Dear Clive
yes please - a pedagogy of the thing!
keith
>>> Clive Dilnot <[log in to unmask]> 25/11/10 9:19 AM >>>
Keith,
You put it pithily.
Another way of being crude about the implications of all this is that it shows how woefully ignorant we are in general, in our culture, about the work that things do and therefore about the character of objects in particular but in truth about the whole artefactual realm.
There are several reasons for this: the cultural imperialism that insists that objects are dumb (mere "means'); the stress placed for the last 50 years or so (only now beginning to subside) on the semiotic meaning of things (signs); the simple assumption that we "know" through common-sense what things are; the cognitive-functionalist conceit that things can be exhausted by their utility (a view that Adorno skewered so concisely in Minema Moralia).
The result is a cultural ignorance about the artefact and therefore about the artificial as a whole--and of course no less an ignorance in design and the cognitive sciences.
So, a pedagogy of the thing?
Interestingly, whereas 15 years ago it was impossible to find anyone interested in things, there is recent signs of life around thinking things, with some good anthologies emerging, e.g. Things edited by brown(?) and the excellent Object reader edited by Candlin et al.
Cheers
Clive
Clive Dilnot
Professor of Design Studies
Parsons School of Design/
New School University
Room #731, 7th Floor
6 E16th St
New York
NY 10011
T. (1)-212-229-8916 x1481
>>> Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]> 11/24/2010 3:38 PM >>>
Dear Clive
a very fulsome and attractive account of knowledge and objects.
Could we simply say that for those who know how to translate the language of an object (or parts of the language) that the object embodies an amount of knowledge equal to what they can derive?
And
for those who don't know how to translate, the object of attention is like the coke bottle in The Gods Must be Crazy where basic utility functions (and mytho-poetic realisations) are derived but little else?
Which kind of leaves us with what you know you know and what you don't know you don't know.
cheers
keith russell
from a wet Melbourne
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