Dear Ken and Eduardo,
Why do these discussions start from scratch?
I ask, because I am an industrial designer writing a PhD thesis in a faculty of information (an "iSchool"), where I am part-way through a literature review of theories of 'objects,' sometimes known as 'things' or 'artifacts.' My bibliography is 39 pages long, single spaced in landscape format. After I finish this, I will embark on the literature of 'information,' to be distinguished from 'data,' 'knowledge,' and so forth (with a separate bibliography) and then head on to the literature of perception, focusing on J.J. Gibson, before returning to the literature of kitchen design, which is my starting point.
While I have never written a PhD before, it seems that literature searches are routine in them. I also note from the title in the "To" section of this email that this list is apparently, in theory, devoted to PhD studies. While the extra garnishes of gossip are good fun, the let's-start-from-nothing-and-not-read-the-literature discussions of topics that have wide established backgrounds are less entertaining — as a past message about fork-lifts pointed out.
It's very designerly to believe you have something to add to a discussion even though you've never met it before. Design schools in the 1970s stopped teaching history in hopes that ignorance would pay off in originality, that big goal. And, because design is a service, all of us who have worked in the trenches of designing have stepped into situations where knowledgeable clients could not solve the problem and the ignorant designer could. Design is what my librarian fellow PhD students like to call an "orthogonal" profession, by which they mean (abusing a perfectly good technical word) that, like information science, it crosses over all the other professions, dealing with everything, while also at the same time remaining itself.
But if ignorance is part of design, what about PhD design? Could that perhaps try to be a bit better informed? Of course education means feeling safe to say dumb things in a safe place, but I think there is a difference between risking dumb explorations and making dumb grandiose pronouncements. The starting point for this discussion made perfect sense, because it was tightly situated:
not only language mediates knowledge and knowing, but as well all other human artifacts do
It stood on a real place, speaking from experience, and perhaps that might be the central point of my interjection here. I, personally, would like to hear less high-falutin' blather on this list, and more about what you-all really know, and/or are working on — not just what you happen to be distracted by.
Heidi
PS. Anyone else reading Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010)? It's all about the agency of material, which I think relates well to what I know about hominid stone knapping technology. I'm thinking that human agency spins on the perception of material agency; could we call this meta-agency?
PPS. Books are NOT containers of information. Information is NOT contained inside heads. Information is emergent.
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