Dear Francois and All,

Perhaps it is simply the fact that it is August, but I’d have expected a few comments on your thoughtful post. I’ll give this a go myself.

The categories don’t work as an exclusive taxonomy. Nearly everyone serious in design research occupies two or three of the categories, and in some cases, all five.

There may well be sole creative professionals, but they may or may not be artist designers. Rather, they may use a repertoire of creative skills to solve design problems. To solve design problems effectively, such designers usually attend to the needs and context of the person or group for whom the professional designer solves problems. This requires adopting a range of other skills: you may want to call the role designer, conductor, or bandmaster. 

It is not especially useful to attribute the concepts about this way of working to Bruno Latour. Latour is certainly fashionable and often interesting. What makes his language of “assemblings” fashionable in the last few years is the fact that Latour includes machines and artifacts in an assembling, attributing agency to the non-human “actants” in a network. The problem of attributing agency to artifacts becomes clear when one must ask the opinions and experiences of all the decision makers in any assembling, all the stakeholders in a process, and all those whom the outcomes will affect. Hammers, computers, and electric doors cannot tell you what they think or value. Tools do not think and they have no preferential values. They are tools. While using tools may sometimes lead to unpredictable consequences, it is not because the tools will, desire, or purposefully shape the consequences to which they lead.  

Latour is vague about whether actants possess agency. Agency is the capacity to make decisions. Latour’s vague position permits a wide range of understandings and misunderstandings. For example, some adherents to the “post-humanist” line of argumentation speak of what they describe as a flat ontology. In a flat ontology, all beings are equal to all other beings. Now I can see the argument that all *living* beings are in some respects equal and equally to be valued — animals, trees, vegetation while still living. I cannot see that galaxies, stars, automobiles, chili peppers, forks, and bananas each possess the same kind of being as a living creature. (Then, too, this position begs the question of whether a complete human organism is one being while each of the molecules in the same human being is also a being.)

If actants do not possess agency, there is no need for ANT except as an occasionally provocative footnote to George Herbert Mead and Clifford Geertz.

The concept of engaging all players in an orchestra or all actors in a process long predates Latour. You find it in organization theory, philosophy, philosophy of science and other disciplines. Read Mary Parker Follett’s pioneering work on democracy and politics from the early 1900s, or Peter Drucker on organizations from the late 1950s through the end of the 1900s. Ricardo Semler did tremendous work as the owner-manager of Semco from the 1980s on, introducing radical forms of industrial democracy to his companies while expanding world-wide annual revenue from a few million USD in the earlier 1980s to over two hundred million by the early 2000s. For that matter, read John Dewey or George Herbert Mead — their theories on work, play, and communication are all relevant. For that matter, you can also draw out significant implications on these issues from the work of Martha Nussbaum.

With respect to the various social and ethical issues of any assembling comprised in part or whole of human actors, I’d suggest reading the authors I mentioned. Latour will remain provocative and interesting after you read Follett and Drucker, but he will no longer seem as important — nor hardly a pioneer.

Nearly all successful designers and *all* successful scientific researchers are reflective practitioners. 

Donald Schön uses the word “reflective” in the term “reflective practitioner”, and *not* the word “reflexive”. The word “reflective” is linked to the English word “reflect”, meaning to consider or look into or to shine light on. A mirror reflects. When we use a mirror for self-examination, we reflect on ourselves. 

Schön’s work is not linked to the English word reflex. A reflex is automatic action that can be triggered on an involuntary basis. A physician taps the area just below a patient's knee to test reflexes. There is some difference between usages of these two words in different branches of English. Reflex also describes trained muscle memory — an athlete trains to develop his or her reflexes. The art of the sword requires repeated practice so that the sword fighter is able to act without thinking.

In specific contrast, reflective practice requires thinking about and learn from out actions rather than repeating them by reflex. Schön used American English, and his usage reflects — that is, it mirrors — the distinctions described here. These issues are at the heart of Ellen Langer’s work on mindfulness. Langer’s work on mindfulness is anchored in the same issues that Schön describes. With respect to reflective practice, Schön did not do his work alone. Chris Argyris was his co-reasearcher and co-author in much of the work. Several of their best books were written together. 

Any serious scientist must continually reflect on his or her research practice. This is why failure can be as useful to a scientist as success. While there are some people in science who work as laboratory technicians, the technical role is limited. In many fields, it is important to possess technical skills to work effectively or to understand research apparatus and experimental results, as well as to understand the theory behind them or the theory that emerges from them.

Painful debates do attend question in design research. One key reason for this is the fact that design as a research field is less than half a century old — and much of that time has been filled with the clash between problematic truth claims or mystical statements as against reasoned argument from evidence. This clash accounts for a significant part of the pain and misery. 

Comparing design research with other research fields makes the differences clear. Physics is over 2,500 years old. The painful debates on astrophysics began with Copernicus and Galileo, lasting until the 1800s in some respects. The really painful debates in other areas of physics began in the 17th century and went much of the way through the early 20th century. In different subfields, the work was long and hard — consider, for example, that Sadi Carnot worked on thermodynamics in the first two decades of the 1800s, while Ludwig Boltzmann was still working in 1905, the year of Einstein’s five great papers. 

Mathematics is even older than physics, moving from different forms of applied mathematics nearly 4,000 years ago to debates on whether some kinds of mathematics even make sense in the 1800s and 1900s to some of the great results of recent years — Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, or Grigori Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré Conjecture. 

It has been only a few centuries since the social sciences differentiated into relatively distinct fields, and the process has only just begun. Debates in sociology, economics, and anthropology are still heated. 

We have rarely seen this kind of rich, serious debate on most design topics — there is plenty of heat, misery, and pain, but relatively little light. As the old song says, “our day will come.”

At any rate, this is how I see it.

Warm wishes,

Ken  


Francois Nsenga wrote:

—snip—

Have all of you seen and read a recent article by Alfonso Montuori on
Creativity: "The Perils of Pernicious Polarities: Contemplating Creativity,
Collaboration, and Complexity"?

Worth going through the 7 pages, it may somehow help dissipate the
confusion often arrising in our conversations on design: many among us
talking about design as 'ceativity' and a 'creative activity' of sole
individual, while others meaning rather through the same terms, a
collective undertaking.

​For my part, as I have often argued, my current understanding is that
there indeed is a solo creative activity of the professional, in English
called an 'artist' designer. But there is someone else also called
designer,  a conductor or bandmaster  methodically 'assembling' a
collective of all concerned (Bruno Latour) with the purpose to come up with
a 'satisficing' (H.A.Simon) artifact.

To these two "polarities" in 'crative minds' that Monutori comments on in
his article, there are two more categories of design professionals often
referred on, but in my view not explicitly enough to make our conversations
less confusing: the 'reflexive practionner' (D. Schon), a technician; and
lastly, the design researcher, a new breed still in making with pain and
misery since the last 3 decades or so.

—snip—


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