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Dear colleagues, I got a message that my recent email has been blocked by some censoring systems. I deleted old reference mails and post the message again. -----Original Message----- From: Lubomir Savov Popov Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2015 11:00 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: About old and new ideas Hi Don, Keith's post instigated a new reading of your previous post. At first, I took your text at face value and completely agreed with it. Citing something 30 years old? No way. Ten years max. However, Keith has a point. In philosophy, they go back a century and still cannot find anything better. We got too much influenced by the computer fields where six months might be a long time. And in architectural design, three years might be the limit for sifting through trade magazines. The age of ideas is important. There are always newer developments, new findings, new kinds of discourses. All that accumulates and makes us richer. But does it? Does it accumulate? Many new development ignore previous achievements in order to boost bigger contributions. Everyone wants to be the first, to make something new, and to start a new line of thought. In some cases, the old stuff is subpar; wrong, and even abusive. But in many cases, the new stuff is ridiculous; or just repackaging of the "old" staff. In many cases large groups of people suddenly change direction and rush into new thematic areas, embrace new discourses and paradigmatic developments, and engage in research that is the fad of the day. Many old thematic circles remain in their infancy, disregarded, and underdeveloped. And actually, those ideas might have much higher heuristic potential than the new ones. But the fad is taking the upper hand; people want to talk the new discourse, and the funding agencies fuel this as well. It is really sad to see new ideas that are compromised, illogical, trivial, and political. It is sad because that is a step back or a step away. I fully support experimentation with new discourses and epistemologies; I am patiently waiting to see their development, to test their heuristic potential. In some cases I enjoy the new developments; in other cases I am frustrated by scholarly liberties that are tantamount to incompetence and scam. Some research domains emerge with fanfares, grow for a decade, then stale, and finally remain undeveloped monuments of past enthusiasm. In my humble opinion, this is the situation with "Environment and Behavior Studies." The field started in the 1960s with great expectations. It was the fad of the day. Everyone hoped that this is the panacea for a better and user-friendly architecture. The field started developing its own theories and methods. There were interesting achievements in the 1970s. Then came a stalemate. No more theory. Just field research on various topics, data collection, and joggling with statistics. At the end of 1980s the community put together a handbook with theoretical developments that were just elaborations of the 1970s ideas. And after that things started subsiding, changing, going in many different directions. New paradigms and discourses were adopted. They brought new topics and thematic circles, pushing the initial ideas away. The new fads bring new information, but not the information needed to develop the theory of the field. The new scholars were influenced by developments in other fields that had a very different logic and way of thinking. In this situation, citing theoretical treatise from the 1970s is unavoidable. However, it is also sad because this is an indication for the failure of the field. So, the new is not always the best, nor even the better. History of philosophy shows that very clearly. Not everything new in philosophy is better than the old. It is just like in architectural design. There are thousands of attempts to create new architecture, but only a handful actually make it and influence architectural designers around the world. And the old Modernism is still alive and kicking, long after the architectural demise of Postmodernism. This is a good example how one new development (Postmodernism) was celebrated as exceptional, only to go away after 15 years on the architectural stage. So, I would not mind 40 years old references if they are advancing great ideas that were not developed at their time and that were forgotten for some reason. There is value in such ideas. There is value in resurrecting such ideas and comparing them to the competing ideas. Tell me in what way the rhizome is better than the system? Is it helping us understand complexity and change better than the system? Does it have a better developed conceptual apparatus? Does it have a better operationalization for application in practical matters (design and engineering of any kind)? Does it overcome the shortcomings of system thinking? Or we just compare one new idea with (assumed) great potential to the worst examples of an old idea (the system)? Systems thinking can be very mechanical and linear, but it can also take the shape of a multilayered, multifaceted, multidirectional, self-learning and flexible conceptual structure. What is the advantage of the rhizome? That if promises more -- a more agile way of thinking, more flexibility, and better response to high dynamic situations. And have we seen the rhizomatic thinking in action? What will happen when it is concretized to the level of practice thinking? I am eagerly waiting to see that. I am not rejecting the rhizome concept, but also, I am not putting time to develop it. And, I am not sure how it is better than the system, at least at this time. Just claiming that everything is connected to everything is not enough. Besides, it is an old systems talk adapted for humanitarians. That is the truth. In some way, it is interesting to see how communities that cannot stand each other learn from each other and borrow from each other. But, in either cases, they would not acknowledge that and will vehemently critics the very ideas they have used to develop their new beliefs. The rhizome idea comes from a completely different paradigm than the systems idea. The two paradigms produce very different discourses that do not interface, do not communicate with each other, and do not respect each other. People schooled in systems thinking would not like to read deconstructivist philosophy that makes the foundation for understanding the concept of rhizome. And the humanitarians hate to think about systems because this is far from the humanitarian rationality, way of conceptualization, and preferred lexicology. I appreciate one initiative about five years ago, started by Erik Stolterman. He was looking at the history of system thinking. It is important to go back and trace the evolution of systems thinking from its mechanistic beginnings to its post-positivist evolution. I don't reject Deconstruction. I just want to make a case that during the time we work to concretize Deconstructivist ideas, we need something else to use in practice. This might be something old that was not developed to its full potential. Something old that might help us work in the transitional period. Or, like the story of modernism in architecture, neosystems thinking might resurrect and function as a respected parallel methodology. This time somewhat different, accounting for previous mistakes, adapted much better to the new changing world. We should not forget that systems thinking was created when the world become too complex to be handled with previous methods. Systems thinking was a response to change, complexity, and multidirectionality. However, some people simplified it to the point of mechanistic calculations. And the systems community didn't do enough to adapt it to an even more complex and dynamic world that emerged in the 1960s. Just a few thoughts about the old and the new in science. Let's remember the adage that everything new is something old that was well forgotten and now resurrected in a new form. I do not support this adage, but very often, when I hear claims for new ways of thinking, I think about it. It is all about thinking and the phenomenon of thinking. Best wishes, Lubomir Lubomir Popov, PhD, FDRS, IDEC, CSP Professor, School of Family and Consumer Sciences, Bowling Green State University American Culture Studies affiliated faculty ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------