 |
 |
Dear David and all. Thanks for the thoughtful response. Yes, I agree about position, elephants and the rhetoric and logic we deploy, what I’ve been calling more generally the intellectual tools we bring to designing. With regard to position in secondary qualitative relationships, like you I emphasize its being both importantly situated and conditioned, situated in its own time place, group, people, language and culture and conditioned by the ethics, values, beliefs, customs and sense of possibility that immersion represents. A where am I within a who am I? A shorthand version of my position: I teeter and try to keep my balance at the tip of a valuing cone of ecological justice and eco-humanism, while still living in and eating my share of dust in the world. With respect to agency within the secondary qualitative relationships of designing, I look for the right fit for each specific instance, and for each individual project. About half way in usually works out best for me. Jerry > On Jul 28, 2018, at 6:42 PM, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > Jerry and all, > > Jerry, I agree very much with what you have added, and I’d like to add two more qualitative considerations. > > One is a subtle inflection of your primary and secondary qualitative relationships, and may indeed be implicit in what you have written. For me the idea of ‘position’ is central. It grew out of my work on communication theory. > > In Jorge Frascara’s “Designing Effective Communication”(2006) I gave a summary of the ideas and thinking that led me to see the relevance of ‘position’ to information design. It’s called ‘Where am I' > > I suspect that ‘position’ is the elephant in the room in the mansplaining discourse that preceded this thread. It is also, from my point of view, one of the most neglected issues in Design and General Systems Theory > > The second qualitative consideration is the activity or argumentations: the specific rhetoric and logic that we deploy in defence of any position we take. > > A small footnote to my own ‘position’: As a committed secularist and none-zionist with an upbringing in Jewish/Israeli culture, Big Truth never died, because it was never alive outside the tribal cultures I grew up in but left. What has always been alive for me is our common humanity. But my glasses, like yours are tinted, and I can only see what is in front of me. Everything else contains a greater or lesser degree of certainty, inference, and speculation. > > Sless, David. “Where Am I?,” In Designing Effective Communications; Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning, edited by Jorge Frascara, 29–37. New York: Allworth Press, 2006. > > David Jerry Diethelm Architect Landscape Architect Planning & Urban Design Consultant Prof. Emeritus of Landscape Architecture and Community Service • University of Oregon 2652 Agate St., Eugene, OR 97403 • e-mail: [log in to unmask] • e-mail [log in to unmask] • web: http://pages.uoregon.edu/diethelm/ • https://oregon.academia.edu/JerryDiethelm • 541-686-0585 home/work • 541-346-1441 UO • 541-206-2947 work/cell ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------