Dear Ken,

You wrote:

"It may be that we can learn a Tao of design, but this comes late in life,
not in the few years we spend at university."

I both agree and disagree with this statement.

I agree, any apprenticeship the Tao way is indeed long, very long. It
requires a lot of patience and much of personal dedication and involvement.
And I know this first hand as I have been training in Aikido daily for over
the last 20 years, and still I remain an eternal beginner... This 'way' of
training/apprenticeship is very suitable for personal and 'integral'
development, the original aim of 'andragogy' when the approach was launched
in the early 70s, particularly here in Quebec. In this 'andragogical'
perspective, training for the market was/is not the prime aim. That is why
it wouldn't fit into the actual market/fast paradigm and corresponding
institutions such as University or any other market dominated and oriented
training institutions. The main purpose of these latter is not for 'personal
growth' ('Continuing Education' has not been as much adhered to as imagined
and expected by those who launched the trend four decades ago). Put aside
what is called 'leisure learning institutions', public and many among
private learning institutions are all instituted and run on relatively short
time-frame duration, with curricula exclusively oriented to feed the
manpower market for the predominant bureaucratic-monetary business. So, in
this perspective, the Tao way of Design wouldn't indeed fit.

I disagree with your statement, on two grounds. The first ground is that of
the old adage saying that any long voyage start with one single step.
Starting right now, as we are doing in the present exchange of views, each
of us reflecting on one's Design practice, those with teaching assignment
revising their curricula or even just re-orienting or modifying a little bit
their Design course method/content (for instance anchoring it in a
scientific/experimental framework as Don suggests and as I illustrated in an
experiment reported earlier this year in Design Issues: Volume 26, Number 4
Autumn 2010, pp. 57-70.), in my view all that is how the Tao of design would
start and gradually take hold. And as 'things' unfold, the 'aim', whatever
it may be, may eventually be reached. Keeping in mind, for that matter of
fact, that in all traditional non-market oriented ways of life, reaching the
'aim' is not that much important as just engaging in the Way (le
cheminement*), i.e. practicing in the best manner - meaning here the most
satisfactory - whatever one has to do: in our case, Design practice/Design
teaching of artifacts conception.

The second ground to my disagreement is the distinction I make between mere
training in skills, and educating (e-ducere = to lead out or from to...)
individuals (pedagogy and andragogy). As I hinted at in my previous post,
training in "tricks" both new and old 'dogs', that is relatively fast and
easy. Leading individuals of any age towards and throughout a 'way' of
conducting - not earning - one's life, that is more difficult, it requires
constant care and dedication, I would say of the entire lifetime, both from
the learner and the 'leader'.

Our current concern comes down then to being a matter of a crucial choice
between either 'fast' training manpower in 'design'..., or leading
individuals to take care of the community artifacts domain, now and in
future. I personally believe a paradigm underpinned along this latter choice
- by the way not at all viewed as a religion nor any other kind of esoteric,
meditative practice -  would, on the long run, serve better both the
individual and our globalized community of humans on earth, including
business persons and financiers!


Francois
Montreal

* To those fluent in French:

La propension des choses. Pour une histoire de l'efficacité en Chine.
François Jullien
Seuil, Paris, 2003