My apologies for the last posting.

Word outsmarted me again. I did not know that characters were being mangled
in transmission until I saw the result.

I hope it works better the second time, below.



Posting:

My posting is general and since I wrote it early this morning (it is now
evening) it may be out of sync. David Sless's comments are not entirely
popular, so I add a voice. In substance, I am in agreement with his
concerns, as I understand them.

Unless the concepts are put in question, one can indeed spiral into
abstraction. The usefulness of an idea is not merely a kind of "vulgar"
pragmatism but a measure of its power and integrity. Ostension is the
measure of concept. If I have an orange in one hand and its definition in
the other, in my view, the orange wins. In postings, it sometimes appears
that the opposite view is taken. It seems to me that speculation about ideas
is very important, but it needs to be looked at as a way to critically
examine those ideas in the light of their correspondence to the world, throw
out the ones that are unproductive, and make a concerted effort to figure
out what should be in their places.

Design has a fundamental problem in that there is no agreed upon consistent
frame of epistemology and ontology to give a base for the field. Designers
borrow concepts and methodological tools from other fields, which, in
itself, is great. If we use them without rethinking them in terms of our
situation, and if we formulate our research questions largely on the basis
of problems-results, then it is not so great. Our categories remain in the
reifications of everyday thinking or in traditional concepts of other,
incommensurable fields.

Without a clear understanding of design's own conceptual point(s) of view,
its knowledge lacks integrity; it is syncretic. We cannot really know the
status of research findings: what they mean, the regions in which they are
operative, their relations to other findings, etc.

There is the view that design is defined by a kind of irreducible ambiguity
or vagueness: i.e. that designers attack "ill defined" problems to
creatively discover solutions. They do this, but defining the field in this
way is, it seems to me, self-defeating and fundamentally intuitionist.
Others argue that design problems are by necessity to "complex" to reduce.
This seems to me simply to reflect the lack of an appropriate taxonomy. The
schematic of a television looks very complex, until you understand how to
read it. Once the devices and taxonomy are understood, it is quite simple.
You can see the power supply, rf stages, video if stages, etc. You can find
your way around it, diagnose problems, predict performance and make
redesigns. I see no reason why taxonomies cannot be built in design.
Moreover, the use of taxonomies is not reductive unless we choose to make it
so. 

In a former life I studied Sociology, which was at that time in a situation
not unlike that of design. Robert K. Merton described it as the overwhelming
gap between "the practical problems assigned to the sociologist and the
state of his accumulated knowledge and skills."  Merton wrote this not long
after World War II when the dominant theories in the field were "grand
theories" at high levels of abstraction. There was no way to operationalize
them. They were more post-hoc symbolic interpretations of whatever
observations were made than descriptions: i.e. ideologies or "spirals of
abstraction." The situation in Sociology changed quite radically in the
following decades. The field remains heterogeneous, but it is a more healthy
heterogeneity, consistent with the human beings it studies and the human
beings who do the studying. It has an "intelligible topography." The various
schools of thought and areas of research can be made sense of with respect
to each other. The situation in Sociology is not "rational" but "reasonable"
in Stephen Toulmin's terms, and in his view, reasonableness may be a higher
form than rationality. I invoke Toulmin here not as an authority, but
because I think he has it profoundly right. Rationality operates within
specific frames (intuitionism or computational mechanism). Reasonableness is
the larger context around and between them.

It appears to me that Design is where Sociology was, in something of a
confusion. There is no reason to believe that it must remain there. There
are ways to bring order, though it will take time. We know that as a
practical matter, if this is not done, the profession will be far the worse
for it. While "consilience" will never really be achieved (and is probably
not desirable), it represents an important value: to make the fabric of
knowledge integral and intelligible.

Certainly, design is not the same culture as science, thus the skepticism of
"computational" metaphysics, whether explicit or implicit. Computations are
certainly required, but the computationalism that was so popular in the
1960's ­ 80's has been found unsatisfactory even to some of it's own ardent
adherents. Hilary Putnam is eloquent on this. On the other hand the notion
of "creativity" has within it an intuitionist redolence. It often appears as
a residual category: i.e. what's left when rational theory is exhausted, or
when a "process" cannot be analytically decomposed: for example, "The
spontaneous flow of his [sc. Shakespeare's] poetic creativity.", or "A
creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere
politician." (both taken from the O.E.D)."  It seems more a value judgment
than a description.

Designers need to build appropriate orienting models of their field: models
that make sense and can be operationalized and tested. There are promising
ontologies and epistemologies out there. Of the range that are currently
available, it seems to me that some sort of constructivism offers a way of
understanding reasonableness and the limitations of knowledge, which is
neither purely foundationalist nor coherentist but "Foundherentist", a term
coined by Susan Haack. This general perspective has informed social sciences
and psychologies for a century. It demands empirical study and gives an
account of what it is good for and what its limitations are. One of its
requirements is that if you think people accomplish something, you had
better be able to account for how they can do it and be able to test it (no
Chomskian linguistics here).

Parenthetically, this leads to a discussion of research, theory, the
development of scholarship, the "practice" Ph.D., and a healthy academic
sector, but that is another question.

Whether or not this frame in a specific flavor works in any particular field
or sub-field of design, one needs to have a scaffolding that is operational,
intelligible, and consistent with its objects of study, in this case
cultural, social, cognitive human beings. "Spirals of abstraction" seem to
come often from the use of concepts that do not conform to the
specifications above. They are not formulated in human terms, cannot be made
operational, or define phenomena in ways that make them unrecognizable. In
short, spirals come from not being critical enough of the concepts by which
we classify and observe. Certainly, difficulties in testing theories are
indicators of problems with the theories themselves.

If the shoe fits, wear it.
I have been studying cross mode cognition to get a handle on how concepts
become "marks on a page", and how physical structure constructs objects as
apprehended by receivers. The largest part of this job has been in studying
models of communication, knowledge acquisition, and the experience of
knowing. It was immediately clear that the available theories of knowledge
were categorically inadequate to form a study of sensory and symbolic
communication. It required that I reconstruct the problem of communication,
define its ontology and epistemology, and then come up with an apposite
model for empirical study. After that, experiments examined the model. This
is what I think is most needed in my area, though perhaps not for others in
other areas. 

Finally, it is not clear to me that design fields are all that alike in
their problematics. Product designers, for example, discuss artifacts in
ways that don't make sense to me in terms of communications. I may entirely
misunderstand other areas of design. I simply propose this for
consideration.


-- 

Peter K. Storkerson, M.F.A. Ph.D.
http://home.tiac.net/~pstork
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