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On Aug 15, 2009, at 6:21 PM, Ken Friedman wrote: > Dear All, > > In this evolving thread, I have enjoyed many posts. Without getting to > “mind” or any deeper issue, I tend to agree with Keith and Johann > that human > beings design. > > If I were to be more precise, I would argue that only a knowing > agent can > design. I disagree, mainly because I think that agency is a term loaded with many conceptual frames that in all likelihood are only narratives which help us understand others, and perhaps may even be fictitious narratives. I agree with Herbert Simon's definition, it need not require any 'agency', design is a process, which things that exist, engage in, to change state of existence X to state of existence Y. What transitions that change of state are actions in the world. > Once again, I am going to define design using Herbert Simon’s (1982: > 129, 1998: 112) definition of design as the process by which we > “[devise] > courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred > ones.” Without accepting all of Simon’s views on design, it is a > useful to > define design as the process we use to change existing situations into > preferred situations. > > Since this involves intentionality, it therefore involves agency. That > brings design to an issue of sentience or knowing agents, that is, > creatures > that can – or can be said to – 1) think or know, 2) possess will or > the > ability to intend, and 3) act on their intentions. I don't think it involves intentionality, I tend to think that intention and intentionality, which refer to some state of the brain/ mind/nous are much like 'will'... they are concepts that solve a particular theoretical problem of the middle ages or modernity, but alas don't exist. What we mean when we say x intends, is merely to say that person will act or person will not act according to what he knows and desires, there is no special faculty of intention that separates persons from non-persons, etc. In short, i don't think intention or intentionality exists as anything other than shorthand for knowing our own desires and realizing them in the world. And really, that is all we need, we don't need 'intend' anymore than we need 'will', except as literary constructs. To design then, does not require to intend, it merely requires knowledge/thought/desire+action which is equivalent to planning+action. One of the issues of 'intend/intention' of course is that we cannot know it, we can only posit it and tell stories about it... the stories all are predicated on actions in the world, person did x, so we infer intention y. however, we don't know if there is any real relations between the two and if we sit back and discard the narratives and metanarratives that structure our understanding of the relationship, I think you'll find that there is no necessary relation outside of stories we tell, because in the end, it is very difficult to tell the story of the state of someone's mind based on a state 'intention' that likely never existed. so do dogs design? yes. can non-humans design, yes. can machines design? yes. you merely need the capacity for having a plan, and making it real in the world through action. some would say that something has to create said plan, and that might be the case, but then again human's don't create all plans, some they discover in nature, and others are free-floating signifiers/codes in our culture that we pluck out and use in reference to that culture. So we can turn back to the dog examples and say... what really happened if we do not infer 'intention' because intention doesn't really exist... and at least i find, that the dog saw a plan, modeled a plan, and acted on a plan because it had a desire. And when you tell me it had intentions, i'd say.. show me, and when you tell me that you have intentions, i'd say show me. And in either case, when presented with skepticism toward the existence of the concept, I think one has to fold one's cards because there doesn't seem to be anything as best as I can tell, and believe me, like many of you... I've had students, peers, etc. all claim intentions, usually good ones:) Usually after the fact of a poorly reasoned, otherwise perhaps unjustifiable action. Which then brings us back to the question of agency... agency has nothing to do with intention, and agency is merely the ability to act in the world. Most things have agency, likely more things than some people are comfortable with, for instance, the concept 'intent' has acted in the world through humans and other beings to perpetuate itself as an analytic tool in a system of tools, or technologies that we use in sensemaking activities. Is it the best tool, perhaps not, is it real, sure it is real in the sense that it exists as a concept and can act, does it have any relationship to the state of the mind that it claims... perhaps metaphorically, but not in any real sense of saying that 'a person intends to do x, then does not do x' which is merely saying, 'i have a set of accepted stories about people, and in that set of stories, i use the world intend to mean that a person knows he or she should perform some act and desires said act, yet may or may not do so' however, you don't know the person knows, nor the person's desires beyond anything they say, and even then they may be misrepresenting their knowledge or desires for other purposes. What you have in the end though... is merely the persons actions... which exist in/as a system of relations, which exist. You can posit all kinds of other things in the world and tell stories about them though and perhaps they'll enter into the analysis or not. So... while intention may play a part in a descriptive narrative, it is shorthand, but in agency all you can really see is what people do, what machines do, what animals do, what nature does, what ecologies do, systems and relations do, what exists. Not everything that exists has agency, granted, but it is surprising as to what does when you take a much stronger sense of skepticism toward traditional descriptions and start treating things in the world symmetrically. jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu ) wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series