Dear Professor Dilnot
I appreciate your two questions and now begin to see where you are coming from.
Your question about the status the "design" is especially interesting to me. While design does not mean any and everything--or any and every disciplinary form of thinking applied to the making, or the construction of the artifact (and you're quite right Simon thinks, it seems to me, like that), the important thing here is not to go too far in the other end, where design is conceived so narrowly it excludes any kind of disciplinary thinking that is not, to borrow Cross, uniquely designerly. So over here in Singapore I heard on the news that Malaysia which is just above us is going ahead with plans for nuclear reactors and that their engineers are being consulted for better safety measures, etc. Engineering debates aside, surely there must be, given what is happening to Japan, some ethical protestation against all these plans--what Edward Schillbeeckx, taking from Adorno, might describe as negative experiences of contrast, protesting against these possibilities and stretching out, with desperate aspiration, to a world where nothing like this could every occur again. This kind of thinking is what inspired the UN's founding and its declaration, which to this day seeks surer, analytical foundations. But such a reaction--surely practical, and definitely ethical--may not at all be something that belongs to the engineer's or designer's epistemology qua designer or engineer. The Germans, on the other hand, react quite differently to the Japanese tradegy--and perhaps, more appropriately, and more ethically. I am inclined to argue that a conception of design to be better which: welcomes, if not all disciplinary epistemologies which have any and every application to the construction of artifacts or prefered states, then at least it should include the ethical, though a non-design disciplinary epistemology, as an essential constituent of what we should think of as "design".
I am reminded of the debate between legal positivists and natural law theorists about what to define "law" to mean. Legal positivism prides itself for keeping "law" and morality distinct: Hart himself explained in his Harvard piece that this had the benefit of making sure that, even if we established something to be lawful, or having legal status, that did not by itslef mean that it was as such necessarily moral. In this way he suggested that what was legal was in principle still capable of being criticized by moralists, and in this respect, the call of legal positivism was for all ethicists to evaluate all laws, even if lawyers and legal theorists have established their legality. But this, natural law theorists like John Finnis point out was in some sense foolish: because if the law were so defined, then only ethicists were competent to criticise the law, and all lawyers and legal theorists could do was to establish if a law was indeed a law or not. On the other hand, if the note of the law included the condition that it was moral, so that, like Augustine and Aquinas was to say, an unjust law is not a law, then legal theorists who grasp that an law was unjust could also criticise its legality, and thus the profession could examine immoral laws and condemn these from within, without leaving this to those outside the profession, i.e., non lawyers and ethicists. Perhaps this is the same thing that should be said of "design". Surely one could I think define "design" in such wise to include merely those things which lead to the successful engineering of nukes and backup systems, but including within "design" disciplinary thinking taken from ethics, could allow those from within the profession, i.e., designers themselves, to criticise a design as a bad design because it failed to satisfy moral considerations, even if, from a purely technical and engineering point of view, it was very good design.
I hope this is useful and relevant.
Jude
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From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Clive Dilnot [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 8:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Status of "design" re Japanese nuclear crisis? Reply to Norman
In regards to the unfolding double tragedies in Japan, Donald Norman’s
“leap-to” diatribe in defense of engineers completely misses the
point. In fact, it is part of the problem (in that, as the subsequent
replies showed, it diverts the real question in all the wrong
directions—no Virginia, building a 100-metre sea wall is not the
answer).
My original post asked two questions. The first was open—what does the
et cetera...\
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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