Dear Chuck,

Nothing in my reply to Terry can be construed to mean what you seem to think I wrote: [Chuck wrote] "Ken, the good academic, seems to want to mire us in endless research on past practices rather then deal with the pragmatic generality of adopting any date that can be established as a matter of reference about a human made object of interest. (By object, I mean concept, information, artifact, or act.)”

It’s incorrect to speak of “mir[ing] us in endless research on past practices rather than deal with the pragmatic generality of adopting any date that can be established as a matter of reference.”

The kinds of documents to which you referred are only pragmatically useful for the past four or five centuries. They did not exist before then.

People who attempt to date artefacts prior to the late 1400s must adopt and apply multiple methods of dating. Pre-humans, early humans, and relatively modern human beings have been designing and making objects for at least 2,500,000 years. Pragmatism requires that we find ways to date these responsibly if we are to work with and understand these items in their historical context.

One reason I participate with increasingly less frequency in these list conversations involves the kind of snippy use of epithets that serve the rhetorical function of demeaning or diminishing a serious contribution. What does “Ken, the good academic” mean in the context of this query?

The question that came up involved ways of dating designed artefacts. You proposed methods that work for 500 years out of 2,500,000 years. But let’s say that the main range of issues involves articulately designed artefacts, tools, widgets, buildings, etc., dating from the time that humans began to work in a more complex civilisation with cities, reasonably well define professions, and the like. Then we are still talking about 10,000 years. Vestigial forms of brand-building and advertising dates back roughly 2,000 years to the first multinational corporations, so there is some overlap. 

If you really want to understand dates, this takes careful work and there are effective methods for doing this. It is not a case of “endless research,” and it is no mire. You can’t pull dates out of hats and hope to shed light on an artefact.

About twenty years ago, I visited a Norwegian furniture factory. In the corner of a store room, there was an interesting piece that I dated to the late 1700s. I was correct. They asked me how I knew this and could state this on a five-minute inspection. I explained that I did not know the exact date, but I pointed to a half dozen different aspects of the piece — especially things that showed the traces of technology: metal work, locks, hinges, as well as the style, the paint work, and other pointers that seemed to me to converge on a date that would not likely be before one time nor after another. That’s pragmatic diagnostic research for something made on a farm that was never subject to advertising, patent documents, or anything else accessible in print.

To be able to do that requires some understanding of multiple research approaches across several fields, bringing them to bear on a designed artifact.

It is fair to say that I am a scholar or an academic, but that is not all that I am. This kind of idle chatter aimed at persons rather than at ideas draws attention away from the valuable part of the conversation: ways of answering Elif’s questions on how to establish the dates of designed artefacts. I offered some useful books that answer Elif’s questions. If you think I was wrong to do so, just state what you find wrong in my approach and show how these resources fail to answer Elif. 

You can’t do research in most fields without some form of study. Elif want to know how to do this kind of research. The resources posted to the list in my reply show how. It’s not endless research into the past. It’s the beginning of understanding the past. It may seem daunting to someone who has not yet done that kind of work, but that is always the case when someone enters a new field.

Or so I believe.

Ken 

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | Launching in 2015 

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia 

Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 


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