Dear Kraus
We took off on a bad start in this thread. But I am happy we cleared that up, and I'd like to buy you a beer if I meet you someday.
Re: your question. Well, this borrows Gunther Kress' own example, in which a child exploits words to express meanings he intends, but does so in a way that breaks convention, and so misuses words/signs. Hence for instance a child uses "heavy" to describe a steep hill - this is Kress' example, and my son does things like this every now and then. But such misuse is, from another point of view, Design, reshaping the sign's rescources to achieve a goal. Overtime, however, education will correct the child, telling him that such words are used wrongly, andthat we need to use words "correctly" as convention employs them (which is of course fair enough), but also as he matures through education, so also he could well become a sign-user, and stop designing, as he does a child, these word signs. Destroy is hyperbole. Philosophers make up words all the time, but in philosphers, I feel there is a naive chidlikeness sometimes that cares little for convention, and hence.
In anycase, I've been interested in whole business of the design of signs. this design of words by children if true is an interesting idea, because if we can design words so freely to express our intentions, then its as if our ontology shapes the signs we use, and force our signs to accommodate that ontology. Whereas if we merely use signs (as adults do), then our ontology is trapped by these words, or worse, permitted only by the word-signs that are available for us. This is often discussed in organizational and educational literature, where policy discourses result in "ventriloquism" and our worldviews become constrained, limited, discplacing other important vocational worldviews that cannot fit into that discourse.
I have a very short paper which discusses this very idea in "Designing the 'camera': photo-semiotical studies" in Writing, Voice, Understaking, Susan Petrilli (ed.), Toronto: Legas, 199-202, and some of its ideas are found in this blog entry: http://inquisitorsmanual.com/chapter-11-transubstantiation-conceptual-innovations/
Interesting that Nigel Cross when he coined the phrase "designerly ways of knowing" - there is no such phrase before him, left it quite vague, or rather handed out, in my view, an open invitation to fill its meaning, and whether one agrees with what he Cross himself puts under that term, he'd done well, I think, to create a sign into which we are now free to debate and to put new meanings under, rather than say "design science" which clearly limits what design can mean. So in that very positing of "designerly ways of knowing" is an invitation to include ontologies of design that have previously been, rightly or wrongly, been discplaced by other design-related signs that could not afford or accommodate them.
All best
Jude
-----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 Klaus Krippendorff
Sent: Friday, 31 May, 2013 2:26 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Design of Fire
so, having straightened out one problem, can you tell us how your son's "misuses" of words would "destroy the designer" ?
-----Original Message-----
Language is partly inherited, but also partly designed, shaped, modified. The oxford dictionary adds new words all the time, and Gunther Kress, precisely on the basis of our Design of word-signs, appeals for a new semiotics. My son misuses, and hence rehapes words to mean what he intends to communicate all the time, and by and by, his education will make him a sign user, and destroy the designer.
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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