Dear Harold,
Thanks for your note. We all three – you, Erik, and I – agree on so many things that I hope you don’t think it ungracious of me to disagree with one sentence in one of the great design books of our time.
With respect to your point here, I agree that we need to approach design “as a unique form of ‘inquiry for action’ and not merely as a form of applied science or applied art.”
My debate was with a specific sentence in your book that seems to say something different. You write: “Humans did not discover fire – they designed it” (Nelson and Stolterman 2012: 11).
Early pre-humans discovered fire in the wild. There was a long era during which human beings could not generate fire, but rather could only preserve it or recapture it.
It’s clear that the ability to use fire was one of the great early developments that helped us to advance. Some argue that control and use of fire may have been the first truly great technological advance.
If we describe design as “a unique form of ‘inquiry for action’,” perhaps one can say that humans designed fire.
Archeological and historical evidence on fire tell a specific story (see, f.ex., Christian 2004: 194-195; Pyne 1997 25-48; Watson 2005: 26).
Telling the story rests on accumulated scientific evidence. The story itself is neither applied science nor technology, neither design nor art. It is a story of pre-human and human development. In that sense, I agree with what you say here but nevertheless disagree with the sentence. You wrote a bold, provocative sentence without the nuances you state here.
I can agree that humans used inquiry for action to design the use of fire. I’d argue that many such developments involve a profound, designerly response to discovery. In this sense, I’m happy to agree that humans designed fire – but I'd say that they discovered it first.
Many hundred thousand years passed between the first pre-human encounter with fire and the control and use of fire – first without hearths, then with. Only long after did we achieve the ability to generate fire. This argues for an iterative, evolutionary response to a discovery. That iterative, evolutionary response is design.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, or rediscovered it following an earlier unheralded discovery in the late 1890s. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain designed the first usable medicine based on that discovery in the 1940s.
To me, that is not unlike the discovery, use, and design of fire. My view is that we tell a better story when we examine and understand all the ways in which inquiry for action takes place. This includes our human response to those chance discoveries that favor the prepared mind, as well as the iterative, designerly evolutions that emerge as we inquire and create.
I hope this explains why I agree with your post and wish that you had stated the point in your book as clearly as you stated it here.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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References
Christian, David. 2004. Maps of Time. An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nelson, Harold G., and Erik Stolterman. 2012. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. 2nd Ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Pyne, Stephen J. 1997. Vestal Fire. An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe, and Europe’s Encounter with the World. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Watson, Peter. 2005. Ideas. A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud. New York: HarperCollins.
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Harold Nelson wrote:
—snip—
I wanted to respond briefly to your post referencing the ‘design of fire’ presented in the book “The Design Way”. I have added the reference to the book so that those who are interested can take a look for themselves.
Nelson, Harold G., and Stolterman, Erik. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World; 2nd Ed., Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2012
I think that the point Erik and I made in the book was that some habits of thought biased modern thinking towards labeling things that were essentially the outcomes of design agency as ‘discoveries’. We did not make a case that the ‘design of fire’ preceded other types of designed artifacts or that it was the first instance of design. That is not the case. Also we did not claim that the ‘element’ of fire was designed any more than we would claim that the design of stone tools is the design of flint. We were talking about the ‘design of fire’ as a technology in the same manner that historians, scientists and teachers talk about the ‘discovery’ of fire as the discovery of the technology historically. The discovery of gravity or North America by Europeans are ‘discoveries’ certainly but the wheel was not a discovery in this same sense — it was the result of the human capacity to design — to intentionally make things appear in the world that did not previously exist.
Such biases in our habits of thought — i.e. scientizing design — limits or blocks scholarly and professional explorations of the nature of design capacitation in humans. In our book we make the case that design needs to be approached as a unique form of ‘inquiry for action’ and not merely as a form of applied science or applied art.
—snip—
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