Dear Francois,
You write, “This, once more, confirms that designing is not about ‘creating’ anything new. Rather, simply, it is about ‘assembling’ what is around and has always been there, aiming at celebrating our being there together.”
Since I have not yet seen the film, I’m not writing to comment on the film but merely on these two sentences. The film, like any text, cannot “confirm” the reality of a state of affairs nor describe what design is or what design is about. It sounds like an interesting and useful reflection on those issues. The two sentences youpropose cannot be correct.
The concept of design that gives the broadest coverage of all forms of design activity frame design as a process by which we solve problems for legitimate problem owners to create preferred future states as contrasted with current states. This may instantiate in artifacts, processes, or systems.
In the sense that we cannot “create” new matter or energy in the universe, it is technically true in a physical and chemical sense that we cannot create something new when we design, but rather assemble what already exists in a universe in which the actual creation of space, time, and that which fills it are beyond our control.
In a more reasonable and ordinary sense, however, I’d argue that design may instantiate in any of several ways. It is problematic to totalize the design process. For some kinds of design processes, assembling, restructuring, or redeploying existing artifacts or materials is sufficient.
Here, we come to a modest jump that requires serious attention. The chemicals that exist on our planet are not new – the elements that we have at our disposal were mostly forged in the hearts of stars in a process that took place while our remoteancestors were chipping stone tools by hand. Nevertheless, to make a telegraph, Samuel FB Morse had to “assembles” substances that were born as elements into what finally became a telegraph: when he did, this was something new – though it, too, had ancestors in Hooke’s description of the telegraph from the 1600s or the semaphore telegraph systems of the UK and France in the early 1800s.
Today, molecular biology, nanotechnology, and other such fields allow us to assemble artifacts and even the alloy and compounds of which they are made into products that can reasonably be described as new. In this sense, people who design such things create them. They do not create them in the sense that the forces of nature – or, if you prefer, divine agents – create worlds or stars or elements. Nevertheless, much of today’s design entails creation, even at the molecular and in some case the atomic level.
In this sense, much of design is indeed about creating something new. Or so it seemed to the first farmers who got the use of wooden, horse-drawn wheat harvesters and threshers. When internal combustion engines came along, those, too, were new to the world of human affairs. All of these go back to antecedent creations, and nearly all innovations involve some elements of assembling as well as elements of creation.
For an elemental philosophy or a philosophy of science, it may possibly be true that human beings cannot create anything new. This is also the case in theology (“Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.” -- Eccles. 1:10.) For a philosophy of design or a philosophy of technology, this kind of statement requires greater depth and nuance.
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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