tools-for-thought

PhD Tutorial Notes 20/05/09

2009-05-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

Self-reflexivity (methodology-folding)

Think about this issue from an organisational standpoint (i.e. the non-creative standpoint).

Is the self-reflexivity paradigm a phenomena of operating (or researching) in the inner working of creative thinking?

What is the applicability of this, how might it relate to the outside interpretation.

Identify and choose what will be the important/crucial/fundamental method and focus the methodology paper on these aspects. The other aspects can become something of a minor or sub-narrative if needed.

Notes on notes on notes (expositional model) or non-creative model. Perhaps use one in the other (creative and non-creative models)

Is the collision of distributed cognition theory from cognitive science and design methodology from design theory an original contribution to knowledge in design.

>>> look through the journal of co-design

Interesting use of scientific method to justify or exemplify philosophical/ontological standpoints in the journal of phenomenology and cognitive science.

A Paul Ryan book might be useful???

What is the minimum needed to explain the major tenants of this research.

Usable form…

Knowledge-action (does this need to be explicit, what is its relevance?)

Investigate potential ready-made sources of data that could be used.

Belbin’s management theory > team roles and structures.

Perhaps this is a way of understanding or mapping the roles of designers working in teams. Has it been taken into the context of observing/educating design teams?

Multiplicity statement about my research?

Every team will depart from this, and any other theory/framework of practice

Chapters breakdown – in doing so specify the purpose.

Illustrate the possibility in my terms.

Define a paradigm in terms of distributed cognition?

Network theory – BBC documentary 6 degrees of separation

We need a formula to get onto the green, then a couple of puts to get in the hole (golfing metaphor)

Have a look into (but not to deep) the work of Vygotsky on both hypertext theory and collective learning.

Map my current bibliography on a scale of relevance and usefulness.

Aristotles ethics may be a fundamental.

My aim is to show that this method… (frame presentations of work in a way that avoids truth-claim criticism.)

J.C.J.’s design methods attempted in this way…

I will need to clarify my points of reference (or end-points) to help frame the writing and use of literature.

Designers can do more… (from personal statement) but what should they try to achieve (not clarified in personal statement)

Eudemonia, perhaps similar term from eastern philosophy perspective. Be careful of the Christian dogma that might exist around this term.

Watch out as well for the nihilism/absolutism duality trap. Can we have a pragmatic eudemonia? Outcome-centered happiness.

Add some old Greek words to the personal statement.

Path inks and clustering (within creative processes) from network theory.

Network theory of ideas and ideation. Also useful tool to map how larger scale re-direction can become paradigm shift.

Find and form a link between Belbins ‘hub’ role and the idea of hubs within networks. This could be incredibly useful and relevant to the research work.

Steering Document 19/05/09

2009-05-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Tooling-for Re-direction:

By mapping the ideational processes used in specific design communities, how can we tool-for and language re-directive practices that catalyse affirmative future design industries?

In an article on metadesign, the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana wrote, ‘we live a culture centered in domination and submission, mistrust and control, dishonesty, commerce and greediness, appropriation and mutual manipulation ... and unless our emotioning changes all that will change in our lives will be the way in which we continue in wars, greediness, mistrust, dishonesty, and abuse of others and of nature.’ (Maturana, 1997) If this is a true reflection of the world today, how could communities of design and their action play a role in catalysing change in ‘our emotioning’, in other words, our collective ‘desires and responsibility’. Can design be the catalyst to bring-about an emotioning change in itself and the world, and if so does it have a responsibility to do so?

To address this question I shall adopt the notion of co-dependence (Varela et al, 1991) as it offers a new way of firstly understanding and secondly tooling-for what Tony Fry has recently coined redirection (ref.) within communities of practice in the design industry. By observing, deconstructing and then mapping entangled webs of distributed cognition (Hutchins ref.) within small design communities, it possible to re-direct the practice by altering the tooling intrinsic and available to the current-state community.

The purpose of this research is four-fold:

(1) to build background narratives of ideational processes, focusing on the distribution of action between, and relationships of, designers and tools;

(2) to identify and language the potential for redirecting practice;

(3) to form an understanding of how we can re-tool the design process, and exemplify how this can redirect practice;

(4) to argue by extrapolating case-studies that by re-directing individual design practices we can collectively shape an affirmative future design industry;

Design is still a relatively new academic discipline, and the majority of its theoretical dialog is adopted and adapted from other older academic disciplines. Due to this, design is left with language, terminology and epistemic-frameworks that relate to purely analytical activities, rather than action and change oriented activities. Maturana proposed the term ‘languaging’ (Maturana, 1997) as an adaptive process to seed new socio-cultural values within a community’s understanding of their world. This becomes a very useful tool when used in relation to describing and explaining these design activities. Through a process of tooling-for redirective practice, we can relanguage the processes already existing in specific design communities, as well as language the paradigm-shift in the eddies created by redirective actions. This is important as a shareable language becomes a fundamental part of both envisioning and building re-directive communities of future design practice, a redirected design industry.

The futuring potential of design is apparent by looking at the progression of the world in recent history, as John Chris Jones explained in his seminal 1970 text, Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures, ‘to design is no longer to increase the stability of the manmade world: it is to alter, for good or ill, things that determine the course of its development.’ (Jones, 1970) However, the majority of designers are currently engaged in what could be called ‘defuturing’ activities (Fry, 2008) - we need to redirect the focus of design practices towards attending to the future.

Re-directions from...

2009-05-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

"We live a culture centered in domination and submission, mistrust and control, dishonesty, commerce and greediness, appropriation and mutual manipulation ... and unless our emotioning changes all that will change in our lives will be the way in which we continue in wars, greediness, mistrust, dishonesty, and abuse of others and of nature." - Maturana, H. (1997). Metadesign Part III: Reflections. Retrieved from http://www.inteco.cl/articulos/metadesign_parte3.htm on 18/05/2009.

Walter Benjamin's tips for writing

2009-05-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

Retrieved from http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/08/walter-benjamin.html on 18/05/2009

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

PhD Tutorial Notes 14/05/09

2009-05-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

Defining a reader (possibly designer at engine? research further...) and identify:

> What they do;

> What they may want;

> What they need;

> What I know they're lacking;

This could formulate method of analysing shifts in my assumptions about an environment.

> Recording my assumptions, and comparing these with my views changed after spending time in a specific design studio.

Start to identify useful ethnographic research methodology that could be used in creating studies of design studios.

Think about and communicate directional flow of readers expertise/knowledge i.e. are they up-stream or down-stream, and what this means for my research.

Framework: moving from co-dependence to re-directive practice.

Remember to define terminology carefully, taking into consideration the differences of the reader's understanding and my understanding of terminology. For example: Prudence.

Write a personal mission statement, where am I coming from, what do I want to do, why?

Write a larger professional statement.

Define an end point or goal to help frame the ongoing writing. (Changing the points of reference in/for the design profession)

Conviviality - Tools for conviviality (book). Interesting writing style to look at.

Short chapters in thesis? (see Walter Benjamin's work)

A chapter for each of the major concepts in the title (f.e. co-depenedence, redirective practice, prudence...)

Justification, 'what is right?' - plea for your case / pragmatic arena can be outcome centered.

Design activism and other contemporary or related fields? Make decisions on research association and look at relevance of these practices to the thesis' purpose.

Think about sensibilities of terminology. How does shifting a readers context of practice/affiliation effect the meaning of terminology, i.e. from a SME design studio to the design council / a trust to a government...

Refine/rewrite/redraft 'steering page'.

Tooling-for redirection (title and synopsis draft) 14/05/09

2009-05-15T02:29:00.000-07:00

Tooling-for Re-direction:

By mapping the ideational methods and processes used in specific design communities using a framework of designer-tool co-dependence, how can we tool and language new re-directive (or prudent) praxis within the design industry?

“To design is no longer to increase the stability of the manmade world: it is to alter, for good or ill, things that determine the course of its development.” Jones (1970)

• Creative processes in specific design practices? – build relationships with design studios (? when, where, how, who?); be involved in the re-direction of their practices and document this process. Perhaps SME design companies? Live/Work, Engine, Big Fish etc.

• Framework of tools-for-thought? – What is my definition of this? Who are the main exponents of this field? What is the relevance/importance of this line of thought to design? What is its history, traditions, recent developments, and underlying ontology? Tools as hubs (or reverse) in networks?

• How am I framing ‘new’? – What am I benchmarking ‘new’ against? Am I investigating specific ‘newness’ or general ‘newness’? Am I assessing relevance of the new?

• What direction of re-directive practice? – How is the terminology currently used? What are the currently examples of re-directed practice? Why do we need to re-direct current design practices? Dogma around term?

• Languaging? – Is there other users of languaging method and examples of this? Is this something that has to be formalised within the thesis or is it already established as a practice? If it needs to be formalised, how would I go about doing that, i.e. what is its context, where did it come from, what are its fundamental principals, what philosophical framing does it exist in?

• Components of new re-directive practice? – What am I looking for? Which specific parts of a process or processes am I proposing to explore and define? How do components reflect systems change or paradigm-shift? What is my proforma?

Designer-tool co-dependence offers a way of identifying and tooling-for redirection (Fry) and paradigm shift within communities of practice in the design industry. If we deconstruct and then map entangled webs of distributed cognition (Hutchins) within a small design community, is it possible to re-direct the design practice by altering the tooling intrinsic to the current-state practice?

The thesis will create a new theoretical framework focusing on designer-tool co-dependence. The purpose of this framework two-fold: to build background narratives of ideational practice, allowing a reflection on implicit (but external) elements of design processes, identifying potential for redirection and then languaging it; to understand how and where we can re-tool ideational design processes to enable the redirection of design practices;

(insert something around re-directing practices by working in-conjunction with studios in industry, groups of students, of design educators etc.)

As design is still a relatively new academic discipline, a lot of its dialog is adopted and adapted from other unrelated disciplines. Due to this, design is left with language, terminology and other knowledge-frameworks that relates to analytical activities. However, through a process of tooling-for redirective practice, we can language both the processes already existing in specific design communities (in their own right), and language the shift or change in direction through the actions of re-directing them.

The stages of conducting research will be:

(1) Outline field of study and introduce the main tenants of the research. Co-dependence, design methodology, distributed cognition, futuring, languaging, prudence, re-directive practice, and tooling, including the background of each train of thought, their current use and context, and finally relevance to a design agenda (past/present/future).

(2) Mapping design-tooling in certain design communities and studios, including both theoretical methods and observed practical methods. This would involve forming research relations with a series of design communities in either or both design industry and/or education. The aim of this is to create a series of background narratives of studio practice;

(3) Remapping the observed current tooling in the design industry using a co-dependence framework, focusing on the links, networks and co-agency of designers and tools;

(4) Comparing both maps, identify and language potential paradigm-shifts and spaces for re-direction. This could be seen as reflecting upon current practice in a forward looking context, i.e. where are the potentials and possibilities for re-direction located in the observed design processes;

(5) Design re-directive tools for re-integration into the communities in which the narratives of practice were collected. This stage could be seen as propositional, proposing to specific design communities how to re-direct their practice and what possibilities their future-state practice could contain;

(6) Prototype the re-directive tools in those communities. This could be through workshops, training, series of conversations, projects or briefs;

(7) After a period of gestation, identify any resulting re-direction in practice. If any re-direction results, this will be languaged and evaluated (against…);

(8) Collate studies and assess the potential for effects beyond the studies themselves (from micro to macro). Could re-directive tooling be scaled up?

Doruff, Sher (2008)

2009-05-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

Title: The Tendency to Trans-: The Political Aesthetics of the Biogrammatic Zone

Author: Sher Doruff

Currently Unpublished.

In relation to the creativity-tool of diagrammatics (ideational diagram).

p.1 "[The Biogram] provides a means of envisioning and revisioning the centralized Fold or 'zone of subjectification' drawn by Deleuze in his overview of Foucaults's diagrammatic ontology."

p.2 "The diagram sketches its own propensity to elide the present via a future-past."

"a lived transcoding of the unformed/unthought (ontogenesis) and the formalizing (autopoietic) encounter between content and expression."

p.4 "Every diagram is interfaced through a subjective zone or dimension"

p.5 "Diagramma in the original Greek, refers to the wax tablet philosophers once used to compose ideas before committing them to papyrus with a stylus (Knoespel, 2001). The blackboard and calk of the mathematician, the notebook of the artist, the sketch of the architect, the inked napkin from the brainstorm lunch, the vectorial indications of the choreographer - all exhibit diagrammatic tendencies, the matter-movement of the not-yet-formalized. There are coextensive registers of relation present between diagramming as an abstract machine and as a formalising realisation of that abstraction - those sketches, drawings and mappings making their way to form, to the desired construction of the aggregate, the more or less concrete assemblage. The movement if thought, sensation and intuition between these registers provokes strategies for thinking processually through the politics of the abstract diagram to the aesthetic politics of the making of and the made; the relation of informal to formal."

p.6 "For it is in the formalizing, looping movement of rearticulation, the becoming-substance of expressive matter, that the concept of the biogram makes sense as an ethico-aesthetic interface, pulsing within a larger diagrammatic scheme."

"So an informal diagram maps the unformed and unstable forces that affect mutations to the conceptual givens of a project's design: all those possibilities that are most likely to actualize in a making process through habit, know-how, style."

p.7 "Biogram-as-interface, ontogenetic and autopoietic, draws off the re-markable as it re-marks the drawn; enables praxis of something Massumi has recently called a "thinking-feeling of what happens" (2008)"

"A doubling occurs in the moving towards realization, the rearticulation, of the becoming-visibility/utterance. This doubling divides in a central differentiation, referencing a voluminous vocabulary of the interstitial - fissure, gap, disjunction, rupture, in-between, crack, interface, fold, non-place - descriptors of a rift between content and expression, necessary for realization."

p.9 "The 'event' of the rearticulation, of knowledge-capture and distribution: the topological dynamic by the diagram, affected through the central differentiation (biogram)"

p.11 " The fissure-as-biogram is a metastable, transductive conduit, embodied and distributed, transforming the re-emergence of lived experience as expressive content."

p.18 "Within the diagrammatic, micropolitics and mircoperceptions share resonant functions. unconscious microperceptions at play in the differential relations of the biogrammatic zone are imperfectly affective. A macropercetion come to consciousness through differential filtering. Both micropolitics and microperceptions effectuate through the immanent cause to perceive, think, act and distribute through a diagrammatic process."

p.25 "The biogram registers the topological shapeshift of continuous change."

Spring Review Presentation - Draft

2009-04-20T03:56:00.001-07:00

Novel Metaphor for New Thinking

2009-04-20T03:33:00.000-07:00

"Instances of novel metaphor, that is, a metaphor not used to structure a part of our normal conceptual system but as a new way of thinking about something." (Lakoff & Johnson 1980:53)

More soon...

3³ Fractal Co-authorship Incubator

2009-04-01T04:52:00.000-07:00

Thinking Points: PhD Research

2009-03-30T04:55:00.000-07:00

> Shape provisional question

> Define a specific/real reader

> Define a specific writing style or typology

> Create a pet-bibliography (towards literature review)

> Road-map rough timelines

> Create a list of potential 'problem-words'

> Define and assess different modes of workshopping and testing tools in relation to time and evaluation

> Specify the contribution to/of new-knowledge in the field

> Start to shape methodology

> Philosophical idea, concept or theory ←→ exemplification

> New-tool ←→ evaluation through trial

Apoiesis and co-dependance: Manifesting deep value through change.

2009-03-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

At an ontological level, any act of 'world-making' is co-dependant and co-authored. It is within the negotiation between agent-of-change and world-being-changed where the true authorship lies. In other words, both agent-of-change and world-being-changed are equal collaborators, each iteratively remaking and remarking the other in the great fabrication of perceived experience.

Anything that is absolutely single-authored remains of the truest abstract, ungrounded, unmanifested, unreal. It is both infinite in scope and void of world. I call this state apoetic, a state of un-negotiated and un-configured potential.

Another metaphor to bring into this languaging is sympoiesis. Shifting the symbiotic paradigm, where-by two or more beings are joined in a closed loop for the benefit of at least one of those beings, to a paradigm of two or more beings coming together to bring about benefit to not just all agents within the loop, but creating outward benefit as well. Through this we may be able to place at a deep level the value shift from framing our understanding of value-resource to value-potential. Rather than looking at what we all have, we look at what we can do, valuing our potential-for. An interesting result of such a shift is looking at accumulation of value in relation to accumulation of agents. In the enframing of resource, the sum of accumulated value is that of all individual value added together, where as the value-potential multiplies when accumulated through the possibility of high-order synergy.

I argue that this is a fundamental of understanding (at relevant levels) the design process, and its users-enactors co-dependant interaction {with/with-in/for/as/through} (or multiplicity-connection) the world, and the resulting embodying, enacting and animating of deep-value into the units of world making in question.

possibility vs. stability

2009-03-23T02:32:00.000-07:00

Beat and weave, context shifting in narrative structure.

2009-03-23T02:31:00.000-07:00

Being, becoming and harmonic modulation

2009-03-23T02:26:00.000-07:00

Perceptual span

2009-03-23T02:22:00.001-07:00

Designer to luthier and back again.

2009-03-21T04:57:00.000-07:00

6-String Fretless Zither (Gnostick) and Electric Upright Bass (EUB)

Being-with Uncertainty Workshop

2009-03-20T04:03:00.000-07:00

Being-with Uncertainty: A workshop using sympoetic metaphor as a tool to navigate and work-with tensions-in-thought;

For: The Thursday Club; Goldsmiths, University of London;

Date: Sometime during the Spring Term

Summary:

Finding uncertainty;

Being-with uncertainty by opening-up to '...';

Negotiating uncertainty through/with metaphor;

Configuring uncertainty through/with self-reflective metaphor;

Tooling uncertainty and metaphor within your practice;

Debrief and discussion;

More Coming soon.

Activities:

Thinking-with/through: Abstraction; Concretion; Denotation; Connotation; Context; Overtone; Catachresis; Dyfalu; Synesthesia; Prosopopeia; Symbol; Paradox;

More Coming Soon.

Worldly investigation through grammatics.

2009-03-20T03:24:00.000-07:00

Information coming soon...

Descriptive Tropes:

• Similie

• Contrast

• Alusion

• Topographia

• Chronographia

• Icon

• Prosopographia

• Paradigma

• Enigma

• Parabola

• Epithetic Compound

• Oxymoron

Metaphorical Tropes:

• Abstraction

• Concreation

• Denotation

• Conotation

• Context

• Overtone

• Catachresis

• Dyfalu

• Synesthesia

• Prosopopeia

• Symbol

• Paradox

Rhetorical Tropes:

• Anachinosis

• Artenagoge

• Antipophora

• Aporia

• Dialisis

• Ecphonisis

• Erotema

• Etiologia

• Irony

• Metanoia

• Paralepsis

• Parimia

• Sarcasmus

• Tapinosis

Designers = Metæpistemologists?

2009-03-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Using an Experimental Co-authoring Method (facilitator J. Lockheart)

From the view-point of Jordan Dalladay-Simpson

1) In the context of my past.

Keywords

Direction: history; practice; belief;

Point: colliding fields; finding boundaries; questioning;

How: looking-back; reflection; case-study;

Paper (200 Words)

Framing a previous form of my practice in relation to spaces of beyond-knowledge.

Colliding belief systems within technological frameworks, involved a passing-over of existing fields and rules present in the fields of knowledge I was ‘borrowing’ from. I found myself engaged in a process of knowledge-absorption, freely and openly digesting and assimilating ideas, constructs and theories from a wide range of otherwise unrelated or interconnected disciplines. Through explicit practice, I found myself pulling together strands of these different trains-of-thought, and assembling them through explicit practice, into the form of reflective and discursive artefacts. The process seemed to be working two-fold, where by first I was starting not just to understand new theories through the process of designing across varying fields but also finding insight, new ideas and questions relating to those theories from the shear collision different elements within practice. I had a feeling of weaving together metaphorical threads, some knowledge others material, configuring (or fabricating) a little piece of the world at many/multiple levels. I was becoming subtly aware of the possibilities for shifting knowledge systems and paradigms through undisciplined-design processes..

2) In the context of my present.

Keywords

Direction: shifts; ontology; preference;

Point: futuring; research; current-state;

How: philosophy; reflection; issues/problems;

Paper (200 Words)

In the context of my present practice, I am specifically researching deep understandings and designs potential to shift perception, value systems (i.e. morals) and ways of thinking. Operating as before within the collision of disciplines external to design, but this time using design processes to explicitly weave-in or seed new systems of value and perception. It was over the last year that this process and possibility of seeding preferable future (or futuring) within design practice became apparent. My current understanding of it (at a knowledge-level) is that any activity of world-making, which implies future-states, is not just made on a physical or material level, but enacts every level, and henceforth the term meta-epistemology (and even meta-ontology), it shapes and binds future states of entire knowledge systems. For me this brings about a very deep responsibility, not just within my practice, but to all activities of world-making, and all scales, which is that all possible levels of futuring and future-state must be at least considered, as the potential for a design process to shape itself, beyond-itself, knowledge, beyond-knowledge and entire cultures of perception means that if used with virtue and know-how it can bring about positive long-term fundamental change at an world-level, and if used without know-how but rather know-what (only existing knowledge systems) can cause catastrophic fundamental issues at all worldly levels.

1) In the context of my future.

Keywords

Direction: practice; complexity; new-knowledge;

Point: action-knowledge; virtue; knowledge-institutions;

How: questions; proposals; ideas;

Paper (200 Words)

The questions I ask for the future revolve around how we can implement and shape new practices (not disciplines) of design that embrace this idea of futuring beyond-knowledge, seeding preference at the deepest of worldly levels? Is it possible to fully understand not just this process, but the full potentials of this process? I am fascinated by the potential for design to shift and bring about seeming lost concepts of eudemonia and virtue and socio-cultural levels, and therefore the ability to bring back together growing divides between people and the worlds they inhabit. Is the framing design in this context altering other knowledge systems around it, and therefore what could it potentially mean for the traditional knowledge-institution and its high flags of rigour and relevance? What happens if scholarly study and critical analysis operated through a world-making practice, where every aspect of the study both folds upon, and embodies within itself, manifesting complex multi-layered change, and offering new-knowledge not just internal to that study and that discipline, but in every other field and at every other level around?

What happens when we re-connect knowledge and action, binding them iteratively within on another?

Calvino, Italo - 6 Memos for the Next Millennium

2009-03-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

p.12 "Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would chose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, show that will all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times - noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring - belongs to the realm of the dead, like a cemetery for rusty old cars."

p.33 "The moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a know in the network of invisible relationships."

Creative writing as a disruptive design thinking...

2009-03-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

Can I harness creative writing techniques as a different way of both engaging creative thinking into my work, as well as provide another level and space in which to communicate otherwise complex and difficult concepts?

http://passionless-sense-of-destiny.blogspot.com/

Work in progress...

Designers = Meta-epistemologists?

2009-03-09T05:20:00.000-07:00

Designers = Meta-epistemologists? Questions of practicing design in the spaces of ‘beyond-knowledge’ and the ‘not-yet’.

By Ayako Fukuuchi, Hyaesook Yang & Jordan Dalladay-Simpson

ayakko_@hotmail.com | hyaesook.yang@googlemail.com | hi@jordandalladaysimpson.co.uk

Department of Design

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW

For the IASDR International Conference 2009 – Rigour and Relevance in Design. Seoul, Korea. Thematic Strand: Design Philosophy, Ethics, Values and Issues.

Key words: design-philosophy; virtue; ethics; futuring; co-dependence;

Abstract:

‘You might know-it-all, but what can you do with it now?’

Taking the view that design is a world-making activity, situated in negotiation, configuration and adaptation through bringing about change, design acts in a space of beyond-knowledge, of not-yet, and therefore reflects, alters and creates deep value systems at a meta-epistemic level, or the level of ethics and virtue. We argue it can be seen that design operates and transgresses in-the-space-between being and becoming, it is being-with and action-within the fabrication and binding of artifice self-consciousness, arising-with continual co-dependence. It is an act of futuring reliant on know-how rather than know-what.

These statements liberate design from traditional knowledge-making and disciplinary-thinking, resulting in potential causal emergence of new systems, disciplines, values and boundaries, manifesting ethical value into components of experiential realities. This creates space and possibilities for deep understandings (gnostic, tacit and/or implicit) of the concepts of ethics, virtue and eudemonia through an affirmative, change-centred, world-making and poetic design in practice, rather than via traditional dualist, rational, logical, analytic or scholarly means.

We propose an exploration of emerging questions around the notion of design as a meta-epistemological world-making practice, and its relation to traditional knowledge and rigour.

Author biographies:

Ayako Fukuuchi worked in Tokyo as a designer, and completed the MA Design Futures course at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2008. The present status: Designer of things.

Hyaesook Yang worked as an interior designer and co-art director at Aa Design museum in Korea. She recently graduated from the MA Design Futures course at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is interested in Metadesign and is currently working as a design researcher based in London.

Jordan Dalladay-Simpson is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is researching and developing relationships between tools and new-thinking within creative processes.

Design = Ethics

2009-02-25T05:43:00.000-08:00

Bringing about virtuous change using design as a tool for good spirited (or using the greek term eudemonic), empathetic (see Elaine Scarry - The Body in Pain), non-truth or knowledge centered adaption, configuration and negotiation of the man-made components, products and systems of the world.

Design acts beyond knowledge (i.e. is meta-epistemic or metapistemic) and negotiates all levels of possibility and possible change, for example change {across/with/through/over} the situated, global, spatial, systematic, value, emotional, known, concept...

Design does not, and should not, be seen to hold itself down with the weight [sic] of knowledge nor the concretions and rigidity of rigor. Design is ethical, it is acted out in the space of adaption, configuration, and world-making, it is change-action [verb]. It operates beyond boundaries of traditional knowledge and disciplinary thinking, resulting in causal emergence of new systems, disciplines, values and boundaries.

In-the-space-between being [verb] and becoming [verb] is where design [verb] dwells [verb].

Abstracts (for PhD seminar -10/02/2009)

2009-02-06T05:50:00.000-08:00

What is the potential that exists the process of designing tools specifically as props to nurture, facilitate and co-create new modes of thinking/action within creative practice and design methodology?

It is seen in fields such as cognitive science that external artefacts can become props for cognitive process within everyday human action, leading to the notion of the epistemic thing or artefact. This formation of a distributed cognitive network also has similarities with the ideas of object-agency emerging from recent work in actor-network-theory (Latour et al). These developments have created a space for people like Clark to identify ‘mind-tools’, and study the ways in which we might think-with or think-through things, effectively scaffolding ourselves and our lives with external cognitive props. I am taking these ideas into the discipline of design, contextualising designer/tool co-agency, or thinking-with-things, specifically in relation towards further understanding and developing ideational and collaborative design methodology.

Throughout the duration of my PhD I will be creating an online database of existing tools-in-use (design methods) through conducting studies and interviews with creative practitioners from around the world. The aim of this is to gather and develop an understanding of current design method-in-use. I will also be using this insight to assist in designing tools (as probes) that reflect on both the theory and philosophy around thinking-with-things with which I will create relationships with creative studios in London to start a series of workshop pilots (workshopping) with the newly designed tools. The aim of this will be to develop those designed tools {in/with/through} the relationships established, in an attempt to identify and evaluate any resulting new or emergent modes of thinking/action within a distributed cognitive-poetic network.

Two-fold becoming - Diagrams on possibilities and poeisis

2009-02-06T05:38:00.000-08:00

An Evolutionary Binding - The not-yet.

2009-02-06T05:37:00.001-08:00

Tetrafurcation

2009-02-06T05:25:00.001-08:00

A personal philosophy of design

2009-02-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

Design is the mode of enacting change by negotiating, configuring and seeding possibilities with/within the world.;

Henceforth,

It must be practiced to be understood.
It is future orientated (deals with the not-yet).
It operates in a different space from other knowledge-based disciplines, and can also operate over their boundaries.
It reflects and produces value systems, therefore is world-making.
The act of designing reshapes/produces itself.
It can be used to shape anything (from products to societies) etc.

The problem with Descartes

2009-01-28T07:05:00.001-08:00

Perceptual Span(s) {with/in/through/as} DPN

2009-01-27T09:58:00.000-08:00

Perceptual Span(s) {with/in/through/as} a Distributed Poetic Network. If we take J.C.J's notion of a designer's perceptual span, being the benchmarking of an ability to harness, negotiate and configure increased potential component/product/system/society level change, and understand it through a framework of the distributed poetic[v] network, i.e. a network of designer-tool(s) creative action, will a sort after evaluation system emerge? Can we find well comfortably fitting levels or types of 'spans' in order to discover and highlight specific actions, effects or processes?

Important Words

2009-01-26T07:28:00.000-08:00

Aims...

2009-01-26T07:19:00.000-08:00

1. Creating a database of existing tools-in-use through conducting studies and interviews with creative practitioners in London-based studios.

2. Designing tools (as probes) that reflect on both the theory and philosophy around thinking-with-things.

3. Creating relationships with creative studios in London to start a series of workshop pilots with newly designed tools.

4. Developing designed tools in, through and with those relationships.

5. Assessing and evaluating the processes against the question and conceptual framework.

Tutorial: 23/01/09

2009-01-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

PhD Tutorial Notes:

w/t John Wood and Matt Ward.

Investigate links between design and management, and the current popular field of design management (Naomi Gormik etc.);

John Law - The Heterogeneous Engineer;

Rupert Sheldrake - Morphic Resonance;

Charles Pierce - Abductive Reasoning;

Jonny Dewey (1930) - Creative Democracy (before JCJ);

Aristotle's Purpose;

Linn Margulis;

Sub-optimisation > Ideational creative process;

Look at concept through a teleological framework;

Live/work could be an interesting case study for methodology in industry based practice;

E.M. Foster - Intertwindling;

Think/reflect about 1) my personal ethics or desired future; 2) my ideal career path;

Produce two pieces of writing, 1) reflection and recap on work so far; 2) project outline and potential directions;

Design Weakles

2009-01-23T05:04:00.000-08:00

Collaborative project with Joseph Harrington looking at tools to help designers find, appreciate, and embrace weakness (weakles and weakages) within project work, using the idea of a weakage (or weak link) within an idea (or ideational process) as a space of change, flux, adaptation, emergence and evolutionary possibility.

http://weakle.blogspot.com/

Stewart & Lorber-Kasunic (2008)

2009-01-20T10:56:00.000-08:00

Title: Akrasia, Ethics and Design Education (revisited);

Author: Stewart, Susan & Lorber-Kasunic, Jacqueline;

Journal: Design Philosophy Papers;

Issue: Collection 4, p21-33;

Editor: Willis, Anne-Marie;

Publisher: Team D/E/S Publications;

Date: 2008;

Location: Ravensbourne, Australia;

In: Goldsmiths Library (745.05);

p.21: "Akrasia is the failure to do what one knows to be right ... it alerts us to matters that are of concern for that individual, for that culture."

"Design intervention framed in response to akrasia may make a difference within the ethical life of the community." They also make a claim concerning 'the responsibility designers bear, both for the prevalence of akrasia within the contemporary world, and for taking initiative in addressing that akrasia ... [addressing] the ethics of designers and of design culture.'

p.22: "For the man or woman engaged in hammering, the world is configured through his or her absorbed material engagement and that-for-the-sake-of-which they are engaged. Those who are absorbed in such focus, task-orientated activity have temporarily backgrounded all other concerns and responsibilities other than those belonging to the particular project they have in hand."

"[The] backgrounding of non task-related concerns affords us recognition that for us responsibilities are embedded within worlds that are opened up by the particular projects in which we are, or might be, engaged ... These project-oriented worlds, within which we recognise and accept particular constellations of responsibility, loam large or recede from our consciousness as we take up, or turn from, the projects that invoke those worlds." * This is a good example of co-dependence in value systems (hence the arising of identity).

p.23: "Those who are absorbed in the pursuit of a particular project are unlikely to experience akrasia."

"For the multi-tasker, by contrast, the diverse projects concurrently managed, with their competing and sometimes irreconcilable demands, configure the world not as a unity but as fragmented, overlaid, stretched and compromised. Such compromised worlds, for all their difficulties, have the virtue of openness."

"Thus the multi-tasker, having opened themselves to the possibilities of juggling multiple responsibilities, is more likely to have canvassed (at least fleetingly) the possibility of responding to more of those less immediately pressing concerns that are often of such vital import to the long-term welfare of the community."

"The experience of breakdown [in relation to Heidegger's Being and Time] within the world of one who hammers is brought about by a failure of equipment, and leads to reflection upon the nature of than equipment and of the task in hand ... The possibilities for breakdown within the world of the multi-tasker ... include moral failure ... but unlike [equipment malfunction, this] akrasia rarely leads to reflection."

p.24: "Not only have designers been complicit in the emergence of akrasia in its current and pressing form, but that a sneaking suspicion of this burden of responsibility is, indeed, an important source of akrasia among thoughtful designers today."

"One of the central purposes that have informed design activity, from the beginnings of modernity to the present, is that of disburdening those who engage with its products" (They mention here Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain)

p.25: "She [Scarry] invokes a kind of animism, in which things are our trusted companions, participating in our projects ad sharing our responsibilities."

"Designed things as actors within a network of ethical relations."

"Humans are dependant on these thingly networks, we trust in them, rely on them, and we are captive to them." * Is this perhaps a good point to link to Heidegger's enframing, how perhaps technological, performance-driven artifice can shape 'ethical relations' and values of it's 'companions'.

"Through such efficiencies, design has allowed for the possibility of multiple relations of responsibility being simultaneously managed."

"Multi-tasking is not only a significant context within which contemporary akrasia makes itself felt, it is also a subtle form of re-burdening. As each of us has accepted the possibility of managing more [including its benefits of greater independence] ... this has simultaneously made us more dependant upon designed things."

Tensions in Thought: Uncertainty and Poeisis

2008-12-05T11:14:00.001-08:00

Diagram using metaphor (stone and balloon) to represent uncertainty and its related tension in the design process when grounding, developing or manifesting that which is yet to exist, an unknown possibility.

Practicing Co-dependence Paper

2008-12-05T08:42:00.001-08:00

Practicing Co-dependence: Shifting ontology and authorship in creative practice and ideational manifestation.

Paper idea for 'The Journal of Co-Design'

Abstract:
By approaching the act of poiesis from the view-point of distributed cognition (or thinking-with-things). I will argue a case for a shift in the understanding of traditional authorship in the processes of applied creative practices. I will emphasise a linguistic shift from ideational process to co-deational process, explicitly marking the act of transfer of creative authorship from I to Co, from autopoietic to sympoietic. As a by-product of this argument I hope to illuminate some of the reasons for difficulties within current co-creative practices in design, as well as indicate the need for a more holistic (or Koestler’s term holarchic) and less precious attitude to the act of poiesis. Negotiations between ideas and worldy manifestations.

Words: Old and New

2008-12-02T09:14:00.000-08:00

autopoiesis - awaiting definition;
biogram - awaiting definition;
beyond-knowledge - awaiting definition;
co-deation - awaiting definition;
co-dependance - awaiting definition;
creative action - To bring about change via a creative process of negotiating and reconfiguring elements of existing systems;
diagrammatics - The study of diagram as ideational/generative process or tool;
distributed poetic network (D.P.N.) - awaiting definition;
emergence - awaiting definition;
emplification - Amplification in a process of knowledge sharing through empathic synergy and iterative fold-back/fold-forward between a group of people. Knowledge sharing with trust has the potential to be isomorphic with wisdom sharing;
enframing - awaiting definition;
enkratic - As opposed to akratic (from akrasia), meaning self-controlled;
eunoia - Beautiful Thinking;
fatal loop - An infinite iterative loop, in which the fold-back/fold-forward renders the loop either as an infinitely changing evolutionary system (and therefore always incomplete), or a meaningless system;
gnosis - A deep embodied or esoteric knowledge.
knowledge-making - The process of poetically making/contructing/manufacturing knowledge through a framework, discipline or creative process;
memetics - awaiting defintion;
multi-plasticity - a synergistic multiplex of plastic (or flexible/adaptive) inter-connections.
network-thinking - The act of thinking as network of both players (active cognitive agents) and props (passive cognitive agents). see thinking-with-things;
not-yet - awaiting definition;
object-thinking - The process of thinking with/thought/in/as artifice. As opposed to non-object-thinking, the highest level of abstract thought;
ontopoiesis - awaiting definition;
ontogenesis - awaiting definition;
perceptual-span - awaiting definition;
re-inscription - The re-shaping/marking of artifice and information;
reflexive void - The apparent space or vacuum between how one thinks/acts and how one perceives their thinking/action;
(re)volution - awaiting definition;
sympoeisis - awaiting definition;
thing-concept - Synthesis of matter and form;
thinking-with-things - awaiting definition;
tumbolia - from Hofstadter - Eternal Golden Braid; "The land of dead hiccups and extinguished light bulbs";
unknowledge - awaiting definition;
workshopping - Research methodology that involves the trying-out of ideas with a group of participants to some form or purpose;

Evolving Jones' Speed of Thought

2008-12-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

"Operate at the speed of thought upon ... a medium that represents the form of the problem" (Jones, 1970)

~ however, augmenting the notion of thinking-with-things this could be seen as:

'Operate at the speed of thought through a medium that is a distribution of thinking and simultaneously representational of the problem.'

~ or even:

'Distribute cognition across a network representing, augmenting and shaping the problem as it develops as an integrated and dynamic poetic thinking space between ideator/investigation/world.'

Jones (1970)

2008-12-01T07:33:00.000-08:00

Title: Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures
Author: John Chris Jones
Date: 1970
Publisher: Wiley Interscience (John Wiley & Sons)
Location: London, New York, Sydney, Toronto
Location: Goldsmiths Library (745.02JON)

intro: "[The] recent interest in methodology is not limited to the designing and planning professions: it has been evident for several decades in other industrial activities such as management, production engineering, accounting and marketing, as well as non-industrial activities like acting, painting, musical composition ... Together these new methods suggest that we are collectively seeking, not only new procedures, but new aims and a different level of achievement."
"New methods [seem] to be directed at the total situation, both outside the boundaries of traditional expertise and within the personal experience, or "inner world", of individuals."

p.4: "There seems to be as many kinds of design process as there are writers about it."
"Another surprise is that nobody mentions drawing, the one common action of designers of all kinds."
"We can conclude that the effect of designing is to initiate change in man-made things."

p.9: "The fundamental problem is that designers are obliged to use current information to predict a future state that will not come about unless their predictions are correct. The final outcome of designing has to be assumed before the means of achieving it can be explored: the designers have to work backwards in time from an assumed effect upon the world to the beginning of a chain of events that will bring that effect about."

p.11: "To the extent designers need to know the present before they can predict the future, they need scientific doubt ... [but] when they deal with the future, [this] is of no use, and some other ingredient, nearer to religious faith, has to be employed. The artistic approach is relevant when designers have to find their way through vast numbers of alternatives while searching for a new and consistant pattern upon which to base their decisions. On these occasions it is neccissery to operate at the speed of thought upon a quickly responding meduim, or analoge, that represents the form of the problem."

p.12: Jones goes on to mention about future expectation of 'online computers' providing 'rapid-exploration of alternative shapes and forms' at the speed (or near to the speed) of thought. was this foresight for the end-conclusion of digital media based design like publication and graphics, and their heavy use of software as both the medium which contains the 'information' for the final result, as well as the medium in which it was ideated, manipulated, developed and finalised. Jones also used the interesting concept 'speed of thought' in relation to an externalising process, but how would this sit in a framework of thinking-with-things where the props of distributed cognition are functioning at the 'speed of thought' due to the fact that they are vital parts of it?

p.15: "The wider view is far from the conventional picture of designing as the activity of slightly hare-brained mystery men who obediently translate practical needs into drawings of products that the consumer wants and can afford."

"The earliest indicator of change in man-made things is not the maker-of-drawings [draftsman] but the maker-of-things [craft practitioner]"

"Craft products also appear to have the organic look of ... naturally-evolved forms."

"It is equally surprising that an illiterate craftsman, with only his simple tools to help him, appears to govern an evolutionary process without any equivalent of genetic coding from which to derive complex forms that he produces ... However we shall see in a moment there is, hidden in the apparent simplicity of primitive craftwork, a subtle and reliable information-transmission system."

p.18: "For us it is enough to notice that each part of the wagon is shaped not only be one reason but by many, and that there is a delicate adjustment throughout the whole to get the best out of each bit."

p.19: "The craftsman's blend of know-how and ignorance can produce works that a scientist would find hard to explain and in which the artistic eye would see a high level of formal organisation." Jones then gives a list of the rough workings of 'craft-evolution':

Craftsmen do not (and often can't) draw their works or give satisfactory reasons for the decisions they make.
Craft product form is modified by successes and failures in a trial-and-error process over long periods of time. A time-consuming and costly search for 'the invisible lines of good design'.
Craft evolution can produce 'discordant' features, inherent from the difficulties of 'changing only one-thing-at-a-time', and 'relying on precedent.'
The cumulative store of information representing the evolution is embodied as the product itself. It is stored two-fold, in fragments as patterns (specific cross sections) and in learnt action (tool-working processes).
The two classes of data that are most important to designing today (shape of product and reasons why) are not recorded in external symbolic medium and therefore can only be investigated through experimentation with the product itself.

p.22: "The upshot of all of this is, to take away much of the intellectual difficulty and fun from manufacture and give them to a new class of persons who make drawings [designers]."

"The effect of concentrating the geometric aspects of manufacture in a drawing is to give the designer a much greater 'perceptual span' than the craftsman had." * Is one of the things that TFTs achieve is an multi-fold increase in 'perceptual span'?

p.23: "Designers have to rely largely on memory and imagination to tell them what will, or will will not, work and what can, or cannot, be made."

p.24: "The sequence of events in engineering design has been codified by Asimov (1962) and a very similar sequence for architectural design has been published by the RIBA (1965)." * perhaps make a current comparison...

Engineering design

Architectural design

1. Feasibility: Finding a feasible set of concepts;

1. Inception; 2. Feasibility; 3. Outline Proposals;

2. Preliminary design: Selection and development of the best concept;

4. Scheme Design;

3. Detailed design: An engineering description of the concept;

5. Detailed Design;

4. Planning: Evaluating and altering the concept to suit the requirements of production, distribution, consumption and product retirement;

6. Product Information; 7. Bills of Quantities; 8. Tender Action; 9. Project Planning; 10. Operations on Site; 11. Completion; 12. Feedback;

p.27: "Why the need for new method?"

"The writings of design theorists imply that the traditional methods of design-by-drawing is too simple for the growing complexities of the man-made world."

"Perhaps we can identify the strengths and weaknesses of traditional methods by posing and answering four critical questions:

1. How do traditional designers cope with complexities?

2. In what ways are modern design problems more complicated than traditional ones?

3. What are the interpersonal obstacles to solving modern design problems?

4. Why are the new kinds of complexity outside the traditional design process?"

p.28: In relation to question 1: "The scale drawing can be seen as a rapidly manipulable model of the relationships between components of which the product is composed ... enabling the designer to deal with an otherwise [or previously] unmanageable, and unimaginable, degree of complexity."

"The phrase 'rely upon his experience and his imagination' does not tell us very much about this mysterious and doubtless essential, aspect of designing [considering the external compatibility of a new product.]"

p.29: In relation to the extensive literature of 'creative thinking' (reviewed by Broadbent:1966a), Jones finds three points 'about which nearly all writers agree' and which are 'very relevant to our enquiry':

1. There are often long periods when the person who is about to make an original work appears to do nothing but take in information, work rather fruitlessly at seemingly trivial aspects of the problem, or give his attention to unrelated matters. This is called 'incubation'.

2. The solution to a difficult problem, or the occurrence of an original idea, will often come all of a sudden (the 'leap of insight') and will take the form of a dramatic change in the way in which the problem is perceived (a change of 'set'). The effect of this transformation is often to turn a complicated problem into a simple one.

3. The enemies of originality are mental rigidity and wishful thinking. These are evident when a person acts either in a far more regular way than the situation demands or else is incapable of perceiving the external realities that make his ideas unfeasible. * Potential linking with Buddhist 'preconditioning' and 'ego-self' concepts, perhaps reference and compare with Varela's Ethical Know-How.

p.30: We can infer that the directions in which a person will choose to transform a problem or a design, and the directions that he will ignore will be closely related to his opinions on questions of morality and value. Thus we can see that the human capacity to reduce complicated to simple ones is an expression, not only of a persons awareness of the eternal realities involved, but also his or her idea of what is good and what is evil, what is beautiful and what is ugly... No wonder that proposals to make changes in design sometimes elicit emotional, and apparently irrational, responses."

"Thus we can sat that, in traditional design methods, the complexities of designing are dealt with by using a tentative solution as a rapid means of exploring both the situation that the design is to fit and the relationships between the components of the design."

In relation to question 2: "Perhaps the most obvious sign that we need better methods of designing and planning is the existence, in industrial countries, of massive unsolved problems that have been created by the use of an-made things ... they can be thought of as human failures to design for conditions brought about by the products of designing."

In looking at extending design process to include the relationships between things, added to the things themselves, and their components, we start to build a new hierarchy. Add to this a socio-political level of behavior that relates to intersystem relations, we have a 4 tier hierarchy: Community; System; Product; Component;

{insert diagram - Jones' 4 Tier Hierarchy}

p.32: As of 1970, "Many of the unsolved problems of designing occur at the systems level ... This level is at present beyond the scope of traditional designing and it is also below the level of effective community action [the self-structuring space of inter-relation] ... There is an obvious need to combine the power of political action and organisational planning with the flexibility and fore-sight of the (product) design process so that the developing systems ... can be permitted to flourish in concert [synergies-of-synergies] rather to multiply in confusion [fatal-loop]."

However this increase in tiers 'open to redesign' would both 'greatly reduce the stability of the design situation' and 'greatly increase its complexity.' * Is this a complexity vs. complacency argument? Jones makes a link to Fullers concept of 'comprehensive designing' and warns of the inherent and drastic consequences that come with the power to 'continuously remodel the whole fabric of the industrial society from top to bottom." "In this new flexibility the most likely inhibitors of change and sources of continuity are not the physical limitations of hardware but the ideas, values, opinions and beliefs of individual persons"

"We can expect to find that technological choices will increasingly be resolved by political means in the light, or darkness, of moral [and/or] religious beliefs." * An example could be the production of GM foods, and the subsequent protests and operational difficulty in the EU.

"Clearly the extended design process that is needed, but not yet available, must embrace and inform the forces and uncertanties of politics, morality and religion." * What about design and ethics?

p.33: Designers of the future will have to 'give substance to new ideas while taking away the physical and organisational foundations of the old ones,' making it 'nonsense to think of designing as the satisfying of existing requirements.' * i.e problem-finding vs. problem-solving.

"To design is no longer to increase the stability of the manmade world: it is to alter, for good or ill, things that determine the course of its development."

"This question of instability in the present, under the influence of technological changes planned in the past and coming about in the future, is perhaps the hardest thing to get used to."

Is it socially feasible to 'plan' on 'what will be possible in the future' rather than planning 'on the basis of what was possible in the recent past?'

p.34: Jones gives a listing of current complexities facing designers, some 'external to the product' and others 'are within it':

External Complexities

Technology Transfer - 'or the planned search' in distant technologies for inventions and developments that are capable of solving a local design solution;
Predicting Side Effects - in new developments early enough for compensation in a product and/or system design;
Standards - and compatibility agreements between products of interacting systems;
Sensitivity - to human overlap between components of any two or more systems;
Impossibility - of removing major incompatibilities between products unless the emerging system is reorganised and the products radically transformed to make possible a different allocation of functions;

Internal Complexities

The increasingly high investment that is needed if a new design is to achieve the economies of scale;
The difficulty of applying information from different sources to an existing design situation without unknowingly upsetting the internal compatibility-between-parts that earlier designers have achieved;
The extreme difficulty in discovering rational decision sequences when the influx of new needs, new materials, new technologies and new ideas is continually upsetting the pattern of relationships between decision variables;

p.35: "[There is] little doubt that the new complexities of designing are not the kind to be dealt with on drawing boards or within the mind of a single designer."

In relation to Question 3: Jones uses the terms 'interprofessional' and 'interpersonal consequences' in relation to the involvement of all people affected in/by the design process.

p.36: "Interpersonal difficulties in designing can be overcome when there is some way of uniting the design team but are likely to be very troublesome when the design changes that are needed cut across the interests of those who are expected to collaborate ... Lewis (1963) has shown [that] group members can either be totally unaware of misunderstandings that arise between them or else are unable to make progress on a broad front once they realise what is going on."

p.37: The different organisations in which a new product may pass through, bring up interpersonal and interprofessional difficulties: * Perhaps the Great Gridlock is an appropriate term for this human phenomena...

Sponsors: difficulty in a new systems development is a 'too narrow financial interest and insufficient influence upon other systems operators whose collaboration is needed [or in some cases, vital]. There is increased hesitance if the future presented by the design team 'includes the amalgamation of the sponsoring organisation with others in order to cope with an increased system size.'
Design Team: 'If the organisational boundaries of the problem have to be shifted in order to find a solution, the team will have to represent interests and professions that have not hitherto be obliged to collaborate and have not had time to get to know each other's attitudes and abilities ... There will be a tendency to overlook the fact that existing components [retained components] will be operating under changed conditions and can no longer be assumed to be reliable without extensive testing."
Suppliers: 'The suppliers may overestimate their ability to meet the demands for radically new design, overlooking obstacles in attempts to match, in detail, their output to the novel requirements of the new product."
Producers: 'There is a problem in predicting accurately the cost of proposed design changes before detailed manufacturing specifications have been worked out. This makes it harder to bring about bog changes with confidence.
Distributors: 'These are the most stable channels/elements in the whole chain, but the most expensive to make or alter. Composed of hard-won experience and confidence of the people who have matched an existing line of products to a great diversity of professions and relative values ... Thus the influence of distributors on proposals for radical improvements in performance depends upon the degree to which the customers have begun to ask for it.'
Purchasers: 'The main obstacles are: the inability of a purchaser to predict the ability of himself or others to adapt to a novel product; the 'showroom effect' by which a new product either has, or does not have, the kind of immediately recognisable appeal reducing the purchasers indecision.'
Users: 'Users take a long time to adapt to a design change and cannot predict what their reaction would be.'
System Operators: 'When dealing with a newly emerging system, with no parent organisation yet set up, the interests and attitudes of existing systems operators will reflect only partially the merits or demerits of the new system that may emerge ... We find that the people concerned are not trained or accustomed to assess the effects of any but minor changes upon themselves and upon their organisation.'
Society: 'At the far end of the chain in product life history comes the only element that can reflect all the radical changes that are involved in the development of new systems and in the reorganisation of old ones. political action and public protest are often the only channels for influencing the more important aspects of socio-technological change. The difficulty at this ultimate point is that existing political institutions and pressure groups are not equipped to take anything like enough account of the technical issues at all of the levels we have discussed and are far to sensitive to short-term attitudes and opinions of the majority of people, who, as we have seen, are bound to be poor judges of the merits and demerits of radically new proposals. However it is only through the exercise of political and economic pressure that the need for large scale changes at the systems level can be expressed.'

p.41: In conclusion "there is an inherent resistance to the kinds of radical change at the systems level that seem to be necessary to solve the major design and planning problems of our time."

p.42: In relation to Question 4:

Reasons for difficulties in acting at the systems or societies levels as a designer:

Without something equivalent to a drawing (in which to store, and to manipulate, the relationships between products) the systems designer is not free to concentrate upon one bit of the problem at a time and he has no medium in which he could conceive of a tentative solution which would enable him to drastically shorten his search. To tick ti the traditional use of drawings of products as the stable elements in a creative search process is, of course, to utterly inhibit innovation at the systems level.
Without some systems equivalent of the well-informed and uninhibited brain-and-pencil of a skilled designer there is no means of making the very rapid judgements of the feasibility of critical details that makes possible the leap of insight that turns and over-complicated problem into one that is simple enough to solve by attending to the sub-problems in sequence rather that simultaneously. Unfortunately the information necessary to assess feasibility of a new system proposal is scattered among many brains and many publications and some of it may have to be discovered by new research.
Many of the people who carry in their experience the pieces of information upon which the designing of a new system depends, have vested interests in rejecting anything but small departures from the status quo and are likely to make biased judgements upon the long term merits or demerits of major changes.
The selection of simplifying proposals that are sufficiently precise to permit detailed exploration of feasibility involves the exercise of value judgements that, at the systems level, are vital to community interests. It is essential, if such judgements are to be effective in removing major socio-technological evils, that they are compatible with all the social, economic, technical data that is needed to predict detailed feasibility at all four levels in the hierarchy of communities, systems, products and components.

Jones then goes on to state the need for both new 'inter-professional' designers and new methods to 'provide sufficient perceptual span'.

p45: "All the methods are attempts to make public the hitherto private thinking of designers to externalise the design process."

Mapping Process 2

2008-11-30T09:23:00.000-08:00

Mapping Process 1

2008-11-30T09:21:00.000-08:00

Rolin Becker Memorial Lecture

2008-11-29T07:24:00.000-08:00

Sutherland Cranial College (SCC)

Energy Osteopathy by Nicholas Handoll:

This lecture was on understanding fundamental principals of Cranial Osteopathy through a framework of Quantum and Theoretical Physics.

Deeper understanding - deeper fundamental healing.

If the body is seen as a self-regulating, self-healing organism, then treatment of problems (in other words, treatment of anything which causes a lessening of the maintenance of health) is effectively aiding or helping the body to self-sustain as best it can. Any change the body makes is towards health, hence the importance of touch in cranial osteopathy as a tool for healer/patient body communication on a multiplicity of levels. Healing could then be seen as re-healthing the body through the training of tacit understanding and knowledge via touch.

Healing: Allow the physiological function within to manifest its unerring potency, rather than the application of blind force from without.

* Does the alternative systems of understanding health in C.O. open up potentials within the fields of design? If design is shaping and forming things of everyday interaction and touch, from door-handles to coffee cups, then should designer be aware of the relations between health and touch, or at least be educated with the possibilities of their potential creations? Does our definition of healing ("Allow the physiological function within to manifest its unerring potency, rather than the application of blind force from without") become one of many potential definitions and frameworks for both teaching and evaluating for good design practice?

Infinite Evolutionary Iterative.

2008-11-25T09:02:00.000-08:00

If designing is an activity that both shapes and defines itself (as design is an act/action) then designing's product is always an alteration of itself. However aside from the fundamental product (design), the by-products of this endlessly evolutionary iteration are the things, artefacts and artifice we come to know as our world.

*The design process affords us the ability to become aware of the sensibilities of both understanding and applying affordance into the stuff of (and is) our reality.

Tooling the Design Process: Metaphor

2008-11-20T03:19:00.000-08:00

Exercise for Prospect: Goldsmiths Postgraduate Design 2008

as part of the London Design Festival '08

Map: Orientation and Territories.

Mapping out territories can be a valuable tool when engaging with a new brief or project. It allow the designer to dip and cross through a multiplicity of ideas while maintaining orientation and distinct boundaries. It helps establish a series of defined interests or modes of investigation, places and methods in which to start prospecting.

Pick Axe: Volition and First Moves.

To start the investigation, the designer must act out a first move. This is the process of making a choice, and then following through with action. The inherent difficulties lie in the nature of having to choose between and act on prospects, however this is vital, a first step forwards within the design process.

Shovel: Digging-in and Self-reflection.

Digging into the modes of a personal practice can help the designer gain insight and awareness into the nuances of their ways of working and thinking. This ‘self-reflexive’ method of practice becomes critical for the designer to start to master and be in control of their own creative process.

Gold-pan: Filtering, Separation and Objective.

Once the designer has dug-into their own creative practice in an attempt to start being aware of the ways they work, what results needs to be filtered and separated to find the wanted elements, streamlining them from the more unproductive activities. This can be done with an objective, formalising previously implicit modes of working into methods and processes, turning them into formats in which they could be shared with other people.

Hammer: Shock, Break and Fracture.

The process of shaping ideas, grounding abstracts into the beginnings of their physical manifestation through a conscious enaction within the world and it’s material. What is produced is rough and developmental clusters of possibility, ready to be explored through shaping and defining.

Chisel: Faults, Boundaries and Categories.

Finding the natural faults and boundaries within rough and young ideas aids the development and maturity of the resulting outcomes. With the assistance of others and their alternate perspectives, ideas can be quickly split-up, categorised and organised, drawing up new directions of movement for their continuing development in the process.

Loupe: Looking-in and Being-with.

It is when the designer is deeply involved in the project that all understanding of it only becomes apparent within the processes of designing and making. The designer has become fully-engaged and focused to the act of prospecting and shaping possibilities, creating, mediating and acting-with the spaces between abstracts and realities.

Rock Hammer: Shaping and Marking.

Once the designer has been-with, they may want to attempt to shift perspective on the project in an attempt to shape and define the manifestation of their ideas to better fit the world in which it has been ideated for. Shaping and defining comes from placing things back into the world, the artefact is shifted and becomes the tool for investigation rather than the object of investigation, being marked shaping by the interactions in which it is submerged.

Distributed Poetic Networks (DPN)

2008-11-12T08:57:00.000-08:00

A productive or ideational network composed of a distribution and scaffolding of people (active) and props (passive) which allow a synergetic generation and co-authoring of ideas on a potentially greater scale than the sum of all agents. An alteration in structure (both known and unknown) affects both the dynamics of generation as well as the process of generation.

Ellipsis

2008-11-11T08:40:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to develop and adapt current language to help us construct (or grow) an action-centred mode of discourse, relating directly to understanding/communicating design practice? What would be the potential methods that prop up a shift, allowing the designing or relanguaging in a future oriented context? How could we try this seed-language out?

Currently language does not adequately utter implicit action within poeisis, and therefore understanding and knowledge fall victim to ideas of stasis, repeatability and rigour, causing the narrowing of frameworks (or increased enframing) to avoid incompleteness and and increasing the assumption that act upon thing that do not fall within the narrowing fields of justification, analysis, proof, and objectivity. This in the end effects our ability to guide the progress of development of new knowledge, henceforth understanding, henceforth future.

How do we discuss or write about the actions and process which occur in the ... or in other words, the space immediately before becoming and therefore before the utterance itself?
What can be modelled by reflection in this space?
Can we actually embody ideas of iteration and uncertainty into language, and linguistic level, or do we always end up producing meta-language upon utterance of before-becoming?
Could the shift be caused by the seeding of awareness of linguistic (and language) evolution?
Does this process (and its potential products) benefit practitioners, and their practice, directly?

Zen Koans as tools

2008-11-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

Zen Koans could be seen as tools to break formalistic, logical and dualistic thinking, and therefore perception. The tool does not embody or posses the final goal (enlightenment and nothingness), nor could ever contain it. It acts as a seeding process, intervention, interjunction ... tool to strip oneself of socio-artificial preconditioning and ego-shell through iterative self-reference and paradox.

Could this concept be used in the as a TFT, as well as help in the justification of pre-defining purpose?

Fugues and Synergy

2008-11-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

[In relation to the difficulty in closely listening to Bach's fugues] "I guess it has to do with alternating between perceiving something as a whole, and perceiving it as a collection of parts" (Hofstadter, p.283:1979)

Does this notion of fugues resemble the difficulty in understanding and placing synergies-of-synergies within dynamic structures (like collaborative or group work)? When one is a participant within a gestalt, and knowledge seemingly swarms, can one 'listen' to both the knowledge as a dynamic collection of parts, or as an overarching and solid whole?

Hofstadter (1979)

2008-10-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

Title: Gödel, Esher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter

Date: 1979

Publisher: Harverster Press

Location: Goldsmiths Library (164HOF)

p.7: Ricercar - 'to seek' (Italian) written on Bach's Musical Offering, composed written for King Fredrick; Recherché - 'sought out' surviving word in English.

p.9: Quaerando Invenietis - 'by seeking, you will discover'

p.10: In relation to what Hofstadter calls strange loops: "The 'strange loop' phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started." Tangled Hierarchy is the term he uses occasionally to describe systems of this nature.

p.15: "Implicit in the concept of strange loops is the concept of infinity, since what else is a loop but a way of representing an endless process in a finite way?"

p.17: "Gödel's discovery [of strange loops in mathematics] involves the translation of an ancient paradox in philosophy into mathematics. That paradox is the so called Epimenides paradox, or liar paradox, [I am lying, this statement is false]." He refers to the notion of steps in strange loops, this becoming a metaphor with the apparent tightness or looseness of the loop (or looping) in question. "The Epimenides paradox is a one-step strange loop."

p.18: "In the Gödel Code [or numbering] numbers are made to stand for symbols and sequences of symbols. That way, each statement of x number theory, being a sequence of specialised symbols, acquires a Gödel number, something link a telephone number ... by which it can be referred to. And this coding trick enables statements about number theory to be understood on two different levels: as statements of number theory, and as statements about statements of number theory." * This is an important process in relation to accidental/deliberate word doubling that seems to occur in the formalisation and communication of design methodology. Is there potential to use paradoxical coding (strange loops) to help reposition design method (theoretically) in the same way that Gödel used his numbering methods to announce: "This statement of number theory does not have any proof in the system of Principia Mathematica"

p.19: "Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system in involved." "No fixed system, no matter how complicated, could represent the complexity of the whole numbers 0, 1, 2, 3 ... "

p.21: A two step written strange loop: "The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true." This loop is produced by simultaneous direct/indirect self-reference. To achieve logical figuartion, both statements must be banned [as well as both types of self-referring statement] 'if one sees self reference as the root of all evil.' For example, in the creation of the following strict hierarchy, whereby each level is the category for statements about the previous level:

meta ... language

meta meta language

meta language

language

If something doesn't fit into a category, it shall be deemed meaningless and disregarded. *This also holds resonance with Heidegger's enframing.

p.23: He mentions the study of mathematics becoming know as meta-mathematics or meta-logic, in attempts to determine the 'true nature of mathematical reasoning'.

p.24: "How can you justify your methods of reasoning on the basis of the same methods of reasoning?" Statement relates to Hilbert's challenge around consistency and completeness of the mathematical P.M.

p.37: "It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump in and out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it is doing/done; it is always looking for, and often finding patterns." A process of stepping out the system, or in design terms, perspective or paradigm shifting.

p.82: "... meaning - at least in the relatively simple context of formal systems - arises [or is configured correctly] when there is an isomorphism between rule-governed symbols, and things in the real world." He writes about the increase in complexity in the isomorphism, the more 'equiptment needed for the extraction of meaning.' In a simple isomorphism (with explicit meaning) 'we see the meaning without seeing the isomorphism.' There is a problem with assuming all meaning is attached to the object or world, rather than the link between them, object and world.

p.127: "Sometimes recursion seems to brush paradox very closely. For example, there are recursive definitions. Such a definition may give the casual viewer the impression that something is being defined in terms of itself. That would be circular and lead to infinite regress, if not to paradox proper."

p.128: Classic computer science terms for recessions:

Push - Suspend current operations on a task without forgetting where you are, to take up a new task on a lower level.
Pop - Close operations on one level, and resume where you left off one level higher.
Stack - The store of information and levels in which it is on.

p.149: Differences between 'bounded-loops' and 'free-loops', could become an interesting metaphor pair in relation to design methods and actions within designing.

p.158: 'Information-bearers' and 'information-receivers'.

p.168: Three levels of message: Frame, Outer and Inner message, within the story being message in the bottle, recognition of Japanese charters and written message, respectively.

Future-Steering

2008-10-23T10:09:00.000-07:00

Future-steering via evolutionary, adaptive and transformative props or supports. Future-steering is the art of shaping, directing, guiding or steering an evolutionary process towards a more preferred future.

Steer - To guide the course of (restore?);
(Re)volution - To make a drastic change in the direction of a currently occuring evolutionairy path from within;

Clive Dilnot on Metadesign

2008-10-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Everything is possible vs nothing is possible (marketing).

Design is about the possible, embodying action and transformation. What is possible [to think, act, do...] to this century, which was not possible in the last? Seeding the future, for the future?

Design (or re-design) the evolution of transformation. What is transformation on a small scale? (...)abilities - Articulate capacities and sensibilities through/with/from/in... design and the actions of designing. In other-words explicitly looking at 'design' of the future/future of 'design'. The inherent importance of design come from the face that it deals and acts with notions of possibility and concepts of 'futuring'.

To change the whole world, do we need to know the whole word to start with? Or even know the whole world individually? In order to amount such a task, we would need global collaboration in the actions of sharing aspirations. What we need today is some form of positive, affirmative and aspirational action. Our systems are fragile, however people's everyday lives are resistant.

Reconstruct factuality, reconstruct possibility and reconstruct actuality. Within what is, is the possibility of what could be.

Emerge from or into? What is the situation we are in, and therefor what is the inherent and emergent possibility that lives within. In relation to danger and destructive force, are we aware of the difference between a catastrophe that happens (emerges) and the catastrophe that arrives slowly (evolutionary).

To focus on embodied sensibilities, design capacities and capabilities and turn compromise into a positive and affirmative notion, rather than it existing as a sacrificial term.

There are not artificial laws in artifice. Technology as perverted mode of making. How do we live with uncertainty? Seeing possibility through embracing (or re-embracing) 'what we do not know' as itself, and in itself. Identity based in self-consciousness and its binding to the artifice. Heidegger's 'enframing' and problems around relationships with ourselves and everything else create the foundation for uncertainty. Everything is configured.

Fabrication (word)

2008-10-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

Fabrication "building, thing made", fabrica "workshop", faber "artisan who works with hard materials". evolution via "manufactured material" to "textile". "To fashion, build". Using metaphor of manufacture ~ relation to identity binding to fabrication of textiles, the weaving of threads of artifice and thought to make a 'material of being'.

Design should...

2008-10-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

Design should not underwrite or impose on groups of people. It can sit as a facilitator between legislative (top-down action) and grass-roots (bottom-up action) frameworks. Design is the process of (through evolution of thought-action) piece by piece building and dwelling futures. It is important design works with-and-through people, rather than singularly for them. Design's field is the middle ground (or middle-way?) supporting co-dependant arisings of the new (sympoeisis) and not the becoming (floating-affordances; Heidegger, 1971).

Action made in the binding of words and things; matter and form; purpose and affordance; artifice and self-consciousness;

Heidegger and Gendlin

2008-10-12T06:46:00.000-07:00

Heidegger writes about the nature of hearing things (Heidegger, 1971), rather than hearing sounds resonates with Gendlin's psychoanalytical work on sensory doubling. 'To hear a bare sound, we must listen abstractly'.

> Synthesis of matter and form: thing-concept.

Aids to Thinking

2008-10-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

List of aids to thinking (root being from the wikipedia article 'Thinking'). I will add, subtract, shift, alter and develop this list as my research goes on:

Use of models, symbols, diagrams and pictures;
Use of abstraction to simplify the effort of thinking;
Use of metasyntactic variables to simplify the effort of naming;
Use of iteration and recursion to converge on a concept;
Limitation of attention to aid concentration and focus on a concept;
Goal setting and goal revision;
Gestation of thoughts;
Talking with like-minded people;
Working backwards from a goal;
Desire for learning;

*It is interesting to note the assumptions that are made relating to 'purposeful thinking' in general knowledge/understanding. There is an obvious void between how we think, and our perception, understanding, reflexivity and communication of how we think. For example, see Baum, E. (2004); What is Thought?; MIT Press; Chapter 2 - The Mind is a Computer Program; What is the relevance and significance of 'the void' in relation to design processes?

Tools-for-thought paper

2008-10-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

Tools-for-Thought: Towards understanding tools in relation to innovative and co-creative practice.

To be published in Networks of Design – Special Edition of the Journal of Design History, BrownWalker Press (2008/2009)

Abstract.
It is seen in fields such as cognitive science that external artifacts can become props for cognitive processes within everyday human action, leading to the notion of the epistemic thing or artefact. This formation of a distributed cognitive network also has similarities with the ideas of object-agency emerging from recent work in actor-network-theory. I have taken these ideas into the discipline of design, contextualising designer/tool co-agency specifically in relation towards understanding and developing creative practice. The purpose of this paper is to outline further investigation into the notion of tools-for-thought in relation to creative practice.

Thinking-with-things.
To frame tools-for-thought in relation to creative practice, I will start by using established discourse around thinking-with-things in the discipline of cognitive science. The two main tenants of this paper are the concepts of embodied and extended mind, theorised by Francisco Varela and Andy Clark respectively. Although there are several other strands in my argument for the explicit investigation of tools-for-thought and processes of thinking-with-things within innovative and creative practice, I will start by outlining the ideas of Varela and Clark which relate directly to the formulation of this paper.

Varela, in his book The Embodied Mind (1991), identified some of the issues around the bipolarity of nihilism and absolutism in modern western philosophy. In order to find a middle-way between these two extremes, he looked to the practices of the East. This results in his proposition for a new experiential middle-way of embracing the loss of belief in an ego-self and the groundlessness of consciousness as a way to move forwards from the otherwise philosophical dead-ends forged by nihilism and absolutism. Through his engagement with Buddhist traditions, Valera proposes the idea of co-dependant arising, this being the formation of ego-self, groundless consciousness, and fundamental circularity emerging from an iterative binding of what is within the body and what is outside. This becomes an important concept in relation to our understanding of ourselves, our relation with and knowing-of the world in which we dwell. One example being, in relation to the scientific study of the mind, the fundamental circularity causes difficulty in attempts to model and understand the nature of consciousness and experience in relation to mind throughout history.

A repeated concept within Varela’s work is the groundlessness and fragility of the ego-self. This fragility is often seen in the writings of Clark and his studies on ease and plasticity in which the processes of creation, adoption and evolution of external extensions of mind occur:
For our sense of self, of what we know and of who and what we are, is surprisingly plastic and reflects not some rigid preset biological boundary so much as our ongoing experience of thinking, reasoning, and acting within whatever potent web of technology and cognitive scaffolding we happen currently to inhabit. (Clark, 2003, p.45)

Clark’s idea of ‘plastic mind’ as an explanation for our constant readapting of artefacts and environment as a web or scaffolding for distributed cognition is important for understanding tools-for-thought. Clark and Chalmers resonate Varela’s co-dependence of conscious being and world when they write “the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in it’s own right.” Following on to say that the removal of ‘this’ external component from the system would have the same affect as a lobotomy, ‘behavioural competence will drop.’ (Clark & Chalmers, 1998, p.4) They use this as premise to theorise that the rapid evolution of human traits, like communication through abstract complexities such as written and spoken language, is a result of this mind/artefact binding.

Seeing our sense of self being so plastic and adaptable, “where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” (ibid. p.1) How does this effect our traditional understanding and boundaries of object-user-world. If there is potential for adapting external tools into our sense of self, then the traditional ‘skin-bag’ (tastefully termed by Clark) as the container of our mind and consciousness has been broken:
Within the cognitive sciences recent work has begun to challenge some of these “obvious” truths – including the question as to whether the presumed cognitive boundary of skin and skull is either appropriate or helpful for understanding cognition. (Prior, 2004, p.6)
Varela’s work also emphasises that the ideas of perpetual grasping, binding and justification of self through processes of exchange and adornment of material ‘identities’ has been seen to hold an agent within the habitual human conditioning, as well as pushing them further away from the awareness this conditioning. This effect being deeply engrained within our society is one of the reasons why I argue the potential of a process of designing and developing specific tools-for-thinking for creative practice, that both exist, act and co-create between a self and a thing, acting within the binding of being and world, of artifice and self-consciousness.

To follow this idea, I will briefly call up an element of Donna Haraway’s feminist explorations on the potential technical and artificial modifications of the human body in relation to genetic preconditioning and socio-cultural identities. Haraway writes “there is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic” (Haraway, 1991, p.178) showing some of the deep issues around both scientific and philosophical investigations of the definition and understanding of mind, body and world, and its inevitable effect on both experience and understanding of self. With the traditional (or dualist) boundaries of body and world falling down under closer experiential investigation, there has been increasing interest in revisiting ideas like proprioception. In proprioception it is seen that the way in which we learn to control our body, its orientation within space and its senses, is what helps us shape our mind, and therefore the way in which we perceive the world, making us plastic-adaptive information finding machines. It is through the constant and continuing exploration of our surrounding environment, and our experience of this that creates, forms and dynamically shapes the our mind. This again illustrates the concepts of plastic co-agency (and co-dependant arising) around bindings in mind/object and body/world relationships (Gallagher, 2005).

With the agency of things and the plasticity of the mind through exploration of the things around us, the possibility is opened up for augmentations of body and artefact, extensions of the mind into and through external things. Clark, in Natural-Born Cyborgs (2003) argues for that a constant integration of outside ‘things’ into our cognitive processes helpa us engage or enact in the complexities of the ‘outside world’, being that we are naturally inclined by nature to adapt and adorn our ‘naked brains’. In one example he illustrates the slang that has emerged around the mobile phone. Coining Hutchins’ idea of ‘cognition in the wild’, Knuuttila says “this economical and embodied cognition uses external scaffolding, environmental clues and cheap tricks in its cognitive tasks instead of creating complete, internal representations of the world.” (Knuuttila, 2005, p.33) She goes on to claim that as well as our cognition being ‘largely skill-based and tool using’, it is ‘distributed between individuals and artefacts.’ (ibid.). Here I would like to emphasise the idea of tool using within the act of exploring, experimenting and creating on one side, and the tools for storing, assisting and problem solving on the other. Whether we are counting using our fingers, or making out a path by carving glyphs into trees, these extended tools of cognition (or tools-for-thought) play an interesting role, both in the philosophy of mind, and for understanding and potential future developments of the practices of design. In terms of defining the self and the importance of these artefacts, Clark makes an interesting relating to the agency and ontology of these tools-for-thought, “no one uses the mind tools. The mind is a collection of mind-tools” (Clark, 2002, p.10)

Interestingly, in the field of Science Technology Studies, Latour also creates a critique of the agency of things, creating one of the principle foundations, and placing him as an eminent figure of actor-network-theory. He writes:
There is hardly any doubt that kettles ‘boil’ water, knives ‘cut’ meat, baskets ‘hold’ provisions, hammers ‘hit’ nails on the head … and so on. Are those verbs not designating actions? How could the introduction of those humble, mundane, and ubiquitous activities brings any news to any social scientist … If action is limited a priori to what ‘intentional’, ‘meaningful’ humans do, it is hard to see how a hammer, a basket, a door closer, a cat, a rug, a mug, a list, or a tag could act. They might exist in the domain of ‘material’ ‘causal’ relations, but not in the ‘reflexive’ ‘symbolic’ domain of social relations … anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant. (Latour, 2005, p.71)

Tonkinwise reflects this agency of things in his paper Ethics in Design: The Ethos of Things (2004). He looks at Varela’s autopoietic and connectionist work “suggest[ing] that ethical expertise is dispositional and enactive; it is the wisdom of the immediate action that is so symbiotic with its environment that it is best characterised as arising through a distributed self … the no-self of Eastern traditional thinking.” (Tonkinwise, 2004) Tonkinwise goes on to pick up the romanticised view of the ethical domain as being almost solely populated “with human-to-human relations” and that “to date things, designed things, have not assumed a central, or at least symmetrical, role with humans when it comes to ethics.” He calls to the anthropological discourses in which “material relations, shared products and environments are not only the instruments of social relations or the bearers of symbolic meanings, but are essential aspects of that culture in their own right … an immaterial culture is an impossibility.” (ibid.) Following through the ideas of an ‘ethical force’ in things, he references Latour’s The Missing Masses and his critique on the problems faced in sociology by only taking into account the importance of what is understood by ‘sociality’ and ignoring the enacted ethics and therefore agency of artefacts. I find the following statement very important in moving towards understanding the co-agency, ethical force and evolution of the things in which we bring, and through them bring ourselves, into being. Tonkinwise goes on to summarise:
What things design, that is to say, the intentions, actions, understanding and relations that things are designed to design, that they design beyond what their designers intended, and that they are redesigned to design by those who use them, must be a vital part of any ethos with a future … what must the philosophy of ethics learn about design and the axial role of designed things in conserving, promoting and altering what is ethical? How can design be understood as making things ethical? (ibid.)

Through the ideas about materialised culture emerging as ‘things’ and object-ethics, Tonkinwise opens up the essential nature of the artefacts in which we think, function and store. Being both a material reflection of our mental processes, as well as, objects of the history of our symbiotic and cognitive evolution (Prior, 2004).

Clark, Dennet and Sterelny label the objects entangled with cognitive processes epistemic artefacts. The word epistemic relates to the knowledge embodied in the use and subjective experience of the object, and artefact relates to a materialised and man-made/designated physical entity which has a place and acts within the world. Knuuttila creates an interesting set of criteria for defining the conditions of an epistemic artefact:
1. They cannot be understood apart from purposeful human activity.
2. They are somehow materialised inhabitants of the intersubjective field of that activity.
3. They can function as knowledge objects. (Knuuttila & Voutilainen, 2005, p.2)
There is an important element here of the readability of the artefact in relation to ‘purposeful human activity’, meaning the artefact in itself, or otherwise in the way it’s used, will have some embodied knowledge which can be obtained through a study of that object. The epistemic artefact also becomes a materialised and definite mediation between the context of use and the cognitive processes it is bound in plastic co-agency with. However, the term epistemic artefact can start to umbrella the majority of man-made/designated ‘things’, and leads on to the question of ‘what isn’t an epistemic artefact?’. However, the artefacts used specifically within creative practice and creative process better fit the term ‘tool’ due to the external artifice being adopted to purposefully alter, augment with, and define itself through a creative process.

There is a to-and-fro between artefact and active cognitive agent building up a dialogical flow between internal representations and external representations, allowing through the repeated passage of mediums, mind-bound and material-bound, a metamorphosis of both the cognitive process and the object it is trying to represent. A good example which Clark points out is the artist’s sketch pad. “The sketch pad is not just a convenience for the artist … Instead, the iterative process of externalising and re-perceiving turns out to be integral to the process of artistic cognition itself” (Clark, 2003, p.77) These tools on closer inspection become paramount to a lot of creative processes. However, there can be ambiguity and difficulties in defining points of action and singularity in this dialogical flow of person and object:
It does not seem to follow that I ‘think in’ pen and paper … though it is true that the pen and paper form part of an extended cognitive and problem-solving system with my biological brain. This, is perhaps the distinction between ‘thinking in’ and ‘thinking with’. (Clark, 2002, p.11)

An important point to make here is that there is obviously a comfortable level of integration of person and tool, however the ease of decoupling the relationship means that the object is not fully incorporated as a part of the whole body/mind becoming only something to ‘think with’. However, it is an interesting proposal to take ‘thinking in’ and look at the phenomenal and ontological shifts of physically extending the body/mind into vessels of cognition within a creative mode of action. One potential shift is that of authorship, control and agency, reverting from the singular practitioner bringing about ideas into realities, to a co-dependant and collaborative process of practitioner/tool/world, whereby each component weaves together (through the interactions taking part within a process) the manifestation of abstracts into concretions.

The placing of the tool-for-thought may also vary across a broad spectrum of localities. Clark and Chalmers (1998) look at the extensions close to home, and specifically action-orientated functions around the body. Informational markers however, like signs, books, trails in the forest, become communal tools, shared un-prescriptively between an large number of agents. Another example of communal tools could be the big whiteboard in a hypothetical think-tank, in which all participating agents bounce representations back, forward and centre, continuously and instinctive re-representing each others re-representations, creating a rapid and immensely complex transformation of thoughts and ideas. The extension in this case becomes a joint identity of all the agents present, a joining of minds for say. “Latour takes up this theme of the cognitive value when he argues that the possibility of superimposing, reshuffling, and recombining signs and inscriptions can engender totally new phenomena.” (Knuuttila, 2005, p.33) This is a very important idea in relation to moving towards the possibilities of designing tools that allow entirely new and innovative thinking modes to take place in and with.

Conclusion
In summary, the ideas of co-dependant arising from the work of Varela open up interesting discourse around the nature of the self (or specifically ego-self) which resonates through the questioning of traditional boundaries and models of mind and body through research undertaken in Cognitive Science. These developments have created a space for people like Clark to identify ‘mind-tools’, and study the ways in which we might think-with or think-through things, effectively scaffolding ourselves with external cognitive props. As Haraway points out, the binding of self-consciousness and artifice can cause difficulties in ontological or experiential understanding of the self which can be seen to link back to Varela’s fragility and groundlessness of ego-self, and rather ego-self being a product of that mind/artefact binding. With the agency of things being introduced in Sociology through the work of Latour, objects are starting to be seen to play a much more pivotal role within social organisation and identity, creating complex networks, systems or webs of people and things. Looking then at the idea of an epistemic artefact, whereby knowledge is embodied into a subject experience of use helps us move towards a definition of a tool-for-thought specifically in relation to creative practices and new ways of thinking.

An important observation that emerged is the shift in creative authorship cause by this user/tool co-agency, which points towards an interesting debate around how ideas come about; where do they come from; and do we ever actually create new ideas? This can have a two-fold effect: reshaping a historical model of the development/evolution of design and designed-things; and the potential reshaping (and rapid evolution) of creative processes within design through the explicit design of tools-for-thought. In conclusion, I propose a question for further investigation: How do tools function as cognitive props within creative practice, and hence forth, how can we design new tools-for-thought to co-create new, innovative and radical practice?

Becoming of Intervention

2008-07-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

Design as Archaeological Process

2007-10-09T06:01:00.000-07:00