Dear Derek

I agree with your complaints - ambivalence is prevalent - acculturation
is the man way of addressing the problem.

And, there are very subtle reasons for these lingering inhibitions to
the development of design as an academic filed of relevance.

The suggestion you make about "crafting solutions" is one entry point
to the deconstruction of the monster. In crafting we generally allow a
high level of technique, that is, knowledge that is made evident in the
practice but is not readily transferable or amenable to formula or
theory. Indeed, we can structure the argument such that to talk of
technique is to talk of a range of skills that are observable,
repeatable and transferable through the long and slow methods of
apprenticeship.

For strange historical reasons, technology became the objects and
processes that embody technique - that is, the study of technique
(ology) became instead the machines that were constructed out of an
analysis of how craftspeople crafted things. We can think of a modern
example to exemplify this operation. Think of car spray painting as a
technique held by an expert that has then been transferred, through
robotic modeling, to a machine.

This transfer has been accomplished for many craft practices, but not
all. Much of the resistance to theory in creative fields such as art and
design arises from the fear that transferable knowledge will be found
and hence the designer's craft techniques will be made redundant (think
of desktop publishing and automatic kerning) and from the realization
that the underlying craft skills are best protected by keeping what
might be know a secret (think of guilds).

Then there is the world of craft knowledges that communities resist
elaborating because a fuller understanding of how things happen in
society would upset existing status arrangements. If we knew who in the
room was the person who tapped the dish and brought about the
crystallization of the solution then we might have to rearrange the deck
chairs and worse, we would be seen to be beholden to their "magic" skill
(think of Marilyn Whirlwind, the native Alaskan receptionist in Northern
exposure).

We fumble, we stumble, we are awkward. But, we could know lots and lots
and lots more about what we do and what others do but do we really want
to know? The moral urgency about current world events is no good reason
for us to become more human; rather, the urgency is a sure guarantee
that we are being human enough. Besides which, as Blake would have it,
devils are the go-to people for answers.

cheers

keith russell
OZ newcastle





>>> "Derek B. Miller" <[log in to unmask]> 03/30/11 3:56 AM >>>
Dear Harold,

When people tell me they are involved in a practice, it means to me
that they are involved in an activity that has a beginning, middle and
end (even if the end is a new beginning); and that the practice is
distinguishable from other practices.

The challenge I have with design taken to be "writ large" is that it
becomes indistinguishable as practice. There are other words, for
example, that also suggest processes of deliberate creation, and indeed
the word "create" is one of them. As is formulate or craft. Surely, we
all craft solutions.

I understand you've been at this for decades, so I don't want to pick a
fight, but coming in rather new to the field from a position outside it,
I do see a few patterns:

1. That the field of design is struggling to estabilish itself as an
academic discipline, but is ambivalent about the development of theory
to explain and distinguish itself

2. That the everyday term "design" in English is regularly confused
with the discipline of design, and the practice of design, whether by
professional "designers" or people whom we impute to be designing. This
intellectual confusion seems so native to the conversations that I fear
people are becoming acculturated to it rather than aggrevated by it, and
therefore endeavoring to offer a remedy (and it begs the question of how
this addressed by scholars and practitioners working on design in
languages that provide other forms of differentiation to be made)

3. That "design thinking" isn't making much of an inroad among people
working on peace and security issues, because innovation and harnessing
creativity just is not viewed as the issue. However, design processes,
such as modeling, prototyping, simulating, co-designing and other
practices are capturing the imaginations of some key people because they
are very concerned indeed about A) how existing knowledge is not
becoming manifest in project/programming solutions and B) how to form
new cooperative opportunities that take us beyond debate or
deliberation.

I did not mean to suggest * if I did * that design is limited to a
small set of activities. But to answer the question, "aren't we doing
this already?" with a statement of potential value, one does need to
propose (in my view) sets of actions that are accomplishable,
distinguishable, and useful to existing social processes.

derek
_________________
Dr. Derek B. Miller
Director

The Policy Lab
321 Columbus Ave.
Seventh Floor of the Electric Carriage House
Boston, MA 02116
United States of America