Nice note Birger.
I'll say one thing about my observations from within engineering.
Engineering designers seem to be not as "depressed" as seems to be the case
outside engineering. Some may think what comes next is very controversial,
but I don't think so. No insult to anyone is intended; this is just my
well-intentioned opinion.
Some might argue that this is because engineering designers are part of the
problem, having been responsible in (nearly) direct ways for many of the
technologies that are screwing up the planet and humanity.
Of course this is true for some of our members, but not most. We were
trained, for the 2nd half of the 20th century, to follow a strict division
of labour, and to understand that we can create something in good faith that
users turn into some catastrophe-inducing machine of death. But that is the
scientist in us speaking, and there is /some/ merit there. If everyone else
did do the right thing that these products we designed would not be causing
so much trouble. Yes, it was naive to assume everyone would do the right
thing, but at that level, scientists and engineers tend to be that naive.
They tend to be aspire to the elegance of nature, and so eschew the nasty
Machiavellian tendencies of others. From the outside, this often looks like
naivety; but it is more often a personal choice.
Some might argue that engineering designers simply don't "get" the intricacy
of the interactions that occur between system elements in the "real world."
Well, there are no "system elements" in the real world. Nature doesn't do
systems. Systems happens to be a really, really useful way for humans to
understand /parts/ of nature, but they're not real. If systems don't exist,
then their interactions don't exist. It's all a matter of how we've chosen
to model the universe.
Science has given us the systems approach, as well as the realization that
systems don't really exist. If more people truly understood science, more
people would realize that we can /change/ anything that we have just
decided. That is, we can find and adopt new ways of thinking at will. All
we need, of course, is will.
And anyways, scientists and engineers /do/ understand the intricacy of these
things. Complex systems, chaos theory, emergence....all these concepts were
developed in science/math/engineering and then percolated their way to the
rest of the world.
If engineers have a "problem" in this regard, it's that they think the
intricacies that designers work with (which can usually be reduced to
interactions between people) are second-order effects compared to the
primary effects caused by other natural things. The reason they think this
is because, in nature, a phenomenon is 'fixed'. Gravity is as gravity does;
F always equals m*a for v<<c, etc. But the interactions between people are
subject to sudden and total changes. While there are /some/ patterns to
these changes, they are coarse and unreliable. No reasonable engineer has a
problem with continued study of the mind for the sake of eventually
understanding it as well as we understand the rest of the universe.
Understanding is always good. But in the meantime, engineers will largely
prefer to focus on the things that they can treat now. Think globally but
act locally, and all that.
If you look at virtually any Serious Problem today, you'll realize that the
problem is almost /never/ technical, but rather a "people problem." And I
think that that problem can be summed up like this: as a species, we behave
like animals, but we think we're better than animals. This makes us
constantly surprised when things go "wrong" and also ruins our ability to
predict our own actions, even if just coarsely. So we /seem/ unpredictable,
but only /seem/ so.
Although I haven't done the actual studies, anecdotal evidence tells me
almost all engineers to whom I've ever spoken with about these matters
agrees with me, more or less. I could very well be wrong, but I've seen
nothing to suggest it yet.
Anyways, the point is this, engineering designers tend to be less depressed,
as near as I can tell, because they console themselves with a better
scientific understanding than many other kinds of designers can bring to
bear. Whether the engineers are right or not - only time will tell.
But one thing is certain: it's better to do something 'good' today, in the
near term, and be happy about it, than just beat your chest about some
distant and hypothetical ill of the future about which nothing can be done.
Cheers.
Fil
2009/7/5 Birger Sevaldson <[log in to unmask]>
> Hello Terry
> Cool you are a sailor too :) If you are interrested check my sailing site
> (http://www.birger-sevaldson.no/seiling/index.php)
> I only partly agree with what you are stating. though decisions on the race
> course are seemingly reduced to single loop decisions if it was that simple
> you could make a computer program telling you what to do in different
> situations. Well it partly exists but only partly.
> A very experienced sailor who i know had a very different view. He said
> sailing is like playing chess on several boards simultaneously. I would add
> yes but while the boards in chess are disconnected and static in sailing
> they are interlinked and dynamic. One single loop decision that seems right
> at a certain moment may turn out to be wrong at the next. Well enough about
> this only a small comment on gut feeling: i think everybody can have gut
> feelings but the only gut feelings that are relevant are those intuitions
> that are based on experience and deep knowledge. exactly when the single
> loop decisions fall short and a fractioning of the networks of
> interrelations and when calculated models don’t work the experts base their
> decisions on gut feeling. in contrary to what you say i think only very
> skilled experts can make decisions on gut feelings that make sense.
>
> Now back to saving the planet: I think what has left us as designers in
> depression because of the disability to act is the last generations
> realization of the complexity and dynamics of things. Systems are counter
> intuitive and best intentions often produce worst results. But i think that
> this depression can be overcome by these partly new soft systems approaches
> in combination with other views. i think the designers ability to synthesize
> from very complex data is only partly developed into this. I had a very good
> experience with my students this spring where they were able to learn a
> deeper and wider thinking. look at big fields of interrelated data and to
> respond to this, attack their solutions with catastrophic scenarios to
> speculate about the resilience of their systems design.
> The examples of this will follow as promised i hope within the autumn.
>
> I am not saying that this is the way but its one way. it is hard but fun
> and creates innovation. Its also very much connected to real life, in the
> end by looking at an intervention as an ecology were economy and the
> survival of actors on many different scales simultaneously are included
> factors.
>
> What i am saying is that designers have to trust less on their bright ideas
> and instead start to work with deep and wide ideas and interrelated ideas
> that work in synergies over time. Systems oriented designing is a creative
> activity also because looking at systems carefully brings you beyond the
> object fixation, beyond your prejudices and schemata.
> My experience is that this has to be learned as skills and techniques more
> than methods and this is where it becomes interesting for the discussion on
> design education and to your question of the outcomes you mention.
> If we agree that designers need to cope with more of the consequences,
> suggest alternatives and engage in the ecologies of the industrial
> production they are a part of, what are your suggestions or models for
> coping with this?
>
> I think there must be other approaches out there? I fyes its crucial we
> bring the suggestive solutions to the table so that they can be challenged
> and developed further.
>
> Best
> Birger
>
>
> ________________________________________
> Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
> research in Design [[log in to unmask]] på vegne av Terence
> Love [[log in to unmask]]
> Sendt: 5. juli 2009 03:55
> Til: [log in to unmask]
> Emne: Re: Betraying the Planet: systems oriented design
>
> Hi Berger,
>
> Thanks for your message. I'll respond more fully later. Good to hear you
> sail!
>
> My feeling is sailing is a good example in favour of my comments: race
> training of successful helmsmen and boat teams attempts to reduce
> everything to single feedback loops or at most, two feedback loops.
> Match-racing, one boat against another, is essentially a single feedback
> loop system. Your boat makes a move, the other boat responds and you need
> to
> change your move. One feedback loop. All the other factors are not part of
> feedback loops or also single feedback loops - wind, tide, hydrodynamics
> etc. You cannot change the tide, wind or hydrodynamic laws by your sailing
> you can only respond to them.
> From my experience in regatta racing, helms typically reenvisage any
> situation to two feedback loops or less. In the main, this reduction back
> towards a single loop thinking is done by learning whole sets of fixed
> moves, patterns and strategies that can be wheeled out in particular
> situations (i.e. single feedback loop). There are large numbers of books
> and
> training courses dedicated to learning these strategy groups (e.g. "Learn
> to
> sail like Dennis Conner" - I'm showing my age!). This is similar to the way
> those in the martial arts learn patterns and katas. Improving sail racing
> skills is dedicated to reducing everything to seeing only one feedback loop
> or less at any moment a decision needs to be made. You can easily test this
> by listening to discourse when sailing decisions are made (e.g. 'Look
> they
> are starting to lift, going about now'). The use of 'gut feeling' is not
> about the solution. Otherwise any physiologically sensitive novice sailor
> would be good. The use of 'gut feeling' is about which strategy to use in
> seeing a particular pattern out on the water - simply a single feedback
> loop.
>
> There has been a lot of confusion about systems methods. There is no magic
> in understanding them, the situation is very straightforward. The 'magic'
> that has been used to apparently differentiate between 'hard' and 'soft'
> methods is a politically driven illusion. The same conceptual and empirical
> situation applies to all. The systems field suffers in parts from much the
> same sort of mess that the design field does. For example, one problematic
> systems belief is that systems analysis IS designing. I wrote about this
> problem some years ago in a mapping of the ways that systems analysis and
> design activity fit together (confession - the title and spirit of the
> paper
> was based on John Langrish' battleships paper at La Clusaz). You can find
> it
> at
> http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/systems%20&%20design.htm
>
> What I'm more interested in is getting this right in terms of Design
> Education about complex systems. Designers can learn to be able to design
> better in the realm of multiple feedback loops. The question is how, and
> which methods are likely to result in successful designed outcomes. In that
> sense, I feel we are on the same side but seeing things from different
> perspectives.
>
> Warm regards,
> Terry
>
> Berger wrote:
> "On a race cource of a regatta the action is a complex interdisciplinary
> thing that involves aero and hydrodynamics, strategy, tactics and social
> systems (teamwork) Some of these things can and are modelled in realtime
> with computers, but in large we deal with chaotic systems (weather)
> nonlinear tubulences over foil surfaces and social dynamics. It makes you
> wonder why the best guys always are at the right spot at the right moment ,
> how they catch the shifts etc... If you ask them they dont answer. Its the
> gut feeling, years of experience. its the deep knowledge and skill of being
> a specialist in coping with multi-layered systems in real time. Soft
> systems
> approaches are fokused on these issues and therefor have renewed the way we
> think of and cope with systems. So this way of approaching systems askes
> for
> different skills than mentioned in the paper (thanks for the reference!) It
> would only make partly sense to approach this with the old school systems
> view: isolating the systems and their subsystems and look at all the
> feedback loops and relations separately etc. And we have not even talked
> about the technologies and economies of sailing (wich can hurt badly :) )"
>
--
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
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/
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