Hi MP Ranjan,

The extent to which I feel out of step is highlighted by your  
reference to General Systems Theory and the HfG Ulm. Like you, I  
avidly absorbed the work of all the authors you cite, but I took a  
different direction. In my last post, I deliberately stopped with the  
1930s because I feel out of step with what followed.

That leads neatly into what I wanted to say about the colonial/ 
imperialist debate which I alluded to in my last post.

I don't want to get caught up in the 'apology' for or the  
'accusation' of imperialism. Imperialism happened and continues to  
happen. Some of the less appealing actions and habits of mind that it  
encourages or tolerates are as virulent and persistent in our time as  
at any other time in the past. Norm Sheehan makes that eloquently  
clear. Our age has no greater claim to being enlightened than any  
other. If there is any difference in our time it is one of scale and  
reach. There are more of us, we can successfully kill each other and  
other living things in greater numbers at greater distances, and we  
can do so more efficiently than in previous times. This, along with  
the internet and good plumbing, is an aspect of what is incorrectly  
called progress.

What I have been trying to do is open up a rarely regarded but  
important space that gets masked by the none-space from which  
imperialist points of view often speak.

Going back to the original substantive questions I asked in relation  
to designers' use of anthropological material—though it could apply  
to almost any area of investigation undertaken as part of a design  
project:
> In so far that anthropological investigation is allied to any kind  
> of problem solving, it's important always to ask whose problem is  
> being solved, or whose description of the problem is being used,  
> and who owns the data and the outcome.
These questions PRECEDE and frame any data collected and subsequent  
outcome. In turn, these questions are only asked if one begins by  
trying to articulate the POSITION from which one speaks, listens, or  
engages. But the articulation of which I speak is quite concrete— 
describing the communication landscape from where I stand inside it.

I am not interested in the abstract articulation of relativism,  
subjectivity, and situatedness—the post-modern angst. This is often  
recited as a mantra, and then followed by yet another series of  
imperialising abstraction about 'humanity', 'the environment',  
'sustainment' etc.

My interests are quite concrete and specific. I assume I'm already  
embedded in the world in a particular context (Whether I acknowledge  
this in the abstract or not). How could it be otherwise! And from  
this immersion (as Norm describes it) I am faced with a series of  
specific practical questions. How am I to read what is being said to  
me by people I talk to? How do I read the data that comes to me in a  
report about what people have said to an interviewer? How do I read  
what a writer tells me in a book about their own experience? When I  
look at a system diagram, I want to know where I am situated relative  
to other elements in the system, or where the person who drew the  
diagram was that enabled them to see the system from this particular  
point of view. Whose point of view are they showing me? These are  
human questions about the relative relationship between me and the  
world I have to deal with. They are at one and the same time  
practical and moral questions, and the answers I give have practical  
and moral consequences.

Nothing in general systems theory, in the work of HfG Ulm, nor the  
work on design methods, wicked problems etc. that followed, enable me  
to answer these questions. Nor do the excrescence from hermeneutic  
approaches help either.

To help in my own work I created what I called the 'logic of  
positions'. It helps in a formal mapping of the communicative  
landscape in which I am immersed. This has been for me, and my  
colleagues in information design, very useful in practically mapping  
out our relationship to the material and people we work with and the  
types of questions we ask of that material and those people.

I would suggest that the questions I raise above are the types of  
questions that individuals and teams of designers ask all the time,  
and try to answer through their work. Whether they do it using some  
formal tools like a 'logic of positions' or through some less formal  
methods, it is the fact that much of the tone and content of design  
research as discussed on this list avoids these questions which puts  
me and  (possibly) other designers out of step.

Of course, I cannot speak for others, but I am continually  
disappointed by the absence of  a practical engagement with the  
issues and questions of our time in which we are embedded.

David