Ken Friedman kirjoitti 6.4.2013 kello 2.00:

The thread raises the question, “What can designers learn from natural, biological, and cultural evolution?”  To ask this question, designers must know more about natural science, biology, anthropology, sociology, and psychology than they generally know. This involves both background knowledge and specific facts. As I have often done, I’ll refer to Don Norman’s Core77 blog contribution “Why Design Education Must Change.” If we are going to get into these issues, we’ve got to develop an appropriate level of background knowledge and an appropriate level of field specific knowledge.

My view is that once we know enough about these issues to discuss them in a responsible way, the topics will remain useful – but we won’t describe them using the word “design”. The issues are important. Designers can learn a great deal from these issues. What we learn may help us to improve design processes and design outcomes. My one objection is simple – there is no need to label the outcomes of these processes and phenomena [special usage noun] “designs” to learn from them.

As so often, I fully agree here with Ken: the further we broaden the scope of "design" the less distinctive the term becomes – when everything is design, it does not mean anything any more. And we really need to use all background knowledge that is available.

But there is a twist with respect to what we can learn from other disciplines on this particular issue. Despite that human shaping of their material environment is fundamental to their (and our) humanity, social sciences have been very reluctant to study this issue. Given the importance of the topic, it could and should well be the mainstream – we could have a number of accounts where human relations to their material environment is described, analyzed, and explained, but unfortunately that is not the case. There is a historical reason to this: when social sciences emerged, they did it in a bitter struggle of legitimation, that there is beyond physical world something ("the social") that can be studied and is worth of that; as a result they distanced themselves efficiently from things material. To study artifacts was/is sub par, not worthy, stigmatized; only archeologists can do that, and then only when artifacts have been buried long enough.

I think that this is what Kari-Hans is longing for, and what anthropology has not yet been able to deliver: a better understanding of dynamics of human life from a material point of view – so his quest is not without legitimation. But I am pretty reluctant to ask design research to tackle this larger and fundamental problem on behalf of anthropology: nothing against grand challenges, but surely there must be some limit in ambitiousness... :-)

During the last years, there has finally been increasing interest in the materiality in the fringes of social science; best accounts are those done by material culture researchers (such as Daniel Miller or Elisabeth Shove), and in STS, social studies of science and technology. Unfortunately, the research on material culture has been far more interested in consumption than design, and STS is not much better. But despite their shortcoming in this respect they are a good starting point, and a critical review of material culture studies from a design point of view would be a valuable resource for the community -- not a bad topic for a literature-oriented PhD theses, I presume. Any takers?

best regards,
--Kari Kuutti
Univ. Oulu, Finland






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