Dear Martin,
Thank you for your earlier post. It was close to the mark.
In terms of your criticism of me below - yup I'm as bad or worse than
anyone.
If I can go back to your previous post, what you commented about my position
was true but it wasn't the essence, and the human/machine discussion was a
bit of a diversion.
I'd like to try to explain.
My position starts from focusing on the essentials of research and theory
making.
One of the foundational and essential aspects of research is to insist on
being able to separate 'this' from 'that' (whatever this and that are).
Unless it is possible to make clear separations between concepts, it isn't
possible to make good quality unambiguous theory.
This is such a core aspect of undertaking research that if it isn't done,
it has four bad effects:
1. It creates a theory mess in which no theories make sense.
2. Reasoning, evidence and proofs underpinning all the theories using such
concepts can be effortlessly broken and disproven
3. At a basic epistemological level, all theories using such concepts are
false
4. It results in a huge mental fairy castle and body of theories and
zillions of extra concepts to patch things together and interpret some
partial ways past the contradictions from the lack of separation of the
thises and thats.
The above four issues are all found as problems in the design research
literature.
Resolving this is why I feel that focusing on epistemology and concepts is
important before anything else.
Second, in some cases, there are multiple possibilities for creating a
singular definition of a concept.
In those cases, there seem to be lots of advantages in thinking through
the implications for all other concepts and theory development.
Then it is possible to choose the definition that offers theory elegance and
minimises theory complexity.
At heart, that is the reason why I suggest the noun definition of 'design'
offers advantages over the verb definition.
I moved to the noun definition of 'a design' from the verb definition of
'to design' because the noun definition of 'a design' offers significant
benefits in theory elegance and minimising theory complexity.
More recently, however, I've realised that the verb definition (e.g.
Newell's ) is problematic because it intrinsically compromises the integrity
of other definitions by including too much. In the limit, any definition
that includes too much no longer defines - worse it develops contradicting
theories. In contrast, the noun definition is simple and succinct, and also
as a matter of course separates several thises and that's in ways that make
reasonable sense.
In theory and research terms, we have a big task in design research that
includes making theory about design activity that can justifiably include
human activities and machines. More importantly, all the design theories
haves to also align with all new justified research findings about human
psychology, biology, sociology, socio-technology etc.
To do this, we have to move beyond making theory about how we create
designs based on subjective perceptions of creating designs. Instead,
theories about how we create designs must cover more and include as one
aspect of them, that issue of how we subjectively perceive how we create
designs.
We haven't yet sorted out some of these basic foundations for creating
design theory.
In 1987, Dixon suggested that design research was in a pre-theory stage
(Design Theory '88 Springer Verlag) . His criticisms still apply and it
would be nice to move forward.
So, to summarise, my focus is on the essentials of foundations for design
theory and design research. Whether the best foundations come from a
Humanities perspective or a science perspective is secondary, and the
human-machine discussions area long way further out in theory terms.
My immediate concern at present is the problems and implications caused by
making theory about how we create designs based on our subjective
perceptions of how we design. I respectfully suggest we need to move beyond
this.
Warm regards,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Salisbury, Martin
Sent: Friday, 18 September 2015 9:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SPAM] can machines design?
Dear Terry,
In your demands for a Pol Pot 'Year Zero' approach to design research in
posts under this heading and others over recent weeks (and recent years),
you have variously described the inherent weaknesses of human beings in
relation to design. Here are a just a few of them:
". (our) processes. are very varied and none (sic) as we perceive them."
". (our actions) different from what we subjectively perceive what we do."
"(we are) incompetent"
"(we are) biased"
".the illusions, delusions, errors, mistakes, fallacies, false premises of
humans ..."
You site these examples of the hopeless unreliability of human beings in
support of your arguments for moving towards a more scientific/ automated/
machine-led approach to design.
As (presumably) a member of the human race yourself, who therefore must
exhibit these same depressing shortcomings, can you please explain why we
should believe that your own arguments and propositions are not similarly
biased, flawed and unreliable?
Many thanks
Martin
Professor Martin Salisbury
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration Director, The Centre for
Children's Book Studies Cambridge School of Art
0845 196 2351
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