Terry,
I can think of a few ways to reply to this, but I'm not sure any of them are quite appropriate to what you're asking. Can you elaborate a bit? It feels as though there is a concern animating the question itself. I should assure you we're not discussing classical propaganda or the kind of work Hovland was working on. We're asking the question — from the perspective of discourse studies, not rhetoric — what gives communicative force to an utterance? But I'm not working on that so much as Gerry is.
We're more concerned with understanding local system of premise, practice and meaning that animate daily life in order to achieve what Geertz called an "understanding of understandings not our own." Donal Carbaugh (U.Mass) is a key reference here for theory building.
d.
PS. Have to run. May not respond for a while …
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Dr. Derek B. Miller
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On Friday, April 1, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Terence Love wrote:
> Hi Derek,
> What are the limits on this work?
> I'm wondering about the sense, value and ethics of persuasion or discourse, if the behaviour of a design situation is beyond what an individual's brain can predict.
>
> Best wishes,
> Terry
> ____________________
> Dr. Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
>
> Senior Lecturer, Design
> Researcher, Social Program Evaluation Research Unit
> Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia
> Mob: 0434 975 848, Fax +61(0)8 9305 7629, [log in to unmask]
>
> Director, Design-based Research Unit, Design Out Crime Research Centre
>
> Member of International Scientific Council UNIDCOM/ IADE, Lisbon, Portugal
>
> Honorary Fellow, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development
> Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
> ____________________
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Derek Miller
> Sent: Friday, 1 April 2011 5:51 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: The false dichotomy of theory vs practice in desgin[was:NASA,Hasmat, etc.]
>
> Keith,
>
> Just a last quick one on this (which has been very satisfying): One of the reasons Lisa and I work in the ethnography of communication as a grounding for our policy design work is that it allows us to rapidly, and empirically, come to understand what some have called "persuadables" in a given discourse. I haven't read Don's work on affordances, but from the way we're talking, I suspect there is a strong resonance there. So please send me a reference (I know Don might be lurking out there on this forum too, so please do comment).
>
> Overstepping here with some presumptions, but I'll bet that one can persuade if there is an affordance in place (metaphorically speaking, as "place" makes no real sense in discourse). Gerry Philipsen, U.Washington and the founder of speech code theory, is now working on the issue of "discursive force." I'll bet that's right on the money too.
>
> Back to my lecture now on "reducing cultural barriers to maritime security." Which, believe it or not, really is a design problem.
>
> d.
>
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