i would not want to suggest that we, designers, attempt to usurp all 
disciplines that create newness.  but i have argued elsewhere that it is 
worth the effort to inquire into what distinguishes design from, say, 
science so as not to be unwittingly trapped into the latter's peculiar 
epistemology.  this is all the more important as we are discussing design 
research, a ph.d. (in design) which has heretofore been associated with the 
renaissance institution of the university.  the creation of new realities 
certainly is part of design and absent in science.  science aims at 
generalizations of what is permanent and can be asserted with confidence to 
hold up against future tests.  by contrast, design is trying to circumvent, 
overcome, or bypass what is currently believed impossible.  so, when rosan 
asks whether design knowledge is objective, subjective, or constructive,  i 
have to say that science has thrived in the distinction between objective 
and subjective. constructivism, on the other hand, is an epistemology that 
overcomes this distinction, suggesting the process of making as a key to 
understanding the world.  i myself think this is where a bifurcation of 
science is currently taking place (whether constructivism will be usurped 
by science or ruled unscientific is the issue and the outcome of this 
debate is difficult to predict).

i think we should be carefully evaluating the claims made by the advocates 
of various scientific disciplines, most of which have a history of claiming 
more than they end up delivering.

dick says that rhetoric is a discipline concerned with the making of (new) 
speeches.  my reading of aristotle and recent rhetorical work 
(communication scholarship is full of attitude change models, agenda 
setting theories, media effects research) suggest that rhetoric attempts to 
explain what makes some speeches more successful than others.  different 
schools have developed slightly different systems of distinctions of both 
the kinds of speeches (categorized by their purposes) and the parts of 
speech by which successes or failures of the whole are to be 
explained.  rhetoric has nothing to say about the ingenuity needed to 
create new speeches but about what is invariant in and can be generalized 
to all speeches.  the fact that rhetoric has not (yet) managed to identify 
the elements of speeches that could predict their effects with acceptable 
levels of certainty suggests the working of a non-rhetorical kind of 
knowing that successful politicians, advertisers, and teachers have (and 
rhetoricians are blinded to see by the categories of their 
system).  linguistics would have been an equally convincing example of what 
i am suggesting.  it cannot explain poetry nor purposive uses of 
language.  where newness is constructed is where we need to search for what 
knowledgeable designers have that general propositions cannot describe.

just as the laws of physics cannot predict the invention of technologies so 
are the distinctions of rhetoric unable to predict the creation of new 
speeches and their effects.  i suggest that a constructive kind of knowing 
is involved, which modern science is epistemologically blinded to understand.

klaus

At 10:20 AM 9/28/00 -0400, Richard Buchanan wrote:
>I am puzzled by the suggestion that design and knowledge of design is
>somehow beyond the scope of other ways of knowing.  It seems rather
>precious--a kind of special pleading for self-defense--to claim, on very
>vague and general grounds, that design just doesn't fit into the
>framework of human understanding as we have known it and as we continue
>to explore it in diverse ways.  Before going down that path, we had
>better look closely at how this matter has been addressed in other areas
>of inquiry--and there is more than ample literature to consider.
>
>My response takes two forms.
>
>First, all inquiry is the investigation of possibilities and "what-if."
>To think otherwise is to imagine that truth is carved on the body of
>what exists and requires only to be excavated.  This is a very narrow
>and naive vision of research and inquiry in other fields.  In fact, it
>seems to trivialize the problem of inquiry in general.  Special us and
>poor them.
>
>Second, as Bryn points out, design as a discipline is by no means unique
>in focusing on the creation of what does not yet exist.  The first
>example of this that comes to mind is the discipline of rhetoric, which
>for more than two thousand years has been concerned precisely with the
>invention and creation of speeches that have not yet been made.  The
>problem of writing and communication is an exceptionally close parallel
>with the problems that designers address, and writers in the former
>tradition have not found its future orientation to be an obstacle to
>clear thinking and articulation.  Other examples cover the range of
>creative disciplines in the arts.  And still other examples cover the
>range of human practical action--politics and related disciplines that
>seek to understand how human beings create and sustain various forms of
>organizational behavior--to say nothing of inquiry into ethics and moral
>behavior.  It is also tempting to discuss the problems of theology over
>the centuries and across cultures as another example.
>
>In short, it is naive to suddenly declare the special status of design,
>as if no one else has ever considered the problem of creation.  If this
>is where we are, then the "field" is surely in no small trouble.
>
>Dick



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