Colleagues,
I've been approaching the subject this way:
I find it helps to distinguish between kinds of thinking. What I mean by
kinds of thinking is thinking that orients itself toward different ends and
thereby takes on a character, vocabulary, concepts and processes related to
those ends.
When I am thinking like a lawyer, I am interested in resolving disputes
related to maintaining order and certainty in societal relations. I think
through concepts such as original intent, precedent, justice, contract,
problem and stare decisis in order to settle differences that depend on a
framework of order that is an embodied system of social values.
When I am thinking like a designer, I am oriented toward resolving
differences, but they are differences of a different kind. These are
typically qualitative differences in situations that need "improvement."
Concepts such as intentions and problems in this kind of thinking take on a
meaning related to their resolutions as artifacts. Such artifactual
embodiments and expressions that are the ends of this thinking can serve
usefully as both enhancements and disruptions in an evolving culture.
And when I am thinking like a physicist, or more generally like a scientist,
I tend to eschew the interests and values that were the motivators and
drivers in designing, including the opinions of all the churches and Fox
News, and focus down on a strategic objectivity whose target is "how things
are and how they work."
Stepping beyond behaviorism, cognitive science has gathered these
distinctions under the schema, source->path->goal as a means of identifying
how thinking is and how it works.
It's my hope that a more careful comparative analysis of the cardinal
source->path->goal expressions in human thinking will lead to a better
understanding of the cultural significance and relative status of what we
are now calling design thinking.
Jerry
On 8/20/14 2:21 PM, "Charles Burnette" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I think I see in the comments on this thread something that happens all the
> time: people seek what their existing knowledge and interests incline them to
> find rather than the essential nature of the subject they want to understand.
> In this case design thinking is the subject but few are seeing it as
> purposeful thought first to which design adds the intention to improve
> whatever the thought addresses.Thought happens in individual brains and
> becomes social only when people express their thoughts to others through
> language, images, artifacts, or behavior. Once expressed it is these
> expressions that become objects of interpretation, recognition and adaptation.
> Although design often encourages unusual ways of thinking and expressing
> things, and designers are often skillful in applying some of them, the ³tools
> of design²are not necessarily known to everyone, even though the components of
> purposeful thought are.
>
> Or so I believe,
> Chuck
>
> Pedro: I don¹t know if you are familiar with the "Society of Mind" metaphor,
> or "The Folk Theory of Faculty Psychology² in which each faculty (capacity) of
> the mind is conceptualized as a person. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
> ³Philosophy in the Flesh², New York, Basic Books, p420. It offers food for
> thought about how people interpret their experience and how these thoughts
> collaborate and form a ³society of mind². I have a paper at www.independent.
> academia.edu where I ³personalized" the primary modes of purposeful thought in
> ³A Theory of Design Thinking² and we used these animated characters to
> collaborate in teaching children through demonstration and explanation.
>
>
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--
Jerry Diethelm
Architect - Landscape Architect
Planning & Urban Design Consultant
Prof. Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
and Community Service € University of Oregon
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