Frances,
I am very sympathetic to, and essentially agree with, your critique of
my post, subject to a couple of very important caveats.
1. Configuration cannot simply be identified with "giving a form to
things."  Configuration is double: that is it is a property that is
possessed by all living and non-living "things" that has two, highly
inter-related, components; i.e., "configuration" describes both the
structure of a thing and its propensity or capability to act. A human
being possesses a certain physical configuration: this permits it to
indulge in some activities (reaching within the span of its arms for
example) and prohibits (without the use of artifice) others--for example
extending an arm to double its length. Design does not design merely the
outward form of things but rather their configuration (first sense) in
the light of configuration in the second sense, i.e.,  what it is that
we wish these things to be able to do and in the light of the
propensities that we wish them to have. This makes (re-)configuration a
deeper process than "design" thought of as merely shape-giving. The
configuration of something "sets it on its way" which means that the
re-configuration of things re-sets their trajectory and their
implications, the relations they construe, albeit in often tiny
ways--yet sometimes in ways (and with consequences) that cannot be
easily or at all predicted in advance.
2. I say that design is centrally concerned with configuration because I
see no other practice or discipline where, albeit often more tacitly
than in full-consciousness, configuration is 'put on the table' In
design (as to some extent in politics) the configuration of something is
the very question: design arises, surely, out of the double sense of the
dis-satisfaction with the configuration of something (its propensities,
how it acts; above all how it relates to contexts of use) and the
parallel "instinct" that the thing in question could be better
configured, i.e. could be re-designed.
In that sense too, design (or better, re-configuration) is indeed the
process of "evolving" artifacts by revision-analysis, sometimes via
incremental change (predictive in Terry's language) sometimes by
un-predictable evolutionary (configurative) leaps.

Best wishes

Clive

************






Clive Dilnot
Professor of Design Studies
School of Art Design History and Theory
Parsons School of Design,
New School University.

Room #731
2 E 16th St
New York NY 10011

e [log in to unmask]
T.1-212-229-8916 x1481
>>> Francois Nsenga <[log in to unmask]> 08/19/10 3:24 PM >>>
Dear Clide, Klaus and list



Clide, in your comment on Klaus’ statement that 'Innovations cannot be
extrapolated from existing data, they always add something new and are
inherently unpredictable from the past’, you emphasized the view that
“one
of the most essential internal aspects of design” is that "design
operates—we might say exclusively operates—on the configuration of
things.”

First, I beg to humbly disagree with this ‘exclusive’ view.  Other
designers, and I am one of those, view design as a process, not ONLY of
simply giving a form to things, but ALSO and prior to configuration, a
process of the following other 'sequences':

1.        selecting parts of the things subject to configuration

2.       Circumscribing the physical and socio-cultural context(s) to
which
the intended configuration is destined

3.       Developing configuration proposals

4.       And eventually, closing the entire process with an evaluation
sequence.



I don’t see how, dealing with all these other sequences of what I
believe to
be the (complete) designing process (Form, Content and Context), one can
do
without referring  to (meaning here rationally critiquing) “prior art”
as
always required by Patents Offices.

Even just focusing only on the single sequence of giving form (i.e.
draughtsmanship which is not the only “key to understanding design”),
“genuinely
configurative innmay be  “configurative jumps”, but those jumps cannot be made  from and
into
a void. Configurations of things are not “retrospectively and
artificially
extrapolated”  from nowhere. They inherently are drawn from a certain
past,
things have respective own traditions as well. And design "ideas" have
each
their respective genesis.

Experts in another field of inquiry confirm this, stating that, like for
natural forms, man-given forms are as well evolutionary  and adaptative
(Perkins, David, Chap. 12 in Ziman, J., 2000, pp. 159-173). According to
Perkins, both natural and artificial forms evolve while (self- )adapting
by
 selection,  by revision – analysis of what already exists, present or
past
- , and by planning or coding. However, Perkins stress this point, we
humans
are “smarter” in conditioning the artefactual evolutionary process.

Whether consciously or unconsciously proposed, “configurative
innovations”
are human arrangements of existing elements, both physical, contextual
and
mental (including shapes or contour given to artifices), derived from
human
past experiences, both personal (psychological) and collective
(cultural).
It is this human past that reverberate into evolutionary directions
taken by
artifacts. My take is that novelty in artifacts configurations resides
rather in their actually perceived  presence, a more or less vivid
re-enactment to conscious.

Klaus, you evidenced your argument with the invention of telephone,
evoking
how it ‘deviated’ from the history long direct mouth-to- ear human
interaction, or for that matter from any other mode of traditional
proximal
communication. And you say that perusing these past or still existing
other
modes wouldn’t have led to innovating new ways and means of
communication
such as the telephone. True, the telephone was not directly
“extrapolated”
from past modes and means of communication. Nonetheless, can’t we say
rather
that the (wired) telephone was the epoch result of an incremental series
of
previous studies and inventions in electricity, in acoustics, etc.,
including studies/observations in human voice utterances and
transmission at
relatively long distances?

In the volume cited below, in Chapter 11 (pp. 137-158) we learn of
“Edison’s
transformative sketches of the Reis telephone”  (sound and electricity),
and
we also learn of the concern by the entire series of successive
inventors of
the telephone, prior and at the same time as Edison,  over human voice
modulation or “acoustic tones” (“loud and soft sounds) p. 141).

From the above I would therefore conclude that, for instance, Edison’s
telephone did not just happened to be there. Neither did it “deviate”
from
previous mode of communication. It was simply the result of a particular
different arrangement of several basic elements of both natural and
human
kinds. No ‘magic’ here as Terry, and I concur, would say. The telephone
was
considered as ‘new’ by Edison and his  contemporaries, meaning simply
that,
reviewing their actual and past cultural past modes of communication,
they
were unaware of yet of that one. Edison and other
scientists/technicians/designers of his era consciously or
serendipitously
arrived at the artifact named telephone, drawing on already existing
elements such as the knowledge  accumulated by then on human voice and
speech at distance, as well as the knowledge on various potential
containers/carriers/vehicles of human sound: air waves, electric wires,
theory of fluids, etc. The telephone did not “deviate” it arrived as an
adaption from past data. As it recently adapted again to data on
wireless
communication. And who knows how it will adapt again in days ahead, on
the
basis of what is there now and the continuously accumulating experiences
and
knowledge in various related domains?

Back to your posts and argument, Klaus, “research into the history of
speech, including sound production, can – indeed - say little – at least
directly -  about how the telephone expanded the interaction among
people by
electric or radio devices”.  However, research in directly and
indirectly
related domains, OTHER than ‘human speech’, as mentioned above, can. And
this wouldn't by any means be just "repeating history", rather drawing
inspiration from it.

I therefore remain among those who believe, until convinced otherwise,
that
innovations can derive (be extrapolated??) from existing past data. The
issue being rather that of determining, selecting and access to which
data.
And on the basis of the RIGHT kind of existing data consulted, together
with
the individual (i.e. relative)  capacity to notice and interpret
artifactual
evolutionary trends, I also believe that innovations are inherently
predictable; provided informed scrutiny is exercised. Innovations are
predictable, though not necessarily 100% as some may have interpreted
Terry’s assertion.

Francois

Montreal



Document cited:

*Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process*. Edited by John
ZIMAN,
on behalf of The Epistemology Group, Cambridge University Press, 2000.