Dear David, Yoad, and Terry,

David — you are quite right in what you say (below). The philosopher John Austin has written at length about different kinds of speech acts and the different purposes they may serve. John Searle has also given great attention to these issues.

Language and symbolic communication are often confusing because human beings use them to describe the world, while we also use them as tools for shaping the world. It is impossible to know which use occurs if we take any single word out of context. Full sentences become more clear, and longer communications more clear still.

One of the problems that led to confusion involves the misinterpretation of a clear idea. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic — The Social Construction of Reality — has often been misunderstood to mean that human beings in groups construct the physical reality of the world. Berger and Luckmann wrote about the social construction of social reality. That title lacks the panache of the title they choose. But their meaning does cover the ways that we understand the physical reality around us. No matter what human beings believe, however, our beliefs do not change the orbit of the planets around the sun or the molecular composition of water, and we’ve gone much farther with contemporary theories of illness as contrasted with bleeding to adjust the humors.  

So the answer to Terry’s question (below) is this: engineers are human beings. As human beings, language and communication affect and moderate behavior, planning processes, perception, judgment and a great many additional factors. When Yoad speaks of “physical terms and semiotic terms,” I took this to mean physical interaction between people and other people, physical interaction between individual human beings or groups and the world around them. I did not take it to mean that communication alone changes the qualities of steel or the composition requirements of special-purpose cement. 

Yoad’s further explanation (below) seems to me partly correct, but far too sweeping in its claims. A hidden element in an automobile engine is a functional object for most of us, not a communicative object. In the 1960s, I took my old VW bus to our mechanic, Wolf. Wolf knew how to interpret the engine as a communicative object. Some of today’s cars are so complex that mechanics cannot interpret them. Instead, they hook the engine to a computer that talks to the factory. The factory instructs the mechanic on what to do.

An old chef at a restaurant I used to visit taught me how to make some of her foods. If she had spoken Spanish while teaching me, I would have missed the half of it. My Spanish was good enough for low-level daily communication and ordering food. It was not good enough for cooking. That required a mix of Spanish, English, and on-the-spot demonstration. 

To argue that every artifact is communicative rather than productive or functional removes too many of the complex aspects of language, design, productivity, and function to make it a useful model of the world in which we live. Yes, we use language. Many artifacts can be understood as language or as text. But few people speak the language of all artifacts in their many kinds and varieties. For someone who does not speak the proper language, an artifact is functional but it does not communicate. 

My father’s first car was a Model A Ford, produced between 1927 and 1931. Made for the most part of steel, with some rubber and glass, the great part of the value of the car was material. The Ford assembly line represented the key knowledge factors that brought the car from raw materials to finished vehicle. Many people could repair the engine or replace parts — including people who were not professional mechanics. The engine had some communicative value to all those who could repair it, professional and amateur both.

My father’s last car was a Toyota Prius. I have been told that this generation of cars and many like it from other manufacturers carry more on-board computing power than the Lunar Landing Vehicle that first took human beings to the moon. The 2016 Toyota Prius communicates a great deal of information, but it requires expertise to understand much of that communication. 

To explain it another way, I have (or have had) the use of several languages, but if you speak to me in Greek or Hindi, Arabic or Hebrew, I won’t understand a word of what you are telling me and I never did. I am what the classical Greeks termed a barbarian, someone who does not speak their language. Where it comes to many kinds of artifacts, I remain a barbarian — some objects do not speak to me, nor I to them.

Many years ago, I was invited to visit a Norwegian furniture factory to talk about design. In the corner of one work room, there stood a chest. Even though I do not know how to build furniture, I was able to date the piece with accuracy based on a few technical details. The real experts in woodwork were quite astonished by this. The piece had been made on a nearby farm, and it didn’t seem to them that a foreigner — a barbarian? — like me could know so much about it. If you had asked me to build such a piece, my all-thumbs problem would have surfaced rapidly. 

Around the house, I am the spirit of the kitchen. The dishes and I carry on a good conversation. My wife is a theologian and psychotherapist by profession, and she is good with tools. She interprets and speaks to artifacts in need of repair.     

Theologian and hermeneutics scholar Kevin Vanhoozer distinguishes between the divine and human uses of language. For Vanhoozer, only a divine being exists [in, through, by means of] the power of a word. Vanhoozer describes a God who brings worlds into being by a speech act that creates even as it represents. For the divinity, language is an existential event.

For human beings, language only represents the world. Language takes on active power when we act in response to language, including the language we speak to ourselves in thought. In many ways, we also act through language. Nevertheless, we require other tools to build the houses, bridges, and highways we speak about. We need tools such as books, newspapers, phones, and digital media to communicate our words to people far away.

Ursula LeGuin’s wonderful Earthsea books invent a world in which all language has power for those who understand the language of creation. Those who become wizards must spend a great deal of time learning the true names of things, and the parts of things: the name of and ocean, the name of a bay on the ocean, the name an inlet on the bay, a rock in the inlet, a single flower that grows near the rock, and so on. LeGuin — the daughter of two distinguished anthropologists — creates worlds in which the plot turns on crucial understandings of mind and thought. It is this understanding of human beings in societies and cultures that gives such depth and meaning to LeGuin’s books. No matter how unusual or distant from us her characters are, they act in key respects as moving actors in a world of words, actors whose behavior we can understand, actors with whom we can empathize.

This, set in our own world, is what makes an Aeschylus or a Shakespeare resonate today, even though the river of time separates us from the world in which they lived. Jane Austen’s novels have grown more powerful with two centuries of time and understanding.  

In the religions of our world, there are sacred books that live only when they are recited, and some religions have words and names so sacred that they may never be spoken.

For religious believers, these books and recitations constitute the language of creation.

Engineering and technical design have no need for these words. In contrast, they need a language of precise description and instruction anchored in the physical reality of the materials with which they work.

But we build the social world in which we live of words. All of us — engineers, technical designers, sociologists, anthropologists, semioticians, chefs, historians, football players, and the rest — live in the social world we build through language. The artifacts we make have functional properties and communicative properties, and these converge and diverge in many ways, often quite different. The problem of posting a note to a list such as this is that we must reduce challenging issues to the length of a post.

In the last words of the movie _Anonymous_,

“Though our story is at an end, our poet’s is not; 
for his monument is everliving, not of stone but of verse. 

“And it shall be remembered … as long as words are made of breath,
and breath of life.” 

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia

—

David Sless wrote:

—snip—

There is a long debate about the nature of communication in communication theory and the philosophy of language which touches on the issue of communication as on the one hand, as an instrumental activity—a means of achieving specific outcomes in the world, and communication on the other hand as foundational—constructing the social fabric of the world. Many of us in the field have moved to the latter view. That this is happening in design is to be expected and welcomed.

In discourse about this we have moved from talking about language to languaging—from language as a thing we use to “languaging” as an activity, something we do. So, for example, instead of talking about metaphors, we should be talking about metaphorising. You can see the parallel changes in some design areas such as moving from interface design to user experience design, and so on. This move opens up an extraordinary rich vein for new work.

But in the English language we have a confounding problem to do with the way we describe communication as having it’s own properties like any other ‘thing’ in the  world. This leads to some strange and ultimately pointless debates, many of which have been rerun in this list

—snip—

—

Terry Love wrote:

—snip—

You wrote, ‘Communication and the structures that enables it between people (both in physical terms and semiotic terms) are the unifying principles of design.’

Please can you say more?

I’m interested in how what you wrote applies to engineering design or the other technical design fields.

—snip— 

— 

Yoad David Luxembourg wrote:

—snip—

Whatever the activity of design is, it relies heavily on human cognitive ability and neuro structures that allow designers to refer to abstract concepts with out limitations to time and space. The structures of thinking, speaking and designing are strongly linked to each other and allow designers and humans in general to do this symbolic reference through the creation of artifacts ( lingual such as text, or spoken language, and designed such all man made artifact that we use and interact with around us). Everything man made artifact is made for a purpose, not functional, but communicative - to coordinate and exchange meaning whether be it by spoken sentences or designed artifacts. artifacts that which their design does not facilitate human communication, end up being thought as meaningless or broken or wrong.

Moving on, when we refer to a concept, we also invoke the relationship it has with other concepts. For example, the concept “to put” invokes role players such as who put something somewhere, object or item concept that is placed somewhere, location where the item is placed at or in, and so on.

With every artifact or sensed information structure that we perceive (Gibson’s ambient light), in the process of recognizing the object sensed we ask and answer:

What are we sensing?
What does it look like?
What does it refer to or symbolizes?
Who is it from?
Who does it belong to?
To what community of people it belongs?
When and where or in what context can we use the artifact?

This may seem complicated but every adult human, after years of training in childhood, builds a huge memory of experiences that allows them to answer these questions in less then 2 seconds.

Designers, what ever the methodology, always structure their artifacts in a ways the enables users to answer this questions effortlessly as possible and to reach the (designer’s) intended meaning evoked by the artifact.

What design methodologies do is to moderate and pace the creation of artifacts through the exchange, collection, and circulation of information and the conceptualization of design concepts relating to macro contexts and micro details of the artifact.  To do so Designers language ( from Krippendorff’s “languaging”) their creation into being using the language that is practice in their discipline or methodology.

—snip— 

—

Terry Love wrote:

—snip—

I’m still wondering how it applies say to the mathematical design of the shape of a camshaft curve and the choice of harness and materials? How does the user (presumably the car driver) derive meaning from the design of those details?

As far as I can see, semantics ands communication to the user doesn’t much apply at all in these sort of cases (which I suspect is the majority of design decisions when you include all technical design disciplines).

—snip— 

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