Great conversation. Happy to be mostly a lurker-There are a couple of
issues that have come up that a very least need to be considered.
Most critical to me is design as a practice-that it is essentially connected
to embodiment. It
becomes a tactile experience whose agency isn't really in words but in the
realm of the senses.
I also agree that each of the design arts seems to have a different quality
to its activity. Graphic design
is not like fashion. and so it goes. Each works with different elements and
envisions them in dynamic
ways that are unique to their discipline.
There is also a terrific difference between those who practice design and
those who write/think/research
on design. Its my personal feeling that the direction things have been
heading in for quite a while and will
continue to is about the connection-the embodiment not the rigor of thinking
it through but the actual product
as it relates, is part of human life.
Kathryn Simon
Adjunct Professor
Fashion History and Fashion Theory
Parsons School of Design
New York
AAS Dept.
917 226 2860
Cultural Producer & Curator
Art/Design
On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 11:56 PM, Gavin Melles <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Wittgenstein's family resemblance is useful here (substitute design for
> game)
>
> 65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all
> these considerations.-For someone might object against me: "You take the
> easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have
> nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language,
> is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into
> language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of
> the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part
> about the general form of propositions and of language."
>
> And this is true.-Instead of producing something common to all that we
> call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in
> common which makes us use the same word for all,-but that they are
> related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this
> relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language".
> I will try to explain this.
>
> 66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean
> board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is
> common to them all? -- Don't say: "There must be something common, or
> they would not be called 'games' "-but look and see whether there is
> anything common to all. -- For if you look at them you will not see
> something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a
> whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! --
>
> And see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#Lan (below)
>
> It is here that Wittgenstein's rejection of general explanations, and
> definitions based on sufficient and necessary conditions, is best
> pronounced. Instead of these symptoms of the philosopher's "craving for
> generality", he points to 'family resemblance' as the more suitable
> analogy for the means of connecting particular uses of the same word.
> There is no reason to look, as we have done traditionally — and
> dogmatically — for one, essential core in which the meaning of a word
> is located and which is, therefore, common to all uses of that word. We
> should, instead, travel with the word's uses through "a complicated
> network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing" (PI 66). Family
> resemblance also serves to exhibit the lack of boundaries and the
> distance from exactness that characterize different uses of the same
> concept. Such boundaries and exactness are the definitive traits of form
> — be it Platonic form, Aristotelian form, or the general form of a
> proposition adumbrated in the Tractatus. It is from such forms that
> applications of concepts can be deduced, but this is precisely what
> Wittgenstein now eschews in favor of appeal to similarity of a kind with
> family resemblance.
>
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