I have to side with Alain Findeli in stating that "the exact nature and quality of the relationship between thinking and acting" is too often uncreatively understood, which is in itself a contradiction, or should be. The very important point Alain was leading up to, and this is of the utmost importance to the future of design research, is that Western dichotomous thinking persists in separating the studio project and the "written" dissertation (the fact that the "written" part may not necessarily be on paper does not invalidate the point being made). Alain asked Dick, and by implication all design educators, this question: what relationship do you wish to establish between "doing" and "writing" as far as design research is concerned? This use of the word "relationship" does not imply that thinking and acting must b two different things, on the contrary. It rather points to the fact that there is, and should be, an area of overlap or communality between the two terms. If you wish to be dogmatic you may say that all terms are separate and different, and so they are, but only seen as units of understanding that need other units to "explain" them. Not even de Saussure was as guilty of the dichotomous thinking that the poststructuralists accused him of. The term "design" cannot be explained in the absence of what brought it into being, the term design needs the explanatory kinship relationships that make of it a human activity.
In this same way the relationship between the activity of design and the thought of design should have a defined relationship in any educational programme (this implies strongly the lasting effect it should have on design practices "out there"). No student of design, whether undergraduate or postgraduate engaged in research, should be allowed the luxury of subjective "making" of design sans theory. A good relationship between the studio project and the written dissertation must have as an essential component the aim of "metamorphosis of the practice and of the theory of design." Because of this relationship, which should become a "habit", theory will influence practice and vice versa, in Alain's sense of theory metamorphosing your idea of the practical, and because of this change, the new understanding of practice metamorphosing the theory in turn, in a back-and-forth mutual enhancement of the understanding of design as a whole.
Of course the real problem, especially for students, is that there is still the belief that you can do only one thing at a time: you can either do design or write about design, but not both at the same time. Theory/analysis and practice/creativity seem to mutually exclude each other. Analysis stifles creativity and true imagination does not need reason. If this is true, how on earth then, as Tim might say, do you manage to walk along the street? His point about sketching is well taken, and in real time represents the relationship between the studio project and the dissertation which is simply more protracted and not so "visibly immediate", but the same process nonetheless. The relationship between analysis and creativity, between thinking and acting operates along a continuum between pure reason and wild imagination, and is often "invisible" because it operates as rapidly as the alternating but progressive frames of a moving film. The whole is indeed more than the bare and "scientifically observed" sum of the parts.
Because design operates along this continuum it can incorporate what Dick means with "the diversity of ideas about what the relationship may be and how each of our ideas allows us to think and act in particular ways." Design moves along this continuum because, Mary, there is room for "being" and "emotion" in the sense of being shared and communicable. Design is a social act of communicable significance.
Johann van der Merwe
Faculty of Art and Design, Port Elizabeth Technikon
P/Bag X6011 Port Elizabeth 6000
Phone +27 41 504 3682 Fax +27 41 504 3529
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