Your mailing below provokes a response. Firstly your work for
the UK Design Council 'largely about definition' - please could you
provide a reference/info.
Secondly, my forays into the subject of 'definition' within design was
prompted by the issue of 'context' and the use of things, where the notion
of 4D design became a useful peg in the ground for me to deal with it.
The designs of behaviour and activity, particularly where there is a high
cultural component involved, provides the context for the the design of
hardware. The low attention to this context, as well as environmental
contexts etc. has resulted in rather myopic product designs - ie they may
make someone a fast buck but are as likely as not to impoverish the
ecology, culture and social fabric around them.
More recognition of contexts, in this context, leads to the issue of the
design of contexts.
Alec Robertson
Faculty of Art & Design
De Montfort University
http://www.dmu.ac.uk/dept/schools/des-man/4dd
On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Derek Nicoll wrote:
> I disagree with Chris Rust on a couple of points. As an acedemic I have
> long argued that the value that we offer is the ability to consider, then
> name, taxonomise and otherwise redefine. What is in a name is important if
> your work is, for instance, helping industry realise benifits in theory.
> Our recent work for the Design Council of the UK, has been largely about
> definition. In this case what 'smart' or 'intelligent' products are or
> could be. In order to settle on defnitions we worked closely with
> practitioners and others in order to define what was and was not in this
> category, and to reach some consensus about the category itself.
>
> In a sense this links quite directly to the issue of context, and my second
> point of disagreement. "context is all there is."
>
> Things define and are defined by contexts. Any study or theory of context
> is only relevant by defining limits to contexts, or deciding which elements
> are relevant for a particular project or goal. How much is a particular
> context relevant to defining meaning in an act or object? This is the aim
> of contrasting the particular to the general, or the instance and the
> category. Contexts within themseleves are potnaitlly infinate, and
> therefore not defining them and their relevance to an act or thing is
> surely a regressive frame of analysis. This surely confounds any sensible
> disscusion of their relevance.
>
Watzman Information Design: Making things easier to use and understand.
25 Inman Place Cambridge, MA 02139 U S A
[log in to unmask] (617) 876-0099
offshore offices (508) 645-5126
"How I wish that somewhere there existed an island
for those that are wise and of good will." Albert Einstein
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|