Dear Chuck, Bernhard, Teena, M.P. Ranjan and Colleagues
Yesterday I was reading Zygmunt Bauman's (translation in French of)
"*Globalization.
The Human Consequences*" and it is mentioned in there that, in German, only
one single word, *Sicherheit*, conveys the three human experiences of *
safety*, *security*, and *certainty*. We can multiply such cases whereby
nuances are expressed broadly or not, better or lesser, through such and
such expression in other languages and cultures.
On the other hand, particularly in Design, we all are aware now that, these
days we are more and more paying attention ALSO to various cultural and
societal aspects of material artifacts from and throughout communities the
world over. Exclusive emphasis is no longer only on functionalities and
economics of artifacts, as it was prevalent until recently in the Western
'modern' (young male based) based tradition. As Design professionals, we
therefore are required to be more and more aware of as many cultural and
individual insights as possible related to interface with each of material
artifacts we are studying or/and prescribing. We need to learn a about
those insights as expressed through respective languages.
M.P. Ranjan, you wrote:
"I can access only resources in English and must wait for advanced concepts
from other
languages to be translated and filtered down for us to make access and use
these in some meaningful way. Google translate, as it gets better may help
bridge this gap, but the resources must be made available in the first
place for us to be able to access these. Today design scholarship is moving
to many local languages in Asia as well and we will need to look at many
new sources for insights to inform and sustain design thinking and design
theory in the future."
Yes indeed, as a worldwide research community, we need to be notified of
any publication of interest, no matter in which language. Otherwise, if we
remain local we'll bear all the consequences as briefly stated by Bauman.
And our Design expertise will remain partly and partial, thus incomplete
and ultimately inefficient in globalized contexts; in a word, we'll be
procuring only bad design.
Bernhard, In my view, instead of being 'unfortunate', we rather are so rich
of so many potential inputs from colleagues all over the world. It is just
a matter of finding a way to be more practical in taping and sharing such a
large well of latent collaboration.
Currently, bad to some and good to others, English is the dominant
vehicular world language. It used to be French, tomorrow it may be Chinese
or...But only Linguists and Political scientists would care, I guess. For
us, Designers, I believe this should not at all be a problem. We should
each express our 'Design Thinking' in any language that best conveys
whatever we wish to share. The "real problem", rather, is availability of
adequate and full translation services. And Google's is not the best, it
can only help by default.
Could we then make it systematic that those among us who are not fluent in
the English language provide the community with at least abstracts of
whatever we publish in other languages, when it is not possible to
translate contributions in their entirety?
Chuck (or someone else), since you have cleared the way, could you
persevere and launch as well a regular compilation of abstracts in English,
of Design related publications in other languages? And Teena, could you
compile for us, ideally annotated bibliographies conveying peculiar female
Designers insights? This way we all will learn from far extended and richer
bibliographies, hopefully later complemented with closer research
collaboration and exchange links.
Based on my personal experience, language is no longer a problem when
communication has become directly interpersonal; that is once barriers of
whatever nature have fallen, for instance by the way of translated abstracts.
With genuine goodwill, humans always find a way to understand each other
and share.
Best wishes to all!
Francois
Montreal
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|