Hi all, see embedded comments.

teena clerke wrote:
> Hi Glenn,
> 
> in picking up on your post, substituting 'task', 'challenge' or 'puzzle' 
> for 'problem', still seems to construct the design space as a site of 
> struggle in some way - which might also seem contrary to the idea of 
> design as collaboration (or is collaboration also seen as a site of 
> struggle, challenge, puzzle?).

Chris Alexander suggested the 'seeking of harmony' for such an activity, 
I think.

> 
> In thinking through what this might mean while walking my children to 
> school, I wonder what might happen if we trouble this perhaps 
> adversarial construction to allow for a 'collection' of words ('working 
> across multiple design sectors') rather than a single (problematic) 
> term, that provide for descriptions of the design space as other than 
> problem/task/challenge? Words like synchronic, serendipitous, synergous, 
> might open a broader space for discussion about certain phases of the 
> design process that disrupt the binary of 'smooth/problematic' temporal 
> narratives of how it works in design - I prepare my children's school 
> lunch, wonder what I might cook for dinner, worry about the (lack of) 
> thesis writing, and think through a tricky wine label design I have been 
> working on for six months. I go hear the Dalai Lama speak and lunch with 
> a self-described 'housewife who sits in the corner' from Warren, who is 
> also the ex-Mayor of Nyngan, and from a family of fifth generation 
> Merino sheep farmers who recently switched to wine production and 
> exporting - she pragmatically suggests a way forward, while I am 
> 'inspired' to produce an entirely different illustration than the one 
> that remains problematic for me and the client. What are these sites? Do 
> they arise from my struggle alone? Do they emerge from synchronous 
> random events that are not about design and also not about struggle? Or 
> is this simply another site of struggle? (after all, I did go hear the 
> Dalai Lama speak). Are they then legitimate sites/spaces for design 
> work? Can the housewife/ex-mayor be a collaborator in my design work? Is 
> there space in this collaboration for other (future) work?

This sounds like 'reflection' to me - the kind of free association, 
letting diverse experience blend with your struggle.  A prelude to 
discovering an analogy.

There's also recent work that suggests the white matter of the brain 
does the heavy lifting during 'problem solving' (sorry, they're term, 
not mine) in conditions where the solver lacks a canned analytic 
technique to follow.  And the solution gets kicked upstairs to the 
cortex once it's found.  The result is a moment of sudden realization 
when a solution appears whole, as if from nothing.

Your account, Teena, of all those ancillary activities sounds:

a. just like what I do when I'm trying to solve a hard 
programming/design/engineering problem;

b. surprisingly similar to the typical examples of setting up the 
conditions for analogical reasoning to occur spontaneously in your 
brain; and

c. consistent with the tasks that 'creativity researchers' have 
considered in their work.

The guy who's work in this area appears the most popular in this part of 
the world is R. Keith Sawyer (e.g. 
http://news-info.wustl.edu/sb/page/normal/46.html).

> 
> Can we conceive of a productive and 'collaborative' space as a coming 
> together (is this merely unproblematised collaboration?) of 
> things/ideas/views/perceptions, that produces other things 
> (ideas/processes/partnerships/products), or from which other things 
> might emerge, not in a strictly linear, sequential or temporal manner, 
> but, as Deleuze and Guttarri (1975, previously referenced) suggest, 
> rhizomic, and/or as Patti Lather (2007) suggests 'polytemporal', in that 
> working on a current issue/job/outcome that already is, I might also 
> predict that which is yet to come (a line of flight predicting a future 
> thought/enterprise/process). Am I not collaborating with myself in a 
> polytemporal space which specifically focuses on possibilities rather 
> than resolutions? Not sure.

How exactly the brain does this, I don't know.  I don't even know if 
someone else, like Sawyer does know.  We will eventually.

Till then, what you've written sounds like a perfectly reasonable 
potential model, for at least some people's processes.

Cheers.
Fil

> 
> cheers, teena
> 
> Lather, Patti, 2007, 'Getting Lost', State University of New York Press, 
> Albany
> 

-- 
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/