is not new
stuff.
I'm suggesting
as design researchers exploring the ways designers design and users use, it is
important for us to recognise that focusing on thinking and feeling gives only a
superficial understanding of how we interact with our environments. In
research terms, I feel self reports (self reflection etc) can
be particularly problematic and misleading. In part, because they
reinforce this illusion of self-determiniation via thinking and
feeling.
It is at this point that studies of the human physiology are useful. There is no humunculus in the brain. How we function, including all our learning and culturally shaped mental imagery, is actualised through our bodies and physiologies. Understanding this actualisation gives a more direct foundation for research into higher level human skills.
I agree with you that human designers can be regarded as autopoietic systems and that simplistic approaches to the role of ‘thinking and feeling’ are unhelpful. Autopoiesis doesn’t however mean that such a system is not understandable or explainable. It requires addressing the system at a more abstract level than it functions. For us humans, this is rendered easier because the autopoiesis of the illusionary ‘movies in the mind’ are a minor aspect of, and actualised by, a complex physical system – our bodies - that is more amenable to conventional research approaches.
Terry
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Dr. Terence Love
Curtin Research
Fellow
Design-focused Research Group
Dept of Design, Curtin
University
PO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845
Tel/Fax +61(0)8
9305 7629 (home office)
+61 (0)8 9266 4018 (university office)
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____________________
Visiting
Research Fellow
Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise
Development
Management School, Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
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____________________
Conselho
Cientifico
UNIDCOM
IADE,
Lisboa
Portugal
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