Gramma/topology

gramma/topology johann van der merwe A Gramma/topology of Design Knowledge: Mapping emergent meanings in socially interactive design by Johann van der Merwe Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Technology: Design in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology Supervisor: Professor Dewald Roode Co-supervisor: Associate Professor Jörn Messeter Cape Town November 2010 DECLARATION I, Johann van der Merwe, declare that the contents of this thesis represent my own unaided work, and that the thesis has not previously been submitted for academic examination towards any qualification. Furthermore, it represents my own opinions and not necessarily those of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Jvd Merwe November 2010 Signed Date DEDICATION Vir Jessie, Poppe, Mannetjie en Lisa In Memoriam Dewald Roode d. 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Background i The research problem ii The research question iii And another question iv Research design and methodology vi Research methodology vii Research methods viii On the use of the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger ix Chapter outlines xi Chapter One Contemporary design education in a complex, social world of constructed realities ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Gate 1 Introduction 3 A background motivation for change 6 The state of design education 8 A change of mind(set) 11 Discourses of teaching and learning 13 A fog-bound prospect 18 The affordances of a constructivist scholarship prospect 21 Combining perspectives 24 Design scholarship and The Boyer Report 25 The four constructivist scholarships 28 The Bridge 29 Chapter Two Myths and other social narratives ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Gate 33 Introduction 34 The myth of the Millennium student 35 We are who we are 37 Edupunk? 38 Real myths 44 The world is flat. Again. 47 Are we connected yet? Creating mythical bridges to nowhere. 48 The medium as metaphor 49 The medium as epistemology 53 The medium as ontology, or, amusing ourselves to life 56 From the Old World to the New World 60 What are we playing at? 62 From MySpace to MyIdentity 63 From MyIdentity to MyMyth 64 The Bridge 66 Chapter Three Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Gate 72 Introduction 73 Freely invented: maps versus territory 78 Article: Natural Death is Announced 83 Reinjection 92 Theory as the inbetween, figure and ground, territory and map 96 Foundations for a groundless theory 101 The Bridge 105 Chapter Four Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Gate 107 Introduction 109 4.1 On being Cybernetic and Systemic 111 Article: The Magic of Three 117 Reinjection 130 On being an open user of systems 135 On being a Radical Social Constructivist 136 Soft social constructions 139 Paper: The Construction of a Dancing, Dangling Conversation 141 Reinjection 153 4.2 Actors and networks 155 Of scallops and square pants 160 Article: The secret lives of ANTs 162 Reinjection 167 4.3 Autopoietic social systems 169 Article: From Problem-Solving Paradigm to Co-Ontogenic Drift: How do Learning Narratives Self-Generate? 174 Reinjection 185 Can design education benefit from autopoietic social systems? 187 A last objection to Luhmann 188 4.4 The affordances of ontological phenomenology 190 Paper: Changing a phenomenal change 195 Reinjection 207 Article: Ontologically shaping a designed future: Design education as revelation 208 The Bridge 218 Chapter Five Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function: A spacetime landscape ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Gate 219 Introduction 220 The ontology of equipment 221 The migration of an aura from a stable knowledge-state to an un-stable knowledge-process 226 The migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimile 227 Migrating the aura, or how to explore the original self through its facsimile others 231 Migration versus transfer 233 Paper: The Innovative Principle of a Design Language 238 Reinjection 247 Paper: Cybernetic Conversations: Designing ourselves towards discovery 251 Reinjection 263 Paper: The complexity of design as a wavefunction 270 Reinjection 279 The evocation of form. 289 The shape of space-time 292 A most peculiar matrix 294 Chapter Six The continuing argument to the self ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Work in progress 295 Learning how to renew a thinking identity 295 Re-entering the making of a thinking identity 298 The indeterminacy and fundamental undecidability of becoming 302 The flow of an ice canoe 306 The story that tells itself 308 A likely story concealed in a portmanteau 310 Education uses us 312 The glory of a nice knock-down argument 313 Is this a gramma/topology which I see before me, its theoretical-equipment ready-toward my hand? A last Bridge to cross 318 320 Chapter Seven A new beginning ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------There can be no conclusion 321 But there can be a new beginning 323 The Manifesto for the M(B)A in Designing Better Futures 324 Reflections on designing better futures 328 The Uncanny 328 Entry points to reflection 329 The entailment mesh of reflection 336 The skilled practitioner 338 *References 344 *Addenda 371 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Chapter Two Myths and other social narratives Figure 1. Jim Groom as “poster boy” for edupunk 39 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter Three Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production Figure 2. (1) Duck / Rabbit & (2) Young Girl / Old Woman 100 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter Four Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing Figure 3. Simplified version of Beer’s Muddy Box 148 Figure 4. Student free-flow performance 176 Figure 5. Students interacting with audience 177 Figure 6. Structural coupling 177 Figure 7. Heséré’s performance & Cardboard on steel dummy 180 Figure 8. Weyers’s thoughts turn to, Now What? 181 Figure 9. Ashleigh & Inge 181 Figure 10. System within a system 182 Figure 11. Contact 182 Figure 12. The cognitive process in action 182 Figure 13. The true nature of co-ontogenesis 183 Figure 14. The Womb 198 Figure 15. The Infinite Star 199 Figure 16. The Flames 200 Figure 17. The Sunflower 200 Figure 18. The wickedness of design education 203 Figure 19. The creation of a design identity 204 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter Five Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function: A spacetime landscape Figure 20. Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana (San Giorgio Maggiore). 228 Figure 21. Probability curve of an artefact as information source sans text 241 Figure 22. The probability curve of analytical creativity 242 Figure 23. Exploration to discovery 243 Figure 24. All that goes before can be seen 244 Figure 25. The unified field theory of design 245 Figure 26. Splitting the Infinitive 246 Figure 27. Conversational echolocation 254 Figure 28. Jakobson’s Ladder 267 Figure 29. The Complexity of Design as a Wavefunction 284 Figure 30. The organism as a functioning whole: Diagramme of twofold closure and Torus Figure 31. Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane 292 293 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter Six The continuing argument to the self Figure 32. The three-step process: Barthesian Eco/s 302 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prologue i Prologue Background Design is as social an activity as is language. Both are instances of the communicative ability we can rightly claim as a human necessity for being and becoming. Paraphrasing Steiner, we can say that the need for a human being (of human becoming) to find appropriate means of articulation and shaped expression will continue to press on language which, under that pressure, becomes either literature, art, or more concretely, becomes design. However, design1 is much more than just the end product of a linear thought process that satisfies materialistic needs and wants, and is instead a process dealing with „wicked problems‟2 and conceptual integration3. Therefore this work will forego any attempt at dealing directly with the „concrete end products‟ of the design process, and focus, instead, on design theory / thinking, and a design-like identity-creation process that has been variously called a designerly way of knowing4, knowledge of the third kind5, and ontological designing6. These approaches to design thinking begins with some form of design theory, but, and following the new design trend of focusing on process instead of product, instead of placing theory at the service of the manufacturing process leading into the product itself, it regards enhanced human thought patterns as far more important, thus placing this type of theory at the service of human capability, first and foremost. This particular approach to ontologically inclined design theory, I will argue, is also the best approach to a renewal in design teaching and learning, since it focuses on the identity-creation capacity of the student more than on designed products: the end result of a design education should be a critical and symbolic analyst capable of dealing with the complexities of designing interactive spaces populated by both humans, as users and critics, and the non-human actors (cf. Latour, below) we call designed objects. Östman (2005:9) reconsidered “the state of the art of design theory” by asking not only what the nature of design theory could be, but also what the aim of design theory is. My interpretation of his work is that design theory can function very much like theories of social structuration in building up a shared stock of knowledge, and that, provided that it remains useful in everyday reality (theory for practice), this integrated stock of knowledge can be enhanced from many different fields of knowledge, thus, in effect, agreeing with Jonas (2004) who describes design as a groundless field, of necessity sourcing 1 Although I write from within a background of Industrial Design, the term design, unless specified otherwise, is used to refer to design as a generic activity, of both thought and action. 2 “Wicked problems are ill-defined, ambiguous and ... there is often little consensus about what the problem is, let alone how to resolve it. Furthermore, wicked problems won‟t keep still: they are sets of complex, interacting issues evolving in a dynamic social context” (Ritchey, 2005, after Horst Rittel). 3 Mark Turner (1996:57). The way we make sense of our world and come to understand our relationships with others and with objects, is through creating literary and parabolic meaning. Meaning, in turn, does not reside in an object or a concept, but “is alive and active, dynamic and distributed, constructed for local purposes of knowing and acting”. 4 “The underlying axiom of this discipline is that there are forms of knowledge peculiar to the awareness and ability of a designer ... so we must concentrate on the „designerly‟ ways of knowing, thinking and acting “ (Cross, 2000:46). 5 John Shotter (1994). Knowledge of the third kind: a „practical‟ way of knowing that can „call out‟ , not simply responses and reactions, but also a “stance toward our own construction of our own abilities”. 6 Anne-Marie Willis (2004) (1999). Ontological designing: a radical departure from traditional design understanding, implicitly focu sing on how, through design activity, we create our „selves‟ or our identities through a phenomenology of „design knowing‟. It has to be said, though, that the use of the term ontology in this research follows the original philosophical meaning, and in particular that of Heidegger (1962:49): ontology deals with the nature of existence as becoming, and “the task of ontology is to explain Being itself”. A distinction has to be made between this use of the term and the use to which it seems to be put by Information Systems designers, i.e. “as a specification of a conceptualiztion” for software programming (Pulkkinen, 2003). Prologue ii what it needs from many other contextually relevant fields of knowledge. Considering design theory a philosophical discipline that has to enter into a reflective discourse with practical design questions, Östman (2005:9-10) nevertheless points out the necessity of separating theoretical inquiry “from the pluralism of the various design fields”. This does not mean separating theory and practice per se, but highlights the need for (I would say, obligation towards) a type of theoretical inquiry that does not focus exclusively on solving practical design problems. Instead, this ontologically fuelled theory would conform to Heidegger‟s notion of a pre-ontological7 self-comprehension, a pre-understanding that has to precede the question of Being (Cavalier, 2006). To designate the authentic future terminologically we have reserved the expression “anticipation”. This indicates that Dasein, existing authentically, lets itself come towards itself as its utmost potentiality-for-Being … Dasein8 comes towards itself from that with which it concerns itself. (Heidegger, 1962:386) A pre-ontological understanding, for design, would call for regarding both designers and the process of design (more accurately, the thinking-design-into-being process) as forms of Dasein, which would mean that the type of design theory-as-ontology9 this research is concerned with, needs to look at how, interchangeably, both designer-Dasein and design-Dasein can induce a coming-towards-itself, as potentiality-for-Being, by finding out what it is that “it” should concern itself with. The focus of this research, then, is to provide a conceptually theoretical platform, indeed, a theory-asontology framework that can be called gramma/topology, a theory of knowing that could enrich the teaching and learning of design in all its diverse applications. The research problem The research problem, therefore, is a problem of social structuration that yet allows for individual, identity-forming, interpretation. How could one bestow on a theory-as-ontology framework the ability to function as a design educational model that could enrich the teaching and learning of design in all its diverse applications? Throughout this thesis I shall, incrementally, construct a framework, in the sense of projecting-ahead-of-completion, for this theory-of-knowing and call it gramma/topology. The complexity of social structuration forces us to ask, what is design knowledge, and how is this knowledge generated? A person can be questioned, but how do you question a situation, or question an activity, or worse still, question an object that (seems to have) has no voice, presence or identity? These various and sometimes-divergent aspects of design are important to this research, namely: what is the place of design itself, the design processes, and the designed objects in our lives? I will be arguing that design, as a term denoting human organisation and activity, needs to be recognised as a social process that can only be evaluated, and subsequently awarded a place in our lives, if we can understand our own, constructed selves as inextricably linked to these products of our projected image-schemas of selfidentity and our models of social reality. 7 Throughout this thesis I consistently use the term ontology to mean the coming-inti-being of who we are, at any one moment, and who and what we constantly become the next. This is in opposition of that particular use that claims onology is the study of the nature of existence, or the nature of being, as fact, an approach that effectively puts a stop to becoming. 8 Dasein is the term used by Heidegger (1962:27) to denote that entity we call a human being, but focusing on its beingness, i.e. how it is that we (potentially, all of us) come to be as we are. 9 The theory of knowing that I am arguing for has as much to do with the construction of the knower‟s identity structure as it has to do with the structuration of the discipine‟s identity. Prologue iii The research question The appropriateness of the main research question will, indeed, be determined by the process, context and moment of social structuration as mediated by, and in turn mediating, the designed artefacts we think into being. If we are serious about placing a theory of knowing at the service of human capability then this theory must have an ontological basis, in order to focus on the identity-creation capacity of the design student. I can now construct, in the sense of projecting-ahead-of-completion, a name for this theory-of-knowing, and ask that small, insignificant but potentially rich-picture10 generating question: what is a gramma/topology of design knowledge? The approach taken in this research is that our understanding of design comes through a gramma/topological mapping of our total environment. We construct virtual grammars (of creation) for both mind and matter in order to deal with the worlds of both objects and events. Our minds are not disembodied, but using the probing transformational qualities of language, imagination and narrative to explore conceptual and perceptual realities helps us experience the world by living through it spatially, i.e., phenomenologically (/topology), and we can live through it virtually, ahead of time, pursuing our own grammars-into-narratives of creation (with apologies to Steiner) by following Heidegger‟s ontological phenomenology (gramma/), which investigates, not the actuality, but rather the possibility of existence. “At its outset, a philosophy is an ontological narration, this is to say an account of how being originates” (Steiner, 2002:17), and in the same spirit Heidegger (1962:62) declared “Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutics of Dasein ...” Gramma/topology does not have any connection to Derrida‟s use of the term grammatology; “As a critique of Saussure, grammatology seeks to replace semiology …” (Leitch, 1983:29). Gramma/topology does not seek to replace any other method of investigation, or way of knowing design, but rather seeks to become an ontological narrative for design knowledge, and yet Derrida‟s own description of grammatology is of relevance to this research: “I shall call it [grammatology] … . Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of [that] general science ...” (Derrida, in Leitch, 1983:29). Language and its uses as communication is only a part of this general ontological narrative. If I then propose the main research problem to be the social structuration of a theory-as-ontology framework with the ability to function as a design educational model that could enrich the teaching and learning of design in all its diverse applications, the appropriateness of the question, How could this model be structured?, will, indeed, be determined by the process, context and moment of social structuration as mediated by, and in turn mediating, the designed artefacts we think into being. To paraphrase and deconstruct Derrida, I shall call this model gramma/topology; since such a peculiar field-of-knowing does not exist, in any particular form, before the model is used, no one can say with certainty what the outcome would be, but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance for both designer-Dasein and design-Dasein. Pelle Ehn (Ehn & Svenstedt, 2000:274) has, so far, come closest to describing what I have in mind, namely the difference between techne and phronesis. The former refers to “concrete context dependent means-end knowledge oriented towards production”, while the latter “is fundamentally not concerned with statements of fact nor prescriptions of what ought to be, but speculative propositions ...” that encourage students “to focus on their own hidden politics-inpractice rather than on espoused design philosophy (e.g. socio-technical methods ... participatory 10 Nardi, (1996). “The object of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousness and activity... We have recognized that technology use is not a mechanical input-output relation between a person and a machine; a much richer depiction of the user's situation is needed for design and evaluation.” Prologue iv design procedures, etc.)”. The search for Dasein‟s character can be equated with this search for the essence of phronesis, the ability of a student to become a speculator of propositions. The first logical reaction to this proposal of a new model of and for design education would be, why is it at all necessary? If design education provides the necessary conceptual tools … but it does not. We live in a world that constantly influences us, on many different levels and in many different ways. Immediately the correlations between design and information systems become clear: not only does Latour (1992) make us aware of the symbiosis between human and non-human actors, but Giddens (1991:7) regards our mediated experiences as central to the way we situate ourselves contextually in the modern world, with our appropriation of the information received from all manner of information systems as part of the reason we perceive and experience the world in a „radically‟ changed way. To further the relationship between design and information systems, we can take the following statement from Restrepo et al. (2004) as grounds for regarding the term design as broadly representing both traditional design activities and modern day information systems: “Design is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous activities of modern societies”. If we then believe that design is a social activity and an instance of human communicative ability, and if we further believe that design, as a cognitive tool, can be used to realize the appropriate means of articulation and shaped expression we need in order to cope with Latour‟s and Giddens‟ new world, we have to re-conceptualise our idea of design as a discipline and consequently how design is taught. However we look at the world we inhabit, we have to agree that, mainly because of the impact of information and communication systems, our modern day (global) living and working environment has changed quite briskly and substantially, and simply regarding the roles of all the Latourian non-human actors today, Michl (2002) is correct in stating the obvious: the basic and narrow term design is no longer sufficient in advancing any understanding of the modern designed object. And another question This is an argument about nothing, because I am really interested in the individual as a modern designed object. Gramma/topology is an argument about „no-thing‟11 because it is an argument based on probability and possibility. What I have discovered through writing this thesis is that I return to the same starting point no matter in which direction the research journey takes me, which is enough proof that I cannot prove anything, not even to myself, because when I do return to that same starting point it has disappeared and has seemingly been replaced with something almost similar and yet different. The problem is, the starting point is a virtual construct, a languaging device I use to try to explain to myself what is happening, to me. I cannot do this for you, as I cannot explain what is happening to you, but I can possibly help you to explain this to yourself. This is a story about Bateson‟s „no-thing,‟ that space where nothing is allowed to settle for very long, because when I come around again to this starting point, which is now different, I do not even find myself,12 I find … nothing. Nothing, that is, if I expect to find anything that corresponds to the real world out there (things that I don‟t know already). If I choose to be a positivist thinker, and only believe in what can be observed and that what is observed must be the truth, then nothing will be what I find, to all intents and purposes. I can stare at this computer screen for as long as I like and nothing will 11 12 Cf. the later use of Bateson‟s „no-thing‟ and Latour‟s „thing / Thing‟ concept (both examples in Chapter 3:95-96). Heidegger (1962:68) states that Dasein (everyman) is its own possibility, but precisely because we are our own future we can lose ourselves, lose our newness of self if we look for positivistic truth-in-the-world. Prologue v change, because it refuses to talk to me. That, at least, has brought us a little forward; nothing will happen without conversation, without communication. This thesis is an argument about nothing, if seen from a positivistic viewpoint, because the only thing that changes is myself, and since that cannot be observed outwardly you might be convinced that this is, after all, much ado about nothing. The difficulty with this thesis, an observation of observations, and the concomitant difficulty with teaching design theory, is that I cannot teach you anything, nor can, or indeed, may I try to persuade you of my viewpoint, since for a radical constructivist that amounts to propaganda, which, by the way, is easy enough, and in certain cases is called visual persuasion, an aspect of graphic design that I was taught to master. However, when it comes to teaching design theory I refuse to teach in the sense of instructing students, which would amount to no more than rote learning; instead I hold conversations with the students, in the hope of instigating some form of dialogue, and I introduce them to a few interesting theories that can be called circular theories of knowing. In the following chapters I will deal with four of these, namely cybernetics (inclusive of systems thinking and constructivism), actor-network theory, autopoiesis and ontological phenomenology, as ways of seeing the world, and as catalysts for changing the focus of design from something that can be seen in this concrete world to design as a virtual construct that talks back to us. You may very well ask, but what, then, is your real research question? This is an argument about nothing, and when I come around to the starting point and find … not my old self, I have to ask, who are you, now? That is the single most important question I wish to ask my students. In asking the main research question, what is a gramma/topology of design knowledge?, I am really asking a second and implied question that becomes primary, i.e., who are you, as a designer, and how do you know this? In this complex world of ubiquitous information-as-presence, the worst thing I can do is to help students achieve and maintain a stable picture of themselves as designers inhabiting a world in equilibrium. Inside the question, as a designer, who are you? is implied another question, i.e., have you observed yourself thinking, and what do you think with? In asking who are you? we cannot expect a direct and isolated answer, but have to keep on asking more and wider-ranging questions, e.g., Are you a reflective practitioner? How do you know what design really is? Where does this information come from? All the answers to all these questions have to contain the facility of feedback loops, the first answer feeding back to the first question, generating the second question, leading to the second answer which feeds back to the … in an iterative cycle of give and take. Another problem with teaching … yes, simply with teaching, anything, and not just with teaching design theory, is that this iterative process is not as linear as it seems, i.e., question, then answer, then feedback, then question again, because the learning journey is parallel more than it is linear, and often in real time, which means that several questions and answers seem to be asked and answered at once and confusedly out of synch. Think of any discussion, in class, and worse still, an informal discussion in an informal setting (anywhere outside the designated classroom situation) that any one individual must make sense of despite the seemingly random structure of the inputs (questions, problem situations) and outputs (answers, problem solutions). Of course, if I can ask questions then so can the students, and I must be able to answer a question such as, what is a design theory? This thesis, then, has two further research questions to interrogate; in a design context we have to ask, of ourselves first, who am I?, and then ask, what is a theory? These two questions are interrelated, in the sense that the first question cannot be attempted without forming Prologue vi some theory about the process of asking questions, searching for possible solutions and the problematic of finally selecting appropriate answers, and a really good answer will leave you undecided whether you in fact answered question one or question two, or both. That is gramma/topology. A quality answer will have taken heed of Heidegger‟s (1962:31) contention that all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task. Being, to Heidegger, is a nothing in the world‟s terms, and a no-thing epistemologically speaking, since no facts can be gathered to be used later by another person, but still every thinking human being has to strive for Being, that state of being that is yet to come, that still needs to be investigated for its possibilities and its differences. To highjack Herbert Simon‟s words, we all wish to change our existing everyday being into a preferred Being. Epistemology, the competence of acquiring knowledge, is nothing without the affordance of personal ontology, the way we actively design our presentcompelling-itself-into-the-future identities, and for that „we‟ need to maintain a joint socio-technical, intrinsic, control. Research design and methodology This research outlines an approach that privileges neither an inside nor an outside, by making use of the structural coupling of autopoietic boundaries, that looks at human perception and understanding as neither objective nor subjective, but follows the reasoning of Protagoras in stating that it is, rather, the fitness of a contextual action or decision that we should focus on (Turner, 1992). What would we, each person, researcher, philosopher, student or designer, need, as a self-organizing system, and how can we interact with other systems and the environment; in short, how do we learn? A design-as-narrative argument that steers a path between chaos and order, linear and nonlinear thought processes, that can adjust to inner complexity / subjectivity as well as outer subjectivity / complexity, a design narrative process that can really help a user „paint a new picture‟ is possible, but we have to realize that, in order to „speak‟ complexity, we have to follow Luhmann in saying that our discussion, our communications, are not stand-alone constructs and are built upon bases that are entirely not there. We can only „speak‟ complexity by painting a new picture language (design) that operates in a virtual environment, entirely not there, but accessible to human knowing, nonetheless. The philosophical grounds for this research project are, really, a search for applicable ontologies, in terms of design as a discipline, and in terms of individuals as identities. In that sense I am largely adopting what O‟Donovan & Roode (2002:27) calls Heidegger‟s four ways of being, a way of searching for ontological understanding using (1) consolidation (verfallen); (2) learning (verstehen); (3) disposition (befindlichkeit); and (4) dialogue (rede). This is a process of recursive relationships, and an “interdependent progression that results in an emergent process” (O‟Donovan & Roode, 2002:30). A process that includes both recursive relationships and the notion of emergence means, to design, an iterative and evolving process that has important implications for growth (understanding) and learning. In any model for design education the (2) learning (verstehen) category must provide the strongest „conceptual tool‟ to escape from (1) consolidation and (3) disposition, those everyday activities that keep our feet on the ground and engages all our attention, (too often) to the detriment of our imaginative faculties. The German word verstehen means so much more than the English word learning can convey, being immediately denotative of a movement forward, a standing further on, a forward Prologue vii displacement of the knowing-self, and this can be achieved through (4) dialogue (rede), when we have found a reason to move. I want instead to invite the reader to consider learning as a collective activity in which the focus is on asking questions and engaging in dialogue – one in which teacher-student roles are not predetermined, but are fluid and are dependent on individuals‟ expertise and insight in a particular situation. Thus we must think about the values and assumptions we bring to the learning process, rather than the specific tactics of training or teaching. (Schuck, 1996:200) The purpose of (4) dialogue (reasoning, finding out, teaching), is to collectively find a „new disposition‟ that not only overcomes “incoherence, fragmentation, and polarities [but is also] directed towards rearticulating the coherent whole of the discipline” (O‟Donovan & Roode, 2002:33). In the spirit of Heidegger‟s ways of being, and with a view to „re-articulation‟, the „data‟ that will be „collected‟ for this research are stories (narratives) of how people see the world in certain contextual situations, normally associated with their own research work, which in turn is situated within their worlds of practice. These various worlds of practice and experience are collectable because they are written down and shared, and as such can become part of our general, socially constructed stock of knowledge. This literature-as-narrative that I will be actively pursuing, in accordance with the approach of design as a groundless field, will be sourced from any discipline that makes use of the concept of systemic circularity13. Consequently, a qualitative research approach will be used, since the descriptions applicable to this field of inquiry are also descriptive of design as a groundless field of knowledge, i.e. “It crosscuts disciplines, fields, and subject matter” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998:2-3), and in that sense it also follows what Checkland (2002) had in mind in declaring systems thinking not a method to follow but a way of seeing that is not discipline-bound. Narratives will be collected from these disparate fields as data, since “a progressive accessing and reading of relevant literature can become a part of your data collection procedures” (Dick, 2005), and so these narratives, as forms of combinatorial play14, as collective pre-ontological readings15, supplant any previous method of data collection. Research methodology The philosophical framework for this qualitative research, then, sets no boundaries and adopts no „worldviews‟ as such, since this „framework‟ makes use of a „framing action‟16 more than it establishes a rule to be followed, hence the reference (above) to absolute knowledge definition resistance. Instead, this „mobile‟ philosophical frame is derived from the work of Heidegger, and specifically his notion of a phenomenological ontology in pursuit of uncovering or disclosing the processes of coming-into-being. As a systemic and circular mode of investigating human ontological understanding, Heidegger‟s 13 “Contructionist inquiry, as a human activity, must concern itself with a knowing process as embedded in a reflexive loop that includes the inquirer who is at once an active observer. Reflexivity, or a turning back onto a self, is a way in which circularity and self-reference appear in inquiry, as we contextually recognize the various mutual relationships in which our knowing activities are embedded” Steier (1991:163). In seeing research as a design act Glanville (1998) also sees both design and research as a circular act or conversation (discourse): "A conversation is a circular form of communication, with understandings being exchanged between the conversational partners". 14 “This delicate and demanding balancing act” combines Gadamer‟s insights (in Blacker, 1993) with Calvino‟s (1997:4) exposition of the storyteller‟s purpose in exploring possibilities and changing the permutations as they present themselves during the act of storytelling. 15 Thereby conforming to Heidegger‟s notion of a pre-ontological self-comprehension, a pre-understanding that has to precede the question of Being (Cavalier, 2006). 16 A design educational conversation is not about the what of learning but about the how and why of learning. As an example, Kees Dorst (2003) thinks of Schön‟s notion of reflective practice as a „constructionist theory‟ that describes design as a „reflective conversation‟, and during this process the design task is set and possible solutions are outlined, “all in one „framing action‟” - this happens because the designer is the structuring agent in this process, and the extent of the structuring is determined by the potency of the frame. Prologue viii phenomenology is chosen, as it is my belief - my hypothesis - that the insights to be gained from Being and Time can be made applicable to a more „primordial‟ understanding 17 of a designerly way of knowing the world, knowing the designer-as-being, and knowing-interpreting the interactions between the two, given that this „knowing‟ takes place within Heidegger‟s philosophical „framing action‟ that shrugs off temporal closure. In this research I will thus follow Heidegger (1962:62) in acknowledging that “Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutics of Dasein ...” In this same vein I will also utilise the work of Maturana and Varela, since their concept of autopoiesis (autoproduction applied to social systems) can be regarded as another form of phenomenological ontology in pursuit of uncovering or disclosing the processes of coming-into-being. Both of these approaches to disclosedness are ontological in nature, and descriptive in their primordial structure, that (albeit, incomplete) part of the structure that can be ascertained at any one time. Being always farthest away18, the „description‟ obtained from this primordial structure of human thought is non-prescriptive in being part of a „mobile framing action‟ linked to a potential world-in-waiting. Research methods I will also make use of the fact that qualitative research is, additionally, known as a site of discourse, since it does not privilege any methodology or set of methods over another. “The qualitative researcheras-bricoleur”19 does not determine the tools of research inquiry in advance, rather, the choice of research practices / methods are reliant upon that which is being investigated, contextually (Nelson et al., in Denzin & Lincoln, 1998:3). “The methods of qualitative research thereby become the „invention,‟ ... even though, as bricoleurs, we all know we are not working with standard-issue parts, and we have come to suspect that there are no longer any such parts made (if ever there were)” (Lincoln & Denzin, 1998:426). The parts that contextually fit the whole are being „made‟ in a symbiotic relationship between researcher, storyteller and the contextual intention of what is being communicated within this site of discourse. The methodology chosen as a philosophical framework already identifies all human activity (all forms of communication or symbolic interaction) as a site of discourse, in that our understanding of this activity has to emerge from this (non-temporal) interactive space, which is produced when people interact with each other and with their environment. The most appropriate research method, therefore, is not so much a choice as an innate substance of this interactive space that functions as a site of human discourse: “Our investigation itself will show that the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation” (Heidegger, 1962:61). The main focus of this research is design education, and the true purpose of education is to inquire into the not-now, but it can only do so through interpreting what is there already, although this interpretation cannot be of the what-is-there, but must be an act of making, an ontological act. In this site of discourse the act of interpretation becomes a restructuring of the what-is-there, and the texts, 17 Rather than focusing on the observable phenomena inherent in the relation between a thinking subject and the objective world, a „disclosive structure‟, being more „primordial‟, “concerns the revelation of something hidden” (Alveson & Sköldberg, 2000:57-58). 18 This potential world-in-waiting, being the essence of Dasein, also becomes the essence of life-long learning in design education, thereby allowing „education to use us‟. Heidegger (1962:359) states “that the entity which in every case we are, is ontologically that which is farthest”, meaning, in effect, that we should not even wish to end the quest for continuous becoming, for learning. 19 Traditionally a bricoleur was known in artistic circles as the type of creative person who worked only with „found‟ material. “The solution (bricolage) which is the result of the bricoleur’s method is an [emergent] construction” (Weinstein & Weinstein, in Denzin & Lincoln, 1998:3). Prologue ix with(+in) their contexts of possible meaning(s), are not interpreted for themselves, as meaningful entities, but interpreted-with. Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur remind their readers that "the study of symbolic forms is fundamentally and inescapably a matter of understanding and interpretation," according to Thompson (1990:274), and the work of all three philosophers of the word will be used to illuminate the research method most suitable to interpreting-with, namely alethic hermeneutical interpretation. Truth is a concept that is difficult to deal with, unless and until it becomes a social construction and the user of such a concept can feel themselves part of its meaning. Here we are confronted by a situation that can correspond closely to the interactive spaces of daily life – this site of discourse. What are we to make of the interacting concept parts that make up the phenomenal whole of life? In terms of design education, questions such as these have to be asked, and indeed, induced in students. To Heidegger (in Dreyfus, 1991:270), the concept of truth was associated with the Greek term aletheia, equating truth with unforgetting, and when one unforgets, something is brought forth from a space of hiddenness, thereby equating truth with discovery. In that sense the truth of our daily phenomenal encounters can be discovered (as an uncovering, a disclosedness) anew, every day: it simply means that the possibility of a learning interpretation-of-disclosure is available to anyone, and as teachers we must bring this to the attention of students. Alethic hermeneutical interpretation can, as a method-of-seeing, unveil this alethic truth we need in order to deal with any design situation-in-the-making, including the role that Latour‟s non-human actors play in our lives. Schwandt (1998:224) touches on this aspect in discussing the interpretivist approach of specifically Heidegger and Gadamer, whose views acknowledge the hermeneutical quality of life. Instead of being determined by a specific methodology, interpretivist social inquiry and its understandings become the actual condition of that inquiry. Heidegger (1962:62) made it clear how, in an ontological understanding, alethic truth may be discovered that can serve both human and non-human actors. In the very process of understanding-towards, we strive to uncover both the beingness and the structure of Dasein, but, in so doing we create the conditions that can further uncover both the beingness and the structure of entities that are not-Dasein, i.e., non-human actors. In this way, as a process of alethic hermeneutical interpretation, design inquiry becomes its own condition for establishing the identity (ontology) of design as a discipline, and learns from Dasein‟s ability to let “itself come towards itself as its utmost potentiality-for-Being … Dasein comes towards itself from that with which it concerns itself” (Heidegger, 1962:386). In concerning itself with its own ontology, design can come towards itself, from itself, and both designer-Dasein and design-Dasein can induce a coming-towards-itself. This process of alethic hermeneutical interpretation is meant to discover a theory for design that can serve as a model of design teaching and learning that works on several levels, most importantly on the level of the personal (designer / student) and on the level of design as a discipline. On the use of the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger It would be rather ironic, for academic freedom and the openness of research procedures that many academics and scholars are struggling to keep viable (especially in the face of increasing government pressure for „efficiency‟ and „accountability‟), were I to choose to steer clear of the work of a philosopher that has had such an impact on worldviews as is the case with Heidegger, because an interpretation of his work is possible without falling into the trap of simply becoming a consumer of Heideggerisms, meaning specifically, „listening‟ to the opinions of detractors of Heidegger‟s work rather than reading the work itself. That would be following a trend (and is an example of the figure / ground gestalt switch discussed in Chapter 3:99-100) and not interpretation in any sense of the term, as is Prologue x discussed in this thesis. Part of my argument for a theory of knowing as opposed to a theory of knowledge, is that knowledge must be constructed by the individual, but that this construction happens within a defined context, and to various degrees, can be called a „group construct‟ of the social meaning of reality; when this boundary of definition becomes too narrow and confined, the design student must learn how to break out of convention when innovation is the goal. In my own case, as a learner at school and university I was forbidden by the (then) Nationalist government to read the works of Karl Marx, on the grounds that it was nothing more than communist propaganda. Today we know this was merely an opinion, an expression of the will to power by a group of politicians. Heidegger does seem to be a writer who falls roughly into three categories: there are people who say, “Heidegger? Heidegger! Uh-uh, not for me thanks,” meaning that they do not understand the admittedly sometimes convoluted language that he employs to get to the point; there are people who seem to be vehemently opposed to his work, whether on academic grounds or based on more personal opinion, which stance one must respect, as one respects the traditional boundaries of cultural groups, while simultaneously avoiding the trap of absolute authority by transcending those boundaries to gain knowledge of the „other‟ (as both Gadamer and Derrida advocated, cf. Chapter 3:92). Then there is a third group that seemingly wishes to understand any work in as unbiased a manner as possible, keeping in mind that everything is mediated and even our honest attempts at interpretation may in some way be pre-judged, to borrow a term from Gadamer. Not only is knowledge constructed, but in our efforts to understand „the other‟ we must also learn how to learn, and that includes, as part of the argument in this thesis, the ability to let the aura of the original migrate20 from, say, the original Being and Time to the space where these insights will be put to use, and only judged on its effectiveness and its validity at the point of use, and not at the point of departure. Taylor Carman wrote a review of a book by Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger, in which he points out that “Like Faye, Weissman systematically misreads Heidegger‟s interpretations of Nietzsche‟s ideas as endorsements of those ideas” (2010). Weissman, much like Harvey, Massey, and Leach … reacts negatively to scholars who have a different interpretation of Heidegger‟s work to their own. It has become clear to me, through reading the Letters page of the Times Literary Supplement, that many scholars react badly to criticism, justified or not, and, at least on such a public platform as a Letters page, feel themselves allowed some appreciable leeway in driving their particular point of view home. Two aspects of this negative reaction to an other-than-mine interpretation of Heidegger‟s work stand out in Carman‟s response to Weissman‟s critique of his review: “Weissman … asserts that in my review … I said „several times that Martin Heidegger‟s philosophy was un-tainted by his Nazi beliefs‟. I said no such thing. What I wrote in the review is that Faye establishes no connection between them”. This correlates with Malpas (above), who is concerned that critics of Heidegger (the person rather than the work) do not seem to pay close attention to his texts, and themselves offer interpretations grounded too often on their own beliefs, and yet would disallow the interpretation that is contrary to the „facts‟ that they establish. The second thing of note is that Heidegger is „quoted‟ quite selectively, and in this case the very contentious issue seems to be his apparent endorsement of Nietzsche‟s nihilistic philosophy, and the ramifications of the will to power. As Carman points out, the sentences that „repulse‟ Weissman “are Nietzsche‟s words, and what Heidegger is saying is that the struggle is underwritten by Nietzsche‟s metaphysics, which Heidegger disavows … [and concerning the emotive issue of the use of the word annihilation, and all that this term may imply in historical terms, Heidegger] is interpreting Nietzsche‟s concept of the will to power. He is not advocating the preservation and enhancement or annihilation of anything”. 20 Cf. Chapter 5:226 onwards. Prologue xi Despite this plea for an open discussion, a dialogue even, those writers that deal investigatively with Heidegger‟s work make no attempt to shy away from the historical fact that Heidegger did join the National Socialist Party in 1933, but, in Carman‟s (2010) words, “Some of Heidegger‟s philosophy is tainted by his Nazism. Some of it isn‟t. Rational discussion of these points is impossible if we are unable or unwilling to read his texts with a minimum of intelligence and care”. Malpas (2006:17-18) admits that There has … been an ongoing debate … also over the extent to which that commitment [to the NSP] compromises or taints his thinking as a whole [and] it becomes apparent that far from being merely a question of Heidegger‟s own politics, what is at issue here concerns the politics of place as such. Indeed, Heidegger‟s Nazi associations, coupled with the evident centrality of place and associated notions in his thinking … seems often to be taken as providing a selfevident demonstration of the politically reactionary and „dangerous‟ character of place-based thinking. The notion of place (or heimat, wrongly translated as homeland) could only be interpreted as politically reactionary by a willing participant in matters resolutely political, and this would represent the very particular observational position (a new authorship) of the interpreter, and on those grounds the decision as to the meaning of the text can hardly be ascribed to the original author without substantial proof. “Certainly an exclusionary politics presupposes the idea of that from which „others‟ are excluded, but this does not establish that place is an intrinsically exclusionary or reactionary idea,” it only establishes that place may be utilized by a reactionary, or used to exclude the other, but, “this would seem to be true of just about any important concept one may care to name” (Malpas, 2006:20). According to Malpas (2006:21), any researcher who wishes to make use of Heidegger‟s work must do so with caution and even a trace of suspicion, but that is the advice I give my students in any case, even (especially) when asking them to review one of my own articles, since “there will always be a measure of inconsistency and indeterminacy, as well as scope for interpretation and reinterpretation,” and as a matter of principle, whether we find Heidegger‟s work or the implications (to us) of the work “distasteful and even abhorrent, [this does not] pre-empt the need, if we wish to understand his thinking, to engage with his philosophy”. Chapter outlines: 1 Contemporary design education in a complex, social world of constructed realities In this chapter I will deal with issues of design education which, naturally, have to take into account the changing world circumstances within which designed objects have to function, and, since the sociocultural world is becoming far more complex than even a few decades ago, we have to look at the new realities that design education needs to confront if it is to succeed in preparing designers of the future to deal with changes unforeseen by both our own and our parent‟s generation. We have to find a new framework of understanding, because the objects we surround ourselves with are obviously artificial, and so are the houses we live in, and even our „natural‟ landscapes are more designed and artificial than we would like to admit. The mere fact of artificiality is not the issue, but what is of importance is that we become used to this fact of life (this „necessary‟ arrangement, or compromise to circumstances), and what we are used to increasingly transforms the way we see ourselves, the way our identities are being shaped. To design is to create the artificial, but human beings are very resourceful and adaptable, and we become used to incorporating into our framework of thought (which is primarily Prologue xii directed at ourselves and our way of dealing with the environment) these artificial objects, events, and circumstances (social groupings being an example). Within an admitted politics of the artificial we need to pay attention to the “larger issues of how contemporary social discourse is conducted” (Margolin, 2002:17), and design education is a very important part of that social discourse, because the only „natural‟ part we have left is our humanness21 and how that is construed and constructed, designed, as it were. We have the choice of becoming more or less human, more or less „natural‟ within the politics22 of the artificial. The concept of the artificial is not a choice between good or bad, it is neither black nor white, and so the interesting problem to be jump-started in this chapter is, in which direction do we steer future design education? This chapter begins with a general introduction to the state of design and some thoughts on issues we can focus on, such as the inclusion of the social as a natural part of design thinking, as well as an issue that is quite central to this thesis, namely that design education, while taking the individual as the foundation for thinking about design‟s renewal, has to do so from within the individual-group interrelationship. A motivation for change is looked at next, and a case made for why and how design is changing, before dealing with the current and future state of design education. The importance of a theoretical framework is suggested, leading into a discussion on discourses of teaching and learning. An argument is made for design education based on a social (radical) constructivist framework, with some discussion relating to the advisability of not separating the two streams of undergraduate and postgraduate learning. The core investigative approach binding these together is that of research, and we take a closer look at the idea of an undergraduate research university, a structure comprised of the combined perspectives afforded by the notion of scholarship, on the one hand, and social constructivism, on the other. The chapter ends with a bridging section that links with Chapter 2, and in which I remind the reader that not only is design as discipline and as education changing, but so are we changing in the sense of adapting to a world populated by these new designed hybrids whose technorhetoric we have to resist and manage. These designers of the future require new thinking paradigms and perspectives, and they are the focus of Chapter 2. 2 Myths and other social narratives The movement called The 21st Century Learning Initiative is to be seen as part of a much larger, and world-wide, contemporary network23 that is dedicated to the renewal of education, one that seems specifically concerned with shifting the focus from content to the learning individual. According to Hadland (2009), our South African situation is no different, and from a recent debate entitled: “Does higher education produce the knowledge, skills, competencies and people needed for South Africa‟s development?” it became clear that employers are questioning the usability of graduates because (too) many of them “lacked communication skills, writing skills and the ability to think critically”. Not only 21 I prefer this somewhat awkward term to the use of „humanity‟, since humanness focuses more on the individual‟s contribution, while humanity lets individuals hide in the group. 22 Let us not forget that „politics‟ derives from the body politic, polity [Greek politeia, i.e., citizenship or government], of and for the people. 23 Networking is becoming of prime importance with the growth of the knowledge economy in the digital era, but here we are witnessing an organic network that, although some initiatives are obviously not connected officially, are nevertheless focusing on the same goals: all are searching for ways to renew education, from the bottom up. Prologue xiii should our education system renew itself, with universities analytically rethinking their roles as institutions of learning, but we should question whether a university‟s role is to produce these „skilled graduates‟, whether we are producing practical skills or thinking skills. The answer to that question comes in part from Abbott (2009:i), who writes that the minimum purpose that we can expect education to adhere to is to prepare the next generation not only for the type of grown-up world the present generation values, but also a better world that these young people should bring about. I stated (above) that the socio-cultural world is becoming far more complex than even a few decades ago, and we have to prepare designers of the future to deal with changes unforeseen by both our own generation, but these changes are also happening while the Millennium student is studying. This chapter investigates who these young people are as the new Millennium students, since, to acquire (to design) an ontological24 identity, one that is not static but can keep on developing, these new students have to confront the disadvantage within what may appear to be the networked environment that is most natural to them, specifically socio-technical extensions of their proto-realities such as Facebook and Twitter. Not only do they use these communication technologies to tell us who they are, but these very support structures can work against the essence of a developing ontology, and turn becoming into the technorhetoric of what is. In Chapter 1(:2) I interprettranslate Margolin‟s (2002:119) use of the term spirituality as referring to the connection we still have to our innate humanness, and when he states that “A metanarrative of spirituality can help designers resist technorhetoric that sanctions the continuous colonization of the natural”, this refers to a new discourse of the social that, also, focuses on a comprehension of being-human, while it concerns itself with the construction of being-social. This position borders closely on the question asked by Willis (1999) as to whether the construction of being–social means that technology designs us or we design technology: “Interpretation is inseparable from the ontological designing process.” We can ask of the Millennium student the same question, will Facebook design you or will you and your co-discoverers design this new medium of exploration? Design as a discipline is looking for an identity, and the new Millennium student is likewise looking for a personal identity (a natural and ongoing process); the discipline and the student of that discipline are comparable to what Flores (1998:352) calls corporate and personal identities: “the construction of and participation in sites on the Web is already enhancing both of these identity-forming practices, and is, for that reason, about identity-building …” Flores also mentions a third possibility, which I will only be able to deal with, in depth, in Chapter 4, which is that both accounts of identity formation can be grounded through the work of Heidegger, an outlook I fully endorse since I do not believe in the possibility of a „split personality‟ for designers: your professional identity (being the way you think, and the way you are) is25 the same as your personal identity. What is important to know, is that these new Millennium students are constructing totally new social and cognitive maps, and, as discussed in Chapter 1 (:46), the (personal) map we follow through life and learning is constructed by our co-ontogenic relationships (Chapter 4) with our environment, which includes teachers, students, family, friends and, potentially, anyone and everything else in our 24 In this text I explain my specific use of the terms ontology and ontological, taken to denote not simply that which exists, but existence itself, and specifically the Heideggerian approach that implies continuous movement and development. 25 I have to concede that many people would find this viewpoint unacceptable, since they wish to play a different role in the workplace than they do at home. My contention is that your professional and personal identity is the same, irrespective of how you then project that core self into and onto the world. Prologue xiv experiential world, including designed objects and systems, and today, electronic communities and their different worlds that need quite different maps, namely virtual ones. Bateson (2002:27) warned that the map can never be the territory, since what we construct for ourselves may be a hybrid mix and ultimately our decision, in the final instance. The question is not whether anything in the „objective‟ world can change or not, but whether our perception and conception of that thing will ever change, and therefore transform into a different map, conforming to, and creating, a different territory. If our educational aim is to find a way to assist the student in acquiring the ability to transcend and span different spheres of reality – using social constructivism as (one of) the main tool - in order to `bring back' the symbolic creations of subjective processes, how will they construct these double maps, or, rather, how will they cope with one map, newly constructed (at least partly inside virtual territory), beginning to transform when they start their journey back to „reality‟? How then would we construct these virtual maps to avoid error? The „real‟ answer starts to emerge in the next chapter, because it is necessary, first, to describe the theory behind the construction of something that does not exist in the world of objects, before looking at the construction process itself. 3 Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production This chapter deals with a description of the theory behind the construction of something that does not exist yet, but first it has to begin with a discussion of what a theory is, how and as what this concept is normally employed, before developing an argument for design theory as a way of seeing more than a way of doing, and it ends with a discussion on the beginnings of the construction process of such a theoretical framework (based on Aristotle‟s arguing to first principles), one that can assist the student in acquiring the ability to transcend and span different spheres of reality. Hunter (2006:78) mentions the lack of agreement, in the humanities specifically, on what would constitute the object of theory, and the language that this mode of communication needs to use as a carrier. That view, on closer inspection, is only my interpretation of this text, and the author, perhaps, did not mean to equate theory with communication at all. If not, then why would theory need a language in which it needs to be conducted? This last term points to (n.) behaviour, management, control, and (v.) carry out, behave, act, and accompany, all words that can lead one to believe that the task of theory is to show and tell. But, even so, why would content (theory) need a specific mode of expression (language) before it can be decided what theory, or rather, the object of theory, really is? Hunter discusses several viewpoints on this matter, e.g., Eagleton‟s opinion that theory‟s object is culture while its language is that of Marxist socialism, and Pippin‟s idea of the conditions of knowledge being the real object expressed in the language of critical philosophy, after Kant, of course. The other viewpoints make it even clearer, that theory is a vehicle for expression for whoever uses it. An argument can be made out that Eagleton‟s „culture‟ and Pippin‟s „conditions of knowledge‟ cannot exists as separate entities within the environments of the humanities, leading one to suspect that the mode of expression, the language most proper to theory, instead of being pinned down to a specific such as socialism, left or right, or critical philosophy, whether metaphysical or phenomenological, becomes not a system to be classified and agreed upon, but an extension of theory itself – theory becomes an extension of being human. Prologue xv As part of the argument for a change from set rules (for both a theory and a discipline) to a more fluid approach to dealing with „the world‟ I then offer the article26 A natural death is announced. The main points being made in this article are 1) that design, as a discipline, should be undisciplined, to differentiate it from the other fully described disciplines whose methodologies and methods are geared towards control and prediction, whereas design, as an inbetween activity, follows Jonas‟s view of design as a groundless field of knowledge. We need the freedom to source our material for thought (our socalled theories) from any other discipline – the more fundamental and general the idea, the more adaptable it will prove to be, and not necessarily bound to any one discipline; 2) that theories are as subject to social constructivism as any other social concept, being our state of human understanding at any one moment, and as such subject to adaptation and change; 3) that, in order to understand something, the self must realize that this knowing is only possible “through the subject surrendering itself to the idea as subject-object”, a process that applies equally to an individual as to a whole discipline. This chapter argues for human beings as the vehicle for that design theory-as-a-way-of-seeing, and according to Wittgenstein (in the words of John Shotter) we need to remember that the research field is very much like a landscape bathed in fog, and only when we take the first tentative step into the unknown, so to speak, does any form of landmark make itself clear, to us. For that reason we need better lenses, better ways of seeing-with-a-theory (which is simply part of our new selves), and therefore Chapter 4 deals with four „theories‟ that, in conversation and in symbiosis, can form the backbone of a design theory called gramma/topology. 4 Gramma/topology: A new discourse of design knowing In this chapter I construct a version of what could be seen as a theory for design, with the proviso that a theory in this sense cannot be used as a method for application, but as merely a lens with the help of which we can look, not at, but through the descriptive problem space (Langley and Jones, 1988: 181), because critical theory as question turned inside-out paradoxically transforms a question into what could begin to be an answer, transforms the asking into the saying without losing the characteristics of either (van der Merwe, 2000b). Under similar conditions Richard Jung (2007:19) uses the term sive to denote “a descriptive conjunction-disjunction, that is as and/or or as either/or”. The four theories to be discussed are Cybernetics (inclusive of Radical Constructivism and Systems Thinking), Actor-Network Theory, Autopoiesis, and Phenomenology. First is a description of Cybernetics, and an explanation of the difference between first-order and second-order. I make out a case for regarding cybernetics as coming into being as a practical way of dealing with the world using interdisciplinary communication as a medium of interaction, a clear call for theoria to be integrated with praxis. Design is not, initially, about finding answers or solutions, but about observing the system that needs design intervention, and in this way design becomes primarily an investigative system to redefine the problem space, but design thinking can include a prediction-andpurpose combination because design is a relationship of purpose. Norbert Wiener (1982:2) spoke of the no-man‟s land, boundary regions of science as the most important, which correlates with design‟s 26 Van der Merwe (2010a), Design Issues 26(3):6-17. Prologue xvi inbetweenness on the groundless fields of knowledge where it has to reconstruct its very nature, every time a system-of-knowing is investigated. In the article27 The Magic of Three the approach is to regard design as a „groundless field of knowledge‟ that may source methodological insights from cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive studies and complexity theory, among others. The focus of this research is to model an adaptive frame-ofreference that design students may use in order to construct their own autopoietic identity systems. The semantic question How does a student obtain information about design is changed to a structural question: How could students acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment? With the backing of cybernetic principles it is apparent that this process is not only feasible but preferable. While the practical use that can be made of any design theory is not within the remit of this article, it is nonetheless the goal of theory to enhance the individual‟s analytical and communicative skills, and I suggest an autopoietic model-for-becoming that can have the virtual potential of bringing to understanding the grey areas of human-object relationships. In the sections that follow I deal with, first, a general background to systems theory, particularly with the change in mindset brought about by General System Theory, and that fact that “systems, to a certain degree, constitute self-contained and self-referential entities” (Locker, 2006:297-298). GST became critical towards the belief in universal truths, and hence declared itself to be an interdisciplinary approach, and instead, through Ludwig von Bertalanffy recognised the concept of reality as originating from distinguishable systems as opposed to having an a priori existence. What is further of interest to design thinking is the development that took place in the scientific mindset from exclusively Mode 1 knowledge production to contextualizing knowledge as a Mode-2 production, so much so that Bertalanffy (2008:112-113) could typify GST as “a new scientific doctrine of „wholeness‟”. Radical Constructivism (RC), also considered a branch of cybernetics, helps one to look into human observation that can reveal in some way what consciousness means and how it could possibly work; by human observation I mean perception as well as cognition, and the importance of RC to this thesis is that RC maintains that I cannot know anything about perception and cognition except as it pertains to the self. As for soft social constructions, I conclude that, if the focus of social constructionism is seen to be the „artifacts‟ that are designed in and for the group learning process, and social constructivism focuses on the individual learning from group interaction, then Peter Checkland‟s soft systems thinking qualifies as a social constructivist theory of knowing, one that uses explorative models not to represent reality, but to represent possible and probable change for improvement of existing situations. A conference paper,28 The Construction of a Dancing, Dangling Conversation, written from a systems and constructivist learning and teaching viewpoint, is used to illustrate these ways of viewing the design (educational) process, and it does so by telling a simple story, one that systematically developed from what my students and I have experienced over the course of a decade or so. This story is what I have come to believe in as a methodological approach to design teaching and learning. Evidence for this way of looking at renewing teaching and learning comes from Katja Tschimmel (2004), who believes that “instead of teaching in the traditional way, we should give the students tools, which provoke a new way of thinking,” and this story of mine is simply about just that, a set of tools (another set, if you must) that will enable a design student to begin “the construction of one‟s own world” (Tschimmel, 2004). 27 Van der Merwe (2007), Kybernetes 36(9/10): 1436-1457. 28 Van der Merwe (2005), Proceedings of the 6th international conference of the European Academy of Design. Prologue xvii Next comes Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and its use in highlighting the interaction between human and non-human actors, as well as the interaction between the individual and the group. As a way of sharing this knowledge among a group of like-minded people, ANT is a methodology that works well for designers, but we must remember that, as a theory, ANT is not applicable to anything (Latour, 2005 141). Any good methodology, as a good theory, is not a method for doing anything, and it is not a recipe that guarantees an outcome. Latour‟s (173-74) description of how ANT can be useful includes “specific tricks to help resist the temptation to jump to the global”, because, in the very act of communication, in forming networks (even if only between one local actor and a second), we are moving („jumping‟) from the local (the individual) to the global, to the many, to the away-from-us. “A ploy has to be found to make the two social theories diverge, letting the sociology of the social go its own way while the sociology of associations should be able to keep drawing more and more accurate maps.” When the journal MEI thus invited articles on objects and communication (Objets et Communication), I saw it as an opportunity to test-run, as it were, the applicability of ANT to design theory.29 In The secret lives of ANTs I reflect on design‟s ability to communicate with users through designed objects, and as such (design) semiotics should be seen as the study of how human beings observe and interpret the worlds they have created. The argument being assembled here is thus one that uses the theoretical frameworks of social structuration and of constructivism, but it does so through making use of the affordances of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and this leaves structuration / constructivism intact while largely negating the „social‟ as an entity in the communicative process of negotiating everyday meaning. This approach is particularly fruitful for design as a process, for designed objects are meant to communicate with specific groupings of active humans; „active‟ as in performing tasks in real-world situations that change over time and even change from region to region. Design, as an intermediary between the user and the object, cannot rely on „the social‟ as an unchanging entity that can be communicated or reasoned with. Meaning is constructed by individuals, and yet it is never subjectively individual, nor is it social, although we have become used to attributing meaning-making and meaningkeeping to this amorphous mass. That is the problem, the fact that something we have made up, an artificial something, is imbued with so much authority of signification and structuring power. In the next section I undertake an enquiry into Autopoiesis as an approach to social systems understanding, and despite Humberto Maturana not agreeing with Niklas Luhmann regarding the latter‟s use of the basic tenets of autopoiesis, an attempt will be made to reconcile both views through incorporating a social autopoiesis into design thinking. The article (below) also demonstrates student responses to this method of inquiry. In this co-authored article,30 From Problem-Solving Paradigm to Co-Ontogenic Drift: How do Learning Narratives Self-Generate?, we deal with a different kind of educational approach in contrast to the still too prevalent notion that knowledge can be transferred from teacher to student. It is now an accepted maxim in design theory and practice that real-world problems needing the attention of design practitioners are not neat and well-structured, but are, indeed, ill-structured and „wicked‟ [1] in the sense of being a part of a larger, complex social situation. It follows that, for design education to take its lead from contemporary social, political, and economic structures, it will have to seriously re-think its problem-solving paradigms, and ask whether such a paradigm, or mode of thinking, can really solve problems? Part of our answer is to investigate the use of self-generating learning narratives, and we do 29 Van der Merwe (2009), Objets et Communication MEI 30-31 279-288. 30 Van der Merwe and Brewis (2011), Leonardo 44(2): in press. Prologue xviii so through the work done by Maturana & Varela on autopoiesis, specifically the notion of co-ontogenic drift. The last section, based largely on the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger, will be used to not only „cement‟ the other sections as a unit, but it also affords the gateway to Chapter 5, to point the way to „speak complexity‟ and utilise what sounds like scientific language, i.e., managing a spacetime landscape on the edge between chaos and order. In the conference paper31 Changing a Phenomenal Change it is noted that the only change we can be sure of is that over which we do have control, when we change ourselves, and even then this control is mediated by our interactions with others, by a mediating and normative environment that includes the designed objects we let into our lives. That change is necessary is not in doubt, seen against a broad canvas of sustainable social structuration. How to go about effecting this change has to be, even if only for the sake of not making the same mistakes as have been made in the past. Change has to be controlled from within, has to be designed into being as a normal part of the individual‟s ongoing growth process. This is followed by the article32 Ontologically shaping our future: design education as revelation. Using ontological pragmatics, and by learning that what they conserve in the present (making choices) leads to the new innovative future, students can teach themselves how to deal with the uncertainty of our modern world. An argument for Maturana‟s method of changing semantic questions into structural ones is discussed, as well as Latour‟s notion of reassembling the social. An ethics of negotiation is argued next, and thus we need to rethink our own selves, including issues of sustainable ethics, very much along the lines suggested by Whitbeck (1998), who believes that, for engineering, a design process analogy can help moral decision-making to escape the rational foundationalist approach. Two questions were asked of the participants at the [conference]: How are educators shaping future designers? and How does design shape the future? This work deals with the changing design educational scenario as the backdrop to my answers to these two questions, which are both in the negative – (1) educators cannot shape future designers and (2) design cannot shape the future, but (1) design students can „shape‟ themselves, and (2) students-turned-designers can help shape the future, through having first shaped their own (possible) futures. This is not semantic word-play but ontological pragmatics. These are the four main theoretical strands that make up the framework of gramma/topology, and Chapter 5 will thus focus on this (new) conceptual blend that is offered as a „theory‟ of and for design thinking. However, this new theory, as a model of how thought may be activated, still needs another „part‟ to add to the developing „whole‟ of gramma/topology. When designers wish to grapple with future scenarios, with the unknown, they use the following cybernetic principle: every regulator must contain a model of that which is regulated. I make out an argument that this regulation / control means intrinsic control, thus re-writing the cybernetic principle as: every designer must contain a model of the situation / system / object being observed; the question is, how does one structure this intrinsic model? The first part of the answer has been offered in this chapter, while the second part is dealt with in the Chapter 5. Through dealing with, specifically, the notion of complexity, I will offer a „model‟ illustrating Monod‟s „unexpressed constituents‟, and show how all the above can work within the created environments of our spacetime landscapes (with reference to the work of Stuart Kauffman). 31 Van der Merwe (2008b), Proceedings of Changing the change, an International Conference on the Role and Potential of Design Research in the Transition Towards Sustainability. 32 Van der Merwe (2008a), Journal of Design Research 7(3):317-330. Prologue 5 xix The complex reality of creating a phenomenal spacetime landscape In the journal article A Natural Death is Announced (Chapter 3), I wrote “If we want to keep up with the contemporary flux in world affairs, we need to learn how to start conversations/dialogues, and learn how to listen to „the other‟, all of them. At the Cumulus Kyoto 2008 Conference, titled [Cu:] “emptiness” Resetting Design – A New Beginning, a Declaration was signed stating that all the people of the world live in interdependent systems for living, a veritable groundless and perfectly cybernetic field for design investigation. This Declaration calls for the merging of the sciences and humanities, technology and the arts, and puts it clearly that design thinking places itself in the midst of this important paradigm shift and must therefore redefine itself”. This, as an introduction to Chapter 5, becomes the gist of what is to follow. In the work of Jacques Maritain, Paul Ricoeur, Gregory Bateson and Martin Heidegger, among others, we find direct references to the building of a structure of / for revelation, but one that is based on nothingness. This should not pose a problem for designers, however, since they should be used to working with the what is not there yet. Metcalf (1999) says much the same about Luhmann‟s interpretation of an autopoietic system, which is one that “constructs itself upon a foundation that is entirely not there”, and the elements comprising the design conversation, the people in dialogue, construct not only their own „environments‟ but mutually construct their social environment based entirely on what is in fact not there. Design as projecting or throwing (cf. Heidegger‟s 1962:185 notion of thrownness, to project an idea ahead of its completion) thus has a different focus to design as object, and as Bonsiepe (2007:26) warns, in the debate around the nature of design research and design science, it would be best to “create free space for reflection and thus avoid making premature characterisations … In this situation, a fluid physical state is preferable to a solid one”. In opposition to bounded rationality, the ontology of equipment is discussed as an extension of our everydayness towards something more, and thus as the ontology of the self. As part of this same argument I investigate Latour and Lowe‟s (2008) notion of the migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimile. Following on this is a look at the different ways of reasoning, including inductive and deductive reasoning, in preparation for an argument for abductive reasoning, which leads into the next paper33 to be offered as an example of theory for design thinking. I began The Innovative Principle of a Design Language with reference to that which does not exist per se, which could become the content for a possible discourse for design research. In fact this discourse is a combination of the contents of the two pathways of analysis and creativity, and especially the relationship(s) between them. Through the specified complexity of a design research discourse, by focusing on similarities and parallelisms, a poetics of design could contribute to a working discourse for design research which would contain, as two essential and inseparable elements, [1] the vertically (synchronic) creative element in which imagination and the production of image draws on knowledge 'already there' (recollection or what social theory calls an 'inner storehouse' or social stock of knowledge) in selecting its associative content, or more correctly, its patterns of possible connections in parallelism. Much of implicit knowledge is found there in its content of discovery that is foregrounded while expression forms are backgrounded. This element is complexity based on the specificity of abstracted structured order. The horizontally (diachronic) analytical element [2] relies, in the last instance, on thought patterns into text via combinative expression forms. It is sequentially explicit through foregrounding discursive meaning while 33 Van der Merwe (2000), Proceedings of the Conference, Design (plus) Research, May 18-20, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. Prologue xx backgrounding though relying on, creativity's 'content of discovery.' This element is specificity based on the complexity of syntagmatic order, and demonstrates how it is possible for us to "put our thought in the place where our imagination goes" (Gunn, 1987:96). An argument for abduction is thus an argument / conversation with your outside-self that (the collective) „you’ control, a preferred situation where the self can become its own functional explanation in the fitness landscape of complexity, but before discussing the importance of complexity theory for design thinking, we need to ask how a conversation works, and through this investigation ask, who are we? In the article34 Cybernetic Conversations: Designing ourselves towards discovery it is argued that systemic thinking is something we had and then lost. By cultivating a new outlook we can rediscover and reinvent a systems mindset, and do so through the dynamics of a cybernetic design conversation, itself a notion based on a social systems design structure. Design, as a process, is a reciprocal social act of communication, but the trap we fall into is to attempt full control of not only the process but the outcomes as well, and to that end this argument offers the idea of intrinsic control, which, in turn, opens the debate as to whether we should argue from or to first principles. I discuss a visual model of what mediated communication might look like, since only communication can communicate, and likewise only a conversation can „speak‟ to another conversation. Cybernetically, meaning that when we see the observer as an autopoietic unity, we should acknowledge that operational closure means, in effect, that people do not talk to each other as much as they are talking to (having a conversation, or interacting with) themselves and their environment, and the person you are „talking‟ to, interacting with, is just an element in that environment. Having dealt with the difficulty of an easy and linear notion of inputs and outputs, the argument then moves on to the question of whether it would be better to regard communication as based on fields of force, which brings intrinsic control back into the picture. A cybernetic design conversation is far more than simply a means to a design product end, but involves all the nested systems that make up what we call the socio-technical world, and as such this conversation must naturally touch on ethics, that which will not let itself be expressed, another aspect of the entirely not there nature of much of communication. We have to find a new language of expression, and, based on the work of Davies (2000:43; 243) and Prigogine (1980:89-90), my argument will be that the complexity of quantum physics makes this possible, and even though a wavefunction is known as a mathematical object, it does represent the information content of any existing state, and most importantly, it is non-local, i.e. ubiquitous, and ideally suited to a model of social structuration. We can become our own internal information for own consumption, but we also „identify with the object itself‟, becoming part of the environmental information, sharing with the group and sharing in the group. In that sense human knowing is (at least) two wavefunctions that collide, two information structures that form a new entity via a phase transition. Individually, as the collective, we are this new single spacetime landscape, discussed in the paper35 The complexity of design as a wavefunction. (The problem between us is) How do we „speak‟ complexity? We have to rid ourselves of the notion that language is a neat system that functions as an almost infallible tool, and that in describing disorder or 34 Van der Merwe, J. (2010c), Image & Text: a Journal for Design (16):22-39. This text was first published in the Proceedings of the 20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, University of Vienna, Austria, 6-9 April 2010, then reworked for the journal. 35 Van der Merwe (2007), Pre-Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy, February 22-23, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Prologue xxi complexity or neat theories of everything we can cope better with our own internal chaos of notknowingness (below). Language is not a system (Luhmann, 1997), therefore we do not „have‟ it, cannot posses it in that way, and neither is there any disorder in the universe, if, as Bohm (1998) states, we mean to imply a complete absence of order. In the same vein there is no such thing as complexity, if what we really mean to say is that things are not as neatly knowable as we would like, and that therefore what we do not understand should labelled as chaotic or too complex to understand or deal with. Wheeler made this provocative statement at a Santa Fe Institute meeting in 1990, “There is no out there out there” (quoted in Norretranders, 1999: 10, 201); if we can accept that there is no objective and accessible reality out there, as Rorty (1992) also believed, where does that leave the idea of „complexity‟? Where, exactly, is complexity to be found? Like the idea of design itself, it is elusively always and already elsewhere. Is complexity, then, to be found in here? It is in that sense that, when Kauffman (1995) says that “we need to paint a new picture” when discussing the relationship between self-organization and selection, I would interpret that as an injunction to re-design the relationship between self-organization (autopoiesis/inside) and selection (non-equilibrium/outside). If we need to learn how to speak complexity (as if we were learning a new form of Esperanto) we need to find it first. We need to discover that there is no outside, and neither is there, really, an observable inside. The complex answer to the problem of us is to redesign, to rethink how we become, and that happens nowhere, and it happens here-and-now, but not as we are used to. Not only is consciousness a wonderfully complex phenomenon, normal human beings manage to perform the most complex tasks without thinking. What we are looking for we do anyway, but we cannot see it: we seem to think it is something else altogether, something very practical and not philosophical enough to make us think further than the surface meaning of the words. We need to rethink the notion of conversation. The problem between us, at least in my design world, looks somewhat like a wavefunction, although Kauffman uses a patchwork quilt to illustrate this point. What he calls a patch procedure (Kauffman, 1995: 252) is visually quite simple: imagine the space, all the space, that can constitute your life-world. Imagine it as a patchwork quilt, with each patch the parts of a non-serial, difficult-to-solve problem (much like life, really). He is talking about spacetime, in equilibrium, a space that contains nothing, a flat quilt with no colour and no pattern but nevertheless, there, a something that we use as yardstick. The minute we add things, like gravity, movement (time), attractors, then the quilt starts to react, or rather, the quilt is drawn upon, warped, becomes a landscape that is trying to change (transform) itself into a fitness landscape, but the trouble between us, is that all the patches, the squares that make up the quilt, are trying to do the same thing. “Each patch climbs toward fitness peaks on its own landscape, but in doing so deforms the fitness landscape of its partners” (Kauffman, 1995: 253), and this happens because finding a solution in one patch will change the nature of the problem for another patch, through the act of networking or interconnection; we are all part of this crazy quilt spacetime landscape we call social reality. 6 The continuing argument to the self In this last chapter I present a few last ideas as to how we might design and nurture our new identities. Gramma/topology will always remain a work in progress, and students and staff alike can learn how to renew their own forms of knowing while renewing the structure of design as a discipline. I make use of Boland and Lyytinen‟s idea that narratives can be investigated in the process of creating a design identity, a notion I then expand on by means of the concept of meta-design, adding the three-step process of Barthesian Eco/s to this mix. Designers do build narratives even in the process of designing Prologue xxii objects, and more so when designing for whole systems, and these narratives have a „designing-back‟ effect on the user but also on the designer (on „the world‟, in fact). Apropos of this, the next section deals with the notion of flow (of information) and the fact that nothing is ever lost, it is merely recycled; energy is never lost but reappears in a new form, and so does information. It is therefore not too impossible to believe, in terms of design education, that Gadamer‟s notion that education uses us can make a difference to the direction that design as a profession may take, and that we are a part of the continuing story that tells itself. The chapter ends with reference to a design education of concern, one that includes a compassionate rationality, followed by a brief summation of this research and the salient points of gramma/topology. 7 A new beginning In the last chapter I make suggestion for a practical outcome for a gramma/topological way of thinking in terms of a renewed design education, and suggest that we allow the users of design education, the students, to take their rightful place as skilled practitioners of learning. I maintain that there can be no conclusion to this thesis, precisely because of its very nature as a radical construction. I am well aware of the fact that in an academic document this is seen by some as a failing in terms of research rigour, and have been advised by some colleagues to avoid using words such as I have no answer to … (cf. Chapter 4:170; Chapter 6:319) and I don’t know … (cf. Chapter 4:107; Chapter 6:319), and yet it is perfectly acceptable to refer to e.g., Shotter (1995) telling us that Wittgenstein‟s investigations, when confronting a philosophical problem, was of the I don’t know my way about kind, which Shotter explains as follows, “It is as if he is imagining us in a great landscape … but lost in a fog, trying to find landmarks, attempting to get our bearings, thus to continue with our projects”. Another example is from Donald Schön (1987), who fully expects the student (designer) to experience, in the “indeterminate zones of practice – uncertainty, situations of confusion and messiness where you don‟t know what the problem is”. My research begins with this type of observational position, and by-and-large ends with the recommendation that we should not lose what is valuable in this I don’t know attitude; it is far better to admit to not-knowing while being able to help your(other)self design your own landmarks, and so to find a way through what Schön described as a lowland marsh, i.e., difficult terrain to navigate. There can be no conclusion in the sense that no practical in-the-world problem has been solved, and no method has been created, except for this: gramma/topology, as an open source theory of knowing acts as a wayfinding mechanism, a personal GPS through both Wittgenstein‟s and Schön‟s landscapes. That is the only „product‟ I will allow into the discussion, and even then it is not gramma/topology that is the „product‟, but the new form being design when an observer engages with another, in a cybernetic conversation. However, there can always be new beginnings, and so I answer the question, where to from here? by suggesting a possible approach to the reconceptualization of design education, and as a suggestion for the future use of a gramma/topological way of thinking, I offer a dialogue between a gramma/topological mindset and two case studies, the first being a brave manifesto from Lucy Kimbell, Prologue xxiii and the second dealing with several articles written for the journal Reflection, describing various approaches to design thinking at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture in Ghent, Belgium. This flexible attitude towards what is studied, which equates with an observer of observations that must acquire a structure of knowing that is „flexible‟ in the sense of being calibrated by what is being observed, already points to the inclusion in the overall curriculum of another mechanism that can scaffold the learning process, namely Pask‟s entailment mesh, an as yet protean idea that is beginning to take shape in my department, and one that I have high hopes for being realised, sooner rather than later, i.e., this design of an open-source e-learning platform that functions as a co-ontogenic entailment mesh. But, and this is an essentialist problem with traditional and managerialist-style education, the student is not the „client‟ for whose needs we have to cater, instead, the student is the user of the design education system (never „product‟), and as such they have to be treated, not as mere users (read „consumers‟) of design but as co-creators of their own „design‟, and to this end I offer a last argument for treating students as skilled practitioners. Contemporary design education 1 1 Contemporary design education in a complex, social world of constructed realities The Gate Design is still struggling to come to grips with itself as a discipline and with its place in the world, although that is due, I think, more to the reverse creativity of the mythologies of the artificial 1 than it is due to a lack of depth in design‟s importance to the world at large. We are undoubtedly on the brink of a new era of sensibility, both philosophically/ethically-oriented and technologically-assisted 2 human sensibility, with this modern mix of sensate inputs leading almost inevitably to a renewed worldview among designers and users alike. That the essence of designed objects, and hence design as a force in shaping the world, has been overlooked for so long is partly explained by the fact that we have been sold images of mass produced products, images of an artificial lifestyle we need to buy into, in order to share in the dream of the good, albeit artificial, life. Particularly after the Second World War the creative mythology-producing machinery of the advertising industry intensified its experiment in social engineering, persuading willing consumers to change their lifestyles and their habits, i.e., their family and social patterns, to suit the manufacturing patterns of industry. Women had been persuaded before the war to „do their duty‟ by joining the office and factory workers, taking the place of men who had been called up for service, while after the war it was their „duty‟ to relinquish those same jobs to the men returning from the war, and to return to their roles as homemakers, a function that would be supported by all the mechanical servants now on offer, and put on display by the reverse creativity of the advertising industry whose job it was to promote modern myths. All those mechanical servants – amazing vacuum cleaners, sparkling white refrigerators, great big ovens large enough for a king-size turkey, and the best of all, a brand new washing machine – all of these promised to make life not only better, but to also turn the housewife into a more caring mother, a more loving wife supportive of her husband, and a pillar of the community in the eyes of the other housewives in the street. This (mythical) narrative, that is largely still sold to the public today, is not sustainable, and not the type of sensibility that design as a whole should strive for and promote. It is hard to perceive the real worth of mechanical servants when they are merely servants, for, like the postman, nobody notices them. Even in our age these servants of humanity are so numerous but still so invisible that Bruno Latour (1992) has to ask, where are the missing masses? In the last section of this chapter I return to this idea of visible and invisible designed objects, and the very fact that we can have a discussion on whether we „see‟ artefacts or not seems to indicate a difference in attitude to design per se. Latour‟s missing masses will probably remain „missing‟ for the most part, in the sense of people 1 As I explain in the text, we surround ourselves with, and are surrounded by, designed artificial environments and objects (cf. reference to Margolin‟s work), a state of affairs we have become used to. There is, however, also a type of „exchange relationship‟ between us and our whole environment (including design objects), which means we are affected by what surrounds us as if we were in conversation with everything that is external to us as biological beings (a fact that ensures the success of the advertising industries), and these artificial (designed by „us‟, really) voices can speak of things either factually true, or they can create stories that are closer to myths (constructed stories that become beliefs) than to perceived reality (and, admittedly, myths and perceived reality can be one and the same thing). This is what I mean by using the term reverse creativity, since designed products are involved in our lives (for the most part) as part of our own creativity, or our ways of doing things (faster, better, more accurately, more creatively, etc.), and yet it has to be borne in mind that this creative ability might be an artificial story that belongs to the designed object (the voice of its creator) and not to the person interacting with that designed object, which reverses the creativity involved in the exchange relationship. 2 The fact that we can see previously invisible parts of our world (from molecules to viruses to particles) and our universe (e.g., pictures of the universe „at birth‟ and its temperature) with increasing accuracy does have a transformative effect in the long run. With the development of ever faster and complex computing power we are becoming used to „seeing‟ what is in fact not physically present. Contemporary design education 2 not being sensitive to the presence of these objects as subjects, for that is what it takes to make them more visible to humans who only regard themselves as subjects that can be noticed (witness the plight of too many pets and wild animals because they are seen as objects and not subjects). However, design itself, what the process, in conjunction with other disciplines, is capable of, is changing, and one of the ways it is coming to the fore - in terms of people‟s conscious awareness - is that designed objects are no longer just stand-alone artefacts, even when they practically seem to be, e.g., the cellphone that is not only connected to and dependent upon communication technologies, but also to the imaging industry (photography) and now the music industry, to name but a few connections. Designed artefacts are now also embedded and situated far more prominently than ever before, and as such design, as a discipline, gets more exposure through its objects and systems that are becoming part of visible daily life. Designed objects and systems are now allowed to „intrude‟ into our lives on a more personal and subjective basis than ever before, and our perception of these previous „invisible servants‟ is changing. And yet, the reverse creativity of the mythologies of the artificial is still in operation today, and can become a bigger problem than in the past, since the artificial is becoming even more artificial through ubiquitous computing, and hence has the chance of becoming even more invisible, which is, confusingly, both a good and a bad thing. That interesting problem (of the visible / invisible dichotomy) will be tackled in Chapter 2: Myths and other social narratives, but in this chapter I will deal with issues of design education which, naturally, have to take into account the changing world circumstances within which designed objects have to function, and, since the sociocultural world is becoming far more complex than even a few decades ago, we have to look at the new realities that design education needs to confront if it is to succeed in preparing designers of the future to deal with changes unforeseen by both our own and our parent‟s generation. We have to find a new framework of understanding, because the objects we surround ourselves with are obviously artificial, and so are the houses we live in, and even our „natural‟ landscapes are more designed and artificial than we would like to admit. The mere fact of artificiality is not the issue, but what is of importance is that we become used to this fact of life (this „necessary‟ arrangement, or compromise to circumstances), and what we are used to increasingly transforms the way we see ourselves, the way our identities are being shaped. To design is to create the artificial, but human beings are very resourceful and adaptable, and we become used to incorporating into our framework of thought (which is primarily directed at ourselves and our way of dealing with the environment) these artificial objects, events, and circumstances (social groupings being an example). Within an admitted politics of the artificial we need to pay attention to the “larger issues of how contemporary social discourse is conducted” (Margolin, 2002:17), and design education is a very important part of that social discourse, because the only „natural‟ part we have left is our humanness3 and how that is construed and constructed, designed, as it were. We have the choice of becoming more or less human, more or less „natural‟ within the politics4 of the artificial. The concept of the artificial is not a choice between good or bad, it is neither black nor white, and so the interesting problem to be jump-started in this chapter is, in which direction do we steer future design education? If critical thinking cannot unravel what the real concept of „the artificial‟ means to us, we may as well give up. I interprettranslate5 Margolin‟s (2002:119) use of the term spirituality as referring to the connection we still have to our innate humanness, and when he states that “A metanarrative of spirituality can help designers resist technorhetoric that sanctions the continuous colonization of the natural”, this refers to a new discourse of the social that, also, focuses on a comprehension of being-human, while it concerns 3 I prefer this somewhat awkward term to the use of „humanity‟, since humanness focuses more on the individual‟s contribution, while humanity lets individuals hide in the group. 4 Let us not forget that „politics‟ derives from the body politic, polity [Greek politeia, i.e., citizenship or government], of and for the people. 5 Erasure (a deconstructive device) has led me to this point: critical thinking transforms rather than transports. Contemporary design education 3 itself with the construction of being-social. This position borders closely on the question asked by Willis (1999) as to whether the construction of being–social means that technology designs us or we design technology: “Interpretation is inseparable from the ontological designing process”. Willis clearly follows Heidegger in not privileging the one over the other, but, rather, she leaves the choice, the shifting of focus, to the human element in the equation. To resists technorhetoric is to go against the grain of modernity and to resist the temptation offered by your fellow social circle members who have already made that choice, and who, quite naturally, resent an outsider perception to their culturally formative, collective choice, and therefore, to their „voice‟ or identity. The „natural‟ in Margolin‟s text is not to be found in contemporary culture, at least not the direction it has taken so far, since the future needs a new definition of the „natural‟, a position that can only be reached if both designers and technologists are willing to collaborate and consciously re-design the composition of the artificial. If we are willing to reflect seriously on what our made environment means to us we may “resist the reduction of the artificial to simulacra” (Margolin, 2002:119), which means we can resist the temptation of capitalist convenience to reduce our involvement in and control over our own environmental development by being actively involved in our own social discourse, thus not letting the depth of the socially-inspired „artificial‟ be reduced to the shallowness (appearance sans content) of a simulacrum. This chapter, then, begins with a general introduction to the state of design and some thoughts on issues we can focus on, such as the inclusion of the social as a natural part of design thinking, as well as an issue that is quite central to this thesis, namely that design education, while taking the individual as the foundation for thinking about design‟s renewal, has to do so from within the individual-group interrelationship. A motivation for change is looked at next, and a case made for why and how design is changing, before dealing with the current and future state of design education. The importance of a theoretical framework is suggested, leading into a discussion on discourses of teaching and learning. An argument is made for design education based on a social (radical) constructivist 6 framework, with some discussion relating to the advisability of not separating the two streams of undergraduate and postgraduate learning. The core investigative approach binding these together is that of research, and we take a closer look at the idea of an undergraduate research university, a structure comprised of the combined perspectives afforded by the notion of scholarship, on the one hand, and social constructivism, on the other. The chapter ends with a bridging section that links with Chapter 2, and in which I remind the reader that not only is design as discipline and as education changing, but so are we changing in the sense of adapting to a world populated by these new designed hybrids whose technorhetoric we have to resist and manage. Introduction It can be argued that the prevailing notion of design (there are of course exceptions) still seems to be based on a linear cause & effect process that relies on logic, rationality and scientific rigour, a very orderly practice that guarantees control and defined outcomes. Unfortunately, this can result in fixed structures protective of design „truths‟ and hence restrictive of thought patterns, and by concentrating on what is being designed and not reflecting on why these objects are being designed, we seem to have created a design crisis in self-conception. On the other hand, much has been said about the new era of design that acknowledges the shift in focus from the object itself to the process of design, and in many fields of design the importance of a user-centred methodology has been emphasised, with this general 6 I am aware of the difference that is said to exist between social constructivism and social constructionism. The latter seems to focus more on the artifacts (designed products or designed systems, including social systems) created by humans, while the former focuses more on the individual‟s ability to construct knowledge within social groupings. However, for the purposes of this thesis and because the term will be used to help define the workings of design and specifically design education, I prefer to use social constructivism to denote both the human learning process and the relationships we have with our designed artifacts. Contemporary design education 4 approach further evolving to include the significance of the users‟ experience. However, any approach to design research, theory and practice that deliberately includes the social element has to relinquish at least part of the „guaranteed‟ control leading to defined outcomes that it depended on previously. Consider, then, this question: How do designers know when they are on the right track if there are no guarantees in design, if there are no set formulas to follow? How is it possible to design anything at all, let alone be innovative? Too many designers are trying to adapt to a new and complex world environment with a mindset that was formed during their educational phase, a somewhat prescriptive mindset that was based largely on set formulas and ways-of-doing that just about guaranteed the outcomes. Once a designer starts off on this road of social inclusion, however, the situation becomes worse. How does any designer progress to the point of being able to handle situations in our contemporary and complex socio-technical world? 7 How is it possible for any one individual to be able to deal with a multitude of complex and seemingly opaque socio-technical situations that are encountered in the contexts that need design solutions? In order to know which directions (the process of) design needs to take at any given stage, where do we look to for answers? There seems to be far more questions than there are answers, and isn‟t design about finding answers to practical problems? Wrong. Design is not about finding set-answer solutions, as if the socio-technical does not matter and will not influence the design process as a whole, and in the long run. If we only had to concentrate on the technical - the „artificial environment‟ - that is relatively unproblematic, and to solve problems using such an approach engineers successfully used a methodology called cybernetics (now recognised as First-Order Cybernetics), a system of control that depended on negative feedbacks, hence the guarantees of defined outcomes. When this same system was transplanted to the study of the social, however, it was soon found that a negative feedback system, used to control the outcomes, simply was not possible, or indeed, desirable. People do not like to be controlled as if they have no choice, and hence no control over their own actions and decisions, and so the adaptation to cybernetic thought brought about Second-Order Cybernetics, a system of positive feedbacks that studies thinking and acting human beings, a system in which the observer of that system (in our case the designer) becomes an integral part. A positive feedback system inevitably means that whatever is fed back into the system changes the system itself, the way people think and the way they operate, an iterative process that amounts to a learning process. Seen against this background, if design were primarily to be seen as a process of finding solutions to defined problems, it would have to use a system of negative feedbacks, and hence control over the whole process, leaving little or no space for the involvement of the social. Accept the positive feedback approach to design thinking and the involvement of the social becomes not just indispensable, but crucial to the designer‟s ability to find direction, and knowing if the design process is on the right track or not; all of this depends on the total context and not on any single individual. Design is not, initially, about finding answers or solutions, but about observing the system that needs design intervention, and in this way design becomes primarily an investigative system to redefine the problem space, for, as John Chris Jones (1988: 224) stated, “the „right‟ requirements are in principle unknowable by users, customers, or designers at the start”. Observing the system also means redefining the so-called problem, for not only is it wrong to assume the stable nature of the problem requirements, but pre-empting the solution in this way means nothing much will be learned from the whole process, and hence very little innovation becomes possible. We all work with what most people would either call (professional) intuition, „know-how‟ or tacit knowledge, the knowledge base we have 7 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) will be discussed in Chapter 3, since part of my research argument is that we cannot investigate the human relationship with design without looking closely at a socio-technical interrelationship as well, and ANT regards human and nonhuman (the technical, or all designed artefacts) roles as mutually formative. Contemporary design education 5 built up over the course of a design career. Paradoxically, this working method can be the worst barrier to product innovation, because “At the start one‟s intuition is likely to be wrong, informed by what is, but not by what is to be conjured into existence” (Jones, 1984:136). Designing more of what already exists, or derivatives of the same, is not what design education and practice should be about, not in our contemporary and very complex world with its quite specific and socially-based, and wide-ranging, problem environments that need addressing by people capable of systemic thinking. I will argue (below) that there are too many designers now having to work with complex world environments while using the learned thinking tools of the industrial age, set formulas that bring about guaranteed outcomes. For this reason they need rigid operational requirements, not realising that these same initial requirements can be very misleading, for the real requirements emerge from the collaborative design process (other designers, clients, users) that is, at the same time, a learning process (Jones, 1988:223). A good case in point is MIT‟s Engineering Systems Design (ESD, 2008). They have reconsidered their educational approach to design thinking, and with this process they obviously wish to influence design practice in the real world. That, I agree, can best be achieved by re-thinking design education to focus on the benefits of socio-technical relationships, thus my educational approach of focusing on the individual and his / her interactions with the world. Another department at MIT (Aeronautics and Astronautics), as part of the CDIOTM Initiative, also focuses on the individual via conceptual understanding (using constructivism as a learning tool), but they do so within the individual/group/realworld-needs relationship (Darmofal, et al., 2002). It is in this sense that the individual, as a critical thinker, can use design as a type of innovation intelligence, as Clark and Smith (2008) believe, and since design “innovation‟s terrain is expanding” it would be wise to use systemic solutions to solve complex real-world problems (Brown, 2008). But, given that we can be persuaded to take this road of social inclusion, and are, further, prepared to tackle the complexity of socio-technical interrelationships, we still have to investigate how it is possible for any one individual to deal with multiple and complex situations. In design education more urgently than in design practice we have to find ways of focusing on both the individual and the group, and investigate how it is possible for individuals to think as if each constitutes a group. The individual, in an ontological sense, comes before the group, yet, seemingly quite in contradiction, the individual self cannot come into being without the input from the group, from others external to this individual self. To that end I will argue (below) for radical social constructivism as part of a design discourse, since it takes the stance that social reality is constructed, following the lead set by Dewey, Vygotsky, and Piaget, among others. Even though individual subjectivity is part and parcel of this process, it is because the formation of each individual self depends on similar processes occurring in other subjective selves that the larger picture of social construction and re-construction can be studied, its actions investigated, and, in line with second-order cybernetics, these observing systems (each human, thinking being) can themselves become aware of their own observations. “Ceccato spoke of operational awareness, deliberately leaving implicit that he was focusing on the construction of knowledge” (Von Glasersfeld, 2005:9), which, for educational purposes, means that students can learn how to learn, in the same way that Jones (1988) stated the designer has to learn what the requirements are, from the process of investigative design thinking. Students of design can thus also begin to learn that designed objects and systems absolutely depend, for their coming-into-existence, on many external-to-„design‟, and quite complex, factors that emerge during the socially constructed processes of daily life. Contemporary design education 6 A background motivation for change Designers have been described as change agents, and change is definitely in our contemporary air. The question is, who determines what these changes are, what they are about, and what they mean for design as a profession? For designers to function as change agents – since „design‟ needs to be about action and change – they have to examine the nature of contemporary design, and from within that viewpoint look at the trends in design. Some of the larger companies seem to be reversing the product design trend that has had a rich economic base as its non-thinking (in sustainable design terms) raison d‟être for many decades now - in fact, a trend that has existed ever since the notion of planned obsolescence in design was first discussed when mass production became possible. It would seem as if General Electric, Nokia, and Proctor & Gamble are “creating entry-level goods for emerging markets”, but then also „re-importing‟ these „new products‟ (at a fraction of the cost of the original design) for the benefit of first-world markets (Jana, 2009). This would seem a good idea, because in these first world economies design has traditionally been brought into being for a mass and economically stable market (with its associated buying power) without taking the real people who make up that market into account: a consumerism market presupposes a large and captive audience willing and able to listen to the product-speak of the large companies. But perhaps this reverse trend has less to do with a change in how companies and manufacturers regard their users, as it has to do with the economic recession. Such a quick change of heart regarding user expectation has less to do with altruism than with economic expediency, since “Not making a purchase was the most powerful impulse in the global economy … Last year [2008] there was ample evidence that the muscle consumers were flexing most was that of constraint” (Hockenberry, 2009). As Jana (2009) emphasizes, the first-world customers are in need of bargains, and these companies can „score again‟ by means of their „trickle-up‟ innovative thinking, hence the re-importation of goods originally meant for emerging markets. An example of this is the MAC 800, a portable ECG system that weighs a mere 3 kg instead of the nearly 30 kg for a standard machine. It comes with a laptop-type battery and a cellphone type keyboard, and is meant to improve the “Connectivity within a physician‟s work environment [that] is key to coordinate care and improved diagnoses” (medGadget, 2009). A pity, then, that the target market physician was a Chinese one, and that the device was not originally designed (i.e. planned) for the first-world market. As Jana‟s (2009) article bears out, past-their-prime products used to be passed on to emerging markets “as if they were unloading fleets of used cars”, but this „new reverse trend‟ is proving much more profitable. So what is a product designer to do? Why design cheaper products for first-world markets that can well afford more expensive equipment? What does the term affordance mean, and who are these users being designed for? Take an even bigger step back, and dare to ask “What is good design?”, because this question “goes further than designers‟ personal need for recognition and reveals a much deeper cultural anxiety about consumerism” (Hall, 2009). To attempt an answer to the last question first, good design is not what the MoMA exhibition of 1951 portrayed it as being (if it sells well it must be „good‟). Hall is of course correct in assuming a moral dimension to this question, and we may well ask with him, “Whose „good‟ are we talking about?” A further elaboration on this first answer would be to turn in the direction of the „social good‟, and ask what these users can afford, in terms of buying power, but more importantly, in terms of Gibson‟s notion of affordance, by asking, can we afford to allow this mechanical / technical device to enter into our network of social relations, given the possible (some foreseen but others unforeseen) results of its presence; will convenience help us do our work more Contemporary design education 7 efficiently, or will convenience become the enemy of an existing social and work fabric? Even though Norman (1999) differed from Gibson, in the former‟s initial translation and use of the term affordance, Norman now acknowledges the broader definition of affordance as reflecting “the possible relationships among actors and objects: they are properties of the world”, and it is these relationships between useractors and designed objects that should be the core business of design education. So where is a product designer to find direction? Change is definitely in the air, in terms of an enforced economic re-think that makes all types of consumers, from individual users to large institutions (cf. the medGadget example, above), think twice about buying-as-usual, but, more importantly for design as a discipline, change has been in the air for some considerable time now. Lancaster and Northumbria Universities jointly hosted a Design PhD Conference (2009) based on the interrelationships between sustainability, innovation and design: “The changing nature of our activities - reflecting changes in society, technology, the environment and business – demands the development of new creative directions … and new kinds of designers and creative professionals”. Findeli (2001:11) has warned designers about this transformative paradigm shift, and he called upon them to “open up the scope of inquiry … and push back the boundaries of our system in order to include other important aspects of the world in which design is practiced”. This call to action was addressed at the Cumulus Kyoto 2008 Conference, entitled [Cu:] “emptiness” Resetting Design – A New Beginning, and a Declaration was signed which stated that all the people of the world live in interdependent systems for living, a veritable groundless and perfectly cybernetic field for design investigation. This Declaration calls for the merging of the sciences and humanities, technology and the arts, and puts it clearly that design thinking places itself in the midst of this important paradigm shift, and must therefore redefine itself (Kyoto Design Declaration, 2008). These calls to action are based on real world challenges, and in Brighton 0506-07 (Boddington et al., 2008) a number of international designers ask that the design community take on the challenges confronting design today, something that sites such as NextD, Doors of Perception and dott07 (the UK Design Council‟s Designs of the time 2007), amongst others, have been doing for some time past. We should rather ask the question, why does it take the design community, and design education, such a long time to change the course of this lumbering ship? Boddington et al. are asking designers to seriously look at ways to transform society through the powerful influence of design. Calls for action and redefinition are not sent out by a few isolated individuals, but by movements in design thinking and sensibility - e.g., one of the keynote speakers at the Design PhD Conference (2009) is Alistair Fuad-Luke, who has become the „face‟ of Slow Design, a mode of interaction/living that promotes sustainability both material and metaphysical, as does another design thinker, Ezio Manzini, who has done much to promote sustainability in design and living patterns (cf. Changing the Change conference, 2008). These designers are representative of changes in design thinking, aligned with realworld paradigm shifts, finding, for instance, that in many different cultures around the world “an obsession with things is being replaced by a fascination with events” (Manzini, quoted in Thackara, 2006:6). Calls for action and redefinition also mean that, as Thackara (2006:7) puts it, the solo designer (who relies on stable problem requirements to guarantee the outcome – cf. above) that acts as a „celebrity‟ more than a facilitator of design solutions is no longer needed, being consequentially not part of the real-world context that harbours the complex systems that are shaped by the actors who initiate, construct and maintain these systems (cf. Actor-Network Theory, below). Designers are changing their roles from individuals essentially outside the system under observation (the sole author of objects, vide Thackara) to being simply one of the actors among the larger group of actors that need the design facilitation; design thinking changes from an individual supplying the group with a solution, to a new individual/group relationship that allows (affords) design solutions to emerge from particular social contexts. Contemporary design education 8 It is in this sense that individuals need to learn how to „think like a group‟ (Introduction, above), and how to learn and experience, systemically, what becoming part of a group network for design can mean for (individual) design thinking. Not only is social reality constructed, but also the complex social contexts that design thinking has to function in, a living and working context that is in no small part due to the interrelationships between user-actors and designed objects, and the best way to assure a new and sustainable future for design as a human activity is to redesign design education itself. The state of design education According to many sources (below) design education still concentrates too much on styling and formgiving, but a curriculum that does not challenge students, one that makes it easy to move from logical idea to the logic of the finished form, is not conducive to development and innovation. Despite the increase in the complexity of social, economic and political structures on a world-wide scale, and the consequent increase in the complexity of designed objects, we have inherited design as an effect of the machine age c. 1851, and as a guild-oriented arts and crafts activity, something the modern world simply does not recognise anymore. Design, both as an activity and as education, must be approached from fresh vantage points to rethink and to broaden its character, and to do so a new educational structure is required. Not only do we need an understanding of the objects we design, we also need this same instructional understanding of the users of those objects and the contexts within which both function (Jonas, 1997; Gedenryd, 1998; Kapustin, 1998; Michl, 2002; Beucker, 2004; Restrepo, et al., 2004; Formosa & McDonagh, 2005; Kolko, 2005; Pombo & Tschimmel, 2005). Not all design education curricula hold to this type of outmoded view, and one of the new design trends today is to focus on process instead of product, but the mere fact that these observations can still be made is cause for concern. “Perhaps design today is a reductionist parody of what should be a truly systemic activity” (Broadbent, 2005). Much has been written about design methodology and the process of design, but too often, with hindsight, it can be said that to design in such a prescribed manner simply does not work, and that a much more sense-making and authentic practice is called for (Gedenryd, 1998:1). I would rather follow Jonas (2004) in declaring design, as a groundless field of knowledge, free from such prescription and allow design to re-create itself as a systemic 8 activity. To do so design education will need to concentrate on the learning process itself, which means un-learning conditioned and uncreative habits, moving towards authentic, competent and cognitive design processes and practices, generic and holistic skills and understanding, and the promotion of life-long learning and development. New educational models must allow students to construct their own learning capabilities, thus structuring their own modes of knowledge acquisition, in order to liberate themselves from programmed knowledge and, instead, allow for emergence as a creative input (Gedenryd, 1998; Basadur, in Van Patter, 2002; Albers et al., 2004; Beucker, 2004; Dowlen & Edwards, 2004; Overbeeke et al., 2004; Giaccardi & Fischer, 2005; Pombo & Tschimmel, 2005). A design methodology for future design development begins with the individual and ends with the group, but to do that we have to set aside, for now, the practical design of objects and, instead, concentrate on how and why designed objects come into being in the first place. If we do not forget that modern design is much more about the process than it is about the product, that means we can acknowledge the human element in the design thinking process, and so make sense of this statement: “It is ourselves … that are the real purpose of designing. The biggest mistake is to take the product alone as the aim. It is always secondary” (Jones, 1988:224). Now we can start to ask questions such as, how do designers 8 To learn in a systematic way has been the traditional education path, and leads to often to rote learning, while a systemic approach sees the learner as part of a larger system, but one that does not dictate what and how to learn. Contemporary design education 9 design (synonymous with, how do designers think?), and how do they know when designing becomes innovation? Anne Richards (2008) makes an important connection between the work of Elinor Gadon and Gerard de Zeeuw, in the sense that we have to pay attention to the relationship between the individual and the group, e.g., Gadon found through self-observation what many researchers believe to be the case: quality research is often driven by personal curiosity, with the focus on “a certain quality of mind and personality”, and, for good measure, Richards also found that this type of quality research “is not just about publishing for career advancement but for the social good”. Similarly, De Zeeuw speaks of acquiring a high quality experience within one such “social good”, which he describes as „stable collectives‟, making a point, however, of warning that we have to focus on the difference between knowledge and experience: “people may have knowledge, while stable collectives are high quality experience”. As part of their social constructivist education my students learn to deal with the ramifications of systems theory, firstly, to prepare them for actor-network theory, the ideal vehicle for observing a stable and sustainable „collective‟ in the making, an emergent situation only made possible because of a co-design collaboration between a social group with specific needs, and the group of (student) designers who wish to create designs for a civil society: design for the „social good‟. Both „personal‟ knowledge and group „knowledge‟ can be engendered at the same time, and the „design situation‟ of the group dynamic provides the high quality experience, something that many professional designers cannot seem to observe while it is happening. Secondly, in re-thinking design education to focus on the benefits of socio-technical relationships, it means my approach to this situation is to not regard designed objects as of primary concern, but to begin with, as well as to observe, the smallest element in the design / artefact / social / world relationship: the individual and his / her interactions with all things external to the self. It also means that students may benefit from the insights of a study of phenomenology, and specifically the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger, which not only deals with the socio-technical relationship, but sheds light on the seeming dichotomy of the individual / group problem. It is a contemporary given that designing for the social good, while dealing with a formative interaction between the individual and the group, is a matter of complexity-in-action. The world that the designer has to deal with, be concerned with in Heidegger‟s terms, is a complex one, and we are not educating students for meaningful work once they enter this new world, according to Davis (2008). This author believes that design education treats the fact of complexity as a problem to be „designed away‟ through positivistic reductionism, an old scientific treatment of anything that „lacks‟ control. Davis deals head-on with the increasing distance between the real-world circumstances of design practice and what is being taught in our design schools, citing this (negative) relationship as „disorienting‟, a term that is very apt in the light of the discussion to follow. Design education, as I believe large sections of design practice still demonstrate, avoids the complex problem of the making of meaning in the first place, and the still greater problem of „designing‟ that meaning into an artefact / system, in the second place. Not only is design as educational subject, and design as practice, a complex relational system instead of a straightforward how-to model of simplistic form-giving, but students can, very early on, learn to deal with design basics while becoming familiar with the expressive qualities of the complex and the applied (Davis, 2008). Looking forward to what the designer of 2015 should be capable of, a recent AIGA research project highlights a number of trends for the future of both design education and design practice (Davis, 2008), the gist of the report being corroborated by the Design for Future Needs (ICSID, 2001) project, run by European designers in collaboration with the business establishment, on behalf of the European Commission, while the ICSID/Danish Designers (2008) research project concentrated on design‟s vital role in society and the impact this should have on education: Contemporary design education • 10 Design is being described as a „weak‟ discipline because it has to deal with increasingly complex real-world challenges, which means design is seen as interpretative instead of prescriptive, forming a social discourse about reality in which hard facts are subordinate to perception and experience. • Design is in need of new sources and a new basis of knowledge that will act as a new foundation for meeting the needs of users of the future, necessitating new techniques and practices that can responsibly and sustainably deal with emerging issues. • Being a „weak‟ discipline (cf. „weak‟ nuclear forces), design operates on the strengths of a many-method platform while taking account of new and hybrid technologies; each new project for social interaction uses this new platform to blend such methods as are locally suitable, resulting in multiple future visions applicable globally. • This approach leads to underscoring the importance of community, impossible without regarding the people we design for as co-designers in some form of collaborative and participatory process; design methods are now user-centred and dialogue-driven, fostering understanding between diverse groups. • With the original meaning of the word „design‟ changing from form-giving to design-as-planning we can look at the value-added potential of design as an innovation tool • All this does mean that students have to learn how to work in large, interdisciplinary teams in order to deal with a complex and largely unknown future while acquiring the capability to effect transformation. Working within the socio-technical sphere and mining data-into-information from the users themselves will enable future designers to generate rich results from what appears to be poor and scattered inputs. One thing, above all else, is non-negotiable: “We have to kill the myth about the solitary designer, who can see through the complexity of this world alone” (ICSID/Danish Designers, 2008), and nowhere is this changed vision for design made any clearer than in developing countries. Reminiscent of the statement that Danish design students “possess a large degree of humanistic understanding” (ICSID/Danish Designers, 2008), Tim Brown, the CEO and president of IDEO, states that innovative design thinking for developing countries can supply the necessary alternatives to our Western, developed modes of practice, and for this to happen we need to take a systems view, the many-method platform capable of accounting “for the vast differences in cultural and socioeconomic conditions” (Brown, 2008:90-91). The socio-technical example he cites is the case of India‟s Aravind Eye Care System, a company that “built a systemic solution to a complex social and medical problem” by not just simplistically lowering their prices and providing cheaper products, but by sourcing ideas for quality and equivalent products from the communities they serve. The preferred (yet to be designed and manufactured) products had to comply with two constraints: the poverty of the social groups being designed for, and the fact that Aravind did not have easy access to the (expensive) solutions available to developed countries. The innovative design-for-the-social-good solution, forced upon them by the circumstances of their clientele, was to design and manufacture their own intraocular lenses, using alternative technology (cf. new and hybrid technologies, above), to be able to offer their users the equivalent of $200 Western quality lenses for $4 a pair. In the West we hardly need more of the same products we have been offered, by design, for so long. What we do need is something else, hybrid „products‟ that will make more sense of our lives on a personal, on a social, group, and on a sustainable future level, and these hybrids “will be complex combinations of products, services, spaces, and information” (Brown, 2008:92), in fact, hybrid products that make full use of the possibilities inherent in a social constructivist approach to design thinking, based on innovative knowledge of the socio-technical interactions of our daily lives. Taking a systems view of design‟s development also means that ideas come directly from the community, and are thus user-centred and dialogue-driven. During 2005 the Bank of America commissioned IDEO to create a new Contemporary design education 11 product, one that I recognise as corresponding to a pattern of behaviour from my own daily life, and a product designed to establish and maintain brand loyalty. Working as a collaborative design / industry team, they called this new savings account “Keep the Change”, since that focuses on consumer behaviour that the consumers themselves would willingly transform into something more positive, and we all know that the small change we receive from a cash sale somehow „disappears‟ because nobody really keeps track of what happens to it. Now you can „siphon off‟ the change left over from a credit card transaction and transfer these amounts directly to your electronic piggy-bank account (Brown, 2008:92), and it really does amount to a substantial figure at the end of a year‟s worth of indirect saving. This same basic idea has been put into effect in a very practical and sociocultural way, and it is called a stokvel, a community-driven solution to poverty that was „designed‟ by ordinary black people in South Africa. Stokvels are very „low-technology economic instruments‟ in first-world-speak, and means that a number of people get together to create an informal, mutually supporting, savings society, every member paying a fixed amount into the stokvel on a monthly basis, with, usually, each of the members being handed the full amount, each month, in turn. “Despite the high level of unemployment in SA … poor people do save [despite unconventional methods, because] they realise the importance of saving for funerals, education and emergencies” by forming stokvels (Shezi, 2005). On a par with the Bank of America idea of creating a product sourced directly from an activity inside a community, First National Bank (FNB) designed the Stokvel Account, targeting the poor who could not or would not make use of any form of banking facility in the past. No fees are payable for cash withdrawals or deposits, all transactions are physically recorded, two designated signatories from the group are able to access the funds, and all movement of monies are regulated by a constitution drawn up by the members of the group (FNB, 2008): in other words, a product was designed that incorporated the best features of a working system already in place, making it more transparent and safer. Acknowledgement of text The greater part of the above text (from the Introduction onward) has been published as Rediscovering design education as a social constructivist foundation for innovative design thinking, in A. Silva and R. Simões (eds.), Handbook of Research on Trends in Product Design and Development: Technological and Organizational Perspectives (Van der Merwe, 2010b). A change of mind(set) As we have just seen, the world is changing, design as practice is changing, and designers are expected to change as well, with these transformations to design thinking more on the level of theory than of practice, which means that the business-as-usual approach to designed objects needs a serious overhaul, starting with design education, fuelled by a new interdependence on sociocultural and user issues. Theory as the inspiration for design‟s renewal means, to me, looking at any discipline that deals with human issues (needs and wants), and mining these other environments of potential knowledge in order to put together the parts of a new whole, i.e., hybrid and complex blends of theory for a „new practice‟, or more correctly, „theory‟ that can encourage a new attitude towards design itself, its place in and its effect on the world. To do that we need a change of mindset, we need a new theoretical framework for the future of design. To effectively run an innovative course project for pre-service student teachers, Foulger, Williams and Wetzel (2008:28-29) designed a theoretical framework for the course that would enable these students to keep up with „new‟ educational approaches, including the “sound educational advantages in group learning”, partly basing their work on Lave and Wenger‟s notion of communities of practice. As my Contemporary design education 12 colleagues and I have found, learning in groups – learning as a group - as opposed to learning as an isolated individual, has many advantages; the group supplies much needed support in an environment that draws on the varied experiences of the group members, leading to the possibility of more complex learning structures and frameworks. This initial „network‟, created by the smaller group, has the potential of self-transforming into a much larger and more resourceful network of interaction for learning purposes, which will be discussed later under the topic of Actor-Network Theory. “Yet”, as Foulger et al. (2008:29) state, “a sense of community does not magically happen” but needs the repeated and committed inputs from all the participants in this group, leading them to the work of Vygotsky and the notion of constructivism. Combined with elements from social life, the theoretical (constructivist) framework of Foulger et al. now take on the guise of „communal constructivism‟, in the sense of focusing attention on the needs of the students themselves, their knowledge production for own use as well as creating a „knowledge‟ resource for the benefit of the group as a whole. According to Foulger et al. (2008:29), the connectivist approach that they found Siemens using is added to this mix, for if we take into account the speed and volume of information available today, especially via the internet, individual learning, just to keep up with changes in any field, becomes quite problematic if not impossible, and vicarious learning through the group connectivist dynamic provides the high quality of experience that De Zeeuw (above) speaks of acquiring. It is important to my argument that Siemens focuses on the individual as both the source and the destination of the production of knowledge (“personal to network to organization”), since it is through these connections and networks that an individual can learn how to think like a group (above), whether the activity takes place on a small scale as in a classroom small group project, or on a much larger scale on organizational team work. It is also because of the cyclic nature of this feedback activity that „real‟ knowledge can be produced. Although the Siemens quote used by Foulger et al. (2008:29), “personal to network to organization” may refer to personal knowledge, network knowledge and organizational knowledge production, I have to point out that we also need to remember, on the network and organizational level, it is still the individuals (as the final „destination‟ of the production of knowledge) who constitute those specific networks who double-act as both the depositories and disseminators of „real, implicit, knowledge‟ – once explicitly recorded inside the network or organization this „recorded knowledge‟ may become accessible to all, but as mere information. Not only is „teaching‟ a complex business, but a definitive answer to the question, what is teaching? has yet to emerge. Teaching someone (anyone) else, other than the (direct) self, is at best a second-hand affair, and as a result wrought with extraneous difficulties. We are, as teachers, always trying to reach beyond our (own) selves, trying to land on the other‟s shore of reality but never quite succeeding. Polanyi (1962:123) put it succinctly in stating that the personal journey of discovery we need to undertake, and the trust we have to place in the procedure, is vitally necessary, because there is a vast (logical) gap between what we know now and what we do not know, and it is as if we leave the safety of our well-known and thoroughly explored landscape and launch ourselves, like baby guillemots hatched on a cliff-side, into the unknown, and suddenly find ourselves on this other shore of reality. You can describe, or try to describe, this phenomenon to others, but it will always remain a secondhand description, since each other shore of reality is uniquely and metaphysically individual, and with the best will in the world cannot be transliterated into true or direct communication (cf. „mere information‟, above). You cannot undertake the fall from on high on behalf of the baby bird, but you can give them the necessary push out of the nest, and, like Socrates, follow them all the way to the bottom of wherever they are bound to land, simply because you have previously made a similar (type of) journey yourself. That is all that is needed most of the time, and the quality of your experience can contribute to the developing quality of the student‟s experience(s). An added, and unlooked for, aspect of this communal learning process is exactly that, it is communal and ongoing, and as a result the quality of your previous experience of the same undergoes a qualitative augmentation, which means, to Contemporary design education 13 put it very simply, your experience one is enhanced / informed by student A‟s experience (multiplied by the number of students in your class, given the number of students who actually respond), and your second attempt at accompanying a student on this journey of discovery means „your‟ experience „one‟ becomes an augmented and expanded effort, experience „two‟ (or, teacher experience one + student experience A), forming a (new) scaffolding that can be of support to student B‟s experience, and so on, ad infinitum. It is with this knowledge, of how my own „interpretation‟ process9 would develop, that I can begin to analyse Pratt and Nesbitt‟s (2000) article on the discourses of teaching, which begins with the caveat that “Teaching … is a complex, pluralistic, and moral undertaking”. I am, personally, not keen on using the term moral, since this is too often used in conjunction with written and set guidelines of behaviour, leading to some form of subjugation and control, however mildly applied. Philosophically, the term ethics is preferred, since this approach to human interaction allows the other an equally preferential position. In that sense a pluralistic and complex teaching responsibility calls for a critical reflection on, and a re-thinking of, the current design curriculum. Pratt and Nesbit (ibid.) express disappointment that teaching, in practice, is still regarded as unproblematic by many, the curriculum being delivered (enacted?) as so much content to dispense to a consuming audience without regard for the prior knowledge or social connections of the student that might, seriously, interfere with the learning (and understanding of what is being learned) process, and (one might further add) without much regard for the interconnections between subjects. However, they do find that the current discourses of learning, in theory, have moved away from a one-size-fits-all approach that can safely ignore all contextual influences, to an educational approach that questions received wisdom (and can therefore begin to deal with the complexities of modern life) by being adaptable to, among other alignments and alliances, the balance between the needs of the student and the needs of education, in the form of the curriculum, echoing the communal constructivism approach (above) of Foulger et al. Discourses of teaching and learning Discourses are language-based 10 systems of thought (Pratt and Nesbitt, 2000) that structure the direction in which the members of a network or group allow their thinking to be jointly developed. If this begins to sound like a manifesto for design education, the impression would not be out of place: design practice, and hence design education, has a responsibility towards the social network resulting from the politics of the artificial, in the sense that we need to pay attention to the “larger issues of how contemporary social discourse is conducted” (Margolin, 2002:17). The social discourse direction my argument is following is one that incorporates notions of design for civil society, making of design practice an instrument of ethical importance through shifting the focus onto the other-of-the-self, with the proviso that an autopoietic approach to social formation is followed at the same time, i.e., that a co-ontogenic drift11 is allowed to obviate the chances of the all too „human‟ traits of power and control to surface. 12 Autopoiesis and its application in the formation of social networks will be discussed in Chapter 4; suffice it to say, now, that while autopoiesis is seen as self-generation, and therefore equated with the individual (organism), the argument here is that the individual cannot function without the other, without the group, and in opposition to traditional design‟s attempts at problemsolving driven solely by the individual, designers in contemporary practice are not only observers of the 9 Taking the individual / communal learning relationship into account, an argument can be made out for „interpretation‟ to be seen as never „authentic‟ (cf. the Introduction chapter) in the sense that meaning making is always a hybrid blend: hybrid because what I interpret with has already been interpreted by others, and blend because my meaning-making actions and distinctions literally blend several hybrid previously-interpreted blocks of interpreted-withs. 10 An argument for language and narrative is made in Chapter 2. 11 Autopoietic co-ontogenic drift (cf. Chapter 4) simply means, here, that we co-create any decision that impacts on all our lives. 12 Gadamer (2006:300) put it quite clearly, that in our understanding of the world, which we think is just ours, “the othe r presents itself so much in terms of our own selves that there is no longer a question of self and other”. Contemporary design education 14 larger system and of the users of products in that system, but they are also (as co-actors in the processes of living systems, and interpreters of Margolin‟s larger issues of contemporary social discourse) participating in what Maturana and Varela (1998:117) called the natural process of ontogenic structural drift, since the ontogeny of the individual is the learning process, impossible to attain without contact with the environment, hence co-ontogenic (co-creation, self-and-other generation of meaning) drift, the latter term pointing to the non-linear and stochastic nature of adaptation and development, making of co-ontogenic drift not only a process, but a relationship, of discovery. The term discourses, as used by Pratt and Nesbit (2000), also reiterates a key principle of communal or social constructivism, namely that, to explore the parameters of our lifeworlds, we have to use language (and take the power of language seriously), and in doing so we construct discourses endemic to our metaphysical environment, as systems of thought. If, like Foulger et al., we wish to design a theoretical framework to facilitate the teaching and the learning process, and further, if we wish to design a framework for the design process, we have to investigate the nature of discourses that serve both individuals and groups13, and it is the argument in this thesis that such a discourse for the renewal of design can be constructed as a theoretical framework for thought, one that is not only appropriate for design practice but, in that act of appropriation, can change the lives of those who enlist this system of thought. To freely paraphrase Jones (1984:127), this new framework will change one‟s meta(+)physical environment by changing oneself and the way one perceives the (real) world, and in doing so will construct a new reality, along much the same lines that the communal learning process (above) makes use of a qualitative augmentation process to „self-produce‟ the interactive, co-ontogenic relationship between teacher and student, to their mutual benefit. There are no definitive answers to the question, what is teaching?, and still fewer to the question, what is learning?, although these are fundamental questions. There are ways of looking at the world (self included) that help us adjust to and adapt these lenses-on-a-viable-world, but here is the trap: if you are by temperament or persuasion (not argument) committed to the ideal of being-in-control, then no discourse, no theoretical framework discussed in these pages will be of any use to you. The adjust to and adapt reference (above) has a double meaning, with teaching and learning in design taking on the exact same meaning as we design the world and the world designs us. The first step is the most difficult one, to give up some measure of control, by suspending disbelief, and adjusting to an other discourse besides your own; the second step is the very natural one of appropriation, when the new discourse is adapted to your specific and individual way of looking at the world, and in this reciprocal process we design the discourse and the discourse designs us. It is as well, then, that Pratt and Nesbit (2000) remind us the inscriptions of discourses, what these instruments of conception awakes in us, come about only at the level of the individual. Discourses of teaching and discourses of learning should function in a co-ontogenic relationship, “as there can be no teaching without learning” (Pratt and Nesbit, 2000), but in the 1960s and 70s behaviourism became the discourse to listen to and try to apply, as if, and this is comparable to Jones‟ (1984:31) warning regarding prescriptive „design methods‟ (above), these new tools could, sans human adaptation, deal with the complexities of individual learning processes. Behaviourism may have emphasized a change in behaviour, but this meant external changes in „behaviour‟ that could be observed in tests; the non-observable (tacit knowledge production) was not important. All the main elements in the teaching and learning process were denied any form of relationship, since through task analysis, instructional technology, and what was seen as a „systems‟ approach objectives and outcomes were defined and then matched, but the idea of „matching‟ teacher, student, and knowledge occurred to no one, with these being regarded as quite unconnected units of observation, consistent with „hard‟, 13 It is not a given that individuals use the same „discourse‟ as the group they belong to; a discourse is not the language it is based on. Contemporary design education 15 scientific, or first-order cybernetics (discussed in Chapter 3), a „systems‟ approach that observed working systems for the sake of controlling them. For behaviourists, then, “teaching and learning were portrayed as context free and unproblematic” (Pratt and Nesbit, 2000), but with the introduction of andragogy, a discourse centred on teaching adults produced a major modification to behaviourism (cf. adjust to and adapt, above), in the sense that the curriculum was seen as secondary to the primary focus on learning itself, a major step towards „matching‟ teacher, student and knowledge. Very much like designers today, students were seen as „active agents‟ in a process that sought to engender an individual learning experience, both prior and subsequent to the introduction of the learning material. However, a shift in focus from a teacherdirected curriculum to students taking responsibility for their own learning still did not outweigh an administrative belief in outcomes-based competencies, which relegates students, as so-called active agents, to a lower level of power regarding their own, inner conscious and phenomenological, understanding of their own learning processes. We can agree with Pratt and Nesbit (2000) that these discourses of teaching and learning that (still) relied so much on control mechanisms should be by now outdated, and yet “such discourses are still used by many who would construct notions of teaching around „outcomes-based education‟ and „train-the-trainers‟ models of teaching”. Cognitive learning, a mid-70s discourse that competed with andragogy, seemed to have ignored the improvements the latter offered compared to behaviourism, and can be seen, with hindsight, as a control-based derivative of behaviourism. Immediately it has to be said that this use of cognitive theories only applies to the rational-technical approach that treated learning very much as if the brain could be regarded as a computer in terms of storing information, while access to memory was regarded as equally unproblematic, something we know today to be far from the case. These versions of cognitive theories were subsumed by the stronger behaviourism, and teachers created serial and ordered curricula that, if followed, could reasonably decide the outcomes, evaluating the students through tests based on set criteria. It was sufficient that students attended classes as passive rote-learners of pre-digested content. Teachers were expected to design instructional modules that somehow made students the beneficiaries of a teacher-student knowledge transfer (Pratt and Nesbit, 2000; Fosnet and Perry, 2005). There are quite a few cognitive learning theories, based on human behaviour and geared towards the development of the individual, that are still used today with excellent results, particularly when they are used in conjunction with theories of constructivism, and some of these will be drawn into my argument throughout these pages (e.g., gestalt theory). Put very simplistically, the division in the cognitive stream of thought came about very long ago, with the separation of mind and body by Descartes, and with the notion that a human being, and therefore human thought processes, could be regarded as a „mechanical system‟ susceptible to management and control. The example of cybernetics illustrates this very well: first-order cybernetics came about in the first half of the last century to deal with the control of observed systems, using negative feedback loops to regulate the way a machined system operated and was kept operating at the maximum level of efficiency. Quite naturally, a good theory has the tendency to enlarge its field of influence, and particularly after the Second World War cybernetics migrated towards the study of social systems, where it broke down completely under the influence of free choice and democracy. The very nature of the theory changed (again, cf. adjust to and adapt, above), and became second-order cybernetics, an investigation of, not observed systems by an impartial scientist, but of observing systems, of people whose actions and choices could not be pinned down by any set formula. It is this type of human-centred and change-inducing frameworks of thought that design education can accommodate, and a constructivist discourse, based to an extent on andragogy, began to pave the way for this new direction during the 1980s. One major difference was that learning was now seen as an Contemporary design education 16 individual experience, while teaching and learning both looked to an approach that was critically reflective and acknowledged to be constructed and interpreted by students and teachers alike. No longer dependent on content and the authority of the teacher, constructivism dealt more with quality changes in the way students viewed the world (and hence the curriculum), pointing this learner-centred discourse in the direction of new ways of knowing , a short step away from acquiring new ways of generating individual knowledge (Pratt and Nesbit, 2000). Following on from this change in mindset, during the 1990s a discourse on learning developed that I can recognise as the beginning of social constructivism, for this is a developing discourse on knowing that has its roots in, arguably, our premodern history: Being myself much involved, it seems to me that the resistance met in the 18th century by Giambattista Vico, the first true constructivist, and by Silvio Cecato and Jean Piaget in the more recent past, is not so much due to inconsistencies or gaps in their argumentation, as to the justifiable suspicion that constructivism intends to undermine too large a part of the traditional view of the world. Indeed, one need not enter very far into constructivist thought to realize that it inevitably leads to the contention that man – and man alone – is responsible for his thinking, his knowledge and, therefore, also for what he does. (Von Glasersfeld, 1984:17) We have to place these different discourses on teaching and learning in context, and realise that, especially in design education, alternative ways of knowing and of viewing the world have been available to teachers and practitioners all along, but people are creatures of habit, which means they are conformist in the sense that any social grouping will expect this from their members. Society does function as a form of self-regulating system, and it is true that “Most theories of self-regulation are founded on a negative feedback system in which people strive to reduce disparities between their perceived performance and an adopted standard” (Bandura, 2001:268), creating an almost „natural‟ barrier between existing (read „traditional‟) knowledge production and what theorists of Von Glasersfeld‟s calibre came to call radical constructivism. Constructivism does „undermine‟ much of traditional ways of doing business with the world, but no more radically than the course of action suggested by both Derrida (1993:919) and Gadamer (1975:246-247). Avoiding the trap of absolute authority, and, crucially, the fallacy of subjective, individual reasoning as the origins of human thought (for action), Gadamer‟s use of the notion of „prejudice‟ and Derrida‟s use of „protective guardrail‟ focuses on the same social phenomenon, namely that societies do expect its members to conform to an „adopted standard‟ as Bandura claims, but that the consequent „prejudices‟ are merely pre-judgments in the sense of thinking from within the safety of the social circle, leading Derrida to call these natural barriers „protective guardrails‟. What constructivism does is underpinned by Gadamer and Derrida‟s advice that, while these barriers to thinking need to be respected for what they are, for the sake of development and improvement they have to be transcended, „undermined‟ in the same way that a biological system „undermines‟ itself by adapting to its (new) environment. Derrida called this stereovision a doubling of commentary that has a place in the critical production of meaning (yet again, cf. adjust to and adapt, above), and we – we as individual human beings – are responsible for our thoughts, and we are not. This is not in contradistinction to either the Gadamer/Derrida insight or the essence of Von Glasersfeld‟s last sentence, but an acknowledgement that, despite the constructivist certainty of individual responsibility, social constructivism makes clear the role that a social context plays in our judgments and our transcendences, and consequently my argument is for this fundamental interaction between the I and the other (as will be seen particularly in the discussions on Actor-Network Theory and autopoiesis). The map we follow through life and learning is constructed by our co-ontogenic relationships with our environment, which includes teachers, students, family, friends and, potentially, anyone and everything else in our experiential world, including designed objects and systems. And yet, that map can never be Contemporary design education 17 the territory (Bateson, 2002:27), since what we construct for ourselves may be a hybrid mix and ultimately our decision, in the final instance (hence the responsibility), but (1) this uniquely individual map fails when we try to „give‟ it to others or even try to have them visualize it, as with „direct‟ or „transferred‟ teaching, since the territory they have access to seems different when compared to the „other‟ map they may form through the process called learning; for the individual this map can never be the territory, because (2) there will always be a cognitive dissonance between having made up our minds about something, and events in the world, and under this heading I would also include „immovable objects‟, for the question is not whether anything in the „objective‟ world can change or not, but whether our perception and conception of that thing will ever change, and therefore transform into a different map, conforming to, and creating, a different territory. According to Pratt and Nesbit (2000), the new discourse on learning treated content as mutable, and thus the curriculum should be regarded as a framework for thought that is being regenerated on a continuous basis; as far as teaching and learning are concerned, the control aspects of the map simply must not be allowed to constitute the territory of knowledge being constructed by the student, in conjunction with other students, teachers, the experiential world. This version of constructivism, that now acknowledged the roles played by subjective accounts from the social, cultural and political worlds, treats the combination teacher, student and knowledge as contextualized, embodied and specific, and dependent on the transformation of these roles, i.e., their ability to transcend the „guardrails‟ of previous maps, in the process changing the territory, changing oneself and one‟s perceptive ability, and thus creating a new territorial reality (liberally paraphrasing Jones, 1984:127), an approach to teaching and learning that I was amazed to encounter in an official document on teacher training. In South Africa, the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) acknowledges the global pressures on education, and hence commissioned a number of reports which were then published under the umbrella heading of Human Capital and Development Strategy. An important part of this framework is the Literacy and Numeracy 2006 – 2016 (LaN) project document, and although it concentrates specifically on literacy and numeracy, this document is also applicable to teaching and learning in general, since, besides implementing a holistic approach to the problem, the LaN document aims to implement a longer-term teacher training programme that will have the „significant learning theory‟ of constructivism as its epistemological underpinning. Citing an inflexible curriculum, lack of communication skills, and negative mind-sets on issues of difference as barriers to the teaching and learning environment, the WCED document makes it clear that social constructivism is to be the preferred discourse of teaching and learning, mentioning the work of Piaget and Vygotsky specifically. The LaN document acknowledges that there are a number of different viewpoints on how to interpret constructivism, as do Pratt and Nesbit (above), and that “they all share the same basic assumption about learning, namely that it is constructed by learners in the course of both individually-motivated and socially-motivated activity” (WCED, 2008:8). This potential split in the road to discovery is at the heart of teaching and learning in general, and constructivism in particular. How can an individual learn to think like a group (above)? How can thinking be individual and social at the same time?, which leads me to ask the question, is consciousness individual or socially and culturally constructed? This last issue will be in discussed in full in later Chapters, since it is at the centre of human development and understanding, and I support the viewpoint expressed in the LaN document that teachers need to take both individual and social constructivism seriously in order to make sense of their own and their students‟ systems-of-action in the classroom. Cobb (2005:40-42) takes a similar view in that he discusses the cognitive constructivism of Von Glasersfeld (the LaN document links this approach to Piaget and individually-motivated learning) as compared to the sociocultural constructivism of Vygotsky (LaN: socially-motivated learning), and then Contemporary design education 18 argues for the coordinating of perspectives by stating his belief “that the sociocultural and cognitive constructivist perspectives each constitute the background for the other” (Cobb, 205:53). To extend Cobb‟s argument, the combined constructivist approach to teaching and learning brings both teacher and student to a place where they can recognise their own interpretive activity, and both realise that they have become „researchers‟ using the social constructs they work with, and that, furthermore, the pragmatism of this systemic investigation allows them to “adopt a particular position for particular reasons” (Cobb, 2005:53), the kind of position I argued for (above) in stating that a pluralistic and complex teaching responsibility calls for a critical reflection on, and a re-thinking of, the current design curriculum, since this approach to human interaction allows the other an equally preferential position, hence adopting a (cognitive + sociocultural) constructivist position for ethical reasons. I thus begin to build my argument for the renewal of design education on a social (radical) constructivist base, and part of that argument is to review the very idea of a curriculum. Jewett‟s (2003/2004) approach to the idea of curriculum, and not just its form, is to cast it in the light of Bateson‟s view of cultural production of meaning, with multiple perspectives, peoples‟ choices and their backgrounds forming what she calls integrated „scraps of interaction‟, and so to look at the resulting patterns as diverse interactions of mind and culture. For Jewett form and content, in turn, become an interweaving of diverse yet cooperative narratives, as participative voices in what she calls a „polyphonic text‟, effectively casting curriculum as an ongoing story-telling and story-making framing of lived experience. By thus naming the curriculum as a narrative framing of consciousness, Jewett, via Bateson, classifies the curriculum as a social, radical construct; “Naming is always classifying, and mapping is essentially the same as naming” (Bateson, 2002:27), and although Damasio (2000:322) admits a correspondence between what we map and the subjective map we form in consciousness and memory, “the correspondence is not point-to-point, and thus the map need not be faithful” – learning can never be faithful to a prescriptive curriculum of goal-setting outcomes, cannot be controlled by anyone except the one inside the „story-making frame of lived experience‟. “The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have an objective knowledge of it” (Gadamer, 2006:301), meaning that any situation (environment) facilitated by the curriculum (which situation then needs to be jointly created by the teacher and students alike), that keeps us standing outside of its effective agency, only offers us so-called „objective‟ knowledge and learning opportunities – mere rote learning that nullifies any form of personal capacity building. A fog-bound prospect I am very much afraid that this is exactly what Fosnet (2005:286-287) seems to be advocating, in a publication that she edits on the advantages of constructivism in education. Putting forward an argument that is reminiscent of Laurillard‟s (1994:2) view of undergraduate education as students learning to give „accurate accounts‟ of the material they work with thus separating the undergraduate learning process from the postgraduate, research based one (on the grounds of cost efficiency, discussed below), Fosnet (2005:286) makes the observation that teachers expect children to learn problem-solving “in certain ways”. The argument put forward by Fosnet sounds eminently reasonable and correct, and one can agree that the renewal of education, based on constructivism, quite obviously means new frameworks of understanding must be developed, but these new frameworks must be developed by the student as well as the teacher, and consequently my interpretation of Fosnet‟s quote from Martin Simon‟s work differs from her own. Simon uses the metaphor of a sailboat: You may initially plan the whole journey or only part of it. You set out sailing according to your plan. However, you must constantly adjust because of the conditions that you encounter. You continue to acquire knowledge about sailing, about the current conditions, and about the areas that you wish to visit. You change your plans with respect to the order of your destinations. Contemporary design education 19 You modify the length and nature of your visits as a result of interactions with people along the way. You add destinations that prior to the trip were unknown to you. The path that you travel is your [actual] trajectory. The path that you anticipate at any point is your „hypothetical trajectory‟. (Simon, quoted in Fosnet, 2005:286-287) Fosnet (2005:287) continues, “As Simon makes clear, teaching is a planned activity. Teachers do not walk into their classrooms wondering what to do. They have a lesson planned and they anticipate what the children will do”, which means that teachers structure, schematize and model, using the „big ideas‟ of education, and these “serve as important landmarks for teachers to use as they plan, and as they journey with their children”. This sounds reasonable, but it is wrong. This approach to teaching and learning is analogous to the design methods-as-solution of both behaviourism and the type of prescriptive thinking that Jones (above) warned about: design education, both the teaching and learning aspects, cannot focus on dealing with certain ways of solving a problem. These very practical problem / solution, project requirements have their place, granted, but in an engineering and material way, e.g., this type of plastic can be mould-injected at such-and-such a temperature using that method. I can even sympathize with the problem of teaching mathematics, which one could assume to be one driven by set answers – after all, there can be only one correct answer to a mathematical problem, not so? I won‟t disagree, for now, but are we talking about the answer that already exists, or are we talking about real education? Who does education truly belong to? To the one being educated, and however difficult it might be to deal with this change in focus, this is the mindset that has to be cultivated, and the new framework for understanding, from the teachers‟ side, that has to be developed. There might be only one „correct‟ answer when it comes to the solution of a long mathematical problem, or the performance of a plastic component in a designed object, but the process of understanding, the journey of discovery, by the individual, to get to that point, will differ one from the other. And in design thinking terms, design investigation that deals with sociocultural, cognitively derived problems, there are, emphatically, no answers at all, only temporary, practical suggestions for dealing with very complex human situations in flux. Fosnet is wrong, because Simon did not intend that we understand teaching to be a (fully) planned activity, and that teachers necessarily walk into the classroom armed with a performance related plan of action, i.e. an inflexible curriculum that is determined to equate the map with the territory, even though it seems to allow different interpretations on a superficial level. Preferring the metaphor of a landscape instead of Simon‟s sailboat journey metaphor, Fosnet rejects the linear quality of a hypothetical learning trajectory, but Simon‟s reference to this path is about as „linear‟ as all the exquisitely short „lines‟ that really make up the circumference of a circle, the difference being that each one changes direction. The curriculum can only be planned in very short, straight lines, in the sense of putting on paper a float plan from the home harbour, to first coordinates 0Lat/Long., to second coordinates, etc., as if the weather would always be fine and play along. You may even, according to Simon, try to plan the whole trip, from home base to the various replenishing points along the route, and so to the final and „correct‟ goal destination, but this would be a not-serious attempt to simply sketch something like a complete trip for an imaginary sailor with imaginary signposts planted in the sea. Simon correctly argues for a constant adjustment because of the very conditions that cannot be forecast with any accuracy, and because, since you were blown about a bit in the first place and found yourself closer to point D than to point B, which was to have been your first stop-over, you re-plan your route according to your needs, not because of the map you were given at the start. Simon makes it very clear that modification to your own, and developing, map is the real issue, according to the interactions with people along the way and the consequent new stopping-over points of interest the teacher never thought to add to her original map of the planned journey. Simon‟s eventual territory covered (his actual trajectory) needed a new map, drawn by the student, one that differs significantly from the anticipated and hypothetical trajectory portrayed in the teacher‟s map, at the start. This is individually- Contemporary design education 20 motivated and socially-motivated activity (WCED, above), the joining of sociocultural and cognitive constructivist perspectives, and when Fosnet speaks of learning as steps, shifts and mental maps, we tend to agree with her argument. But Fosnet is wrong. Seeming to agree with Simon‟s intended narrative, she states that “Teachers do not walk into their classrooms wondering what to do [no, the children walk into the classroom wondering what to do]. They have a lesson planned and they anticipate what the children will do [the teacher follows a planned curriculum and corrals 14 the children blithely sailing on to points off the compass, i.e., the map]”, and further, “The big ideas, strategies, and models – the structuring, the schematizing, and the modelling – serve as important landmarks for teachers to use as they plan, and as they journey with their children” (Fosnet, 2005:286-287). But what happens when the children have to use landmarks in this new landscape they find themselves in? Following socially-motivated planning, the big ideas of structural thinking used as exemplars (conforms to a given pattern) or paradigms to follow, means we ignore the individually-motivated part of constructivism, which means, in turn, that Fosnet confuses Simon‟s differentiation between „hypothetical‟ and „actual‟ trajectory. “We too used the terminology of a hypothetical learning trajectory … but this terminology now seems too linear” (Fosnet, 2005:286), with which sentiment I agree, and yet, by using the term „hypothetical‟ Simon did not refer to the teacher‟s planning so much as to the student‟s. Fosnet uses this change in focus from student to teacher to justify a planned journey that conforms to the big ideas, and to the structures and schemas and models of thought that the children should follow, or else go off track, i.e., arrive at the wrong answer. What really needs to serve as important landmarks in this new and as yet unexplored (by the student) landscapes, are not the official signposts pointing to set destinations on someone else‟s map, but the more difficult signposts we have to generate ourselves, with the help, of course, of other signposts that were there before. According to Shotter (1995), when Wittgenstein confronted a philosophical problem, the form his investigation took was of the I don‟t know my way about kind, which Shotter explains as follows, “It is as if he is imagining us in a great landscape … but lost in a fog, trying to find landmarks, attempting to get our bearings, thus to continue with our projects”. There are no visible landmarks, because the students have to co-construct these using a cognitive-social constructivist framework, and the big ideas, strategies and models are but part of the newly formed framework for thought, they cannot constitute the landmarks on their own. I argued (above) that you can try to describe the journey, whether it is across the metaphorical ocean or in this very foggy landscape, but you cannot construct the path the student has to follow, since at best it can only be a hypothetical trajectory, for now, until you, the one living the experience of learning, take the next step into this unknown landscape, and by doing so you create the very conditions for the fog to lift a little, until you create your own conditions for learning, with the help of others, of course. The new map you are constructing will lead to a different territory to the teacher‟s one, since that map will always remain a second-hand description, because each other shore of reality is uniquely and metaphysically individual. “The environment – the context as well – is designed to facilitate discussion around big ideas because these landmark ideas are major shifts in perspectives – major shifts in structuring” (Fosnet, 2005:287), and will lead to enquiring about that which someone else knows already, which is no true journey of discovery. A major shift in perspective is what teaching and learning should aim for, but this „major‟ restructuring can only happen within the organism, and not be brought about by external pressures, hence Fosnet‟s major shifts in perspectives will only serve to strengthen the position of the original big ideas, but leave the student non the wiser as to why the big idea is such a good idea in the first place. “And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not 14 This seems a „normal‟ defensive mechanism, referred to by Derrida as the „protective guardrail‟ (above), and so conforming to an „adopted standard‟. Contemporary design education 21 know?” (Plato). This question from the obtuse Meno shows an unwillingness to take this first step into the foggy landscape, because the enquirer cannot see any landmarks and no signposts, and the enquirer is unwilling to create individual conditions for learning, preferring to follow the official signposts along the way. Socrates, on the other hand, refuses to „teach‟ in an unquestioning and authoritative way, preferring instead to ask transformational and paradoxical questions – he never pointed to anything or any idea as the exemplar to follow, and he would have perfectly understood Wittgenstein‟s allusion to a foggy landscape, but not Fosnet‟s reference to horizons. “Teachers 15 … have horizons in mind when they plan – horizons like place value, or addition or subtraction” (Fosnet, 2005:287), a viewpoint on education that is opposed by Gadamer (2006:301), who sees the educational landscape (my paraphrasing of his use of the term „situation‟) as representing a perspective (or prospect over the „foggy landscape‟) that restricts the construction of an individual mental map, the very thing Fosnet herself advocates. For Gadamer this „situation‟ or context – the precise start of the new landscape the students find themselves in at the start of the journey of discovery – must include of necessity the idea of „horizon‟, but Gadamer‟s use of the term correlates with constructivism more than Fosnet‟s does, since the former‟s horizon belongs to the student – the one who learns – and the latter‟s belongs to the teacher (or more properly, to the big idea texts). The one who is learning must construct this type of (far-seeing) horizon16, as a way of seeing (the world, the environment, other people, and their texts), and then use this idiosyncratic horizon to see beyond the present, to see beyond any particular „vantage point‟17 because “A person who has no horizon does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him” (Gadamer, 2006:302), overvalues the content of the curriculum, overvalues the correct answers from authoritative sources without questioning. A different slant on the idea of creating horizons comes from Julyan and Duckworth (2005:63), who urge that a distinction be made between providing students with experience (exposure to authoritative „landmarks‟) and providing the scaffolding that can facilitate the developing knowledge necessary for an individual „map‟ of the territory of education. They quote the work of Driver (1983), who “points out, one difficulty in many science classrooms is that „connections that are apparent to a scientist may be far from obvious to a pupil. It is, after all, the coherence as perceived by the pupil that matters in learning‟” (Julyan and Duckworth, 2005:62). Teacher and pupil must form a team, as difficult as it might be on undergraduate level due to large numbers (cf. Laurillard‟s defence, below), they must meet each other half-way, each giving up some part of the original „map‟ they both have, maps whose horizons of expectations differ. How to achieve this is discussed next. The affordances of a constructivist scholarship prospect In general we can assume that the most pressing problem with teaching and learning is specifically an undergraduate problem, in part because of the numbers involved, and in part because of the budgetary rationale that positions a university as a „business‟ servicing the community. As Laurillard (1994:2) puts it, postgraduate education shows the privileged side of teaching students in “a community of scholars pursuing their own course towards knowledge and enlightenment, inspired but not directed by their teachers”, while offering the students support and guidance during their explorations of chosen fields of knowledge. As I am only too willing to acknowledge, this type of guidance, and the assessments to follow, are labour intensive approaches to teaching and learning, and I fully agree that “each case must be judged on its own merit, not in terms of a pre-defined model „answer‟” in a course that seeks to maximise the learning potential of each of the students. In contrast to this ideal view, Laurillard (1994:2) maintains that undergraduate education cannot follow this model, since , besides not being 15 Fosnet is referring to teachers of mathematics, but the idea is applicable to all teaching activity. 16 This point correlates with Heidegger‟s (1962:359), notion that what we (ought to) strive for is that which is always farthest. 17 Cf. Gadamer‟s (1975:246-247) use of prejudgment that we must overcome in society. Contemporary design education 22 cost effective in terms of staff and time constraints, students are only finding out what they themselves do not know, i.e., exploring an already known field of knowledge. Postgraduate students are expected to break new ground, but undergraduates are learning how to give „accurate accounts‟ of the material they work with. “No matter how democratic we are about respecting the student‟s point of view, there is always a pre-defined standard of answer”, this being one of the chief reasons she states that the key responsibility for student learning, at undergraduate level, rests with the teacher. It is significant that Laurillard makes no mention of the Boyer Report18 (discussed below), although she is adamant that “the academic system must change … [since] … This is insanity”, the fact of not knowing anything about the very large class you are trying to teach, whether it be the students‟ learning methods, their level of knowledge and frames of reference, and, closely allied to this last point, the „baggage‟ (prior knowledge, assumptions, etc.) they might still have that colours what and how they learn (:3). It would seem, however, that the changes Laurillard puts forward have to accommodate the „new managerialism‟ still so prevalent in our universities, an approach that Jansen19 (quoted in Barron, 2009) finds “offensive and short sighted for the simple reason that a university is not a business”. Even though Laurillard has in mind changes that find direction in the values of an academic environment more than it does in financial credit, she does not move away from “the new conditions of educating larger numbers”, preferring, rather, to develop a whole new infrastructure, based on educational technology, that has the aim of emulating the progressiveness of research methodology (:4). This added aspect to teaching is not disputed, as far as it goes, but Jones (1984:31) emphasized what can go wrong when we rely too much on „methods‟ (Jones‟ „design methods‟ were used as authoritarian „teaching methods‟); they can become new tools for the same rigid planning we sought to avoid in the first place, when they should have been instrumental in making design practices more receptive to user needs. What made Jones leave design as a profession (albeit temporarily) was the fact that his design methods had been misinterpreted and appropriated by a mindset that, like much of old-fashioned science, ignored the human element and focused strictly on following methods as if these alone could guarantee successful outcomes. The point that Jones (1984:32) is at pains to make, is that design methods, as a term, should not be confused with practical ways of designing products, since the academically correct term for what he has in mind is methodology, which has no direct application and no goal, but is, instead, “a conversation about everything that could be made to happen”. This approach to design thinking is what I think the Institute of Design at Stanford is promoting, and Bill Burnett, a member of this „d.school‟, is cryptically described on their website as: “Bill [Burnett] teaches the Capstone Project class … a class called „The Designer‟s Voice‟ and a somewhat mystical version of the only industrial design class taught at Stanford called Formgiving. Formgiving is as much a guided meditation, self-reflecting, and group therapy exercise as it is a class about design. One student said that learning formgiving this way was like learning to use „the Force‟” (d.school, 2010). Guided meditation and group therapy, using „the force‟, can sound like so much esoteric nonsense, and I have no doubt that many practicing designers would dismiss this approach, if it can be called such, as misguided at best, or reject it, at worst. However, “we spend a lot of our time talking about human centred design and „what humans need‟ here at Stanford” (Burnett, 2009). The d.school approach is a constructivist one, and therefore I can do worse than spend a lot of my time, in this work, talking about what humans need in terms of teaching and learning, by also talking about how and why humans communicate. 18 A report commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to investigate and make recommendations regarding undergraduate education in a research university. 19 Professor Jonathan Jansen was appointed as the vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State July 2009, and is known as an outspoken critic of the prevailing educational system. Contemporary design education 23 Part of the argument of my thesis is therefore (and keeping the above arguments in mind) that the path to renewing teaching and learning has been split by academics such as Laurillard, by subdividing, as it were, the holistic learning process into what they see as post- and undergraduate learning. My argument is that there should be no fundamental difference made between the two streams of learning, that both undergraduate and graduate levels should be based to differing degrees on research principles, and I hope to show that, even for a first year design student, the processes of design are fundamentally the same as the (re)search process, as both are journeys of discovery, with the relative extent and magnitude of the quantifiable being irrelevant when compared to the transformation in the student‟s qualitative capabilities. A dialogue between the work of Laurillard and Jones (above) adds a valuable viewpoint to design teaching and learning: the tools and methods of, in this case, educational technology cannot be equated with (research) methodology, since the first are fixed ways of doing something, while the second remains an ongoing conversation between all parties concerned. Learning, according to my argument, takes place during the interactive exchange of „news of difference‟,20 which makes learning an emergent aspect of conversational and exploratory communication between two or more systems-of-knowing. Learning, and here I am specifically targeting the design disciplines, is not about subject content and whether or not there are tools available to make the process easier for the student. Any programme, any set of tools, to facilitate what is a difficult process at best, is not opposed, but these do not address deep learning in any sense. Design practice and design education made this mistake before, in confidently thinking that textbook methods would suffice to ensure innovation, or that the changes in learning patterns necessary for design‟s development could be secured in this way. I have argued (above) that, in order to deal with the complexities of our world, and consequently of the designed objects that need to fit into that same world, to create a new learning structure based on cognitive processes and sense-making, systemic activity, design education needs to concentrate on the learning process itself, allowing students to create their own pathways to knowledge. This means, unequivocally, that in seeking to change our „methods‟ “not only in design but in all departments of life is to change the pattern of life as we make it, artificially and collectively”, since what we hope to achieve cannot be implicit in these methods unless we allow them a large degree of control, an „inhumanity‟ in Jones‟ view that would not permit the conversational and exploratory communication that goes with the territory of transformation (Jones, 1984:32-33). Design methods, whether we view these as pure methodology, design theory, or designerly ways of thinking (but never as methodical and recipe-like modes of practice), not only extend and amplify the capacity for life (so crucial to an understanding of user-centred design experiences) but also expand the horizons of design‟s possibilities and involvement in everyday human activity (very liberally paraphrasing Jones, 1984:33; 155). These two points are indicative of especially the trend towards the merger of traditional design and all manner of HCI related technologies (briefly discussed in The Bridge, the last section of this chapter), and these new inventions are set “to change not only one‟s surroundings but to change oneself and the way one perceives, to change reality perhaps?” (Jones, 1984:127). On these grounds I argue for a merger of undergraduate and research oriented approaches to design education since, in principle, I can discern no fundamental difference between the two streams of thought and hence learning: both streams are journeys of discovery, and to investigate this claim I combine constructivist thinking with the notion of scholarship in the next sections. 20 Cf. reference to Bateson (Chapter 4). Contemporary design education 24 Combining perspectives Design seems to have something in common with quantum mechanics, or at least with the uncertainty principle that Heisenberg introduced to paradigmatic thought and that Bohr further defined as ambiguous (Bohm and Peat, 1989:80). The more certain we are of one state the less certain we can be of another, introducing ambiguity into visionary thought vis-à-vis design. In the spirit of quantum thinking we may say that there is no sense to be had from trying to define design per se, or indeed of trying to define design research per se, since any question would have no clear meaning outside the social phenomena in which design practice and design research are experienced. Just as we are about to declare this is design or this is research they dissolve and appear elsewhere (or worse, as something else), leaving the indexical nature of the work, or the trace of the real, behind. The structures of both design and of research involve the deliberate construction of 'empty signifiers' that cannot be seen outside their respective contexts. Mitchell (1994:283) asked, what if that which obstructs our view also constitutes that view? The very things that 'obstruct' our view of design (plus) research are those things that we cannot seem to look past, that 'get in our way' - we cannot see the conceptual model of the wood for our close (everyday) involvement with the trees. Those traces of the real that are left behind constitute design (plus) research, in the sense of Barthes‟ meaning when he said "What has filled it [the 'empty signifiers'] with signification is a combination of my intent and the nature of society's conventional modes and channels which offer me a range of vehicles for the purpose" (quoted in Hawkes, 1986:131). The content of a possible discourse for design (plus) research originates in that which does not exist per se, namely those things that are left behind: the relationships between people and the world seen through social cultural structuration, or the mindful artifices we construct. Design (plus) research becomes an active social system capable of drawing on all that social agents normally may draw upon (van der Merwe, 2000a). We have therefore to concentrate on the way humans communicate and why they do so, with the capacity of learning how to learn as a natural part of this ongoing, co-ontogenic process. The argument for this is concentrated in Chapters 4 and 5 (e.g., comparison between Mitchell‟s „obstruction‟ / close everyday involvement and Heidegger‟s‟ notion of Verfallen, or everyday obstruction of being), and in the section on autopoiesis which deals with a comparison of Maturana‟s work with that of Luhmann, but the human communication question will be addressed throughout this thesis, culminating in Chapter 5: Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function, a discussion of the correlations between scientific and social theories of investigation, including complexity theory and quantum mechanics, as well as the continuation of an argument for a design language-of-knowing that I began in 2000, with the Reinventing Design Education in the University paper, referred to below. This argument also deals with Peirce‟s notion of abduction, and how we have to deal with traces of the real, mere indicators of the intention of human action, a difficult route to take at best in terms of explaining human communicative processes, as well as a combination of Barthes‟ explanation of how signifiers and the signified operate through traces, and Eco‟s (1976:249-250) work that asks, how is it possible to visually represent, not the unknown, but the known? The unknown can only be accessed through the known, but „the known‟ is not at our fingertips as if we could pick it up as we would a teaspoon; the known we are dealing with here are traces of the real of social constructivism, socially created realities, but we can investigate this phenomenon by combining Barthes‟ „my intent‟ and „society‟s modes‟, because we can combine the perspectives of individual constructivism and socially-derived constructivism. The argument is thus that the making of meaning („making sense‟ in order to deal with everyday life), cannot be found in designed objects, nor in people, but is only to be found in the relationship between us, in the interaction between people, and between people and objects, i.e., in a natural co-ontogenic drift. When Mitchell (1994:283) wonders whether our view of the world is obstructed by the very thing that should, in fact, constitute that view (prospect), I interpret that to mean we must combine the Contemporary design education 25 individual seeing of the world with the sociocultural way of seeing (almost) the same world, because in the differences (and their derivatives, i.e., distinctions) are to be found who we are and what we mean, and therefore, what we believe. It also means that we need the „social view on the world‟ in order to construct our own, and Cobb (2005:53) seems to support this view in stating “that the sociocultural and cognitive constructivist perspectives each constitute the background for the other”. The individual and sociocultural views of the world each constitute the background for the other, in much the same way that design and research constitute each other‟s background (in terms of design research, at least). The argument for this combination of perspectives follows in the next section. Acknowledgement of text The following extract is from a paper that was published in the Proceedings of the International Design Conference, Re-inventing Design Education in the University, December 11-13, School of Design, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia (Van der Merwe, 2000b). Design scholarship and The Boyer Report On one level the scholarship discourse of teaching and learning, as discussed here, can be seen as an American approach to undergraduate education in a research oriented university, being based in large part on the findings of the Boyer Commission Report, the very idea of what scholarship means, and the fact that the work of e.g. Dewey has been so influential regarding educational thinking in the Western World. That would be a false conclusion, however, since the origins of the constructivist ideas are Russian, with evolutionary social, educational and psychological inputs from various European countries as well as America. That makes of this discourse a hybrid fit for purpose, and it has to be judged against its viability in a world of complexity (Cf. Chapter 7). True to the nature of design itself, the discourse of constructivist scholarship approach can therefore be seen as a collaborative, multi-perspectival, multidisciplinary way of seeing the world (of design), and as such can be read as a peculiarly South African approach to design education, in the sense that the use that is made of this discourse can address the perceived educational problems that present themselves when 'non-design', local, cultural and social outlooks come face-to-face with the more global 'designerly ways' of knowing and seeing, or design understanding. In this sense, too, we might ask, could the discourse of constructivist scholarship approach not be seen as a universally adaptable model of education? The Boyer Commission Report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education (1998), commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, was intended to stimulate discussion on the nature of undergraduate education, and, for the time of publication, made recommendations that were regarded as somewhat controversial, while other remarks are still as topical today as they were then. According to the Report, due to the increasing focus on accessibility, higher education is now seen as far less of an elite institution than in the past, with students now entering universities with prior expectations on the type of education they are entitled to, and in the case of design education, either enrolling in a course with the wrong preconceptions of the subject, or no knowledge at all beyond the superficial. Contrasted to a scenario of high expectation is the fact that the first year is often reduced to what can be seen as a remedial exercise due to a lack of basic and socially contextual knowledge on the part of the students. Shulman (quoted in Sockett, 2000), a past President of and now President Emeritus at the Carnegie Foundation, adds to this picture by contributing what he calls the 'epidemiology of mislearning.' I can fully endorse his views on the several (one may say, expected) entry-level problems that need attention, but after this first phase is over, and the students start to perceive themselves as students of higher learning but are as yet without the personal ability to base that judgement on, Shulman‟s three (mis)learning pathologies of amnesia, fantasia and inertia start to appear. Contemporary design education 26 There are several reasons why students suffer from these pathologies, and they appear to forget what they have learned (amnesia), the worst time being from the end of the first year to the beginning of the second year, when these „seasoned veterans‟ return to what they now regard as „their‟ familiar territory, completely missing the fact that their newly acquired map of the academic territory is still woefully incomplete. One of the main reasons for this situation is due to the fact that they have yet to acquire the inclusive capacity to make the required connections (and therefore the adaptive transformations) between subject areas, between disciplines, between one area of knowledge and another that, on the face of it, seems unconnected. It is for this very reason that Jonas (2004) has called design a groundless field of knowledge, areas of importance that float, as yet unconnected, like islands in a vast sea of possibility. The second pathology (fantasia) is also dealt with by Laing, in the sense that people create „social phantasy systems‟ for themselves, thus occupying „false positions‟ (Laing, 1990:37). Shulman believes that students suffer from fantasia (being overly confident without reason) because they believe they understand the subject matter when, in fact, they do not, yet. Our task as educators is, first and foremost, is to somehow engender in the student the (directed at the world) competence of an own perception of Heidegger‟s „place of reflection‟ that resounds back like radar, not a sameness, but an alternative vision, not imagined before. Worst of all, in my opinion, is the pathology of inertia21, “those states of mind where people come to know something but simply can't go beyond the facts, can't synthesize them, think with them, or apply them in another situation” (Schulman, in Sockett 2000). Students easily 'forget' what they learn when the curriculum is compartmentalised through separating subject areas of knowledge (a mistake compounded by modularisation). They may 'fantasize' about their knowledge acquisition when it simply remains an anaemic diet of information transfer, and they become 'inert' when required to apply knowledge, not parrot-fashion as in a factual exam, but via never-encountered-before problems put to them in the natural uncertainty of a design environment. These observed educational problem areas are but the visible manifestation of a deeper social malaise turned malapropitic 22 - even someone who can read and write can be 'illiterate' in the sense of not being truly competent (read critical) in either the use of words or images. Consequently, in order to deal with the new university environment that is envisaged, the Boyer Report recommends a fundamental change in structuring undergraduate education, and this calls for what could be seen as a radical reconstruction. However, I think that there are focussed design schools and / or successors to the erstwhile avant-garde Bauhausian design philosophy that have been following this type of active, involved, knowledgegenerative educational approach in any case, and therefore these so-called radical changes should not be as threatening to progressive design teachers as they might be to the more traditional chalk-and-talk brigade. Design has always thrived on these radical changes while incorporating and accommodating sustainable tradition, and to deny our fledgling discipline this contemporaneously necessary change of direction would not advance the cause of design theory, practice or research, let alone true design scholarship. This change is, of course, necessary since not all design schools are enabled to offer (research based) scholarly design education (lack of staff qualifications and / or motivation), nor would they want to, while others are set on providing what amounts to professional, vocational education. Although the Boyer Report is specifically aimed at a general conception of a research university, there are enough correlations to be made with a design undergraduate curriculum, based on the principles of 21 22 Cf. the comparison to Heidegger‟s‟ notion of Verfallen, or everyday obstruction of being. Just as the character, Mrs Malaprop (in the play The Rivals, 1775), mis-spoke her words and substituted one for another with a similar sound but different meaning, so people today easily do the opposite; they use the right word but is has the wrong meaning in reality. „Literate‟ now functionally means being illiterate, a fourth pathology of presumption. Contemporary design education 27 constructive scholarship. A context wherein the interaction with external stimuli is allowed to operate with maximum effect is mentioned, and by highlighting the importance of inquiry through the shared goals of investigation and discovery, these elements of various disparate external stimuli are bound together in a holistic manner. Teacher and student, alike, should be both explorer and learner, through recognizing the importance of the interaction created by overlapping fields of knowledge – this being managed within an environment conducive to exploration and creativity. Active participation is a prerequisite, and the shared knowledge of collaborative efforts, being no simple formula, provides the alternative means necessary for a learning experience through concentrating the educational discovery on analysis, evaluation and synthesis. This brief description of a research educational environment and the recommended institutional goals that are contained in this Report are more than applicable to a renewed design education curriculum. As design educators we need to take a fresh look at our existing design curriculum, and we should allow for the redesign of not only the curricular framework but also of various teaching methodologies that incorporate and accommodate these constructivist aspects of design teaching and learning. In bringing about changes in design practice and design thinking, teaching strategies inclusive of aspects of sociocultural diversity and experience would have as a basic assumption the notion of a student-centred approach. Students would be allowed to discover the value of the knowledge they already hold - those aspects of prior knowledge that may be put to good use immediately - while working towards „desired‟ academic and disciplinary outcomes through a combination of design practice and theory. Of course, the question is asked whether the concept of a student-centred research university might not be an oxymoron, and whether undergraduate students should not concentrate, rather, on mastering the mass of existing knowledge in their field. The Boyer Report counters this thought with the constructivist idea of shifting the focus from „mastery of the known‟ to “a synergistic system in which faculty and students are learners and researchers, whose interactions make for a healthy and flourishing intellectual atmosphere” (Boyer Commission Report, 1998). This view, in my opinion, cannot be realized and sustained without a concomitant healthy and sceptical attitude of critical analysis on all fronts (cf. below), an attitude endorsed by the HESA (2006) document, which goes even further, and views, as essential, “Education in research and the maintenance of research as a form of life”. Entitled Spirit of inquiry: Knowledge creation in South African higher education, this document embodies a number of the constructivist scholarship approaches, including the suggestion that both undergraduate education as well as research activities at a university can only be approached through a spirit of inquiry, since both seek to create knowledge instead of only assimilating the knowledge of others. Higher Education South Africa (HESA) has responded to direct inputs from a number of universities in compiling this report, by stipulating that higher education cannot function “outside of the developmental environment of society”, and although the legitimacy of pure research is acknowledged (i.e., research done in the absence of any sociocultural contact), the focus is on practices that can “capture something of the lived experience of research”, in the process placing research at the centre of the university, thereby securing a role in redesigning and transforming undergraduate teaching, education in general, and so maintaining a living contact with its sociocultural base. Undergraduate study does have its problems due to the “necessity involved in commanding the basics of the discipline”, as acknowledged by the Boyer Report, but by actively pursuing education as a discourse of inquiry (which is exactly what a sociocultural, constructivist + scholarship discourse aims for) there is no reason why undergraduate education and academic research cannot mutually benefit from each other‟s activities, and even goals. The comprehensive transformation that both the Boyer and the HESA Reports call for, through adopting a new model of undergraduate education, thus describes the principles of a constructive scholarship– oriented design school, an establishment of higher learning wherein design equals research, and theory complements practice. In order to redesign teaching practices that bring out the best in students as well Contemporary design education 28 as turn them into 'possibility thinkers' it would seem that the logic of a creative process of discovery is indicated in the learning cycle. The four constructivist scholarships The following is a synthesis of the Boyer Report‟s model of scholarship and social constructivist principles as interpreted by various academic institutions (block quoted in the References section as Constructive Scholarship). These interpretations of scholarship seem to be largely based on the work done at the Carnegie Foundation (for the Advancement of Teaching) by Ernst L. Boyer (past President), R. Eugene Rice (past Senior Fellow) and Lee S. Shulman (President Emeritus). Writings on (social) constructivism, on the other hand, usually mention the work of Dewey, Piaget and Vygotsky. The Scholarship of Discovery is usually viewed as close to the traditional notion of what constitutes the process of research, and indeed emphasizes and encourages the process of discovery and the uncovering of new knowledge as much as it does the production of results. The practice and theory, and consequently the teaching, of design principles follow the lead of a social communication system. A channel of communication needs to be opened up between teacher and student, and having established that common ground, the connection between the student‟s world-of-experience and the world-outthere has to be established. Although constructivist approaches are seen as 'student-centred' through using subject matter as vehicles for interactive engagement, this is syllabus-driven education that is not subjectively student-driven. Subject knowledge will always take precedence in this active classroom situation, based on the knowledge that student prior perception mediates all active debates and analyses. Students must be willing to engage with both teacher and subject matter in an ongoing and involved manner. Constructivist scholarship allows perplexity and tension to develop as a natural part of the learning process, while being able to deal with the ensuing resistance. Student autonomy, as an antidote, may be developed through encouraging individual thinking processes, or reflection on reflection in action (Schön, 1987). It must be emphasized that all these areas of teaching and learning overlap and complement each other, so it seems natural to highlight the Scholarship of Teaching as the transformation and extension of knowledge. This is done through a reflective interaction between a teacher‟s understanding and student learning, and correlates perfectly with the constructivist approach of allowing student everyday conception to coexist with academic knowledge. Teachers should be seen as scholars, and by fully engaging with distinctive and innovative programmes and thus also with other staff members in a collaborative team, the teacher may better shape the student‟s learning experience. The desired outcomes, the process of discovery and a certain practical distancing become the prime constructive elements of such programmes. To step back, to put distance between the work and the self is necessary for analysis, and this process leads to relationships and connections becoming clearer. Constructivism echoes this multiple representation of ideas through co-ordination and interpretation, and emphasizes the importance of pattern recognition. Making a point of using the relationship between informal (everyday) and formal (academic) conception paves the way for a reconciliation between theory and practice. This leads to an even stronger emphasis on the relationship between and integration of scholarship and constructivism. The Scholarship of Integration becomes one of the core concepts of a design curriculum, and fits in with the constructivist approach of meta-knowledge, the notion of teaching not only content but also the basic knowledge underpinning the nature and scope of subject principles and concepts. Through encouraging a more holistic approach in the development of interdisciplinary programmes the idea of connecting different fields of knowledge can lead to the synthesis of diverse academic and student viewpoints (above), for a more comprehensive understanding of the complex Contemporary design education 29 nature of the process information-into-knowledge. Dichotomous models change to continuous models of knowledge and teaching (discovery because of uncovering). Constructivism sees the relational view of knowledge as a tentative model of human construction, and agrees with Shulman‟s (Gudmundsdottir et al., 1995) notion of pedagogical content knowledge. Not only does this approach to learning and teaching inquire into the ways students construct meaning, but this model of content transforms knowledge into narrative communication. Subjects may be taught in ways transcending the dichotomy between knowledge content and actual classroom teaching, especially through the use of analysis, metaphor and rhetoric. As a process of creative discovery, these approaches to acquiring subject / discipline knowledge grounded in a social / cultural dynamic need to maintain the essence of creative discovery when considering the Scholarship of Application. The idea is the broader application of knowledge between the academy and the real world, or the constructivist notion of the applicability of knowledge-in-action. Design education remains rule-based knowledge acquisition without meaningful application, and will remain pedestrian application without a sustained component of creative discovery. To effectively guide students toward being 'possibility thinkers' they need to grasp the concept of a reflective practitioner, and to enable them to achieve this goal teachers will have to ask themselves how they manage to teach something as insubstantial and broadly defined as 'understanding‟. Scholarship and social constructivist approaches both support the idea that students be encouraged to develop an ability to formulate creative, analytical and searching questions, a prerequisite for 'understanding.' An attitude towards design education as curiosity-into-discovery can be shown to lead to creating possibilities for practice (application). Having actively and constructively initiated this creative process, students can be shown the relationship between what they themselves had just achieved and the analysis of their own 'design practice' through reflection. It is part of human nature to be less threatened by memory (reflection on what had just been done) than by analysis (being asked to come up with something 'new' to say). A path of discovery from the 'already known' to the so-called 'unknown' through the use of metaphor can lead to establishing creative bridges between perceived dichotomies: creativity and analysis, practice and theory, undergraduate learning and postgraduate research. The notion of constructivist scholarships, as a basis for a design education discourse, is one way to ensure, with Margolin (2002:119), that we can “resist the reduction of the artificial to simulacra”, or, resist the reduction of a sensus communis23 to a remnant of Germanic rationality (Gadamer, 2006:27). Oetinger, according to both Gadamer (2006) and Magee (2001), made of the concept of communal sense (-making) something that derives from life and not rules, being directed against rationalism in favour of the organic structure of living circumstances, and consequently this approach views the very act of knowing as something “which aims at the articulation and grasp of organic wholes” (Magee, 2001:66). The Bridge The world is changing, has always been changing, but when we remember that this sometimes enigmatic and absolution-inducing phrase really means that we are changing, it does tend to refocus our attention on the responsibility - the stewardship - we have towards others, our total environment, and then to ourselves. In this chapter I dealt with aspects of the state of design, and especially the inclusion of the social in the process of design thought, since this addition to the design mix means we have to ask all sorts of questions both of the situation and of ourselves – which precludes us from denying all responsibility for the process or for the consequences of design. A blend of the four scholarships, representing the basics of a research-oriented view of any situation, and social constructivism, representing the basics of human-oriented design thinking, seems to me to be the way forward if we are 23 Discussed in the next chapter. Contemporary design education 30 to create a sense of depth in our social discourse on the artificial. So, we are changing the world with the designed objects and systems we place in it, and we need to take some responsibility for this blended socio-technical result. We are also changing the world through our interrelationships with each other on a global scale and through our interactions with, and reactions to, the artificial, a term which, I suppose, one could translate as denoting the ongoing development of our literal and figurative world of coexistence. One way of making this responsibility apparent without enforcing its acceptance, is through changing the focus of design education from product to process, but not the process of design how-to methods, but the more basic and almost biological process of design thought, correlating design thinking with research discovery processes, and so to move on to the individual-group interrelationship. By means of this constructivist discourse of teaching and learning the place of the individual in the educational process can be highlighted, while the individual‟s dependency on the other (the social, the group) is foregrounded. I also looked at some of the motivations for change, and what the future expectations from young designers could be, especially if they are to heed Findeli‟s (2001:11) injunction that these transformative paradigm shifts call for them to open up the scope of design inquiry. For that to happen, we need to investigate the role that theory, as a way of thinking and a way of seeing, can play in our understanding of design. It is hardly feasible that there can be any doubt regarding the fast pace of change in the world today, and design has now been recognised, by some, as the framework for thought that it can be, instead of merely being a contributor to the manufacturing base of the economy, and therefore largely invisible to the public at large. Perhaps it is because this very „public at large‟ has been exposed to and instructed by the calls for change from the various designers, conferences, publications and events, mentioned in this Chapter, that design as an agent for change is becoming visible for the first time, really. Becoming visible does not mean that Latour‟s (1992) question, Where are the missing masses? is being answered, on the contrary, with the new hybrid artefacts24 becoming ever more ubiquitous, people in fact want more of „design‟, these missing masses, to become invisible. Latour‟s missing masses example focuses on the role that these designed objects play in our lives, and the fact that we do not seem to notice, and are therefore „in the dark‟ as to the effect they can have on our lives, especially when things go wrong, when these designed objects break down. But these designed object examples are all of the everyday, stand-alone kind, the ones physically present but unnoticed, and the fact is that more artefacts are becoming invisible, because more and more „designed objects‟ are now not stand-alone artefacts, but embedded in other systems, e.g., a sat-nav system built into a car. The „design‟ problem is now to re-design the complete package, car, driver, extra widget, to work within the original concept of safe and pleasurable driving, to not get lost on the way to that remote city venue or scenic country spot, but also not to have to take your eyes off the road, where they should be, instead of glancing at this new small screen every few seconds. The interrelationship between artefact and user, the valueadded experience, is now the most important factor, and not the visible object itself, and these new „invisible‟ designs will become part of the driving experience much like BMW‟s heads-up display, visible for its communicative value, but invisible as to everything else. It is now not so much design manufacturing prowess that leads the way but alternative design thinking, hybrid thinking, in fact. According to Lee (2009:71), not only have we been fooled (into thinking the process is going to be easy) by the success and relative efficiency of embedded systems so far, but the problems we are likely to face in the near future will be considerable, not because it cannot be done but because it can be done. 24 Cf. the reference (:10, above) to these hybrid artefacts that “will be complex combinations of products, services, spaces, and information” (Brown, 2008:92), in fact, hybrid products that make full use of the possibilities inherent in a social constructivist approach to design thinking, based on innovative knowledge of the socio-technical interactions of our daily lives. Contemporary design education 31 That means “the problems of real-world compatibility and coordination are going to get worse” since, if we can think of a possible new hybrid, the (short) history of this new revolution called cyber-physical systems (CPS) is such that, sooner rather than later, it will become possible, because “hardware and software design has reached a tipping point, where computing and networking can indeed be integrated into the vast majority of artefacts made by humans”. Will our existing design approaches to „problemsolving‟ be sufficient, and our design curricula up to the task of educating these new critical thinkers? I think not. Examples of CPS include medical devices (cf. the portable EKG system, discussed above), assisted living (e.g., allowing wheelchair-bound users to switch lights on/off via sound), environmental control, energy conservation, smart buildings (self-regulation calibrated through human presence/absence), smart fabrics and smart clothing (interactive sofas, wearable computing), and what Lee calls distributed robotics (telepresencing: research in haptics, e.g., remote sensing / operating of heavy equipment, medical devices, even in some cases robotics-assisted operations on the battlefield; telemedicine: the technology already exists, and research is being done, to close the virtual gap between a physician / clinician in one location, and, e.g., an accident victim or heart patient in another location). This trend in design development comes from real-world situations that do have „solutions‟ at present, but that offer themselves as thought provoking scenarios for totally different future solutions. On the other hand, both „older type‟ designed objects (both stand-alone and/or without electronics) and new hybrids are being designed and redesigned precisely for their „visibility‟ in the sense of their ability to act as meta-designs. This conception of design means, and I stress this is my interpretation migrated and transformed from the original definitions of meta-fiction (Waugh, 1990:2) and meta-design (Fischer, 2005), that meta-design refers to early human and non-human system design, initially a framing narrative, that does not exist in and for itself, having no intrinsic identity. It structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own proto-identity, as a questioning system, in order to highlight, interrogate, and re-design (co-create) the relationship that is being constituted and conserved between emerging user narratives and evolving working realities. Personal and professional identities emerge during these recursive interactions with the medium that contains the system(s) at the time. System design becomes a user-customization of complex working environments in real time. Meta-design products, as an idea, are not new, but have been swamped by the crass commercialism of the age that was inaugurated with the decision to deliberately plan obsolescence into product design, an economic strategy that perfectly suited the advertising industry who sold messages of keeping up with the Joneses. It is no great secret that too many products are on the market, and competing with each other, not for their intrinsic value as objects, or for their espoused function, but for their image quality. On the other hand, meta-design products make you notice them, not for their styling (which is important in itself, who wants ugly design?) but for their communicative value, and what they are saying is, this is what you will be capable of doing with my help: the design speaks to the user‟s environment and concerns, and above all, to the user‟s interactive ability regarding the world of work and play. As an example, Feltham et al. (2007:61-62) designed the open system concept of a Magic Box – in reality two artefacts that act as cultural probes for social awareness – that “carries gifts, toys, photos, souvenirs, messages” etc., to act as interactive and communicative non-electronic devices between grandparents and their grandchildren. Hepworth (2007:108;115), on the other hand, is a designer working for Bang & Olufsen who uses electronic „magic‟, not the passive kind generating consumer amazement, but the participatory kind that generates a positive user experience. The Music Shelf is in fact a digital music player that virtually mimics a CD player and CD library collection, “An illusion bridging virtuality and physicality”, making this a perfect example of one of Lee‟s cyber-physical systems. By moving a slider the user can select a CD as if physically touching the jewel case itself, thereby selecting the music not only by memory but by sight: it is often forgotten that sight is a powerful stimulant to memory and recollection, and our choices are often based on the intermediary action induced by sight. This device operates on a different level to, say, the iPod + docking station combinations on offer now, because it Contemporary design education 32 mimics „reality‟ as far as possible, which includes the original size of the CD cover and illustration, and the action of „reaching out and touching‟ – a very important human requirement. Will design education keep up with these design directions, and help students to acquire (design) their own framing narratives in order to deal with the contemporary world? Lee (2009:71) assures us that CPS “is a profound revolution that turns entire industrial sectors into producers of cyber-physical systems. This is not about adding computing and communication equipment to conventional products where both sides maintain separate identities. This is about merging computing and networking with physical systems to create new revolutionary science, technical capabilities and products.” This is a perhaps a huge claim, but one already supported by contemporary artefacts, and also a claim that has been foreshadowed by Jones (1984:127), whose insight into the possibilities for design‟s future has now proven to be foresight, in that he saw these new inventions as set “to change not only one‟s surroundings but to change oneself and the way one perceives, to change reality perhaps?” If the technical capabilities of future designed objects (now increasingly seen as belonging to and in larger systems) are seen as a huge challenge, the changes in design education should be seen as an even bigger challenge. For designers of the future this scenario requires new thinking paradigms and perspectives, i.e., holistic and constructive systems thinking, or as Lee puts it, we need to see the emergence of hybrid systems theories. These problems will be addressed in Chapter 4: Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing, particularly, but to place that investigation in context we have to consider why theory is such a fundamental issue. We need to investigate the role that theory, as a way of thinking and a way of seeing, can play in our understanding of design; this will be done in Chapter 3: Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production. With design moving to include hybrid thought processes, and with our educational approaches lagging behind, we have to examine the importance of how and why theories are formed, the role of both narrative and story-telling, the several roles we as participants play, and, parallel to this, we have to ask an important question, who are these new millennium students that are to become the designers of the future? These designers of the future require new thinking paradigms and perspectives, and they are the focus of Chapter 2: Myths and other social narratives. Myths and other social narratives 2 33 Myths and other social narratives The Gate The world is changing and so are we. The world designs us as we design the world, and we adjust to and adapt to these changing circumstances. Constructivism means, in a sense, that we give up, or at least suspend, our knowledge of how things are done so that we might listen to an other discourse besides our own. This is what I try to teach my students, but, while they appear to be almost the same type of youth that I remember from my student days, there are also fundamental differences, the key divergence from my own formative period being the ubiquitous presence of computing systems, and the power of instant communication and networking that this fact brings about. The real problem with the future, and with the technological advances that this produces, is not that things will be as difficult as in the past, but that things will be easy. Lee (2009:71) made a good point in stating that this is exactly the problem: the fact that just about anything we think of can be done, because technology makes it possible. That is, if we ignore the complexity of the contemporary world, and the even more complex nature of the technological underpinning of that world. What do these students make of this new world and, more to the point, what are we to make of them? Who are they? For the sake of design education, and even more so in the development of a theory for design thinking, we need to answer this question. What do these new students need in order to deal with the new paradigms that require these new hybrid systems theories? Will our existing design approaches to „problem-solving‟ be sufficient, and our design curricula up to the task of educating these new critical thinkers? In this chapter I will look at the phenomenon called the Millennium Student, or Students 2.0 as they termed themselves, and consider the fact that they wish to be part of a system of education that allows them to constructively participate in what is after all their own future. Attempts at e-learning, such as Edupunk (discussed below) do not seem to meet with the approval of Students 2.0, so what is it that they want? Movements such as The 21st Century Learning Initiative can offer some guidance, one focus being the rapid pace of technological change that alters the world of these young people, and our task in educating them to deal with this critical need for adaptation, to help them forge their own identities, or these new Millennium students will “find their own life teachers for themselves” using the sociotechnical influences outside the classroom. These new students can either form true identities that work in the real world, or they can forge new myths in order to cope with the mediated world; to help understand this possibility the creation of historical myths are considered. A change in the curriculum seems to be called for, as a consequence, but only if we allow it to adapt to The New Age of Connectivity, discussed next. We become increasingly and powerfully connected, flattening the world, but to what purpose? Again, through the work of Castells, the notion of the relationship between learning and identity comes to the fore, and to investigate this, we look at the medium as metaphor, in Postman‟s terms the medium capable of begetting, as it were, a new form of discourse, then the medium as epistemology, in the sense that this discourse can “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (McLuhan, 1974:27). It is therefore imperative to look at the flattened world of instant communication via the medium as ontology, or, amusing ourselves to life; Postman‟s (1987) Amusing Ourselves to Death needs to be turned around, and Myths and other social narratives 34 the new medium used as a positive learning tool that also helps build a critical and workable identity. My hypothesis is that the new Millennium student is experiencing an electronic diaspora, and to resists this tendency I discuss the formation of an intellectual diaspora created by the Second World War and its legitimation processes. This highlights the construction of social and cognitive maps to an own future, something the new Millennium student is good at, but will their narratives contained in these maps correlate with the new territory they have to face, eventually? In the last sections of this chapter I discuss the possible effects, the effectiveness, of online sites such as My Space, which leads to My Identity, but which, if not reshaped from within by means of a critical pedagogy, can only lead to the creation of a new My Myth. Introduction The movement called The 21st Century Learning Initiative is to be seen as part of a much larger, and world-wide, contemporary network1 that is dedicated to the renewal of education, one that seems specifically concerned with shifting the focus from content to the learning individual. John Abbott (2009) is the author of a Briefing Paper that the Learning Initiative will circulate to all British parliamentarians, with a view to focusing attention on the inadequacies of their general education structure. What this Briefing Paper has in common with most of the other initiatives is encapsulated by the following: an education system based on rote learning, that rewards a good memory through factual exams, is outdated and economically non-viable, since what is needed in our world brimming with easily accessible information is not more but „better‟ access, with the latter pointing to the urgent need to, not merely accessing information, but having „access to knowledge‟. For that to happen we need to educate critical thinkers able to communicate, who can collaborate meaningfully through establishing feasible networks, and to do that we need to educate students to take responsibility for their own learning processes in a dynamic learning environment (Abbott, 2009:iv). According to Hadland (2009), our South African situation is no different, and from a recent debate entitled: “Does higher education produce the knowledge, skills, competencies and people needed for South Africa‟s development?” it became clear that employers are questioning the usability of graduates because (too) many of them “lacked communication skills, writing skills and the ability to think critically, Price said”, the speaker mentioned being the vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town. Not only should our education system renew itself, with universities analytically rethinking their roles as institutions of learning, but we should question whether a university‟s role is to produce these „skilled graduates‟, whether we are producing practical skills or thinking skills. The answer to that question comes in part from Abbott (2009:i), who writes that the minimum purpose that we can expect education to adhere to is to prepare the next generation not only for the type of grown-up world the present generation values, but also a better world that these young people should bring about. However, as Abbott emphasizes, contemporary educational policies are structured as “a result of numerous decisions taken in times past by educationalists and politicians as they reacted to social and economic environments very different to today”, that these decisions have now become „foundational assumptions‟ being perpetuated instead of questioned, and that, consequently, “solutions to urgent and current problems” are being sought with a mindset dominated by these historical assumptions, or rather, beliefs in age-old remedies. The „skilled graduates‟ that Price allude to are graduates from “a learning system based on rote-learning rather than problem solving and flexible thinking”, an education system based on foundational and (by now) false assumptions. Universities should not be training institutions for skilled workers for development, but learning environments “to 1 Networking is becoming of prime importance with the growth of the knowledge economy in the digital era, but here we are witnessing an organic network that, although some initiatives are obviously not connected officially, are nevertheless focusing on the same goals: all are searching for ways to renew education, from the bottom up. Myths and other social narratives 35 prepare citizens, leaders, „people who can think‟, Price said” (Hadland, 2009). Design education, in particular, fits into this overall picture of educating the next generation for a new world, one that we are only beginning to explore, but also one that, thanks to ubiquitous computing fuelled by Moore‟s Law2, is becoming increasingly clear; by the time a first year student enters the BTech or 4th year of study, even the world they „knew‟ at the beginning of their educational journey will have changed, and in networked terms, that change can be quite dramatic. How is education to keep pace with this unprecedented flow of change? Besides the already important question of how education must change, we also have to ask, who are the students making up this next generation? We can regard them or label them as the new Millennium student, and take Abbott‟s 21st Century Learning Initiative seriously enough to admit that “Adolescence is a deeply-engrained evolutionary adaptation that forcibly replaces the clone-like learning of the younger child with a determination to work out its own future”, and that this demands a curriculum that is as flexible as the related Latin word curricle, denoting a fast, two wheeled chariot whose great strength lay in its very lightness and resilience, instead of a content-laden lumbering supply wagon impossible to turn around quickly in times of need. “In an information-saturated world it is essential to appreciate what it is that children need to know and understand now that will equip them for a lifetime of performing justly, skilfully and magnanimously” (Abbott, 2009: 19; 24). In many respects there are no great differences between today‟s young people and any hormone-driven adolescent that has ever, throughout history, stormed out of a room slamming the door in the process. We are all biological beings that are, to a certain extent, programmed by nature, but we are increasingly becoming human beings „programmed‟ by our 21st century „nurturing‟, i.e., our artificially constructed and many-sided realities, and these designed environments include all manner of electronic devices and systems that are, by now, a „natural‟ part of our lives, and they do have an influence on our very mindset. The new Millennium student is no exception, and supported, one might even say, scaffolded, by the new communication technologies and their ever increasing computing power, these students are willing to tell us who they are and what they need to know and understand now. The myth of the Millennium student At this point I must insert what might seem to be a digression, but which is in fact another strand in the larger argument of this thesis, namely that design is looking for an identity, and so are these young people. In Chapter 1:24 I wrote that design as form-giving, as styling, is being subordinated to the „form-giving‟ of a student personal and professional identity, relying on their capability of selfreflection, an awareness of self and others, of the objects that enter into each project environment (and that have entered their lives, in any case, outside the project / class environment), and so of the relationships between these. Self-reflection as well as reflection on any subject being studied can form a relationship, a partnership as it were, and in this new direction of enquiry both design and the student of design can find a new identity. I also speculated on the transformation of design into „meta-design‟ (Chapter 1:35), which refers to early human and non-human system design, initially a framing narrative that does not exist in and for itself, having no intrinsic identity. Here I have to be careful, and in this chapter I will be discussing the difficulties associated with paradoxes, but stating that design is looking for an identity, and almost immediately seeming to retract that statement („design has no intrinsic identity‟), is not as paradoxical as it looks. Also in Chapter 1:10 appears the beginning of my new argument for a theory of design, namely that design is being described as a „weak‟ discipline because it has to deal with increasingly complex real-world challenges, which means design is seen as interpretative instead of prescriptive, forming a social discourse about reality in which hard facts are 2 “The basic rule--which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months--has been the guiding principle of the high-tech industry since it was coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965” (Kanellos, 2003). Myths and other social narratives 36 subordinate to perception and experience. The artificial „identity‟ of design is subordinate to the „natural‟ identity of the person interpreting the effects and affects of design, hence the „weak‟ as opposed to „strong‟ label, and the reason for a light and flexible („weak‟ in appearance but strong in performance) curricle as opposed to a heavy and inflexible curriculum („strong‟ in appearance and „structure‟, but in reality weak and inflexible for all that). As a consequence (meta) design begins to take on the character of a „weak‟ discipline 3, in that it structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own proto-identity, as a questioning system, in order to highlight, interrogate, and re-design (cocreate) the relationship that is being constituted and conserved between emerging user narratives and evolving working realities. Personal and professional identities emerge during these recursive interactions with the medium that contains the system(s) at the time, but this can be both positive and negative for the Millennium student, as I shall argue, below. To acquire (design) an ontological identity, one that is not static but can keep on developing, these new students have to confront the disadvantage within what may appear to be the networked environment that is most natural to them, specifically socio-technical extensions of their proto-realities such as Facebook and Twitter. Not only do they use these communication technologies to tell us who they are, but these very support structures can work against the essence of a developing ontology, and turn becoming into the technorhetoric of what is. In Chapter 1:3 I interprettranslate Margolin‟s (2002:119) use of the term spirituality as referring to the connection we still have to our innate humanness, and when he states that “A metanarrative of spirituality can help designers resist technorhetoric that sanctions the continuous colonization of the natural”, this refers to a new discourse of the social that, also, focuses on a comprehension of being-human, while it concerns itself with the construction of being-social. This position borders closely on the question asked by Willis (1999) as to whether the construction of being–social means that technology designs us or we design technology: “Interpretation is inseparable from the ontological designing process”. We can ask of the Millennium student the same question, will Facebook design you or will you and your co-discoverers design this new medium of exploration? It is even more important, today, to realise that for these young people to resists such technorhetoric is to go against the grain of (their modernity) and to resist the temptation offered by their „fellow social circle members‟ who have already made that choice, and who, quite naturally, resent an outsider perception to their culturally formative, collective choice, and therefore, to their „voice‟ or identity. To return to Margolin, the „natural‟ in his (con)text is not to be found in contemporary culture, at least not the direction it has taken so far, since the future needs a new definition of the „natural‟, a position that can only be reached if both designers and technologists are willing to collaborate and consciously re-design the composition of the artificial. That I can only interpret as the impossibility of these students finding their version of a „natural‟ ontological identity in the technorhetoric of a Facebook environment, or at least not the „strong identity‟ that these electronic communicative (and „normative‟) environments have assumed so far, and neither will they find their newly forming identities being scaffolded and metaphysically supported by the existing strongly curriculated educational environment. As Margolin can be interpreted, their future needs a new definition of what comes „naturally‟ to them, and not to us, a new position that can only be reached if both students and teachers are willing to collaborate and consciously, deliberately re-design the composition of „the artificial‟ using the framing 3 I compare the „weak‟ design hypothesis to the weak nuclear forces that form one of the four known fundamental forces in nature. The nuclei of all the atoms in your body, or the chair you sit on, should be tearing themselves apart, since all the protons are positively charged and are thus repulsive. That this does not happen is due to the strong nuclear forces, which are always attractive and thus counter the repulsion of the protons; they act very much like the foundational assumptions (above) that keep sets of beliefs whole in an unquestioning manner. On the other hand, the atoms in your body or the chair should not have existed in the first place, since their nuclei consist of protons and neutrons in roughly 50/50 proportions, and yet the Big Bang produced mostly hydrogen and helium atoms with only proton nuclei, leading to the question, where did the neutrons come from? “The answer is that there is another nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, which is capable of transforming neutrons into protons and vice-versa” (Crowell, 2007:57, 60). A „weak‟ force, like a weak design discipline or theory, transforms what it acts upon. Myths and other social narratives 37 narrative of a meta-design theory, that does not exist in and for itself, needing no intrinsic identity of its own but instead offering the conceptual space of which its human co-discoverers can take full advantage. It is important to realise that if we are willing to reflect seriously on what our made environment means to us (and by that I mean both these new students and we as teachers) „we‟ may collectively “resist the reduction of the artificial to simulacra” (Margolin, 2002:119), which means that in our new educational environment (which inevitably includes the socio-technical influences outside the classroom, where these new Millennium students will “find their own life teachers for themselves” – cf. below) we can resist the temptation of technorhetoric convenience to reduce our involvement in and control over our own environmental development by being actively involved in our own social discourse, thus not letting the depth of the technologically fuelled, socially-inspired „artificial‟ be reduced to the shallowness (appearance sans content) of a simulacrum, also known as the creation of contemporary myths. We are who we are This next section begins with material mainly sourced from a blog set up at the end of 2007 by students (American High School pupils) for students, with the help and encouragement of an English teacher, Clay Burell. The opening message states that, in terms of education, they are experiencing a new era in which it is more important to be able to reason that to regurgitate facts; it further describes the youth of today as “the new horizon. We are the future of education. We are Students 2.0” (Students 2.0)4. A revolutionary change is called for, and suggestions offered, although these students do not pretend to have all the answers; what they do regard as an unconditional part of the new process reminds me of the cautionary 'Nothing about us without us', which just happens to be the Disability Rights motto used by industrial designers in their discussions on universal design principles (Froyen et al., 2004). As for the type of education the next generation needs, nothing for us except with us could be their motto, for as the Students 2.0 blogger, Anthony Chivetta (August 31, 2008) makes clear, In contrast to the consumer generations before us, my generation is growing up a generation of producers. We are the YouTube/LiveJournal/Facebook generation. Correctly identifying the new opportunities offered by the new mass media outlets as productive and many-to-many5 while the older versions were solely for consumption, Anthony speaks of posting videos on YouTube and photos on Facebook, and they can „publish‟ so easily today because all the technology is readily available to them: a single modern cell phone, access to the internet, and they are connected to, potentially, the world. We expect to be able to create and to share. And, it is this expectation that makes our generation different. No new education structure for us if we have to remain consumers, is the message, and contrary to the image of an authoritative speaker addressing an audience (chalk-and-talk education; cf. the defence of educating large numbers of undergraduate students by Laurillard, Chapter 1), the new educational environment that these students need … requires a flat classroom, one where students are first class citizens and are engaged in the activity of learning … Schools, even more than universities, should treat their students like citizens with (human and learning) rights, in the first place, for how else could we prepare citizens, leaders, and people who can think, as Price (above) stipulated? There is as big a gap between how these young people are treated at school 4 In an effort not to visually fragment the text, I will reference all the student voices as (Students 2.0), and likewise do so in the References list. However, the students taking part in the discussions will be identified by their blog names. 5 We cannot overlook the fact that the point being made here includes such „legitimate‟ design and research endeavours as internet / electronic publishing. Myths and other social narratives 38 level, and how we then expect them to comport6 themselves towards an academic environment at university, as there normally is between an undergraduate education sans research principles and the new, daunting research environment they are expected to master at postgraduate level. In the Industrial Revolution mindset being engaged in the activity of learning meant „sitting with Nellie‟, the typical apprentice / master relationship, and yet being taught the very basics of any subject has never been in dispute. With the advent of the Information Revolution, being engaged in the activity of learning means going beyond the basics and applying this „knowledge‟ in new and innovative ways. The Information (or Digital) Revolution is not so revolutionary anymore, for we have already moved on to a world where, as Nicholas Negroponte says, "There is no more digital revolution ... We are now a digital civilization" (cited in Buchanan, 1999:1); this is truly a new and as yet largely unexplored world of sociotechnical construction, and we must ask, what does engaged in the activity of learning mean now? These students do not pretend to have the definitive answers, but they do, with right, ask to be part of the process of finding out what it can mean for a sustainable future, their future. Edupunk? What Students 2.0 do find, however, is a future that seems to have been decided for them, and they do not like it. Lindsea (June 3 2008) posted a message (entitled Edupunk?) that highlights one of the thought-provoking problems of contemporary education, i.e., how to deal with the new technologies, and in this case, the „edublogosphere‟ in the guise of a blog called Bavatuesdays, run by Jim Groom, and purporting to be … student-centred, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporatesourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. I had to find this definition of what edupunk stands for on Stephen Downes‟ (2009) web site, since edupunk.org gave me no useful information at all, except the impression that it was another blog that supported a large community of data miners.7 I can only assume that many students had the same reaction. To be fair, though, perhaps I am an example of someone (an admitted „old person‟) either (professionally) antagonistic towards these new technologies, and therefore also psychologically (personally) closed to its potential and charm, or, more prosaically, I am so set in my way of doing things (teaching) that I simply cannot change and therefore cannot derive the benefits of this new edublogosphere system. Perhaps. However, the principles of social constructivism and systems thinking make this interpretation almost impossible; almost, because human beings are fallible and not rigid mechanistic systems that can be absolutely controlled for a guaranteed and unvaried output. The „theories‟ of systems thinking and cybernetics – as ways of seeing and thinking – will not work in any sense of the term if the individual manages to retain all older mindsets that, to all intents and purposes, „dictates‟ the outcome of all interpretations of an external environment, such as this blog called Bavatuesdays. It will further be my argument that the application of a social autopoietic process makes an antagonistic and closed-off attitude impossible, since the very „theory‟ of autopoiesis rests on the structural coupling of two systems communicating honestly („naturally‟) with each other. We have also moved beyond the postmodern period of denial … and here I have to correct myself, because in a next 6 Heidegger (1962:23) uses the term Verhalten, which is translated in the English version of Being and Time as comport, a way of conducting oneself forward, as opposed to behaving or controlling oneself. „Conducting oneself forward‟ is meant as the same type of framing thought that distinguishes the idea of „paying it forward‟, in which a good deed from person A to person B is not repaid to A by B, but „paid forward‟ to C. In an (ongoing and therefore developing) ontological sense, and paying attention to social constructivism and systems thinking principles, this means automatically that conducting oneself forward cannot be done without, in a communicative sense, going through other entities (people or things), and that going through has to be done with due care and concern (Besorgen). Heidegger‟s (1962:83-84) makes it clear that „concern‟ has more to do with „conducting oneself forward‟ for the sake of a self-becoming and “a possible way of Being-in-the-world … [and] because the Being of Dasein itself is to be made visible as care. This expression too is to be taken as an ontological structural concept”. 7 The off-putting example is from OUseful Info, a technical site at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive. Myths and other social narratives 39 section, Creating mythical bridges to nowhere, we will explore the consequences of creating contemporary myths of identity that, to some extent, still rely on this postmodern denial of „oldfashioned‟ interpretation, and puts too much faith in an almost pure consumption 8. For a professional designer working with, often, disparate social contexts, an ability to interpret the information (lots of it and often very conflicting, e.g., the paradox of „eyewitness accounts‟) is of crucial importance, and we have to ask, how do we, how can we, teach this skill? My argument in Chapter 3 will be that this designerly interpretation – analogous to Cross‟ designerly knowing – is not only essential to the activity of design but essential to the ontological and phenomenological formation of a personal identity. I therefore submit, here, that my constructivist interpretation of Jim Groom‟s edupunk, knuckle-written message, is admissible, though not exactly favourable, and that it agrees largely with Lindsea‟s reading (horizon of a different expectation9) of this attempt to influence future learning and teaching. Even if we disagree with her „reading‟ of what she found (in her search of the „edu‟blogospehere, which is in itself indicative of a willingness to explore other ideas, lest we forget), we will signally fall short in our quest to renew education, through the youth we are attempting to help (and not despite them) towards a new educational structure, if we fail to „interpret‟ a message such as Lindsea‟s („interpret with‟ their horizon of expectation); ironically, many of the responses to her original Edupunk? post proves my point, that too many of the educators involved do not „interpret‟ so much as „consume‟ her stance, and find it unpalatable to their taste. „Designerly interpretation‟ is not personal interpretation (mostly offered as personal opinion, under the guise of objective interpretation), as Gadamer (Chapter 1:19) reminds us, since the educational landscape (for both teacher and student) represents a perspective (or prospect over the „foggy landscape‟ of enquiry, aka the research landscape) that restricts the construction of an individual mental map, and to reach a point of true „innovation‟, how can one path dominate the direction of enquiry over another? That vision brings us to the Jim Groom approach to the edupunk phenomenon, and I have no great doubt that Lindsea saw the same photograph of the „poster boy‟ (as he is billed on the Wikipedia site) as I did when first looking for information on this edublogosphere “approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude” (Wikipedia, 2009). The photograph shows a male of somewhat indeterminate age (late 30s to early 40s?) who „dresses down‟ in a hoodie top, with a scratch beard (fashionably not clean shaven but not full „bearded‟ either) and sporting heavy-rimmed glasses of the nerdy type through which he pears nearsightedly at the camera. His hands are balled into fists held close together, with the letters e.d.u.p.u.n.k. koki‟d across the fingers, in gangster style, a phenomenon usually seen in prison inmates, and with a stencilled message such as l.o.v.e.h.a.t.e., specifically for the world to take notice. If I were to take a photograph of myself in a similar posture with an „educationally motivated‟ message tattooed across my fingers, and post it on our internal wiki pages, my students would laugh in an embarrassed way (some of them would, rightly, ridicule my misguided attempt at „playing young‟). Figure 1. Jim Groom as “poster boy” for edupunk / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edupunk 8 Cf. Umberto Eco‟s Faith in Fakes (1996), also discussed in Chapter 3. 9 Cf. the difference between Fosnet‟s and Gadamer‟s interpretation of the student‟s horizon of expectation (Chapter 1:20). Myths and other social narratives 40 Lindsea asked, as would any self-respecting10 young person, Don‟t you teachers remember when you were young? Hippies? Protestors? Implementers of change? Controllers of the cool, anti-establishment, nonconformist underground culture? Can you imagine what it might feel like if a bunch of older people [that‟s us, now], outside of your culture, used your name for something completely different? She does have a point, and a valid one, which argues against the stance taken by Intrepid Teacher, who takes exception strongly enough to call bull shit (sic) when you say “Edupunk teachers: you are not punk, and you are not DIY. You haven‟t even gotten close.” … I still relate better to teenagers than to adults and I am 34 years old … but I am still the same pissed off teenager I (sic) was when I was 18. This passage tends to speak for itself, e.g. nobody would (or could) have any faith in Daniel Cohn-Bendit today, as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), if he were to still act as the really „pissed off teenager‟ and activist11 he undoubtedly was in the late 1960s. What Lindsea perhaps sees in this picture of a punk „wanna-be‟ look-alike (Jim Groom) is what every teenager from time immemorial has distrusted on sight: an adult with what seems to be a fake identity, and it matters not that the adult in question has not grown up at all; in fact, that makes it worse12. What such teenagers see is what Fosnet (Chapter 1, p. 50) does not realise, which is that when “Teachers [of mathematics] have horizons in mind when they plan – horizons like place value, or addition or subtraction” (Fosnet, 2005:287), then these horizons of expectation, notwithstanding the necessity of „learning the basics‟, are quite likely not in the sights of (not „known to‟) those you are attempting to teach, no matter how much empathy you think exists between teacher and student, because any modicum of „false‟ identity (even if for a „good cause‟) will blind you to the fact that your path will be seen to dominate the direction of enquiry over that of the student (above). Perhaps the activists for Edupunk can derive some measure of assurance from Cohn-Bendit‟s own history; you do not have to give up your principles, but you do have to adjust your application (meaning really, your interpretation) of those beliefs to allow for the times you live in, and this does not mean „joining the mainstream‟ or „selling out‟: Cohn-Bendit moved from „the barricades‟ to become the MEP for the Green Party / Free European Alliance Group, as it were, without missing a beat. However, not being punk enough is not the main issue, according to Lindsea‟s post, which is, rather, that she sees no student discussions and no student participation, which „interpretation‟ is rather borne out by the „official‟ Edupunk narrative that states boldly that “edupunk is … teacher- or communitycreated”; student-centred, yes, but that is not enough for Students 2.0, as we have already established. And here we come to (another) split in the road, to which I will return more fully below, but suffice it to say, now, that this issue of student participation, as far as sites like Edupunk are concerned, has to be seen to be believed, and I, likewise, find no evidence of active student participation. As a graphic designer I have always had a particular interest in visual communication issues, and spent the greater number of years of my professional career as an „information designer‟, and if there is one thing in this contemporary world that I cannot accept as a designer (and even more so as a user), it is a web site that does not deliver what it promises, at first glance, and easily, so that first-time users can navigate at their discretion, and not have to follow (be dominated by) the path designed by the creator of this data 10 I do not mean this in any derogatory way, but in remembrance of my own youthful constructions of identity. 11 “The conference [at which the Revolutionary Socialist Students‟ Federation was formed] was addressed by two heroes of the Paris [1968] barricades, Alain Geismar and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had been brought to London by the BBC for a programme about the student revolts” (Hewison, 1986:162). 12 When youthful stars of the music world finally „grow up‟, should one speak of irony, mere history repeating itself, or of the fact that certain myths do not last? This „educational‟ endeavour named as Edupunk is, broadly speaking, modelled on The Sex Pistols‟ punk image of anti-authoritarian revolt, which is today somewhat diminished, since its front man, Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon), has become the star for a British TV advertisement for Country Life butter, a contemporary road well-trodden by erstwhile mythical heroes, from leaders of revolt to spokesmen for bourgeois products. Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.), who used to be the lead singer for the punk band The Stooges, today stars in a TV advertisement that sells motor insurance for Swiftcover (Sutherland, 2009:28). Myths and other social narratives 41 depository. A web site is neither a dumping ground for yet further links to follow, neither is it a cacophony of information voices all vying to be heard, at once; all of this is counter-productive and contrary to the guidelines of Vannevar Bush, who felt, as Belson (1997) puts it, that “Each individual would perform the roles of information architect and content provider, and in Bush's vision, the technology would be standardized, and ubiquitous, so the technical Webmaster and evangelist roles would be far less necessary”. Bush was one of the most important pioneers of what was to become the internet and the WWW, and especially of how users would navigate (use for their own purposes) the accessible information, and today new technologies are seemingly paying heed to his foresight, with individuals playing the roles of information architect and „content provider‟ in the sense that Web 2.0 and the phenomenon of tag clouding make this possible. The „split in the road‟, in terms of the userproducer as opposed to the user-consumer, was already forecast by Bush, as indeed it has been visualised by many educators in the past, and the choice is comparatively easy: to retain control of the mode of production, or to share it, but how do you persuade teachers (and web „designers‟) that the „technical Webmaster‟ and the „evangelist roles‟ should be played by the users, and not the teacher / designer? In using Web 2.0 technology as a modern prompt to achieve a form of self-realization this is possible, since this new platform has “a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from the core” (O‟Reilly, 2005). It seems to me that what O‟Reilly calls the architecture of participation, and Bush termed as the user “building webs (trails) of information that were personalized to their needs and interests” (Belson, 1997), can be achieved by means of (beginning with) this phenomenon of the „tag cloud‟ addition to many web sites today, that can begin to act like a topos, a transformative space that will, by its very open source cybernetic nature, succeed in complying with Vannevar Bush‟s vision, and, I argue, with the core need expressed by Students 2.0. As Richard Saul Wurman, a doyen of contemporary information architecture (information design) puts it, information is very easy to look at but often not that easy to understand, with understanding, after all, being the basic task of the designer and not the exception. For many designers, still, the only belief is „form follows function‟, without even understanding what that originally meant. For Wurman (1997:102103) „form‟ should not follow the very basics of „function‟, which should be as normal as digestion, but instead, follow the „performance‟ (an attitude I cannot help but compare to Wittgenstein) not of the design, but of the user‟s horizon of expectation, i.e., the user‟s holistic interpretative process; “it is the art of satisfying a need”. Lindsea then makes it clear that the students Will be the leaders in whatever underground change there may be. She is not the only student to feel that such sites (edupunk.org) „package‟ and „label‟ them, and in the process ignores the promise of a developing student community, one with „equal voices‟, and the fact that Shannon (June 3, 2008) identifies Jim Groom as an IT instead of an academic person, having worked with him as a college student, is part of the problem and not the solution, which Shannon cannot seem to grasp. If, as she argues Jim Groom loves the student involvement and he is very much about showcasing their work too, then why can‟t I find any evidence of this? What I do find, is evidence of „the other side‟ denying student voices, which is as non-sensical as a designer ignoring the objections of users. A pity then, for Shannon, that Mike Caulfield (June 3, 2008) somewhat undermines her assertion that students „are involved‟, because he makes it plain that edupunk is about learning (student-centred) technologies, not teaching technologies. Thank you Mike, even though Mike insists, nonetheless, that he takes issue with Lindsea for her view that students are not involved, even though the students themselves may ask, involved in which capacity? The rest of Mike‟s post is about pure IT issues (microgrants to students … to use paid Myths and other social narratives 42 technology / „syndicating‟ student work out of YouTube, etc.), and the reason for this mechanistic approach? We‟re not teachers, for the most part. We‟re people trying to convince teachers to balance power in the classroom a little more fairly. Not in this way, you don‟t. The tone, the somewhat hostile comebacks from the grown-up „punks‟ are not convincing, as Tiara (June 3, 2008) reports in her comment on this somewhat misleading web site: When I first heard the term [edupunk], I thought it was going to be a reflection on doing education your own way – instead of having an authority tell you what to learn and how to learn … So did I, Tiara, and in design terms first impressions can be so off-putting as to turn users away. I have to agree with you that EduPunk reads more like EduTrendy and seems intent on using cool tools in education, which is, after all, what Mike admits to, and not at all about … really thinking about changing mindsets related to education, as Tiara assumes. Yet the new technologies, as designed by adults, do not seem to find as much favour as they should, and the reasons are, I would argue, that this is a modern version of Jones‟ disagreement with the design fraternity (cf. Chapter 1). The „right‟ requirements for a Web 2.0 educational site are, as Jones (1988:224) pointed out, in principle unknowable by both students and designers / teachers. In „observing the system‟, i.e., in really listening to what the students are trying to work out for themselves, and combining that with appropriate learning theories, teachers and designers of these technological extensions of the classroom can come closer to co-designing Web 2.0 sites that work for both parties, and as in the MIT (Darmofal, et al., 2002) and Clark and Smith (2008) examples, constructivism as a learning tool can be used, with real-world needs, to allow critical, individual thinking to develop within a working, communal and innovative „group intelligence‟ situation. The Students 2.0 voices are clamouring for nothing more than is reflected in this statement from Jones (1988:224): “It is ourselves … that are the real purpose of designing. The biggest mistake is to take the product alone as the aim. It is always secondary”. It is the student that is the real purpose of education. We had started on that „split in the road‟ that should lead to a user-producer situation, and must now touch on a further aspect (prospect over the new, unfolding, landscape) that starts to emerge. Apart from being taken seriously as participants and producers, what are these Students 2.0 asking for, or are they simply dissatisfied with older people telling them what to do, which they get enough of in the classroom in any case, a situation they cannot wait to get away from? The students themselves admit to being „absent‟ in the sense of not participating enough in the classroom, and neither do they really participate on web sites such as Students 2.0, leading Lindsea (October 7, 2008) to ask, Where have all the students 2.0 gone? This somewhat rhetorical question has a serious side to it, and the split in the road is beginning to curve back on itself, and starting to resemble a (negative) cybernetic feedback loop, but I take heart from Bruinsma‟s (1995) notion that a new mentality is more necessary than yet more new forms, and a new way of thinking about education, instead of new technological tools, seems to be exactly what these students need, but what they need and what they consume can be two very different things. The negative feedback concerns the dissenting voices, as one could expect on such public sites, who question the students‟ involvement and staying power in an engaged activity of learning. Despite its first flush of success, the later responses to the Students 2.0 site had moved Lindsea to address this strange feeling of transient blogging that I‟m getting from a lot of students. This is an important point to focus on, since even the most professional discussion platform, such as our discipline‟s PhD-Design discussion list on the Jiscmail server, has a somewhat chequered career, in that certain posts elicit very few responses, while others are at times „over-subscribed‟ as it were, yet not always of great importance in the long run (of importance to whom, one may ask, remembering that such a discussion list „caters‟ to a multi-disciplinary platform). It is not that easy to maintain a steady stream of interesting (read, for young people, „attention-grabbing‟) inputs that will keep a significant Myths and other social narratives 43 number of the site‟s members attracted, let alone participating. Robert responded to Lindsea‟s query by reminding us of the “1 percent rule”: … the truth is that nobody is really participating on the internet that much, anywhere … nobody is really taking advantage. It‟s obvious that even our younger, more technologically inclined, generation fits nicely into a theory called the “1 percent rule”. It suggest that “if you get a group of 100 people online then 1 will create content, 10 will „interact‟ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it” Notice that Robert did not say his generation did not use the internet that much, but focused on the act of (in this case, non-) participation. Dillin Decicio despairs of Students 2.0 making any great difference, perhaps because of the apathy of all the students around me in my vicinity … or perhaps because gradster believes the web site Students 2.0 now has plausibly hundreds of followers just waiting for the next post. What‟s the deal? We can talk about it all we want – when is something going to happen? thereby proving Robert‟s “1 percent rule” correct. Student participation is not what it should be, and yet Laura (August 31, 2008) states that while we are all producers and consumers of goods, ideas, and education, it seems clear that today‟s students expect to interact with technology and with each other in new ways. The expectation is still there, but which technologies will the students use, and how will they interact with each other, if not on sites such as Students 2.0 and edupunk? Lindsea really answered her own question by admitting the „natural‟ process of attrition with these sites, as students go off to college, while others have subtly retreated into a period of self-growth, some have … [stopped] caring extrinsically about their grades in English or how they integrate blogging with their classroom. They‟re able to blog and find their own life teachers for themselves. To which Robert responded, High school students lay (sic) in wait for 7 hours a day until the afternoon comes and the internet explodes at their fingertips at the sound of a bell. Traditional teaching and learning is not about to disappear, but the system can and should adjust and adapt, because in the midst of new production methods lie consumerism, and Students 2.0 will find their own „life teachers‟ outside the classroom, and they find them on Facebook and Twitter, and sundry blogging sites that offer unencumbered access to unfiltered and unproven „information‟. Below I will argue that this is one of the „paths of discovery‟ that students will find and try out for themselves, with possible ontologically negative consequences. To have the internet exploding at your fingertips is a powerful image, and in communication terms an unsettling one, since this is fostering an unforgetting that is, alas, not the Heideggerian position of a discovery, but an inability to select. To remember, to rediscover what is already there, and in Bruinsma‟s sense of a new mentality, means the opposite of Borges‟s character Funes, the poor unfortunate who found it impossible to forget anything he saw, heard, felt, and experienced, and according to Eco (2000:190-191), this means you stop acting and „freeze‟, as it were, because you cannot select from among the many different pieces of data, and that leads to inaction because of your inability to filter out what you need for action, for making a decision, which has to come before an action of any sort. „Filtering out‟ is equated with a „filtering-forgetting‟, a necessary skill that young people are not likely to learn while the internet is exploding at their fingertips. “With the coming of the Web, all possible knowledge and information, even the least useful, is there at our disposal”, leading Eco (2000:191) to ask the question, “Who is doing the filtering out?” Who are the „life teachers‟ these students find on the internet? Perhaps Lindsea‟s answer to Robert is doubly significant: Myths and other social narratives 44 In my own life, the internet world and the “real world” have become synonymous – the interactions that I have and the content that I produce online are so strongly linked to the “real world” that I hesitate to call them separate things. In a nutshell, what I call the myth of the Millennium student is closely linked with Lindsea‟s insight into her own actions as a young person who finds herself inside the network society, as she is, in fact, one of the human participants in a global actor-network theory scenario. Once we accept the results of social constructivism, we have to, also, acknowledge that reality is constructed and so are the narratives describing that reality that we leave behind as „history‟. If Lindsea cannot separate her „production‟ online from her „production‟ in the real world, what is myth and what factual narrative? Why and how is there a difference between the two? Unfortunately, as historical beings we have succeeded too often in blurring the boundaries between myth and fact, as the next section shows. Real myths In his book The Deaths of Hintsa the historicist writer Lalu deconstructs the hegemony of both the archives and the written records at the time of the physical death of the rebel Chief of the Xhosa‟s, Hintsa, in the 1830s. Arrested by the British in retaliation for the theft of cattle from the settlers, he was killed under somewhat questionable circumstances. Lalu believes that the wider source of the colonial archives had been manipulated to justify the Chief‟s death, and that eyewitness accounts were written and rewritten to smooth out inconsistencies in the narrative (Thomas, 2009:16). Record keeping, and the subsequent historical records they give birth to, can often be treated more fruitfully as social myths, or narratives of justification, rather than as objective and accurate history, and therefore the last word, as it were. According to Lalu, then, Hintsa died twice (hence the plural Deaths in the title), the second death being the denial of the Chief‟s own narrative, just as much as the losers in any conflict or war will feel they are denied their narratives by the writers of the wider history. An acknowledged source of the opposite of the last word, according to Doniger‟s book The Hindus, is the tradition of Hindu mythology, which kept from becoming a monolithic metanarrative precisely because it embraced narratives from other Indian religions (Buddhism) and cultural practices, as well as from external sources such as Christianity and Islam. Very much like the ongoing narratives of design‟s search for multivariate, contemporary and contextual identities 13, “The question is not so much where these disparate elements came from but how, through the „infinite inventiveness‟ of the Hindus, they came together and stayed together” (Arnold, 2009:8). Similarly, I am not so much concerned with where the influences on the new Millennium student come from, but more on how these provide a kind of social glue for the students to form new groups and communities, and what that might mean for design education in the long run. “Born in a specific time, drawing sustenance from the everyday, they [myths] can illuminate the changing material world, and can … chart significant shifts in social practice” (Arnold, 2009:8), and therefore it would be to our advantage to be mindful of the everyday internet world that explodes at their fingertips at the sound of a bell, as Robert (above) so graphically pointed out. However, even though the network society created by these students can provide clues to shifts in social practices, we have to be aware that “Myths do not exist just to echo the zeitgeist … [since] mythmaking can be the deliberate, self-interested falsification of history” (as in the Hintsa case), and Doniger corroborates this by pointing to a modern mythologizing of Hinduism that seeks to impose a singular conformity “on a religion that once had reason to rejoice in its decentred plurality, and where myths, which once survived because of their ability to speak to the human condition, can now be exploited by the power of the internet” (Arnold, 2009:8). In this work I shall have occasion to argue 13 One is tempted to characterise this state as schizophrenic, yet this perspective does not denote either contradictory or inconsistent stances, nor flawed perception, while striving for more than one „design‟ identity, each one of which can adapt to the context it is dealing with. Myths and other social narratives 45 against the establishing of any standard in design, whether that refers to the understanding, interpretation, or to the discourse of design itself, just as much as I will argue against any method in design that approaches the levels of a metanarrative that, like constructed social myths, seeks to subdue all other possible narratives or alternative interpretations that can speak to the human condition. The mythologizing of traditional Hinduism was a „weak discipline‟ in the same way and with the same goal in mind as contemporary design; being a „weak discipline‟ design operates on the strengths of a many-method platform (Hinduism operated on the strengths of a multi-narrative platform) while taking account of new and hybrid technologies (while accepting or assimilating influences from other cultural practices and religions); each new project for social interaction (each new narrative or variation in myth) uses this new platform to blend such methods as are locally suitable, resulting in multiple future visions applicable globally (cf. Chapter 1:10), resulting in the infinite inventiveness of the Hindus, and the infinite inventiveness of design through ongoing human connectivity. To destroy myth in Hinduism is to destroy the power of multi-narratives in dialogue, and the same argument is applicable to design; the establishment of a standard method or even methodology means setting up a monolithic and myth-less conformity. Gadamer (1975, xvii; 5) was against establishing such conformity through the use of one inductive method, which only serves to address the object (Hintsa‟s „cattle thief‟ aspect; Hindu mythology as one religious narrative) but not the subject (Hintsa as a human being; Hindu mythologizing as a contextual everyman‟s narrative). Inductive logic too often writes the myth that becomes a general belief (the inference of a general law from particular instances), perhaps based on the mistaken account of a biased history, while deductive logic (as the production of facts to prove a general statement) takes the facts of life as the basis for narratives about, well, „facts‟. Except that these „facts‟ are not always historically accurate, as can be seen in the realms of cyberspace, where faction (leaning heavily towards pure fiction, thanks to gaming technology) is an accepted norm. The myths or cyberspace narratives being created by the Millennium student are not questioned as such, for they do exist, as much as all other socially constructed myths have existed, and for many of the same reasons. What we have to deal with is, on the one hand, the reality of these „facts‟ as unreal in the everyday sense of the term, but on the other hand, also as very real for those creating them, in mythically narrative terms. As Doniger (above) stated, myths do not exist just to echo the zeitgeist, as would a faithful mirror-image, and we have to take the „facts‟ of an internet community of practice (for that is what Facebook amounts to) not as facts of so-called objective reality, but as the objectivation of human subjectivity, since "Such objectivations serve as more or less enduring indices of the subjective processes of their producers" (Berger and Luckmann, 1967:49-50); these „facts‟ do not address the object as much as it addresses the subject. Everything that we as humans produce can be seen as both material form and, more importantly, as symbolic form, and the narratives of the Millennium student follow this same pattern; as symbolic narratives the „products‟ we find on these networked spaces are in one sense representative of the times (zeitgeist), and yet they do not simply echo „what is there‟ but symbolise „what is becoming‟ in the developing identities of these young people. My (main research) argument will lead inevitably towards an argument for abduction (discussed chiefly in the last two chapters), being the only humanly and socially acceptable form of argumentation for design thinking. I shall be working with the theories of Charles Sanders Peirce, specifically, and in resistance to (not the exclusion of) both induction and deduction, as I believe Peirce uses his notion of a final abductive logic. The original Latin root seems quite significant for design thinking, in that abducere means to lead away. Design is a reciprocal conversation with the other, an ongoing developmental dialogue with people and objects, and as such design is always elsewhere, meaning that „design‟ itself is not the object, nor even just the process, but fully the person doing the „designing‟ in conjunction with the people (and objects, events) that are being designed for. This means that design is a leading away from so-called reality, or the material forms of life, towards design as the symbolic forms of life and Myths and other social narratives 46 living. No argument for induction nor for deduction can be adequate to encompass what we cannot see but that we all understand: the objectivation of human subjectivity, or, the social construction of reality seen only in its traces of the real, mere indicators of the intention of human action, a difficult route to take at best in terms of explaining human communicative processes. An argument for abduction has to be combined with Barthes‟ explanation of how signifiers and the signified operate through traces, and Eco‟s (1976:249-250) work that asks, how is it possible to visually represent, not the unknown, but the known? (cf. Chapter 1:27). To visually represent the known, as Norretranders (1998:75) has shown, is very difficult, because we are trying to express the complex and not the surface narratives behind appearances, and for that we need to get rid of a lot of information, indeed, get rid of a lot of what we can label knowledge (:25), because what we need to express complexity is exformation (:92), the information that we discard not because it is not used, on the contrary, as traces of the so-called real (that is so difficult to express in the first place) this „discarded‟ information is very much present-inabsence (discussed below). The „content‟ of our narratives does not depend on the visible (only), but depend for the most part on the „invisible‟14, the traces that fill Barthes‟ empty signifiers: Just as we are about to declare this is design or this is research they dissolve and appear elsewhere (or worse, as something else), leaving the indexical nature of the work, or the trace of the real, behind. The structures of both design and of research involve the deliberate construction of 'empty signifiers' that cannot be seen outside their respective contexts. (cf. Chapter 1:26) As I write below, the real differences, the ones that matter and that can be put to use (the traces that we look for and can learn to „see‟) for interpretation and understanding, are not present, at the start, except in absence, since they are probabilities and variables only, building blocks for myths and narratives, and not defined elements for metanarratives that allow no participation but only a consumptive conformity. To speak to the human condition, as myth does, we need to draw borders 15 around our visible constructions (narratives, designed objects), but, as Merleau-Ponty stated, in his phenomenological book The Visible and the Invisible (1968), very much along the lines taken by Heidegger himself, the essence of the visible does not lie with what we can see, now, but with the effects of the „empty signifiers‟ of exformation, the invisible, i.e., the effects of the phenomenon of emergence. According to Merleau-Ponty‟s translator, In recognizing transcendence, being-at-a-distance, being „always further on‟, as the very manner of the being of the visible, we come to recognize that the visible is not a multitude of spacio-temporal individuals that would have to be connected and combined by a mind constitutive of relations; it is a field, a relief, a topography unfolding by differentiation, by segregation, which holds together not by laws, but „through the reflections, the shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothing, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same thing and in the same world)‟. Like the light, these levels and dimensions, this system of lines of force, are not what we see; they are with which, according to which, we see. (Lingis, 1968:l-li) 14 Designers are not really looking for physical changes to occur, for these can be achieved without much effort. The difficult changes lie in our bounded ways of thought, and yet, these can be changed if we could observe (follow, through a well-constructed design dialogue) the processes of thought in three (or more, conceptual) dimensions. Design thinking and systems thinking have this in common, both deal with all the human senses including our experience of and in three dimensional (real) space, but also including our experience of the „three-dimensional virtual space‟ of becoming (emergence), and both use the communicative facility of storytelling to transfer knowledge from one person to the next 15 Drawing borders as a term is meant to refer to, not our bounded ways of thought, but to the notion of our natural performance of the framing action, an action that denotes not the border, but the exformation the framing action refers to. Myths and other social narratives 47 We draw borders in order to work with the territory or space between complete chaos and total control, i.e., with real-life complexity. For Norretranders (1999: 70-71) this space contains everything that we can wish for, because here we really live our lives and here we communicate how we feel about whatever touches us, “changes in the weather, wonderful landscapes, friendly conversation, delicious salads, and fun and games”. We draw borders not just to be able to speak to the human condition, but, foremost, to enable us to see the „horizons between things‟, which situation, for Gadamer (cf. Chapter 1:22) is the precise start of the new landscape that students find themselves in at the start of the journey of discovery. The idea of „horizon‟ is a necessity, and it correlates with constructivism, since this horizon belongs to the student – the one who learns – and not to the teacher (or more properly, to the big idea or metanarrative texts). The one who is learning must construct this type of (far-seeing) horizon (which correlates with both Heidegger‟s that which is always furthest as well as with MerleauPonty‟s always further on, but which is, to all intents and purposes, „invisible‟, as presence, but can become „visible‟, in absence). Perhaps we can learn from the mythologizing of Hinduism (above) and change the curriculum to a way of seeing (the world, the environment, other people, and their texts), and then use this idiosyncratic horizon to see beyond the present, to see beyond any particular „vantage point‟ because “A person who has no horizon does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him” (Gadamer, 2006:302), overvalues the content of the curriculum, overvalues the correct answers from authoritative sources without questioning. The world is flat. Again. There are ten forces that flattened the world, Friedman (2007:51-57) tells us (I will discuss only some of these), and by flattened he means connected, something already foreseen with the use of the term the global village16 during the dawn of the information revolution, and now more correctly identified as the Global Information Society (Dertouzos, 1998:22) and the Network Society, because “We live in a world that … has become digital” (Castells, 2000:29). Given today‟s availability of communication technologies and their far-reaching effects, it is no coincidence that Students 2.0 style themselves as the generation that expects to create, produce and share, substantiating Friedman‟s first „force‟ as The New Age of Creativity. A comparison with real-world events is quite fitting, and Friedman starts this particular chapter about the forces that flattened the world with a metaphorical reference to walls coming down and windows going up, beginning with the fall of the Berlin wall and ending with Bill Gates‟s Windows. Focusing on peoples‟ ability to freely communicate with each other, and having the means to do so connects these two events: by the time the Berlin wall came down in 1989 political and social events on the ground had already started to change and physical barriers to communication and movement had to go, so a wall came down and Windows went up; a physical and local barrier was removed to be replaced by a virtual and non-local (i.e., potentially global) means of communication. However, Windows at this stage only allowed personal creativity, not person-to-person communication and instantaneous access to information, yet. For that we needed Friedman‟s second „force‟, one that followed hard on the heels of the first, and arguably, was not a separate event but a consequential part of the first: the World Wide Web simply had to happen, starting in 1991. No design, no invention, has ever been developed in a social, political or technological vacuum, and the whole of the information revolution can be seen against the „big idea‟ of the human need for communication: writing, printing, then electronic communication, e.g. telegraph, radio, telephone, television, and now, tele- everything in one complete package. The political walls had to come down as much as the geographical „walls‟, and once distance and space was beginning to be overcome as a decisive factor in communication, the WWW and the Internet was just a matter of time and technology, and Friedman‟s (2007:60) second „force‟ truly heralded in The New Age of Connectivity. 16 McLuhan (1974:12-13) stated that “As electronically contracted, the globe is no more than a village”. Myths and other social narratives 48 These were paradigm-shifting events of global importance, but we have to realise that Students 2.0 take these world circumstances, these freedoms, as „natural‟ and self-evident, and Microsoft‟s start-up goal of IAYF (information at your fingertips) is as much a political as a social entitlement for the Millennium student, made possible by a Web that allows unlimited connectivity, and because of that, the possibility of unlimited dissemination. Friedman‟s (2007:93-95) fourth „force‟ of Harnessing the Power of Communities explains this mindset made possible by electronic dissemination, starting with the power of uploading. Continuing the (stereotypically British) tradition of the shed-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden inventor, now called geeks, community developed software programmes designed by these enthusiasts have revolutionised the act of participation on the WWW, not least because it is „free‟ and fair. Communities are now “offering up their own news and opinion pieces” and calling it blogging (or FaceBook, or Twitter, etc.). We have a growing encyclopaedic space called Wikipedia that invites knowledge sharing, and what started out as a wilful sharing of music and video now has the „sanctioned‟ name of podcasting, duplicated by the BBC and CNN. Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine explained this phenomenon by reminding us of the difference in reasoning then and now: when the Internet and the WWW first started to be used widely, the argument was, quite rationally, that people wanted to access information, and that therefore the download speeds were important, but not the upload speeds. “The dogma of the age held that ordinary people had no need to upload; they were consumers, not producers” (in Friedman, 2007:95). Students 2.0 today proudly proclaim their wish to be producers, more so than being mere consumers, and they do so by forming online communities. Friedman‟s tenth „force‟ is the last but also perhaps the most important, and possibly the reason he calls this one The Steroids, because these new technologies “are amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners” (Friedman, 2007:187). All the collaborations made possible by Web 2.0, and that includes framing the expectations of the new Millennium students, are done in ways that become Digital, Virtual, Mobile and Personal. A former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, explains that digital means everything we can think of, produce, design, or wish to communicate, can be digitised and stored, and this power makes the virtual possible, since anything digital can be re-designed, rethought, and interpreted, manipulated in many forms, before it is transmitted with the greatest of ease computer-to-computer, via the Internet or satellite, and now via some of the „widest‟ fibre-optic under-sea cables as far as bandwidth is concerned. In many areas of the world the idea of being mobile is taken for granted, and it has become the standard that everyone aspires to. Wireless networking puts you in touch with anyone and anything else, regardless of time or space, and, of course, this can be done by you, the individual, focusing on the personal aspect of these new technologies, and so we become connected, but to what purpose? Are we connected yet? Creating mythical bridges to nowhere. Castells (2000:3) believes that in our new and connected age we are as much focused on our search for identity as we ever were throughout history, and simply keeping up with the news (newspapers, 24 hour news channels) means we are left in no doubt of the importance of this aspect of human being and belonging: “identity, and particularly religious and ethnic identity, have been at the roots of meaning since the dawn of human society”. In one way or another, our conception of identity and the ways in which it can be (is allowed to be) formed has always been of prime importance to us, since that aspect of who we are is at the roots of meaning, for us and our lives as we situate our very being in the larger constructions of society. However, whether due to the destruction of modernist metanarratives thanks to the influences of postmodernism (which advocated the legitimacy of individual narratives, or „small stories‟) or whether due to the fragmentation of traditional social structuration systems (arguably, mainly because the information revolution, starting with print and ending with the internet, has allowed individuals to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information and knowledge, i.e., the family, the school, the cultural and/or social group, the political party, the government), finding the scaffolding we Myths and other social narratives 49 traditionally relied on for our identity construction in the wider (and hence larger) constructions of society has been compromised by our new and electronic modernity, and situating our developing identities are becoming far less anchored in the „reality‟ of everyday social construction and more motivated into existence through our contacts with the virtual worlds of cyberspace. Castells (2000:360-361), in referring to Marshal McLuhan‟s definition of television also touches on the difference between print culture and the moving images of the electronic age. We have always, as human beings, relied on remarkably modest amounts of information for our perceptions of the external world, i.e., we are creatures that rely on the formation of patterns that we then „recognize‟ as the real or complete thing. Norretranders‟ use of the notion of exformation (redundant or absent information) is but one example of this human trait, and one that graphic design relies on for its efficacy, while the psychological quality of completion in Gestalt Theory (which states that large amounts of information from a perceived image can be missing in reality, but still be „replaced‟ in virtuality, because the human mind recognises patterns or wholes and not detail) backs up the claim for less rather than more information. In very literal fact, when looking at the moving images on a television screen, we should not be seeing what looks like a complete or whole image, because what we are looking at, really, are a mass of very small dots (pixels on the screen) that are changing their position and their colour many times per second. We can only watch television because we are used to „seeing‟ wholes via the fragmentation of the original image17, which we then reassemble, not by perceiving every pixel, every coloured dot on the screen (which does not even represent every single and scientific detail of the original), but by perceiving (by „pattern seeing‟) a model, a guide of the whole (the facsimile original). In design terms, we can argue that people even tend to confuse the prototype with the finished product, and as such we can understand McLuhan‟s argument (in Castells, 2000: 360) that the low definition of television (“a ceaseless forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger”), in mimicking the natural cognitive necessity of closure, involves the viewer in an emotional and reactive way that print culture did not aspire to. Ironically, and quite paradoxically, we need this aptitude towards fragmentation on more than one level. Our brains seem to be hard-wired to deal with perceptual fragmentation in order to favour conceptual wholeness, but on a psychological level we have also learned to deal with another, living, fragmentation of the stresses brought about by the division of labour. Print culture, or as McLuhan puts it, the technology of literacy, has enabled us to act without necessarily reacting, in other words, without becoming emotionally and reactively involved in our surroundings, the work we are doing, or even the whole of the environment we find ourselves in. We can fragment our „selves‟ into two or more parts, as the surgeon has to do if he is to achieve the necessary distance or impartiality during an operation (McLuhan, 1974:12), and it is this distancing, or personal disengagement, that Ong (1987:46) ascribes to the literate culture, which separates the knower from what is known, teaches him to act this way, so that he (e.g. the surgeon) can also do so in real life situations that warrant such separation. The medium as metaphor In this part of the chapter I am working towards an argument that has its basis in the suspicion that the modern media user, such as the Millennium student using sites like Facebook, in reality becomes the medium that carries the message, a variation on McLuhan‟s the medium is the message, and yet, reading Postman‟s (1987:3-15) work that suggest the medium is the metaphor, I would have to rethink 17 When seeing „live‟ images in real life, this fragmentation is still in force, since we only „see‟ or cognise an image once it has been sent to our brains in a synaptically fragmented way, and then interpreted or reassembled, by another part of our brain, to resemble what we like to call the „original‟ image in the „real world‟. Scientifically and biologically, there appears to be no great difference between „seeing‟ in real life and „watching‟ in simulated electronic life. Myths and other social narratives 50 my approach and blend18 the two ideas, if only because our use of language, and therefore the way we express ourselves (in whatever medium), is to a very large extent dependent on the power of metaphor, and as Johnson & Lakoff (2003:3) state, metaphor is not only used in communication but is, in fact, omnipresent in our everyday life, so much so that we may speak of a metaphorically-based conceptual system, the very stuff of thought and of action. Ricoeur (2005:38) is known for his work on the hermeneutic tradition, and the way in which metaphor operates within narratives, so it is enlightening that he sees metaphor not only as operating on the level of our productive imaginations, but that underpinning this human cognitive action is a schematism without which metaphor, imagination, and I would hazard, intelligent thought would be difficult to impossible. Given that, Postman‟s argument becomes more persuasive, which is that the forms and the manner of the conversations we have with one another are of prime importance to our (ongoing) culture, with the forms of conversation and our ability to express ideas significantly dependent on metaphor, and as such consequently shaping the message. By conversation Postman explicitly means all forms of „spoken‟ communication, but also communication technologies, we use to communicate with one another, and specifically the use that is made of public discourse (e.g. students using Facebook). The form that this conversation or discourse takes can have profound effects on not only the way we express ourselves (the content that we send), but also on our ability to receive and interpret content from the sender (Ricoeur‟s schematism, or thought model that we normally use in translating content). Postman is of the opinion that television has, somewhat negatively compared to print, altered our forms of public discourse, for one, because television is a conversation in images more than a conversation relying on the power of words. This interpretation of communication, a somewhat atavistic reference to the development of our conceptual abilities in a tribal, oral, culture, is not that far off the mark. There have been, especially in artistic and filmic circles, arguments for and against the primacy of a visual language, and in referring to my argument for abduction (above) I quote Eco (1976:249-250) who asks, how is it possible to visually represent, not the unknown, but the known? How is it possible to create images that are recognizable as representations of what the viewer would regard as faithful to reality? Eco answers by using Gainsborough‟s (1748) painting Mr and Mrs Andrews, which he then describes as a text, since the complexity of its content can be described as a discourse. Messaris (1994:117-118) does not agree, arguing instead that the differences between text and image are of a fundamental kind, with the former being capable of propositional, but the latter only capable of presentational modes of communication, and further, asking, “to what extent might the cognitive consequences of images parallel those of language?” Petterson (1994:252) also agreed that text and image constitute different languages, but added that they complement each other, a viewpoint I can vouch for, having taught the human cognitive ability to blend the different „messages‟ from both text and image for many years, with particular focus on the resonance of the image alone (cf. below), for, as O‟Sullivan et al. (1983:150) confirm, “narrative is implicit in still images, especially those in advertising”. Messaris (1994:120-121) does not completely disagree with these views, either, but focuses on the different uses of narrative, or messages, holding to the position that, while text and image can both be interpreted for meaning, they cannot parallel each other as language, although we have grown accustomed to using terms such as a visual language. Real language allows the production of meaning, he seems to say, while visual language only allows the consumption of someone else‟s meaning, as in Postman‟s description of the conversational images we receive from television. However much I might wish to agree with Messaris in order to bolster a perceived argument from Postman, i.e., that television is only useful as a consumerist device, this will not do. This is not the point Postman wishes to make, and Messaris (:2627), despite confining most viewers to a consumerist position in the role of a receiver of someone else‟s production, does concede the “potential for structuring audiences‟ worldviews … [if] we were to 18 In a later chapter I will be making full use of Turner & Fauconnier‟s (2003) notion of conceptual blending, a process that generates a new viewpoint from at least two original and usually separate input ideas. Myths and other social narratives 51 examine the narrative content of visual media”, based on what he calls category schemes, which provides us with more than enough correlation to Ricoeur‟s schematism, or thought model that we normally use in translating content, the stuff of thought that we need for translation and understanding, i.e., for the making of meaning. Postman (1987:8; 10) does not deny the association with McLuhan‟s the medium is the message, but in light of the fact that people can confuse the metaphor for the message, wishes to adjust McLuhan‟s text to read, the (electronic) medium is the metaphor. That approach to the differences between text and image, as communication media, would satisfy Messaris, I feel, since both (explicit) message and (implicit) metaphor can be interpreted for meaning, but viewing them this way does not place them on a par with one another. With an electronic medium like television we are dealing with the communicative ability of visual images to signify … and at this point I again have to think of my approaching argument that I suspect the Millennium student of becomes the medium that carries the message, which viewpoint I now have to blend with Postman‟s the medium is the metaphor. What exactly do images normally signify? It should be safe to assume that our contemporary world is somewhat enamoured with the power of images, and my argument for a student (electronic, i.e., internet) image takes on the ontological quality of identity-formation. Do images normally signify the unvarnished truth, as in a correspondence to everyday reality? They emphatically do not, since even previously respectable newspapers and magazines have been embarrassed by images (photographs) that have been „altered‟ / „improved‟ / „doctored‟, or simply lied about, and this practice of „enhancing‟ images, to aid the narrative they accompany, had been established in the 1860s. In the digital age this act of altering images, or fabricating deliberate myths, “is now ubiquitous. People have come to expect it is the fashion and entertainment world” (Farid, 2009:42), but when Time magazine alters a photo of O.J. Simpson to make him, literally and figuratively, „darker‟, it is a lie. When Chinese and Soviet leaders issued orders to expunge a persona non grata they reissued doctored photographs which then were sent out into the world as a new „historical record‟ or discourse. According to Postman (1987:10), it is in this sense of a medium being capable of begetting, as it were, a new form of discourse that we should interpret McLuhan‟s the medium is the message, because it is the medium as a discourse that matters, since the form that this discourse takes can “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (McLuhan, 1974:27). This change happens not on the level of print‟s capability of acting without reacting, on the textual level of our participation in the meaning-making process, but on a more basic and almost visceral level of image-believing, a faith in the truth of images, and it is effective because, according to Postman (1987:10) the symbolic forms of our new media conversations do not issue propositions as found in a textual conversation, instead they become conversational metaphors “working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality”. The medium is the metaphor, which takes the place of the old message with its seeming link to something real in the world, but being metaphor, it can now become (or denote) the new message, without the previous defining (meaning-making) links to another‟s reality. McLuhan (1974:29) quotes Pope Pius XII (1950) who was of the opinion that the well-being of society depended on its ability to balance the power of communication technologies with their own capacity for reaction; I translate the latter term as the cognitive ability to interpret and understand what is being communicated, as opposed to an attitude of agreeable consumption without critical analysis. Print culture still gave us this critical distance necessary for reflecting and deciding, but an electronic medium that acts as a conversational metaphor, especially one that allows the real world to recede, is a medium that fits Cassirer‟s description of the state that people find themselves in when embarking too far on symbolic activities: Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols Myths and other social narratives 52 or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the imposition of [an] artificial medium. (quoted in Postman, 1987:11) The McLuhan quote from Pope Pius XII also focused on this point, that the (mental) health of a society may suffer when they need the mediation of an artificial medium to link them to what matters in the real world. In the section on the nature of theories (below) I will also have to deal with the nature of paradox, since in design terms we are dealing with statements or propositions that seem untrue but are not, and conversely, with apparent statements that seem the truth, but are false, as in the distortion of propagandistic myth. The immediate paradox inherent in the texts from McLuhan and Cassirer is that we need the mediation of „artificial‟ media and technologies in order gain access to information, whether that means books, radio, television, and today the internet. Anything outside the scope of the immediacy of the oral society becomes mediated in some form or another, and in design education we are dealing with what Margolin termed the politics of the artificial (cf. Chapter 1:2) while, at the same time, we have look for the „natural‟ in Margolin‟s text, which is not to be found in contemporary culture (cf. the Pope Pius XII and Cassirer texts), and, as I am arguing, will not be found by the Millennium student in the new culture of Facebook. We do need a new definition of the artificial, the new natural, however paradoxical that may sound, a position that can only be reached if both designers and technologists are willing to collaborate and consciously re-design the composition of the artificial and the mediated. If we are willing to reflect seriously on what our made environment means to us we may “resist the reduction of the artificial to simulacra” (Margolin, 2002:119). It is, unfortunately, in the reduction of the artificial to simulacra that people are constantly conversing with themselves, as it were. Postman has changed the medium is the message to the medium is the metaphor, and we have to realise that the message is now inside the metaphor, or, the metaphor now becomes the carrier for the message. My argument for the student as the medium that becomes the new message takes shape, slowly, because conversational metaphors (as they operate in the description above) are nothing other than myths in development, or, at least, their modus operandi are so similar that the one can be mistaken for the other. “The relation which unites the concept of myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of deformation … myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear” (Barthes, 1972:121-122). Myths and metaphor are not the same, but they can work in tandem to distort an original message, given that the myth in question has the aim of distortion, and not the more normal aim of helping to deal with meaning-making by building narratives of the yet-to-be, or the should-be, which is how a large part of the development of identity proceeds. And, again quite paradoxically, distortion is exactly what is needed for innovation, or the new, to emerge from the old, making the distortion either positive (interpretation, transformation) or negative (propaganda, dissembling, deception), depending on the intention or final goal; distortion and myth can be put to good use via the understandably artificial, or put to bad use via a simulacrum that masquerades as the real. Barthes‟ statement can be taken to mean both; myth or metaphor indeed hides nothing: it presents itself for what it is, a narrative seeming to refer to one instance, but we also know that its function is to distort, not to make disappear; its function is to change our minds about the content of the original narrative / fact, without destroying the original, but by replacing it with the new narrative / meaning. Suffice it to add, here, that what the new Millennium student may be dealing with is an electronic medium (artificial and mediated, but is it a simulacrum?) that allows the message to be carried inside itself (the medium becomes the metaphor becomes the myth), and Postman (1987:88-89) reminds us that, notwithstanding all that one may say about the positive aspects of electronic media (and there are many), the new media have “made entertainment itself the natural format for the presentation of all experience … the problem is … that all subject matter is presented as entertaining”, which can be Myths and other social narratives 53 corroborated by watching Sky and CNN, the 24 hour news shows that present (offer) events in the world as digestible reality shows under a cloak of news reporting. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure … [that it] offers viewers a variety of subject matter [which] requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and [that it] is largely aimed at emotional gratification. (Postman (1987:88-89) In the reduction of the artificial to simulacra, people are constantly conversing with themselves, as it were. My argument is that what the new Millennium student may be dealing with is an electronic medium that is a simulacrum of the real, with the „real‟ acknowledged as constructed, artificial and mediated, yes, but understandable and interpretable. The medium as epistemology Design education is also about the production of design knowledge about this real (however artificial in Margolin‟s positive sense of the term), just as any act of communication has to be about the production of (new) knowledge; in the absence of this goal, communication becomes entertainment, in whichever direction what is being communicated flows. Especially in our network society we may pay heed to the idea of information flows, and as Stalder (2002) explains it, using the metaphor of the Dutch East-Indian spice trade: there has to be a medium through which things flow (the oceans; now the internet), the stuff that flows (spices then, information now), and the nodes between which flows happen (the harbours that served as starting and end points for the ships). What serves as our modern day harbours? In traditional communication flows we have a sender and a receiver, and the medium, through which the communication flows, plays a technological but minor role; the biggest problem is eliminating „noise‟ in the technical medium (radio and TV interference due to „white noise‟ or static). Today, however, noise has taken on a quite different meaning, and we have to ask, again, what serves as the contemporary dispatching and receiving harbours in our internet-driven flow of information? If the idea of traditional person-to-person communication flows cannot be transferred to contemporary electronic communication mediated by the medium as metaphor (given that it seems to have been annexed as a subordinate part in the service of entertainment), then who is transmitting to whom? In electronic communications such as e-mail and Skype we still seem to approximate the traditional person-to-person flow, but in many other internet-driven communicative sites this traditional flow does not quite hold, and noise of a different nature comes into play. Of less importance, although quite annoying, is something called internet background noise (IBN), professionally known as data packets, and unprofessionally as spam. These are messages that exist, that flow from many senders without necessarily having a (willing) receiver in mind, i.e., unsolicited. Of greater importance is the internet noise that masquerades as information with a purpose, as an information flow of which you can discern the rationale. This white noise on the internet is generated by millions of producers, and in a manner of speaking it does flow, but sluggishly and without much direction. According to Yvonne Russell (2008) she “loves to discover new information, but lately I‟ve been turning down the noise”. Rough statistics show that 120 000 new blogs are created every day, and 1.4 million blog posts (and this does not even include sites like Twitter) are sent out, daily (I assume this is just in America). Russell quotes Alexander van Elsas, whose advice is, “Let go … Life doesn‟t stop simply because I choose not to be drowning myself into (sic) this cyber river of information. I don‟t need 20,000 followers, nor do I want to follow 20,000”. A cyber river of information that flows to we know not where, and where it comes from we know still less. When doing research the design student has to follow the traditional guidelines of dipping into this cyber river of available information on the internet by asking, where did it originate, and where is it going? Is the source legitimate, and was this information destined for an accredited audience? In other Myths and other social narratives 54 words, can I trust this information because the content can stand up to rigorous scrutiny? Can I trust this information enough to use it as building blocks in the construction of my own knowledge, i.e., can this medium (that I‟m using at this moment) serve as an epistemological base? Postman (1987:16-17), in dealing with media as epistemology, speaks of a media-metaphor shift that took place in America, and transposing his comments from television to the internet, I would venture that his response to this shift would be even more appropriate today: “the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense”. Some may disagree with such a strong statement, and even wish to disregard it entirely, but then Carnell‟s (2008) rejection seems to take on a personal quality: “What Postman and other neo-luddite (sic) critiques of technology fail to see is that the history of humanity, and more specifically human progress, is inextricably linked with its use of technology”. Carnell would, on this evidence, also accuse me of being a neo-Luddite, since I oppose both Laurillard‟s and Fosnet‟s approaches to education (Chapter 1), and in particular, the „inevitability‟ of Web 2.0 tools as the solution to teaching and learning problems. The original Luddites (the name itself indicates the creation of a myth, since Ned Ludd, the leader, was a fictitious character) protested against the Industrial Revolution‟s introduction of machine technology to replace many textile workers in that industry. To oppose the uncritical, or worse, fatalistic acceptance of technology is not evidence that technology in toto is being opposed; design as practice and design as education must take the role that technology can play seriously (discussed in Chapter 4: section, Actor-Network Theory), since this blanket definition of a non-human actor has agency because we imbue technology with a form of agency, and as such it does impact on epistemology. A link could also be made here to Don Ihde‟s phenomenological investigation of technology. The question of technology and control is usually wrongly put he argues - i.e., it is usually posed as „does technology control us?‟ and „can we control technology?‟ Using a tool shop example like Fry‟s he goes on to explain „… insofar as the tool-human context is constituted as a relation while the user „controls‟ the chisel, it is the lathe and its turning of the furniture leg or banister piece that provides the context for the lathe-user‟s movements. To enter any human-technology relation is already both to „control‟ and to „be controlled‟. Once the notion of technology in the ensemble is raised, particularly insofar as technologies are embedded in cultural complexes, the question of „control‟ becomes even more senseless‟ [Don Ihde]. This statement opens up the much larger question of the nature of technology. For the moment, a qualification can be added that the statement is particular to certain understandings of aspects of certain technologies rather than to technology per se. (Willis, 1999) It is not technology per se that Postman (or I, for that matter) opposes, but particular uses and understandings of technological influence. That technology, and in particular, ubiquitous computing, has an enormous role to play in our everyday lives, and therefore also in design education, is not disputed. Ihde‟s viewpoint on the control / not control issue is, likewise, not at all in dispute, regardless of us using phrases such as we should be in control of technology, which only mean that design education should make students aware of the relationship between the human and the non-human actors, and focus attention on the fact that when this human-technology relationship itself develops an uncritical attitude towards (any) technology it is the human being that has stopped asking questions, and turned, instead, into a consumer, as Postman warns. Winograd and Flores (1988:7) puts this issue into context by not asking what technology can do, but rather, refocusing the question to ask what relationship people build with technology, and, ultimately, being confronted with the (ontologically-based) epistemological Issue of “addressing the fundamental question of what it means to be human”. To be human in a world filled with (saturated would be a better term) all manner of technologies has taken on a quite different meaning compared to the preelectronic and slower age of technological assimilation into cultural life. Winograd and Flores (:4-5), Myths and other social narratives 55 perhaps significantly for the essence of design education, takes up the observational position, regarding the phenomenon of new technology, of viewing developments through a broad definition of “design – the interaction between understanding and creation”. To them design signifies the total process of the social invention of technology, which then designs back, since technology, as a human invention, alters the fabric of society, and to understand this total process we “need to establish a new theoretical basis for looking at what the devices do, not just how they operate”. What some of the new communicative technologies do, as Postman and McLuhan argue, is to alter the manner public discourse, or our ability to interact with understanding and creation. When the medium is the message becomes the medium is the metaphor as a form of discourse, we will hardly be able to see what these devices do, since the focus is very much on how they operate, as entertainment, as convenient devices to link with friends (all 20.000 of them), and the form of this discourse can “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (McLuhan, 1974:27). Resistance would seem rather futile, given the arguments from Carnell (2008), and the subjective argument from that well-known advocate for creating human-machine hybrids, Kevin Warwick (2001:5), who can calmly state that machines posses a huge intellect, and can “actually be far more creative than humans”. Carnell is an entrepreneur who builds web sites and who mounted an attack on Postman (the person), not based on his arguments in (his 1987 work) Amusing Ourselves to Death, but based on a wilful distortion of Postman‟s (2001) article Deus Machina.19 This type of distortion (negative myth) speaks to the importance of filtering as an acquired skill, and, whether one is working with „oldfashioned‟ print culture (aka books) or the new electronic culture (texts published on the internet), we still have to realise, as Eco (2000:190-191) did, that you have to select from among the many different pieces of data that comes your way (discussed above), and that an inability to do so leads to inaction because of your inability to filter out what you need for action, for making a decision. „Filtering out‟ is equated with a „filtering-forgetting‟, I argued, a necessary skill that young people are not likely to learn while the internet is exploding at their fingertips. “With the coming of the Web, all possible knowledge and information, even the least useful, is there at our disposal”, leading Eco (2000:191) to ask, “Who is doing the filtering out?” If we accept contemporary technologies for communication as media that become the metaphors for new forms of discourse, who will do the filtering out? I suspect that this question would have no relevance in the absence of what Coetzee (1983:172) calls a neutrally-critical receptivity, an intellectual skill obtained through practice and a self-discipline that “is not directed against tradition as a cultural inheritance but against the unreasoning servile-sceptical attitude of accepting as absolutely true any idea” from entrepreneurs who foist on an expanding techno-culture the idea of boundless techno-proliferation … Postman was fairly consistent if not accurate about how digital „norm entrepreneurs‟ narcissistically built social-cultural „norms‟ which accelerated acceptance and essentially created the dot com boom of the 1990s. Postman‟s warnings about the effects of uncritical embrace of technology, especially in learning and intellectual environments, is an interesting contrast to the digital propagandization [creation of metaphorical myths as contemporary socio-technical narratives] many unwittingly accepted. (Champion, 2005) Accepting the technologically-driven discourses of modernity leads to plagiarism in students; “American higher education‟s struggle with counterfeit term papers – made instantly available by unscrupulous digital entrepreneurs” (Champion, 2005), and fostering a belief that “technology is … a reflection and a co-creation of what is fundamentally human” (Carnell, 2008) is not only technological determinism, but constructs a narrative of normativity that can alter sense rations to the extent of students believing a 19 I have read this article and can state that Carnell „quoted‟ not just out of context but deliberately ignored parts of the text that put his own argument in a negative light. Myths and other social narratives 56 “rejection of non-digital sources of information or reading” (Champion, 2005) is a viable and acceptable, contemporary approach towards the question of epsistemology. Carnell (2008) is of the opinion that “Postman‟s technological atheism will fail” because the latter does not believe in the normative properties of technology, but Postman‟s technological atheism is, in fact, a constructivist approach towards a socio-technical relationship (one that opposes technological determinism) with which he wants to establish a technological modesty (in the words of Paul Goodman), an approach very much like that of Winograd and Flores (above), and an approach that does not wish to “cede to our technologies more dominion than particular functions warrant”. This approach, as far as design practice and design education are concerned, views „technology‟ as operating inside the holistic socio-technical environment, and detects a relationship between existing, traditional, system(s) of belief and technological thought worlds, but, just as this approach can describe a positive and socially constructive narrative of a socio-technical environment, the exact same words can describe the opposite: technological determinism. When the medium becomes the message, and then achieves the aim of becoming the metaphor, the message is now inside the metaphor, which is not the real message, but a substitute, and in technological determinism, a simulacrum of the real. This is what the new Millennium student is dealing with, something that looks like a safe environment, endorsed by what looks like legitimate sources, but without experience the student cannot see that, being carried inside itself, the new message is the myth being distorted out of the old message. I am aware that this requires substantial proof, and this issue will be discussed in Chapter 5. At this point I merely want to make the point that this is a possibility, and that a new student can be persuaded, by the arguments of technological determinism, that “the primary goal of human thought is efficiency, that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment, that what cannot be measured does not exist, and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by technical experts” (Postman, 1992). The whole of my argument for a renewal of design thinking opposes this viewpoint of what it means to be human in a socio-technical world, and being immersed in a cyber river of information that flows from one expert to another, with the „user‟ being downgraded to the status of a consumer, is not the basis for epistemological development. The medium as ontology, or, amusing ourselves to life The cyber river we find on the internet – the structure of which forms the bedrock for 21st century mass media – is in many cases (especially those instances where the internet explodes at the students‟ fingertips) a turbulent river of noise instead of a regulated stream of information. The „white noise‟ I spoke of (above), that can be found on the internet in vast quantities, is not to be compared to the „noise‟ that was discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. At roughly the same time Dicke et al. had been working on the theory of the Big Bang, but needed proof that such an event had been possible, proof that was not forthcoming, until a third party, knowing of both sets of research, conceptually blended what seemed on face value to be two disparate pieces of information, which resulted in „knowledge‟ of the Big Bang. The noise that Penzias and Wilson had recorded, as coming from all quarters of the universe and appearing to be ubiquitous, was the cosmic microwave background radiation that was left behind by the event that became known as the Big Bang. This is knowledge from reconfigured information, stemming from „noise‟ – even with no intentional receiver, the message can be interpreted through transformation and understanding. That does not happen on the internet with “the introduction of services like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed etc. [which] has created new challenges in isolating the signal (the information in which you are really interested) from the noise” (Phillips, 2008). We are all aware that an internet search usually gives you everything it can find, depending on your choice of search terms, unless you are looking for known information, in which case the search can be narrowed down to (in an academic sense) mostly legitimate sources of information. That, of course, Myths and other social narratives 57 presupposes that you can be the filter through which this information can pass to be vetted, but what if you are not capable of such a conceptual task? “Think of yourself as a high performance radio receiver …” Phillips advises, and realise that you have to acquire the capacity to work at a high signal-to-noise ratio in an environment that, quite likely, produces a lot of ambient noise that hides the faint signal you really want. This is one scenario, while the other scenario, and in design terms this forms the bulk of the wicked problems a designer has to cope with, is one that requires a conceptual shift in thinking, because the ambient noise is the signal you are looking for, but cannot detect. Your signal-to-noise capacity has to be recalibrated, as it were, to look for the new inside the old, to see the trees (plural) for the forest (singular) it really is. I am reminded of the web site dilemma that a bank, for instance, has in designing its firewall security system. The better the firewall, the better to keep all the hackers outside, but the customers on internet banking will also be kept out, access being made so difficult. Restore better access for the customers and you design chinks in the bank‟s defences. So it is with you as receiver and filtering mechanism of information – in “balancing the capture and amplification of the signal you want [and] at the same time minimizing the sources of noise in the receiver” you are in the same untenable position as the designer of firewalls: you are working on the wrong design, or, as Maturana said, turn a semantic question into a structural one. Do not ask how to design one big bank for all the customers, with one tremendously large and thief-proof door, but design as many smaller banks as there are customers; the „bank‟ the customer deals with is only a virtual entity, after all, and the small virtual bank I receive from the real one is the only „data packet‟ that should move between customer and source bank, not the more easily targeted mass of information that streams into and out of that massive front door. This is design on the basis of a whale being more easily targeted and hit than a flock of birds. The more I design myself as a picker-up of signals, while reinforcing the (mechanical, meaning automatic) separation of noise form signal, the worse the design, and the more the student will not quite grasp how to look for, access and work with information, let alone learn how to discriminate between useful and „noisy‟ information. This is what Maturana meant by turning a semantic question into a structural one. We should not ask how one person, the design student, can deal with all the many problems in the real world, but focus instead on the „radio receiver‟ and ask how does that structure need to change (redesign itself) in order to find the appropriate and contextual signal within what will always be a lot of ambient noise. How can a design student acquire the structure (of knowing) that can separate the signal from the noise in each individual case, every time, and not attempt to detect signals for all cases at the same time? The semantic question how can one designer deal with all the signals turns to how is it possible for any designer to detect a particular signal within the mass of transmissions? The design education question is the also, how to teach a design student to become the filter for all the information that is available „out there‟, how can you become the medium (through your constructive involvement) that is (carries) the ontological message? “A large network of „friends‟ may be socially reassuring but if you use it as one of the inputs to your information receiver you are making a poor design trade-off between signal and noise” (Phillips, 2008). In contrast, in this environment the high signal-to-noise ratio interactions that you need seldom occur, and then only because the (usually) smaller group collaboration (of whatever type, and on any platform) creates an interchange of information that, due to a shared interest, acts as a filtering system to separate the signal from the noise. Our young Millennium student regards as natural an environment wherein “Web 2.0 companies, that focus around entertainment and social interactions, are being confused as sources of signal while in reality they are sources of noise” (Phillips, 2008). As the medium changes to message, and the message becomes metaphor and myth, Postman‟s (1987) reference to amusing ourselves to death changes to amusing ourselves to life, by which I mean the medium becomes a source of ontological development for the student. Entertainment and social interactions sites (and games environments) are confused with sources of necessary information, and keeping in mind that design is looking for an identity, and so are these young people, the formation of identity, i.e., the ontological influences of technology, must be taken seriously. Postman (1987:27) drew attention to the Myths and other social narratives 58 fact that any new technology changes the nature of discourse, and the public discourse, or mindset of these students, are being part-designed by our new technologies, in the process “creating new forms of truth-telling”, or, as Winograd and Flores (1988:179) has it, in creating and applying technology we need to be aware of its transformative potential, since, in so doing, we are designing a “philosophical discourse about the self – about what we can do and what we can be”. Design as a discipline is looking for an identity, and the new Millennium student is likewise looking for a personal identity (a natural and ongoing process); the discipline and the student of that discipline are comparable to what Flores (1998:352) calls corporate and personal identities. In an article that reflects on the Winograd and Flores book, Understanding Computers and Cognition (1988), he confirms that “the construction of and participation in sites on the Web is already enhancing both of these identity-forming practices, and is, for that reason, about identity-building …”. Flores also mentions a third possibility, which I will only be able to deal with, in depth, in Chapter 4 (in the discussion on ontological phenomenology), which is that both accounts of identity formation can be grounded through the work of Heidegger, an outlook I fully endorse since I do not believe in the possibility of a „split personality‟ for designers: your professional identity (being the way you think, and the way you are) is the same as your personal identity. Once embarking on a process of structuration … and, again, I have to interrupt myself, because the process of structuration includes a measure of paradox, in the sense that it is a narrative structure that is being constructed, an image, if you will. As such – and I have no doubt that there are enough people who do so deliberately – the „story‟ (that is your identity for others to „read‟) can be manipulated-constructed to the extent that there are different stories for different people; one for the office and one for family and friends. Having said that, once you embark on a process of structuration, normally, and under the influence of social constructivism (which in my design thinking class includes a good dose of cybernetics self-observation), the developing design (of your identity) does not depend on too many subjective inputs and single-decision interpretations, but on the evolution of a co-ontogenic drift (cf. autopoiesis, Chapter 4), with drift referring to a very natural and mutual process of development, a co-designing process that designs and produces an identity with and inside a social structure. Now imagine that social structure to be an internet community. In 1725 the book The New Science was published, and its author, Giambattista Vico, going against the grain of scientific and empirical logic, wanted to establish a science of being human, a sapienza poetica that would be capable of informing the enquirer‟s (designer‟s, researcher‟s) “responses to his environment and [would cast] them in the form of a „metaphysics‟ of metaphor, symbol and myth” (Hawkes, 1986:11-12). Only one other name (arguably, I admit) comes to mind 20, that of Heidegger. What Vico (re)discovered, and Heidegger would call an act of unforgetting, was that, starting with tales of creation and of the very beginnings of social structuration, ancient mythical narratives, instead of being fanciful (and therefore „incorrect‟ empirical evidence) embellishments on reality, were in fact social discourses developed as ways of dealing with very real circumstances that were, perhaps, developing too fast for the proto-group to deal with, given their recent and nominal capacity to form structures that would eventually become quite complex systems. “That is, they [these accounts] embody, not „lies‟ about the facts, but mature and sophisticated ways of knowing, of encoding, of presenting them … All myths, that is, have their grounding in the actual generalized experience of ancient peoples, and represent their attempts to impose a satisfactory, graspable, humanizing shape on 20 In using language, and especially language-use that admits of language-games a la Wittgenstein, one has to be careful not to mislead, particularly when the text is purporting (cf. my use of the term comport, above: both terms carry or convey the sense of offering / giving something, in this case an opinion or viewpoint [purport] or a way of dealing with the world [comport]) to establish what the reader might take for „the truth‟, but subsequently discover, through interpretation of the same text, that a difference in opinion exists, and therefore might declare the text as „empirically‟ or factually false (according to another‟s opinion / interpretation). It has to be emphasized that research, with the intention of delving into the social sciences (i.e., design research), has to admit the qualitative and subjective element within social constructivism, and allow for the hypothetical viewpoint that the writer / researcher is writing from, thereby judging the design or structure of the argument instead of the (in my view) inaccessible face of Mount Probable, i.e., a totality of horizons of expectations. Myths and other social narratives 59 it” (Hawkes, 1986:12-13). What brings Vico into the 21st century is the constructivist insight that we have always constructed narratives, be they called myths or historical accounts, and in so doing we also construct a virtual world environment – very much as if all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players – “and in doing so he constructs himself. This making process involves the continual creation of recognizable and repeated forms which we can now term a process of structuring” (Hawkes, 1986:14). Apart from being aligned to social constructivism (albeit with hindsight), Vico‟s work also resonates with the break-up of 20th century social and national groups – a loosening of the national and cultural bonds that had previously kept families, communities and even nationalities united – that experienced a type of diaspora due to the Second World War‟s displacement of artists, writers and scientists. In some quarters, at least, the „modern‟ and anti-nationalist social thinking was that “human beings and human societies are not fashioned after some model or plan which exists before they do … he [Vico21] seems to say that particular forms of humanity are determined by particular social relations and systems of human institutions” (Hawkes, 1986:15). This approach to social structuration is, today, generating its own legitimation process, in virtuality, on the internet, while it is being modelled on a „plan which exists before they do‟, in the sense that the electronic diaspora is an extension of the cultural diaspora of the last century. History does repeat itself, perhaps not on an obvious or immediately apparent level, but a repetition nevertheless, and often for the same reasons. However, as a socio-technical and as a making process, these new forms of social structuration are being determined by the Facebook-type social relations, i.e., the new and innovative in social structuration emerges from the internet communities themselves, and some forms will be positive but some have a negative impact on lasting and in-depth identity formation. I offer this as simply a hypothesis, but my belief is that what we are witnessing, with the new electronic media surrounding the new Millennium student, is not a new phenomenon, but the further development of a process that started before the Second World War, and there are too many correlations between the previous and the present diaspora for us to ignore as being merely coincidental. The new Millenium students will find their own life teachers for themselves, as Lindsea stated, and they are finding that in their own lives, the internet world and the „real world‟ are becoming conceptually indistinguishable – with their interactions at e.g. home and at university merging with those they are experiencing online to such an extent that the real and the virtual are becoming indistinguishable. The positive view of these circumstances comes from the structuration of design itself, for if we believe that design is a social act, and that design can actively renew itself through forms of social structuration (that should read, socio-technical structuration), then Dunin-Woyseth and Nielsen (2001:27-28) suggest an epistemological premise for design: they have adopted the term making knowledge to highlight the essence of design as a making profession. Based on Gilbert Ryle‟s distinction between knowing how and knowing that knowledge, and, further, based on the notion of scholarship, they develop the field of knowing-how in order for design to cope with the demands of two external worlds made on it, i.e., demands from its various professions and the academic world. On the other hand, I interpret their work as also focusing on an internal set of „worlds-in-the-making‟ whose demands need to be satisfied; rather than playing the traditional academic role of following an inherited and set „design methodology‟ formative of each and every method, regardless of context, “the role of making disciplines is that of a quality supportive framework for making discourses”. In this case the term making or construction can and should be interpreted as internal worlds-in-the making, as the basis for a theory of design that offers a quality supportive framework, for thought, to both design‟s professional identity, and to the personal identities of the students of design. 21 Von Glasersfeld (1984:17) called Vico the first true constructivist, the precursor of Cecato and Piaget. Myths and other social narratives 60 Acknowledgement of text The following text is from my unpublished masters dissertation, revised to focus on the second, electronic diaspora. From the Old World to the New World A metanarrative of justification and legitimation is the „natural‟ outcome of an expanding culture, and in setting parameters to effect a closure within his realized universe, the cultural man defines borders and achieves a `homeland'. The „ethnic model‟ of a nation begins to take shape, and myths and memories supply the „facts‟ upon which a national structure for geographical and psychological possession is based. “National unity requires both a sense of cohesion or „fraternity‟ and a compact, secure, recognized territory or „homeland‟” (Smith 1989:148). Today‟s young people are no different, and look for this same sense of cohesion and fraternity. These are the myths and memories which „define them to themselves‟ and to others, conveying a sense of belonging and „rootedness‟ to both themselves and to any outsider. This collective search for identity is a recurring feature of cultural formation, and through myth and memory a nation or a group of people can discover just who they are, as the Millennium student will look for „life teachers‟ and start to discover their identity in the newly crafted electronic myths. Anthony Smith (1989:212-213) suggests a number of principles (discussed below) that are needed in this process of „modern‟ nation-building, a process he correctly defines as not modern at all, but steeped in antiquity through the symbolic use of myth and memory. The new-worlds-in-the-making that started what I call the first, artistic, diaspora was a move toward a differentiated body of knowledge alien to the cultural formation of the common man, and it started in the 20th century with the formation of internal organizations of culture, as autonomous knowledge, and especially those `organizations' that were formed, not by “formal membership or any sustained collective public manifestation, but in which there is conscious association or group identification ...” (Williams, 1986:68). This „non-public‟ manifestation could be seen in action with the disruption that the Second World War caused in the artistic community, and the move toward the alienation of original cultural formation concepts started in earnest with the ascendancy of New York as the cultural capital of the world, as opposed to Paris or London. It conformed to Smith's first principle of `modern' nationbuilding, in that the formation of cultural contexts cannot be seen as static targets, but is subject to redefinition. However, in non-conformity it established an „ethnic core‟, via the diversity of its members from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, but in alienation and exile - thereby essentially deviating from Smith's second principle, although it has to be said that Smith also claims that if a core identity does not exist, a group of people must, shall, invent one. On the face of it, this New World movement, and now the unprecedented use of the „personal‟ internet sites, adhered to Smith's third principle, in being the „demotic‟ type of cultural formation, and its „missionary zeal‟ was unmistakeable. Instead of relying on some „ruling elite‟ (parents, social group „out there‟, culture-atlarge) the young people who make up the new grouping shall design themselves, as a group. But the paradox is also apparent, or starting to be noticeable. Here one sees that the traditional „culture-bearing demotic ethnie‟,'22 meaning, today, everyone „on the outside‟, is in conflict with the new message of the artistic (now Millennium) community, as new ethnic core, and with the developing world market that relies increasingly on cross-cultural contacts. Smith's fourth principle is violated directly, and as such may constitute the most important change that New York after 1945, and the heterogeneity of postmodernism‟s multi-narratives, instilled in the cultural consciousness. The New 22 Smith (1989:30) defines ethnie as an ethnic community; as opposed to just an ethnic group („demotic‟ derives from demos- „the people‟). Myths and other social narratives 61 World, through its displaced social conditions, engendered a move away from the psychological necessity of a specific homeland, tied to a geographical origin in myth and memory; this had already started in New York and Chicago during the 1930s, when America experienced an „exodus‟ of intellectuals and artists from Europe, and again in 1940 after the fall of France. However, the authority of postmodern thinking seems to have diminished lately, with whole nations and even minority groups (despite the hegemonic underpinnings of a United Europe) demanding a return to Smith‟s traditional „culture-bearing demotic ethnie‟. However, we have to remember that Smith claimed that if a core identity does not exist (or, in Europe‟s case, serious attempts had been made to discredit or remove the old core identity thereby changing, altering, or simply diminishing it), a group of people must, shall, invent one, and in the Balkans that is what happened after the collapse of Tito‟s enforced and false „national‟ core identity for Yugoslavia. The electronic communities being formed today cross national borders at will, and will decide for themselves, while seeing to demand a return to the traditional „culture-bearing demotic ethnie‟, but that is patently impossible, except in myth and in virtuality. The last principle of Smith's (1989:213) is “Finally, nations need heroes and golden ages”. Despite the prospect of artificial intelligence and the other advances of our technoscientific future, or perhaps because of them, the average man that constitutes the building-block of the ethnie still feels the need to turn to a figure that could fill the position of the shaman, someone symbolizing the rightness (justification) of his culture, thereby reminding him of the continuation of his “distinctive heritage against the assimilative pressures and temptations of modernity”. The apparent rightness of this new message of culture in mythology tends to obscure the other deviations from Smith's formation of ethnie, for it speaks directly to the collective unconscious that vaguely remembers the other principles, and in the new ambiguous language of the virtual takes for granted that something of the sort is still inherent in the new message. But what if the medium is the message and then becomes the metaphor for what was an original message? Williams (1986:83) calls this paranational cultural formation, and links it to Toffler's world market of symbolism (which we can link to the influence of television, and now the great interest in virtual gaming): "The sociology of such developments is at a different and much broader level than that of cultural formations”. Yet these phenomena, and indirectly the formation of postmodernism per se, were preceded by the non-ethnic formation, as a non-public manifestation, of the concept of the avant garde, as an oppositional force to the nationalist feeling that traditionally resulted in nation-building. The avant-garde retreated to the realms of the imagination and the sublime to find their „homeland‟ and their legitimation, but displacement from social reality also brings with it disavowal of social responsibility. However successfully one may analyse the structuration of these electronic communities, the Millenniums have to live in a „real world‟ that they might not (wish to) understand, perhaps feeling that they (still) have too little control. The social construction of reality (as does design as a discipline) has always, for innovative and renewal purposes, relied on the realms of the imagination and the sublime (and has needed the „waywardness‟ of the avant garde) to assure progress, but it is still necessary, for our ultimate knowledge of reality as a metaphysical modality, to acquire the ability to transcend and span different spheres of reality - pragmatic physical, and symbolic metaphysical reality in order to „bring back‟ the symbolic creations of subjective processes and „objectify‟ them in a realized language system wherein things can be named and be made known. This aspect of being avant garde, or being visually and situationally literate, has to be sought after by the student, and the endeavour supported by design teachers, and if it takes the paranational cultural formation of an „educational facebook‟, as a designerly community of practice, to enable this transformation, then Peirce (1998:4748) is correct and, given that we “do not block the way of inquiry”, and given that we (teachers and students alike) “throw open our gates and admit … the insistence of an idea”, an act of true observation will mean that “inquiry of every type, fully carried out, has the vital power of self-correction and of growth”. Myths and other social narratives 62 Williams is convinced that these avant-garde cultural formations develop metanarratives of justification and legitimation that are at odds with Smith's „ethnic model‟ in being „specific and distanced styles‟. Whereas national unity requires both a sense of cohesion or fraternity, the avant-garde does exactly this, but in opposition: these electronic communities, today, construct “kinds of consciousness and practice which become increasingly relevant to a social order itself developing in the directions of metropolitan and international significance beyond the nation-state and its provinces ...” (Williams, 1986:84), thereby continuing to break off relations with a stabilizing tradition in favour of the future, not only for themselves, but also for anyone outside their system that can be drawn into its sphere of influence. Smith's third principle with its paradox between competing cultural directions becomes true: a break occurs between the culture-bearing demotic ethnie taking its cue from tradition - myth and memory - and the culture-bearing (market related)23 demotic ethnie taking its cue from the specific and distanced styles of exile and alienation of the avant-garde metropolis, known to us as the contemporary styles of internet interaction and communication. Are we there yet, and is there any danger that we will reach that point? What are we playing at? In terms of a renewed design education base on social constructivism, we have already passed that point, and deliberately so. In Chapter 1:6;10;14 the need for a constructivist discourse was discussed, a human-centred and change-inducing frameworks of thought that design education can and should accommodate, sans unilateral teacher authority, dealing with quality changes in the way students viewed the world (and hence the curriculum), a learner-centred discourse that engenders new ways of knowing, in short, allowing students to acquire new ways of generating individual knowledge (Pratt and Nesbit, 2000). Unfortunately it is also true that society functions as a form of self-regulating system, and “Most theories of self-regulation are founded on a negative feedback system in which people strive to reduce disparities between their perceived performance and an adopted standard” (Bandura, 2001:268), creating an almost „natural‟ barrier between existing (read „traditional‟) knowledge production and the constructivist discourse we expect the students to master. On the positive side, constructivism does tend to „undermine‟ much of traditional ways of doing business with the world, if only to avoid the trap of absolute authority, and, crucially, the fallacy of subjective, individual reasoning as the origins of human thought (for action). What constructivism does is teach students that, while social barriers to thinking need to be respected for what they are, for the sake of development and improvement they have to be transcended, „undermined‟ in the same way that a biological system „undermines‟ itself by adapting to its (new) environment. If that new environment is an electronic community of interest and practice, then I for one am prepared to work with and within this new scenario, in whatever capacity a contribution from my side might take. The fact is, I do not know, at the start, what the right requirements might be (vide John Chris Jones), but constructivism allows you to find out and design a contribution. What is important to know, is that these new Millennium students are constructing totally new social and cognitive maps, and, as discussed in Chapter 1:18, the (personal) map we follow through life and learning is constructed by our co-ontogenic relationships with our environment, which includes teachers, students, family, friends and, potentially, anyone and everything else in our experiential world, including designed objects and systems, and today, electronic communities and their different worlds that need quite different maps, namely virtual ones. Bateson (2002:27) warned that the map can never be the territory, since what we construct for ourselves may be a hybrid mix and ultimately our 23 Our lack of confidence in history, as well as postmodernism's intertextuality has assured this switch from culture to market; "The domination of exchange-value over use-value makes capital a vast, non-teleological desiring machine" (Bernstein, 1992:266). Myths and other social narratives 63 decision, in the final instance, but (1) under normal circumstances this uniquely individual map fails when we try to „give‟ it to others or even try to have them visualize it, as with „direct‟ or „transferred‟ teaching, since the territory they have access to seems different when compared to the „other‟ map they may form through the process called learning; entering a virtual world makes this situation even more complicated. Additionally, for the individual this map can never be the territory, because (2) under normal circumstances there will always be a cognitive dissonance between having made up our minds about something, and events in the world, for the question is not whether anything in the „objective‟ world can change or not, but whether our perception and conception of that thing will ever change, and therefore transform into a different map, conforming to, and creating, a different territory. If our educational aim is to find a way to assist the student in acquiring the ability to transcend and span different spheres of reality – using social constructivism as one of the main tools - in order to `bring back' the symbolic creations of subjective processes, how will they construct these double maps, or, rather, how will they cope with one map, newly constructed (at least partly inside virtual territory), beginning to transform when they start their journey back to „reality‟? Are we there yet, and is there any danger that we will not reach that point? And which point on whose map have we reached when we do get there? Zhao (2007:142), in updating Schultz‟s sociological theory, states that we can posses two types of knowledge, namely 1) the social stock of knowledge that all may share in, and which is to all intents and purposes „objective‟, and 2) the knowledge we build up personally and is therefore subjective. At the best of times it is quite difficult for one person to know another, meaning, phenomenologically speaking, the mind of the other is a closed book to me. Would a map fare better then, if we both agree on how to draw this map, seeing that the map can never be, or faithfully represent, the territory? Who, then, does the knowledge belong to that 3) can be mapped in such a way that more than one (subjective) person can read the same map and not get lost? This professional map may called a narrative, or design conversation, shared between two or more subjectively minded people, who are focusing on a design problem situation, and needing to find their way to a territory as yet unchartered. If it is so difficult for even two people to communicate because of the differences in their mental maps, which inevitably refer to different territories, how is it possible for a team of designers to work in harmony while avoiding misinterpretation? Ironically, the best way, it seems, to deal with reality is to avoid it, and all concerned to play at drawing real maps while, in fact, constructing virtual ones. In face-to-face situations my subjective-trying-to-be-objective efforts at communicating with your subjective-trying-to-be-objective efforts at communicating have all manner of cues and clues to help the process along, i.e., we rely on facial expressions, body language, dress and speech codes, even whole situations (e.g. we will react differently at a sports venue than we would at a church, based on the same words from the same person). In the virtual world, most of these cues and clues fade away, and “mutual knowledge has been found lacking among individuals who collaborate on group tasks on the internet. In the absence of physical cues and direct face-to-face contact, the knowledge of the other seems to be elusive and error-prone” (Zhao, 2007:141). From MySpace to MyIdentity How then would we construct these virtual maps to avoid error? The „real‟ answer begins to emerge in the next chapter, because it is necessary, first, to describe the „theory‟ behind the construction of something that does not exist in the world of objects, before looking at the construction process itself, i.e., how my theory-of-knowing, gramma/topology, is itself „constructed‟. To end this chapter, I will deal with the virtual world that can have a negative impact on the proto-identity of the Millennium Myths and other social narratives 64 student, for it can all be so much play-acting to no purpose, except for the benefit of that real world „non-human actor‟, the world of commerce. NetCommunity has turned into NetGain, and we should not be surprised. Wei (2006-2007), wanting to attend a sold out Web 2.0 conference, found it ironic that a conference supposedly about people (the conference web site announced “Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people”) would cost $3,000.00, and even more so in learning that a comparable (and affordable) but non-profit conference was forced to change its name from Web 2.0 to “Web 2point1”, having been threatened with a lawsuit by O‟Reilly Media (Tim O‟Reilly having coined, and claimed as his property, the term Web 2.0). The culture-bearing demotic ethnie that took its cue from traditional social structuration has been turned into a market related and pseudo-demotic ethnie; pseudo-producers in a new role as electronic consumers. O‟Reilly focuses on the technological and on the profitable aspects of Web 2.0, while, in contrast to e.g. Rheingold‟s work on virtual communities, Hagel et al. “outlined what they perceived as the „real‟ value of online communities: their potential as a commodity” (Wei, 2006-207). There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman said, but the embroidered version speaks volumes about Web 2.0: the only free lunch is found in a mousetrap (Capozzi, n.d.). “It‟s not a free service”, says Marwick (2009), it is only a „service‟ to the extent that you are enticed (attracted is too weak a term) onto the site and persuaded to stay, but “It‟s all about the money … MySpace or Friendster or Hi5 or bebo or Facebook would remove your favourite feature or block your favourite widget provider in a second if it threatened their profit model”. Jervis (2009:67-68) casts the net wider by declaring that “Google has turned commodification into a business strategy. Content is commodified … Even the audience is commodified: There‟s little that distinguishes one of us from another … Everybody‟s like everybody else. We‟re just users”, although I would take issue with this last statement and declare that we‟re treated as just consumers. I wrote (above) that design is looking for an identity, and so are these young people. Referring to Chapter 1:24, design as form-giving, as styling, is being subordinated to the „form-giving‟ of a student personal and professional identity, relying on their capability of self-reflection, an awareness of self and others, of the objects that enter into each project environment (and that have entered their lives, in any case, outside the project / class environment), and so of the relationships between these. The MyIdentity being created via a medium such as MySpace is not a relationship in the real world but a commodity that can be bought and consumed on a par with other commercial objects and experiences. From MyIdentity to MyMyth The formation of a socio-cultural identity can be seen as a symbolic expression in which the individual (the inner self), the social and the learning process itself (external influences) interact in a formative dialogue that creates a hybrid, relational mix between self and external agencies (Buckingham, 2008:6; Drotner, 2008:174; Goldman et al., 2008:186). Both Bauman and Giddens emphasize the contingent, malleable and therefore fluid nature of this negotiable identity (quoted in Buckingham, 2008:2;9), which supports Bauman‟s view that adolescence is a stage of transition, and inbetween stage that allows youth to experiment with any medium that helps them find direction and hence begin to form an identity, in fact experiment with several different identities (Stern and Erikson), this approach correlating with Boyd‟s “analysis of how friendships are conducted in MySpace [that] draws attention to the complex ways in which hierarchies are formed, impressions are managed and social roles are played out” (all quoted in Buckingham, 2008:3;7). In What are we playing at? (above) I stated that these new Millennium students are constructing totally new social and cognitive maps, and, the (personal) map we follow through life and learning is constructed by our co-ontogenic relationships with our environment. Playing at is not simply an adolescent game but an everyday social interaction that Goffman (1959) calls a dramaturgical account, “the subject matter [of which] is the creation, maintenance, and destruction Myths and other social narratives 65 of common understandings of reality by people working individually and collectively to present a shared and unified image of that reality” (Kivisto and Pittman, 2005:272), and, depending on the circumstances, an overconfident approach, as (Laing, 1990:37) states, can have people creating „social phantasy systems‟ for themselves, thus in danger of occupying „false positions‟ (discussed below), which, as Buckingham (2008:6) reminds us, can have “several implications for our understanding of young people‟s use of digital media”. According to Kivisto and Pittman (2005:272), Goffman‟s theatrical approach to sociology derives from Shakespeare‟s All the world‟s a stage, and refers to “the metaphor of life as theatre is rich in meaning”, a viewpoint fully endorsed by Laing (1990:37-44), who also quotes the French philosopher Mounier (1952) as follows: “The Universe is full of men going through the same motions in the same surroundings, but carrying within themselves, and projecting around them, universes as mutually remote as the constellations”. As a prescient statement of possibility, Geyer (1994:23;27) affirmed that our „normal‟ associations and forms of participation will continue („men‟ going through the same motions in the same surroundings), but that the complexity of contemporary life (accelerated by new digital media) “will forge new forms of participation and will continue to do so”. However, one of the implications for young people‟s use of digital media is “a certain degree of alienation from one‟s „original‟ local community” (Geyer, 1994:27), not, ordinarily, to be seen as a negative sign, since this form of alienation is a very natural process24 with its own set of fixed controls, only to be regarded negatively if the participant wishes to leave the socio-cultural group for a unique process of individuation, made possible because “today‟s high-complexity society is the first time in human history that environmental pressures offer this possibility to become one‟s own unique self on a mass scale” (Geyer, 1994:27). Now imagine the new millennium student enacting a new individuality, constructing a new identity, on a MySpace-type web site. As this new individual enters the presence of the other MySpacers, goes online, she knows that the others will want to know things about her, or bring into play the information already available online. These MySpacers will be interested in her socio-economic status and her conception of herself, because this information will help the others to define the new situation, the context within which the new online posting is to be interpreted, since this will enable them to know in advance what is expected of them as members of her group of friends (and vice versa). For those who come online many sources of information become accessible and many carriers (or „sign-vehicles‟) become available for conveying this information. If unacquainted with the individual, observers can glean clues from her conduct and appearance which allow them to apply their previous experience with individuals roughly similar to the one before them. They can rely on what the individual says about herself or on the documentary evidence she provides as to who or what she is. Finally, many crucial facts lie beyond the time and space of interaction or lie concealed within it. Fro example, the „true‟ or „real‟ attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of the individual can be ascertained only indirectly, through her avowals or through what appears to be involuntary expressive behaviour. Wait just a minute … this can‟t work on MySpace, surely? No, it can‟t as it stands, but substantially, this same procedure plays itself out in real life as well as online, with the exception that certain clues cannot be made available to the others (facial expressions, body language, real beliefs and values). About 95% of the paragraph above was cribbed from Goffman‟s (1959:1-2) description of how the individual presents herself in real time in everyday life, and how the others can evaluate the information that she is offering as to its feasibility and truth content. You 24 Cf. Chapter 1:17, and Gadamer and Derrida‟s use of what can only be called constructivism that „undermines‟ much of traditional ways of enculturation. Myths and other social narratives 66 cannot do that online. What this new individual can do is play a role, almost exactly the same role that Goffman says is played out in the everyday world, but with a difference, and that difference was clearly spotted by Sartre one day, sitting at a small table outside a French café. Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid ... He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. (quoted in Laing, 1990:44) We are playing at becoming in everyday life, and we play at becoming a new self online, except that an online audience can be kept away from certain clues that might give away our glossing over some stretching of the truth, to put it mildly. An online space for becoming is much more forgiving and malleable than everyday life, and the temptation too great to not play at being a waiter in a café, a successful student, a climber of Mount Improbable. The temptation and the possibilities inherent in new digital media are just too great not to move from MyIdentity to MyMyth. The Bridge In this chapter I discussed who these Millennium students are, or say they are, and what that means to a future educational structure. The main focus on my own argument for a theory of design thinking pivots on how successful the student can construct a reasoning and ontologically sound identity, and what a renewed design education can do to facilitate this. I find that, their immersion in the new digital worlds despite, these new students are not that different to the way we were at that age, and still they differ from us: why? I knew a number of fellow students who also went from a 1970‟s MySpace (a group of influential friends; the burning issue of the day, especially with political overtones, etc.) to a student version of an MyIdentity that was undeniably formed by 1970‟s politics and a wish for a culture of freedom, and from there some of them forged a MyMyth that either lasted their whole lives, or that was contested and eventually conquered by real and everyday life: one fellow student, allegedly, was a neurotic police spy who later made a mess of his life, while another was one of the main agitators and protestors on campus, but is today a successful doctor. I recognise the same symptoms in some of my new students, the same possibilities, the only difference being the ease with which the newly flattened world can connect people and events, in itself a good and a bad thing.25 Technology in one form or another has always been with us, created by us, and has helped shape the world we live in – what is so different in the contemporary world that these new Millennium students need, that we could do without? I do not pretend to have a definitive answer, but one aspect of a formative process that can only be helpful, and that can give direction to a gramma/topology of design knowing, is the issue of literacy, briefly discussed below. Conole et al. (2006:153) did an in-depth case study on the experiences of students interacting with elearning technologies. They did so, perhaps not surprisingly, by making use of technology instead of using real-life qualitative methods. What they found is all too evident, still, among today‟s students (mine, actually), which is the following, based on the fact that the perceptions students have of what information is have changed: 25 I do not wish to argue for the „neutrality‟ of technology, nor for technological determinism, but it remains our choice how we set up the relations and associations in the socio-technical world. Myths and other social narratives 67 Information is easily available (the internet is the new library) and mostly free, but the problem seems to be that free equals less valuable; Once having dealt with the fact that information is free (to the student, without regard to who designed / complied the information), it was found that students place a high premium on presentation standards (the information isn‟t that valuable, but it should look good), and more, they expect the information (the material they are offered) to be entertainingly interactive; Having acknowledge this fact of student life, the question is how to design away the mismatch between student expectations of the above and the less engaging material offered by their universities; Finally, a very important issue is raised, namely the one regarding the new digital literacy skills the students need, and that Conole et al. claim these students are demonstrating. Conole et al. (2006:158) further mention what the data reveals about students‟ learning processes using new technologies, under the headings *environment, *perceptions and *practice. I looked in vain for any evidence of student learning on pp. 158-160, but found countless references to students using technology to find information, even reference to the sophistication of these ways of sourcing information, to which my response can only be that the „sophistication‟ belongs to the technology and not to the student. One student response that drew my attention is this: The first thing I do when given any piece of a word is type it into a search engine! This gives me the opportunity to see how different people interpret the title. From there I can focus on one main idea and use the electronic resources to support my initial findings or indeed rule them out. Conole et al. (2006:158) The title? The author? Why do we look for information in the first place, if not to find parts that can be recombined to form a new whole that answers a new question, one that the original author and original title (referring, really, to the original work) did not address? If any university lecturer, by now, does not realise that students look for whole answers on the internet then they should not be teaching. When looking for different interpretations of „the title‟ a student means looking for different interpretations, of a single work, by others, i.e., the opinion of other people on that specific work. This turns a student essay, or a research report (as I prefer to call it), into a thinly disguised list of reviews of sources, and not even the student‟s own interpretation of that source. Without wishing to appear too pessimistic, this route too often leads to the very tempting action of plagiarising the work of others, given the time constraints that student work under, because from the student perspective, the internet offers the work of experts in the field, does it not? What is wrong with compiling the words of others in the field, if that is what research, essentially, is all about? From there I can focus on one main idea and use the electronic resources to support my initial findings or indeed rule them out. Conole et al. (2006:158) From where? Where exactly did this search get the student, if not to the place of explication that belongs mainly to another? I have no doubt that my interpretation will appear churlish to some, and I cannot blame them, if design research is taken at face value, that is. Do I not do exactly the same thing, read the work of others, i.e., the work of Hubert Dreyfus that explicates the work of Heidegger, or the work of John O‟Neill and Monika Langer that makes sense of Merleau-Ponty‟s dense texts? Of course I do, and in this way I explain this process to my students, with this proviso: you never, ever, rely on one source for your information on any topic, no matter how well-regarded the author. You have to ask the difficult question, where does an authentic interpretation come from?26 How do you learn to be a critical reader of texts, to filter, in Eco‟s terms, the information you are confronted with? Robert, one 26 This difficult „design‟ will be demystified in Chapter 5 by arguing for a) an Aristotelian version of first principles, and b) migrating the aura of an original to a „copy‟. Myths and other social narratives 68 of the Student 2.0 participants (above), painted the picture of the internet exploding at the students‟ fingertips, referring to the myriad well of information the student can potentially be confronted with, unencumbered access to unfiltered and unproven „information‟ which leads to a situation that lecturers know all too well, and that Eco (2000:190-191) called the freezing of action in the face of information overload: “now that I‟ve found all this information, what do I do with it?” Inaction results because of an inability to filter (make sense of, be critical of) the available information, to come to a decision as to how best to answer the project question and not remain caught in the information web of each individual source. “With the coming of the Web, all possible knowledge and information, even the least useful, is there at our disposal”, leading Eco (2000:191) to ask the question, “Who is doing the filtering out?” Conole et al. claim that these students are already exhibiting critical thinking skills that are demanded by the new digital literacy, i.e., that they can do their own filtering out, and yet they have to rely on how different people interpret the title, meaning that they have to be led by the direction set by someone else, which, ironically, lands them back in “teacher-dominated, authoritarian approach of oldstyle education” (Buckingham, 2008:14) that they wanted to get away from, since how different people interpret the title means how others interpret one single source, a review of a single book / article, which is what I sometimes get as an essay / research report when the student is looking for a short-cut – a mere list of reviews of books / articles, with no individual filtering, no individual interpretation in sight. Given this mindset it is no wonder that free information can be thought of as less than valuable information, but more worrying is that students, as reported in Conole et al. (2006:158-160), are found to look for ready-made and entertainingly packaged visual bites (the equivalent of fully connotative sound bites) that are interactive, and we may ask, this material has to interact with what or with whom? This is not stated, except the mere fact that since this is what students expect, this is what universities must supply on their own course web sites; instead of simply making content available, as a textbook would make the content available and accessible, the new packaging must be visually pleasing and interactive. Conole et al. do not divulge what this entails, but given the type of statement from students, such as above (… given any piece of a word …), I would presume this to mean they would like the interpretation(s) of „the title‟(s) as well as hyperlinks to other material that relate to this work. The perceptions of students regarding the nature of information, and information retrieval, have indeed changed, for the worse. The claim that Conole et al. make concerning their last point, i.e., that students already demonstrate their new digital literacy skills by the way they handle these new technologies is obviously false, since these include “skills of evaluation and an ability to critique and make critical decisions about a variety of sources and content” (:157). No evidence is given that these skills are taught, and it cannot be assumed that students will acquire these skills by default; in conclusion Conole et al. (:160) admit that they still question “how people are constructing or scaffolding knowledge [since] despite the fact that learners are now IT-literate … they are not academically e-literate and still lack the necessary skills to make appropriate critical use of information”. Surely, I ask myself, they must have realised that this last remark of theirs discredits their earlier claim that the students were demonstrating the new digital literacy skills? Lankshear and Knoble (2006:248-249) highlight a number of important aspects of Steven Johnson‟s (2005) argument regarding young people and popular culture. On the one hand, and in opposition to some commentators who argue that young people today are becoming dumb and dumber27, Johnson 27 This is not to say that the phenomenon does not exist; Bauerline (2008:11-13) makes a point of what he calls the knowledge deficit, by referring to the Jaywalking segment of the popular Jay Leno Show, in which the American talk show host takes to the streets with a microphone to test the general knowledge of young people. Typical responses to the question, which book did you read last, are “Do magazines count?” and “Maybe a comic book”. “Do you ever read the classics?” draws mainly blank looks, with “Anything by Charles Dickens? … A Christmas Carol?” eliciting the answer, “I saw the movie”. Another 20-something thought that the Pope lived in England, Myths and other social narratives 69 argues that young people are getting smarter thanks to the cognitive skills necessary “to engage with genuinely complex media that demand serious thinking and problem solving, reflection and comparison”, i.e., online popular culture that demands much more cognitively challenging participation than that demanded of older generations. On the face of it this looks like a corroboration of Conole et al.‟s claim, and that young people do acquire the critical literacy skills necessary for contemporary online knowledge production. However, a different viewpoint brings to light that, Increasingly, digital literacy is being defined by policy groups and others in terms of technical or operational competence with computers and the internet … and/or as the ability to evaluate information by examining sources, weighing up author credibility, gauging the quality of writing and argument building in an online text, judging the „truth value‟ of a text found online, and so on. (Lankshear and Knoble (2006:243) Conole et al. did not provide any evidence of student learning using new technologies, but concentrated on technical / operational competence as if this constituted the skill of digital literacy, and as if ITliteracy and e-literacy were two very different things, which, if we understand the concept of literacy to mean the dominance of writing and of the book (Kress, 2003:1), they still are. The old-fashioned equivalent to IT-literacy would be reading-literacy, teaching someone how to read, i.e., how to become operationally competent with this technology called printing (the skill of reading), while the equivalent to e-literacy would then be the skill of interpreting what is printed (the skill of making meaning). Anyone can be taught to read, but it is much more difficult to teach the skill of interpretation, or the ability to make meaning; it is easy enough to teach the skill of single source literacy, the ability to „take on board‟ the meaning of the author of a book, but that is not true literacy, just as to see how different people interpret the title (above) has nothing to do with literacy but is simply part of the skill in being operationally competent. In this sense the equivalent to e-literacy is not the skill of simply interpreting what is printed, if we are dealing with single sources, or even multiple sources that dole out the same information. Real literacy is being able to deal with multiple sources that do not answer your question (assuming, as a reader, you have a question, the student equivalent of answering the project question) because they are concerned with their own narratives and not with forging links to other sources, despite the very real presence, in our contemporary world (more obviously so today than in the past), of intertextuality. Real literacy is the ability to link disparate elements in design‟s groundless field of knowledge (cf. Chapter 1:28), and students have to acquire the inclusive capacity to make the required connections (and therefore the adaptive transformations) between subject areas, between disciplines, between one area of knowledge and another that, on the face of it, seem unconnected; they have to acquire the knowledge of what real literacy means in all its wide-ranging facets, and today the young designers of the future have the added responsibility to acquire a new structure of knowing that can deal with e-literacy. Part of the problem is that the internet offers too much, and it is far too easy for young people to come under the spell of what Schulman (discussed above, and quoted in Sockett 2000) called the pathology of fantasia in believing that they understand the subject matter before they in fact do understand, an unreasoning28 and overconfident position that is not uncommon and not restricted to young people, since people in general create „social phantasy systems‟ for themselves, thus occupying „false positions‟ (Laing, 1990:37). I already touched in another of Schulman‟s pathologies, that of inertia, “those states of mind where people come to know something but simply can't go beyond the facts, can't synthesize them, think with them, or apply them in another situation”, a state of mind that persuades a student to and when asked “Where in England?” answered, “Ummm, Paris”. It would, however, be extremely unfair to blame this sorry state of affairs on the use of the internet alone, since the evidence, such as it is, points much more to a deficit in the schooling system. 28 Cf. the argument in Chapter 3 and Slamat‟s use of Cohen‟s argument that your reasons put forward should not only be compelling to you, but also compelling, and (reasonably) acceptable, to the others involved in the (ongoing) dialogue. Myths and other social narratives 70 decide on the worth of information by weighing up the author‟s credibility (Lankshear and Knobel (2006:243), not by reading the work or comparing it to another source, but by „listening‟ to how different people interpret the title (above), mere facts that cannot be applied in another situation, other peoples‟ facts that do not answer any question, since there isn‟t one. Lest it be thought that I am condemning the internet out of hand, in design theory research I find that the majority of my sources I acquire through the internet, since 1] published material (books or journals) are either too expensive or not available in South Africa, and 2] some of the best work tends to be those articles published in accredited journals that simply have not made it into book form yet (but that are available to me via my institution‟s library search engines), and 3] most importantly, as I write and construct an argument, I come across references to writers and to work that are unknown to me, but that might just provide a better clue as to how to proceed. For example, needing to make sense of Gunther Kress‟ (2003:36) use of the term transduction I search for definitions and use on the internet, which, of course, does not really answer the question. But I do find links to the work of Gilbert Simondon, work (by others on Simondon and by the author himself) that not only explains the use of the term transduction satisfactorily, but provides me with additional links to authors I have already used, and so contextualizing the use of transduction in terms of my own argument. That immediacy of association would not have been possible without the agency of the internet. However, I have been doing this for a long time, and can use my (external-to-the-internet) experience as a filter for what I find on the internet, but where does the student‟s know-how come from, and can this be taught? Can literacy be taught, and more importantly, can the new digital literacy be taught? Like design knowledge itself, literacy cannot be taught as a textbook subject sans practical application, and in a reverse action, digital literacy cannot be acquired by using the internet as a practical tool, without linking this experience to experience in the real world. If this „real world‟ happens to be the world of internet social networks, then attention needs to be paid to Gee‟s interpretation of literacies (quoted in Lankshear and Knobel, 2006:17), since the efficacy of a literacy lies not in the theory but in specific ways of knowing and being facilitated by particular versions of literacy, which Gee named as discourses, or “ways of being in the world”, and, further, as Johnson (above) also confirmed, the fundamental experience lacking in the use of the internet is a correlation to these ways of being in the world, but a world in which “words, acts, gestures, attitudes, beliefs, purposes, clothes, bodily movements and positions” are integrated, and can be confirmed as authentic or not, in the real world external to the virtual worlds of the internet. In dealing with the new millennium student it has to be kept in mind that a significant proportion of „literate‟ people are transferring their allegiance 29 to the social practices mediated by new digital technologies, that these new spaces for identity-formation have “nothing directly to do with truth and with established rules, procedures and standards for knowing”, and the implication is not that these issues are unimportant, but that “today‟s learners are increasingly recruited to other values and priorities” (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006:242-243). The inherent meaning of the terms truth, rules, standards, and indeed, literacy, can start to differ from those we have become used to, if it is true that People read and write differently out of different social practices, and these different ways with words are part of different ways of being persons and different ways and facets of doing life. From a sociological perspective [this has the implication that] it is impossible to separate out from text-mediated social practices the „bits‟ concerned with reading or writing (or any other sense of „literacy‟) and to treat them independently of all the other „non-print‟ bits 29 It is significant that allegiance is thought to stem from the same source as alliance, which implies an authoritative host that is accorded the power of mediation. Myths and other social narratives 71 [“words, acts, gestures”, above]. „Literacy bits‟ do not exist apart from the social practices in which they are embedded and within which they are acquired. (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006:13) Given that these social practices are mediated, and indeed, in some cases brought about by, the new digital technologies we find a situation wherein the new social discourse of youth (including its version of literacy and/or ways of knowing) treats the „bits‟ concerned with reading or writing (or any other sense of „literacy‟) as dependent or conditional upon all the other „non-print‟30 bits, i.e., “values and gestures, context and meaning, action and objects, talk and interaction, tools and spaces” (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006:13). Internet mediated reading and writing and speaking are all intertwined „literacy bits,‟ and the world told is the same world as the world shown, in opposition to Kress‟ (2003:1) statement that normal literacy has it that “the world told is a different world to the world shown [because] The two modes of writing and of image are each governed by distinct logics, and have distinctly different affordances”. This brings me back to Kress‟ use of the term transduction, which led me to the work of Simondon. “A new theory of meaning cannot do without the concept of transformation [which] needs to be complemented by the concept of transduction” (Kress, 2003:36), and according to Styhre (2009:27-28), Simondon‟s work focuses on “understanding how both biological organisms and technological artifacts or systems are capable of becoming part of metastable systems in what he calls the process of transduction”. The world told and the world shown are now intermingled into a new metastable system (for as long as the association lasts) that is formed between the biological organisms (the student) and the technological system (the internet and its many rooms), and transduction31 is used to explain how it is possible for a significant proportion of people to move their allegiance to the mediated world of the internet, since it is here, in this new environment of virtual ontogenesis, 32 that a mutual identity is forged, a process of individuation that transforms what we think we knew, and moves this mindset to a new space of understanding because of the medium within which we do our thinking and understanding. The efficacy of this new digital literacy lies not in the theory of its newness, but in the specific ways of knowing and being that is facilitated by this new medium, this new discourse of learning that functions as a co-ontogenic relationship (cf. Chapter 1:14), and so we need a new theory of meaning for design that will allow a student to learn how to filter information, indeed, learn how to become the new filter in a socio-technical constructivist way, and in the end, learn how to manage this new process of individuation in a new medium, because the world designs us as we design the world. The next chapter will offer the first half of a theory for and of design, a designerly way of seeing the world that can be called gramma/topology. 30 A bit of semantic gymnastics is called for here. With non-print bits Lankshear and Knobel originally meant the literacy effects engendered by actions in the world, and that these in turn are effected by the literacy-induced ways of thinking sourced from the print bits; in the world mediated by digital technologies the term non-print bits would equate with non-reading-on-the-screen bits, since the involvement in these new social practices of context and meaning are not seen as reading-on-the-screen, just as texting or typing blog comments and „writing‟ your life experiences on a personal web page is seen as the equivalent of „speaking‟. 31 32 Transduction “accounts for the shift of „semiotic material‟ across modes” of knowing (Kress, 2003:36). “Ontogeny is the history of structural changes in a particular living being. At the same time, it is born in a particular place, in a medium that constitutes the ambience in which it emerges and in which it interacts” (Maturana and Varela, 1998:95). Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 3 72 Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production The Gate If the world is changing, the new students we have to deal are changing thanks, in large part, to the flattened world1, if all manner of boundaries are being crossed almost daily, then why and how can the discipline of design still remain a silo discipline? In reality, when it comes to things like these, everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method. (Jung, 1942:79) This chapter begins with the first half of an argument for a theory of and for design, which is necessarily interrupted by a diversion to Chapter 4, which sets out the theoretical and philosophical inputs that provide the core of what can become gramma/topology. The beginnings of such an argument are important to provide direction to the critical thinking process, but before continuing the (second half of the) argument for a gramma/topology of design knowledge production in Chapter 5, certain realitygenerating mechanisms need to be considered, as ways of seeing the world, and these need to be described and discussed in Chapter 4, since the argument for gramma/topology cannot proceed and be completed without frequent reference to these theories of knowing and becoming, i.e., systems thinking and cybernetics, actor-network theory, autopoiesis, and ontological phenomenology. Chapter 3 thus begins with a reference to design plus research, and the importance of a concern for the discipline‘s very formation, a mutual path of discovery for both the individual and the discipline, the human actor and the non-human actor. We depend on differences that include the other in all its manifestations, meaning that we come to realise that the world designs us as we design the world (cf. :77, below) This leads to the acknowledgement of the unstable nature of the whole process, and the first encounter with a tenet of design knowledge acquisition that entails arguing to first principles, and the necessity of learning to ‗think like a group‘ in order to achieve this. The next section, Freely invented: maps versus territory, deals with some of the design models provided by a theory, and asks what they are for? Gregor‘s focus on what we learn with instead of what we learn from is highlighted, since how we interpret a theory may make a huge difference to the development of a discipline. Mention is made to Einstein and Infeld‘s notion of freely invented ideas and concepts, which in turn slots in with Richard Jung‘s (2007:19) different way of seeing that hybridly (re)combines a descriptive conjunction-disjunction split, a textual device (expressed as sive; cf. :78, below) that does away with rigid dichotomies such as and/or and either/or, and lets them intermingle (associate) in contextually relevant permutations of meaning,2 and I will follow this practice throughout this text. Following on from this I discuss the relevance of the structural sive ontological frameworks of thought, closely allied to the map sive territory problem of human cognition. 1 The concept of the global village is a complete misnomer, the world may be connected as if you are communicating with someone just the other side of the street, but that is not everyday reality. 2 Sive is a Latin term taken from Spinoza, and used when ―a dual description (or construction) of the topic is contemplated‖ (Jung, 2007:19). Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 73 To put the practical background to this research in perspective, the next section is taken from a paper written originally for the Undisciplined! 2008 Conference, A Natural Death is Announced (withdrawn, but subsequently published as a journal article) which deals with many of the issues that are important to a developing theory of design knowing, such as the disciplined versus undisciplined issue. This is followed by a section called Reinjection, which summarises some of the most urgent issues of importance to Chapter 3, such as the question of a unique and exclusive theory of and for design, and the contrary fact that a Mode 2 knowledge production is not only accepted in contemporary science, but can be seen as the most effective opposition to a Mode 1 way of knowing in design. The section then touches on the idea of an effective agency that we are exposed to (and that will be discussed more fully in Chapter 5) and that can be seen as (interpreted as) a topos of discovery sive revelation. Theory as the inbetween, figure and ground, territory and map introduces a semiotics and semantics approach that can contribute to the creation of a free space for reflection. In this section I argue against Cross‘s (2007) line of reasoning that seeks to develop a domain-independent approach to design theory, and, instead, put forward Jonas‘s (2007) call for design to broaden its self-conception in order to claim ―an appropriate share of the definition power regarding future conditions of living‖: an appropriate direction for design to take in its search for a contingent theoretical foundation. Which brings us to the last section, Foundations for a groundless theory, in preparation for Chapter 4‘s explication of the four theories of knowing, the four cybernetically-driven investigations into human conduct and belief that can make up a plausible gramma/topology of design knowing. It is argued that only in this hybrid mix, consisting as it were, of Bateson‘s no-things in a contingently-grounded and shifting environment, can the interactive foundations for critical thinking be formed. Introduction Theories are neither one thing or another, are neither here nor there, very much like design itself, and theories of and for design, I shall argue, are quite as elusive as the question, how long is a piece of string? Apart from the fact that not many experts can agree on what exactly design is, and likewise cannot really agree on what a theory is, in itself, since that is usually the wrong question, we have the perennial problem of reconciling these two ‗unknowns‘ to each other. However, there is sufficient evidence (presented in this chapter) that, more than ever, design practitioners and researchers (implicitly including design educators) are calling for not only a collaboration between theory and practice, resulting in theory for practice, but also calling for a new relationship between this ‗thing‘ called design theory and this ‗thing‘ called design practice. The answer to the unasked wrong question (above) is, of course, that it should not be asked in the first place, making no sense without a defined context, under which contextual circumstances even how long is a piece of string? would begin to make some sense. Asking the question what is a theory?, and the more focused, what is a design theory?, would quite likely elicit a very abstract and abstruse answer, and part of my (larger) argument has always been that, no matter how much you create abstract ideas and concepts (and we have to do so in order to be innovative), these flights of fancy will remain exactly that if not brought down to earth and secured by action. In this thesis we will deal with theory for and on behalf of practice, and yet, not theory for the how-to of design, but theory on behalf of that elusive thing called design thinking. In this chapter I will, in building an argument for a theory of and for design, generally use the term gramma/topology, since that is the design ‗theory‘ for constructing designerly knowledge that I wish to argue for. Although this chapter is focused on the nature of theories in general and what they, as tools for knowledge creation, can mean to us in our quest to make meaning, and the fact that my argument here concentrates more on what is yet to become gramma/topology, through the structure of this chapter‘s argument I will attempt to clarify the (self-)organization of this thing called Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 74 gramma/topology, a theory of and for design that is not a traditional theory in any sense, having no direct practical application. According to McKean (2001:86), when students of design study their subject / discipline in a ‗rigorous‘ way, i.e., when they adopt ―a concern with its formation‖, this attitude, and I would add, this disposition towards their discipline and all that it could possible entail, helps a student of design approach Alberti, say, with the same immediacy that a student of creative writing approaches Shakespeare. It seems obvious to me that such a study of architecture is a central [often undervalued] tool in the education of the designer. (McKean, 2001:86) What McKean is touching upon is a very sensitive subject for many designers: ―Undertaking such study is often called research‖. I do not subscribe to the view that ‗design‘ is an inferior-to-science subject of study, and that, therefore, the study of design cannot be called ‗rigorous‘ or ‗scientific enough‘ to be judged as ‗real research‘. At the same time I do not hold the view that all design activity can be called ‗research‘, and especially not that everyday design practice is automatically the equivalent of research. On the face of it, then, to state that design and research can be equated, sounds like a paradox. But both points of view can be correct, because ‗design‘ is not simplistically one thing only, i.e., a planned action resulting in a manufactured object or system, and the ‗design‘ we are concerned with in this study can be compared to a pre-materialistic design stage (a stage that is of necessity preoccupied with production costs, although sometimes exclusively so) that focuses on the philosophy, criticism and theory of the whole of what can constitute design as a human activity. I have always believed that one may view the design (thinking) process and the research (thinking) process as one and the same path of discovery, basing this approach on George Kelly‘s3 notion that what matters in both processes is not the subject being investigated, but the person, the thinking entity, doing the investigation (Kelly, in Bannister and Mair, 1968:2-3). In the course of this enquiry into design thinking and knowledge production, I hope to show that the differences between a designer, a researcher and a user are minimal, as minimal as the differences can be between two ‗ordinary‘ people in conversation, since both are human beings with the probable capacity – and once past probable, the dispositional capacity – to think about things, and to interpret the resulting process set in motion by this dispositionally-driven thinking engagement-with-the-other-and-the-self. The real differences, the ones that matter and that can be put to use (by both / all parties) for interpretation and understanding, are not present, at the start, except in absence4, since they are probabilities only, and cannot be foreseen. All ‗non-factual‘ communication, all interpretation, and hence all forms of ‗personal / individual‘ understanding can likewise not be foreseen or predicted. In Chapter 1:4 I stated that, in terms of design, ‗observing the system‘ also means redefining the socalled problem, for not only is it wrong to assume the stable nature of the problem requirements, but 3 When we consider both research principles and practices, Kelly believed that it is the human aspects of scientists, as persons and not ‗abstract workers‘ that make them what they are, which leads me to argue that designers should not separate their professional from their personal character. Kelly viewed his scientific behaviour and his ‗normal‘ human behaviour, in terms of ‗knowing‘, as the same. In comparing his role as director of graduate studies with his role as a psychotherapist, Kelly saw his ‗theory‘ role as ‗research scientist‘ – a role that, in the past, was regarded as ‗objective‘ and hence removed from the ‗personal‘ – as guiding research students along paths of discovery. Later that same day Kelly would, in his ‗practical‘ role as a psychotherapist, guide a patient along paths of discovery. In both roles, and in both theory and in practice, Kelly thus regarded his own human characteristics as the theoretical guiding principles that made him the scientist and the psychoanalytical practitioner that he was in fact. 4 The term absence is used here to signify that the differences – deferring to the Batesonian patterns that matter – have not yet been activated by the thinking entities concerned in any true act of communication, and all we have to go on for the sake of interpretation, is the immediate past history between these two entities. Given that they quite likely do not have this history of a shared resource, the John Chris Jones (1988: 224) injunction holds: ―the ‗right‘ requirements are in principle unknowable by users, customers, or designers at the start‖; we do not, as yet, have at our disposal enough production to enable any interpretation. On the other hand, given that there is some form of history – a previous context or even a set of contexts – to enable interpretation of the present circumstances, even if this past history does not at first seem to have a direct bearing on the relationship between the two entities, interpretation turns to research, in the sense of opening ―up the scope of inquiry‖ (Findeli, 2001:11). Through the lens of social constructivism (cf. Chapter 1), any past history, that thinking entities have in common, can be read as ‗evidence‘ or grounds for present interpretation. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 75 pre-empting the solution in this way means nothing much will be learned from the whole process, and hence very little innovation becomes possible. In terms of communicative action and knowledge production, ‗observing the system‘ means being self-aware of the process of consciousness, in the first place, and of the process of communication – enabled and facilitated by this self-awareness-ofconsciousness – with the-other-external-to-the-self, in the second place. Once ‗externals‘ enter the equation5, once that-which-is-represented-by-the-other is given a place in our personal thinking process, we cannot any longer assume the stable nature of ‗the problem requirements‘, as it were, because both our own system and the system of the other are undergoing changes in real time. The act of communication is a transformative act, and likewise the process of interpretation that leads to understanding is a transformative process. To pre-empt any solution or answer is to be willing and able to control the process, but this control is a ‗double‘ one-sided affair: designers and users alike may think that they ‗control‘ the process, and, by the same token, both parties to a conversation may think that they are directing the ‗design‘ and the resultant ‗understanding‘ of the conversational process. In truth, both parties are in the wrong and an unstable situation the only foreseen result of this state of affairs, an unwillingness to accommodate the other and adapt, accordingly, to the real-time changes taking place. Again, seemingly quite contradictory, an ‗unstable‘ situation is exactly what is needed, but not this stalemate of two systems-of-knowing that each want and need to control the complete process. The ‗unstable‘ process that leads to design, research and philosophical knowledge is unstable only in the sense of becoming, when two knowing systems merge in communication and a third (unforeseen by both) system - more properly, space - of possibility is formed: the virtual and the probable, the new, the innovative. This is the path of discovery to learning and knowledge, and the transformative paradigm shift created by the changes in design practice (cf. Chapter 1) calls for the opening up of our scope of enquiry (Findeli, 2001:11) into the holistic nature of that which we touch with our very enquiries; it is a truism by now that an observer of a system not only becomes a part of the system being observed, but inevitably influences that system by means of the enquiry, the depth of that influence differing only in degree. We depend, then, on differences for communication to do its transformative work, but as Kelly‘s example shows, these differences cannot be ‗external‘ in the sense of, ‗trust me, I am a designer‘. I have stated a number of times that there is no such thing as a designer without the social context that underpins each design space (Van der Merwe, 2003), and that to be a designer one has to adapt to this very context (Van der Merwe, 2002). This is where McKean‘s ‗rigour‘ comes into play, because, when students of design adapt to an other context by studying their subject through adopting ―a concern with its formation‖ attitude, this type of ‗study‘ ―is often called research‖ (McKean, 2001:86). In Chapter 1:15 I wrote that the adjust to and adapt reference has a double meaning, with teaching and learning in design taking on the exact same meaning as we design the world and the world designs us. This mutual process of transformation cannot happen without recourse to some form of rigour, but here we have to differentiate between ‗severity‘ and ‗thoroughness‘, between an inflexible attitude towards a subject under study and one that allows for adaptability, yet remains a process of discovery that pays attention to what emerges, and pays that attention by means of a concern with the formation of both parties in the communicative process: the ‗I‘ and ‗the other‘. Not only is the formation of the subject important, but also the formation of the ‗other subject‘ doing the enquiry, the designer, the scientist, the observer of the observing process of the social interactive context. To make matters slightly more complicated, even the ‗subject‘ under study becomes ‗an observing process‘ if we keep in mind the attributes that actor-network theory would assign ‗non-human‘ actors (cf. Chapter 1:4, ftn. 5), and for the purposes of communication, we may ask, which is subject and which object? If we design the world and the world 5 Referring to the mind-body assimilation, as opposed to the Cartesian separation. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 76 designs us, and if human and non-human roles are mutually formative, then both parties are simultaneously subject and object, whether ‗both parties‘ refers to the two people in direct conversation, or a present reader in an indirect conversation with an absent author, a user in direct contact (‗conversation‘) with a designed object, or whether it refers to students of design ‗in conversation‘ with their area of study. Both parties, both sides of the conversation are subject and object for teaching and learning purposes, if we have ‗a concern with its formation‘, and if we undertake such study for the sake of calling it research. We cannot assume the stable nature of the design educational process (above), for then it would amount to no more than rote learning, learning what is there already, and no more. We need an ‗unstable‘ situation to develop, and opening up the scope of our investigation in this way means widening the enquiry into the formation of our own selves, as well as the formation of that which we study, and that studies us6. To turn design education into a subject approximating a research process, ‗it‘ will have to ‗survive‘ by studying the student, in the sense that the mere act of observation changes that which is being observed, an indeterminate and uncertain situation on the border between chaos (translated as unstructured information) and order (perceiving new patterns of knowing). Research will flourish as long as the requisite inputs into the subject / field being studied are maintained, as if design-as-subject is in conversation with those observing ‗it‘ in the first place. When we have a concern for design‘s formation, and given that we have, as a first principle, a concern for our own ontological ‗formation‘, we not only ensure design‘s survival but its renewal, and we do so by undertaking a study that is often called research, as McKean stated. Design education, as a true learning paradigm, cannot follow a prescriptive curriculum, and it follows that the student of design cannot be controlled by anyone except the one inside the ‗story-making frame of lived experience‘. ―The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have an objective knowledge of it‖ (Gadamer, 2006:301), an approach that argues against ‗scientific‘ first principles as the real focus of design education, and this means that any situation (environment) facilitated by the curriculum (which situation then needs to be jointly created by the teacher / subject-under-study and students /scientists / designers alike), that keeps us standing outside of its effective agency, only offers us so-called ‗objective‘ knowledge and learning opportunities – mere rote learning that nullifies any form of personal capacity building (cf. Chapter 1:19). Arguing from ‗scientific‘ first principles, as a research strategy, assumes a stable situation wherein facts are known to us and accepted as truth, proving Aristotle‘s Principle of Non-Contradiction (Gottlieb, 2007), without which we simply cannot know what it is that we do know. That approach to ontology is a ‗scientific‘ one that is still used extensively in the study of HCI and information systems, unfortunately, since it merely describes what is, and does not seek to go beyond that horizon. Arguing from such first principles is not in dispute as such, since it would be like arguing against our ‗true‘ knowledge that the world is not flat, but arguing from first principles as our real and only focus will not advance the argument for design, nor of exploratory science that looks to the unknown. For that we need to argue to new first principles. In this thesis I will follow Ken Friedman‘s (2003) guidelines for theory construction, in the sense that ―Critical thinking and systemic inquiry form the foundation of theory‖, with the emphasis on the driving force of the term systemic, which then allows ―Research [to offer] us the tools that allow critical thinking and systemic inquiry to bring answers out of the field of action‖, which in itself is important for design education, in the sense that I interpret this as an injunction to look at design education as underpinned by research principles, and only then will critical thinking (on its way to becoming this thing called design thinking) and its companion, systemic inquiry, afford us the ability to bring answers out of the field of action, not of design as ideal, but of design as idea, leading to we bring answers out of the present contextual field of action every time we engage in a design activity. ―It is theory and the 6 Cf. the discussion on Gadamer‘s notion of bildung, Chapter 5, and the notion that education uses us. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 77 models that theory provides through which we link what we know to what we do‖ (Friedman, 2003) then means that this theory provides us with models, but how does it do so? Is this what traditional theories normally do, provide us with models that give us access to knowledge that allow us to know how to ‗design‘? I think not, for traditional theories of knowledge give you access to someone else‘s paradigm, someone else‘s set way of doing things, and in science that is probably the safest way, working within this stable environment. I choose, however, to interpret Friedman differently, and transpose (cf. my later argument for abduction in Chapter 5) his words as It is a theory-of-knowing and the models-ofseeing that this theory provides through which we are able to observe that what we tacitly know can be linked to what we explicitly do. This chapter begins to unravel what that could mean fro design thinking and design education. Critical thinking is only possible when operating within an unstable 7 environment, whether it be the unstable nature of problem requirements due to uncertainty or dealing with the unstable (i.e., changing) nature of a complex situation wherein we design the world as the world designs us. Systemic inquiry differs from systematic inquiry in the sense that the latter is serial and controlled, while the former is parallel, includes time and movement, and is far less capable of being controlled by the researcher. How, then, can critical thinking and systemic inquiry, seemingly contradictory terms, both be used to form the foundations of theory? If critical thought is used by the researcher to bring some form of control to an unstable situation, and if systemic inquiry cannot be controlled by that same researcher, then surely the two terms are dichotomous? McKean (2001:85) is of the opinion that paradox and ambiguity are fundamental facts of life, as is complexity, and that these inherent contradictions to stability form the basis of our reality. A stable reality is, on the one hand, an oxymoron more than it is a paradox, but it is what many people want and believe in without questioning the impossibility 8 of the matter. However, on the other hand, it has also been accepted by many that the true essence of the very act of thinking is to be critical, i.e., when the researcher asks penetrating questions that need answers that go beyond what is known, since the question is generated by new problem situations as much as by the researcher as a person. We design the world as much as, and while, the world designs us. Such critical thinking cannot operate in a stable environment where everything is known and understood systematically, linear fashion and safe, thus making critical thinking, as a tool for thought, uncontrollable by one individual, even though that individual might have the aim of bringing control to (stabilizing) an unstable situation. What looks like a paradox often is not so strange or dichotomous after all. Critical thinking plus systemic inquiry means a researcher is confronted with a problem space that at first offers no clues to a solution, and, furthermore, this problem space is not susceptible to a methodical theory application; i.e., the real life situation becomes an opaque problem space that cannot be read with the help of existing theories from a text book. What is a researcher (or a designer, for that matter) to do in this situation? Our answer is that the individual student has to learn how to ‗group-think,‘ and that can only be done with the help of others, whether those others are real people in a team of researchers / designers, or the other is found in the textual voices of experience; in the end the individual, whatever else is done, has to communicate with the people being designed for, and in so doing have a conversation with the problem space. In Chapter 1:4 these questions were asked: How does any designer progress to the point of being able to handle situations in our contemporary and complex socio-technical world9? How is it 7 Critical thinking within a stable environment, in design terms, is fixing what isn‟t broken. The spur to critical thinking is the opposition offered by an unstable situation, especially regarding social problems that need solutions not achievable through tried and tested methods. 8 A stable reality would require very strict laws from a government to control all aspects of life; it can be done, but is not advisable. Everyday existence is complex, multilayered and therefore ‗unstable‘ because of its variability. 9 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) will be discussed in Chapter 3, since part of my research argument is that we cannot investigate the human relationship with design without looking closely at a socio-technical interrelationship as well, and ANT regards human and nonhuman (the technical, or all designed artefacts) roles as mutually formative. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 78 possible for any one individual to be able to deal with a multitude of complex and seemingly opaque socio-technical situations that are encountered in the contexts that need design solutions? In order to know which directions (the process of) design needs to take at any given stage, where do we look to for answers? With the adoption of social constructivism we look to the whole of the socio-technical environment in which humans interact with their designed artifacts as much as they interact with each other, a situation that calls for the use of second-order cybernetics, a systemic inquiry into observing systems, i.e., the people being designed for. Critical thinking is vital in this situation of positive feedbacks, since the information received cannot be used for control, as in negative feedback, but must be allowed to change the whole of the environment it operates in, including the ‗knowing‘ of the people involved (cf. Mode 2 knowledge production, below), hence the world designs us as we design the world. Freely invented: maps versus territory Critical thinking allied to systemic inquiry can indeed form the foundation of theory. A theory for design thinking, design knowing, must provide us with models, yes, but what is this model for? How does it work? As a theory for design knowing, gramma/topology offers a model, of sorts, but it is one we will have to construct ourselves, for it is how we learn and what we learn with that design education should focus on. Not only must we learn to deal with paradox, complexity and ambiguity, but McKean (2001:85) makes the suggestion that design education itself, the way it explicates the process (I would add, of both design and research), must absorb10 design students to the extent that both subject and learner act as models for each other. Gregor (2006:611) believes that theory is important, but feels that the focus is far too much on questions of what we learn from (epistemology and its methods; macro-theory /disciplinary knowledge) than on what we learn with (micro-theory / self-knowledge, pre-conception, pre-judgment, tacit and experiential knowledge), and that we should therefore concentrate more on questions of what Michl (2002) calls redesign, a ―perspective that will capture the fundamental incompleteness of all design activity‖, an approach to design knowledge that argues against the type of epistemological theory of a fully described discipline11. Certain questions arise regarding the latter, i.e., domain questions that set the boundaries and focus the core business of a discipline; epistemological questions that establish the knowledge acquisition mechanisms within that discipline; socio-political questions that further direct the function of a discipline via its stakeholders. According to Gregor (2006:611-612) these three categories have been adequately researched, but despite their interrelatedness, there is a fourth category that has received far less attention, i.e., structural and/or (sive)12 ontological questions concerning the nature of theory itself, and the way the concept of a theory is understood within the discipline. This viewpoint, this stance that forms your recurring theme, as it were, reminds me not only of Einstein‘s (1942) observational stance, but also of Willis‘s (1999) question whether we control technology or technology controls us, and of Latour‘s (1992) reminder that there is no such thing as the social. What a theory is, and how a theory is understood, depends on the capacity for interpretation of a person, with due acknowledgment of the constructivist and ongoing role of the group in that individual‘s interpretative capability. The individual sive group must not be confused with the social, which is an imaginative and thus unreal construct, and on the same level not be confused with a discipline. It is still the person that does the thinking, unless the thinking is being done for people by the discipline and its theories, hence Willis‘s question of what controls whom. 10 I use this term deliberately, in its widest sense. Students must be ‗engaged,‘ as McKean puts it, but must also become part of the process itself in full participation, and become absorbed into the learning process, as it were. 11 A fully described discipline makes use of well-defined theories that act more like methods for practice than tools for thought, and more often than not adheres to Mode 1 knowledge production, in which the researcher has full control. 12 Here is a good example where the original author may use the and/or device, but, for the purposes of your own argument, it would make more sense to use Richard Jung‘s (2007:19) textual device of sive. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 79 Gregor‘s structural sive ontological questions, then, must be seen in this light: a person‘s critical thinking skills are more important than the strict adherence to a fully described discipline and its equally fully described theories. We seem to have forgotten that everything we believe in, all the knowledge we have, are constructions of the human mind, even ‗empirically proven‘ scientific knowledge that tempts people to reify the results: ―Science is not just a collection of laws, a catalogue of unrelated facts. It is a creation of the human mind, with its freely invented ideas and concepts‖, and the theories we build to explain to ourselves what anything and everything means, by appearing as it does to us in the world13, are reality-constructions, and ―the only justification for our mental structures is whether and in what way our theories form such a link‖ with the world as we understand it (Einstein and Infeld, 1942:310), a ‗world-as-reality‘ that contains both empirically verifiable objects as well as the variableness of human thought, and not a link with a world we can only understand through disciplinary knowledge, via a Descartian lens. Gramma/topology, as a designerly socio-technical discourse, follows this concept of free invention, and we should not, as did the physicists of the early 1800‘s, try to retain our belief in the explanatory power of set theories and the formulation of points of view based on a mechanical observational stance (above) to found our particular conception of reality on, for as Einstein and Infeld (1942:311-312) state clearly, Newton‘s mechanistic lens was surpassed by something much more subtle and inbetween, shifting the focus from the behaviour of bodies to the emergent activities between them (i.e., the electromagnetic field). Gramma/topology draws on the free invention of interacting circular theories as fields of force, and the human observer (cf. the individual sive group, above) provides one of the strongest force fields in the equation. What we believe in, what we believe with, are the structural sive ontological frameworks of knowing that has received too little attention (Gregor, above), and the nature of gramma/topology, of theory itself, is the nature of our ways of knowing in the fields of interaction between disciplines, when one body of what is known collides with or willingly merges with another body of what is known.14 How the concept of a theory is understood within a discipline is vital to the development of that discipline, and without wishing to argue against the traditional concept of theories and methods and even less to argue that an undisciplined approach could disprove the very idea of disciplines, I submit that the structural sive ontological questions are at the heart of a theory of and for design meaning-making, even though with every attempt at explaining this ‗theory‘ the description turns to narrative and so eludes narrow definition. I stated above that Gregor‘s focus on the nature of theory itself reminded me of insights by Willis and Latour, but also of the idea of an observational stance (from the Italian stanza) that runs through our minds like a musical theme repeated over and over again, since it is the rhythm of our ‗standing place‘15 (i.e., both meanings of the Italian stanza), our observational position, termed the coordinate system by Einstein and Infeld (1942:163). The problem with the terms co-ordinate and position is that it tends to detract from the human volitional element when using the term observation, especially when combined with traditional uses of disciplinary theories, as if this knowledge is ‗doing the observing‘, which, given the tendency to reify knowledge, it can seem to do, in the same way that we ascribe agency to the non-living thing called ‗the social‘, when it is we who are doing the observing, we, with our structural sive ontological, and therefore fallible and perpetually incomplete, frameworks of knowing. When we make ourselves aware, as reflective practitioners, of taking an observational position, and further, acknowledge that this position is a human choice, a stance that has consequences for our understanding of what we observe and also for our understanding of our developing ontologies (selves), the idea of a co-ordinate system 13 Cf. Gadamer's (1975:6) notion of ‗method‘ as a procedure whose "aim is not to confirm and expand these general experiences in order to attain knowledge of a law ... but to understand how this man, this people or this state is what it has become - more generally, how has it happened that it is so". 14 15 Discussed in Chapter 5 as the knowledge emerging between two colliding wavefunctions. Discussed in Chapter 4 as ontological phenomenology, and particularly the meaning that Heidegger gives to this ‗opening space‘. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 80 takes on a different meaning from letters and numbers on a map. Einstein and Infeld‘s observational position is thus much more of a stance than the physical spot itself, even though they use the term coordinate system (CS), and not only do we need to have a frame of reference ―to be able to determine the position of bodies‖ either in space or here on earth, but we must realise that ―the earth is our coordinate system‖ (:162-163). This does tend to sound as if I am arguing against my own case, and it is true that most of the explanation around a CS has to do with the laws of mechanics. However, this approach to knowledge ―thus far [has] lacked something. We took no notice of the fact that all observations must be made in a certain CS. Instead of describing the structure of this CS we just ignored its existence‖ (:164), and worse, ignored the fact that different CS‘s exist. All observations made by humans must be made from within the physical but also the metaphysical space of a particular CS, an observational position taken, a stance towards what is to be known, and that very fact colours everything we begin to understand; we might say that our chosen space, the ground from which we observe, interprets for us while mediating between our developing ontologies and the world. It is thus of importance that the structure of this CS be investigated,16 since the co-ordinate system is the map but it is never the territory. In Chapter1:16 I wrote the following: The map we follow through life and learning is constructed by our co-ontogenic relationships with our environment, which includes teachers, students, family, friends and, potentially, anyone and everything else in our experiential world, including designed objects and systems. And yet, that map can never be the territory (Bateson, 2002:27), since what we construct for ourselves may be a hybrid mix and ultimately our decision, in the final instance … and although Damasio (2000:322) admits a correspondence between what we map and the subjective map we form in consciousness and memory, ―the correspondence is not point-to-point, and thus the map need not be faithful‖ – learning can never be faithful to a prescriptive curriculum of goal-setting outcomes, cannot be controlled by anyone except the one inside the ―story-making frame of lived experience‖. When considering the earth as our co-ordinate system, and if we agree with Bateson and Damasio and thus interpret our own CS as being the map to the territory of so-called reality (i.e., what we are mapping), then the map becomes the territory? Surely that is contrary to what was stated above, and contrary to both Bateson‘s and Damasio‘s stance? In Chapter 1 the argument was made for a constructivist viewpoint, deliberately taking the stance that we construct our own realities, our own learning processes and thus our own understanding, given that this process is seen as a co-ontogenic relationship, which ties in with Damasio‘s point of a correspondence between what is mapped and our resultant subjective, cognitive maps, i.e., the mental structures that Einstein and Infeld (1942:310) said can only be justified through the links they form with ‗the world‘. And ‗the world‘, ‗the earth‘, is our coordinate system. Taken factually, taken at face value, this means that the map can never be the territory, but interpreted and translated (i.e., mediated by our developing ‗maps‘), the world/the earth, and as I stated (above), the idea of a co-ordinate system takes on a different meaning. The map of necessity becomes the territory, newly created by us, created by each individual as a particular coordinate system in time and space. This line of argument is not meant to contradict either Bateson or Damasio, since both statements can be true: in the one CS the map and the territory is not the same thing, but in another CS they can, and should, be the same thing to all intents and purposes. The models we abstract from the world becomes our world: the (real) map can become the (imagined) territory and real and imaginary fuse in virtuality. I will have to repeat my quote from Chapter 1: ―And yet, that map can never be the territory (Bateson, 2002:27), since what we construct for ourselves may be a hybrid mix and ultimately our decision, in the final instance … and although Damasio (2000:322) admits a correspondence between what we map and the subjective map we form in consciousness and memory, ―the correspondence is not point-to-point, 16 Cf. the Maturana-Valera viewpoint on asking structural questions, Chapter 4. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 81 and thus the map need not be faithful‖ – learning can never be faithful to a prescriptive curriculum of goal-setting outcomes, cannot be controlled by anyone except the one inside the ‗story-making frame of lived experience‘‖. The mental structures we co-construct in the course of the learning process, which is nothing other than the mediation process we participate in when we interact with ‗the world‘, can be seen as ‗our‘ maps that cannot correspond faithfully to ‗the territory‘ (the world / the earth), the correspondence that does exist not being point-to-point: the ‗map‘, our map, need not be faithful to ‗the world‘. Which ‗world‘ are we talking about? Which CS? Perhaps if I change a sentence from Chapter 1 (:18) the idea will become clear: ―The very idea of a situation CS means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have an objective knowledge of it‖ (Gadamer, 2006:301). A coordinate system can be compared to what Gadamer terms situation, pointing to the fact that we (who design/help to design) this situation that is a CS, cannot ‗stand outside‘ of it to have an objective understanding of our own position. To further paraphrase (use a deconstructive erasure, rather), Chapter 1:18, we then know that we perceive others just as these ‗others‘, from their CS, perceive our CS, meaning that any situation (environment) CS, facilitated by the curriculum theories / mental structures (which situation then needs to be jointly created by the teacher and students observer and that which is being observed, inside the interactive field), that keeps us standing outside of its effective agency, only offers us so-called scientific ‗objective‘ knowledge and learning structuring opportunities – turning us into mere rote learning inertial systems that nullifies any form of personal capacity building possibility of crossing over from one CS to another. Cleaned up, mediated by my constructivist lens, this sentence now reads: The very idea of a CS means that we are not standing outside its framework of thought, its effective agency (this is our model, our map) and hence are unable to have an objective knowledge of this CS, as others, from their CS, perceiving our CS, cannot have an objective knowledge of our map / model, our framework of knowing, and our specific interpretation of any theory, which to us is knowledge, but to others becomes mere information. This means that any CS, or framework of thought (which constitutes the individual‘s total environment, at that time and space), a situation facilitated by the individual‘s co-ontogenic version of theories / mental structures, and jointly created by the observer and the observed inside an interactive field … if this CS keeps us standing outside of its effective agency it effectively disallows critical thought and full participation, since it only offers us Newtonian scientific knowledge and mechanistic structuring opportunities – turning us into mere inertial systems that nullifies any possibility of crossing over from one CS to another, crossing over from one way of knowing the world to a different way that can take us to Polanyi‘s (1962:123) other shore of reality. What, in terms of the developing argument for a gramma/topology of design knowing (this new discourse of free invention), and the developing view of an undiscipline with its concomitant untheory, does this mean? What is this effective agency in social science and design terms? Gadamer‘s (2006:301) reference to situation, and Giddens‘s (1986:xxi) reference to locales both point in the same direction; Gadamer speaks about the embeddedness of knowing in specific situations, with a warning not to imagine that we can step outside this created space of knowing and pretend to objectivity, as if looking at the unfolding scenario from outside its influence, while Giddens clearly states the nature of this social interaction as being co-ordinated by the situation, which he calls the locale, which can be a place in the ordinary sense of the word, but also, and crucially so, a setting for social interaction17, this view correlating strongly with Einstein and Infeld‘s changed meaning of ‗the earth‘ as one‘s CS; the ‗earth‘ not as physical space (which is quite correct for mechanical observations) but as a field, Giddens‘s setting and Gadamer‘s situation, a field for interaction and not simply objective (factual) observation. In the next chapter I will discuss Actor-Network Theory and its 17 Cf. the discussion of Latour‘s use of the term topoi, in the article A Natural Death is Announced, as both places and events, but never objects. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 82 insistence on the ‗glue‘ of social interactions as the real intention of the structure we term ‗the social‘, and here we see this ‗glue‘ being constructed by individuals, each within their own CS and, initially, for their own autopoietic purposes18 (of understanding their own and constantly developing world) but increasingly becoming aware of the interdependence of, and relationships between, the various interactions; the individual discovers group dynamics.19 Before taking this line of argument regarding the effective agency of place any further, I submit a journal article that deals with the undisciplined nature of design as a discipline, an argument towards the construction of a gramma/topology of knowing, and the beginning of an argument centred on the importance of the effective agency of a place of discovery and revelation. 18 19 Cf. this link to Maturana‘s and Luhmann‘s interpretation in Chapter 4. CF. the argument in Chapter 1:6 that answers the question, how can individuals think as if each constitutes a group? via social constructivism and an ontological phenomenological approach. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 83 Acknowledgement of text The following article was published in Design Issues 26 (3):6-17 Summer (van der Merwe, 2010a). A Natural Death is Announced We have, for some considerable time, been living in an era of unprecedented change, but only now are we apparently becoming aware of the paradigm shift overtaking our life on earth. We hardly need the admonishment of Al Gore‘s An Inconvenient Truth20 to point out the material unsustainability of our manufacturing and consumerist base. We cannot afford to keep on focusing on designed objects in isolation to the real problems of the world, and we cannot afford not to link the present manufacturing/consumerist base with the changes happening to and in society as a whole. We have to ask what these paradigm shifts are all about, and what will be required of us is to give up our comfortable worldviews and to construct, to design, our new and better paradigms of thinking and living. We have to announce our own death in order to live. However, we cannot do so from within the parameters of any of the design disciplines as we know them today because ―we‖ are not enough. But before I bury the corpse of old-fashioned design (because its self-deception ignored the concerns of everyday life), let us pause a moment and reflect on what could have been, by asking this: Why do I see a discipline being buried and do not see something else? We see what we do and do not see something else because of the way in which we look. And these ‗ways‘ constitute … reality-generating mechanisms … [and each of these] schemes has its own characteristic set of tools and methods for answering the question. The methods [produce] a set of rules [that] are of a special type and, in contrast to many other reality-generating procedures, are always subject to revision in the light of new evidence. (Casti, 2001:1-2) The way I see and the way I use design thinking to view the world has changed, initially because I discovered systems thinking and cybernetics, and recently, because our Faculty had to change its character when it was subjected to an official merger process. In this article I unfold the development of a way of thinking in, with, and through design theory and practice first by briefly dealing with our new Faculty structure and the renewed research direction(s) this afforded us, and second by following the trail of emergent signs that seems to point the way to an undisciplined future development of design. An Arranged Marriage Because of the educational merger (between the Cape Technikon and the Peninsula Technikon) that resulted in the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, our newly formed Faculty of Informatics and Design provided many unique research opportunities, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary. This merger also gave us a chance to reconfigure our collective research focus, and we soon realized that research into the relationship between knowledge and technology must also view ―technology‖ as any human system designed to classify and organize the world. As a new research group we have chosen a methodological framework based on the social construction of reality, since industrial, interaction, and information systems designers, in general, agree with qualitative researchers on the need for research data that is sourced directly from the emerging needs and concerns of a specific social group or market. 20 I am well aware of the fact that many well-meaning commentators and scientists have made light of this effort to publicize a complex problem, but Al Gore has at least brought to people‘s attention that business as usual is not an option anymore, and that we are, indeed, living in an era of consequences. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 84 Engeström‘s (2005) interactive design, based on activity theory, looks at both designed objects and people as embedded in the same dynamic social structure or activity system, and in this everyday practice, according to Nardi (1996), all human experiences are shaped by the tools, signs, and systems used by them. The closely related ideas embodied by actor-network theory (ANT)21 are depicted by Tatnall and Gilding (1999) as not concentrating on the real differences between humans and machines (artifacts), but rather focusing on their interactions, viewing the social and technological ―properties‖ as ―network effects rather than innate characteristics of an entity‖. Based on the work of Latour and Callon, Tatnall and Gilding view the world as filled with hybrid and co-existing human and non-human entities, and they state that ANT can help resolve situations where these two entities cannot easily be separated and identified each in its own right, as if existing in isolation from one another. This very brief background illustrates our thinking, leading up to the position we find ourselves in at the moment, and it also illustrates why we chose designing interaction spaces for usability and usefulness as our overall research focus. However, realizing the need for something and knowing how to go about achieving your goals is usually not such a straightforward exercise in logic. To merge22 two distinct disciplines such as design and informatics (also, confusingly, variously known as Information Systems, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), or Human Computer Interaction (HCI)) is not an easy matter, but to not find collaborative ways of working together would have been worse than short-sighted. For the purposes of examining the concept of undisciplined, how is this helpful? Well, we could do worse than to ask this Lewis Carroll (1978)23 question: ―‗Where do you come from?‘ said the Red Queen. ‗And where are you going?‘‖ Casti‘s (above) notion of reality-generating mechanisms, subject to constant revision, can be a useful guide to rethinking the discipline of design, and to reconsidering where the subjects you teach have their origins, and where they are going—in fact, to ask who their new friends are and what new influences they are bringing home, as I do in the next section. Describing the Perceptible Systems theory and cybernetics started life as systems of control, but with time and a shift from object to subject, these ways of understanding phenomena needed to be adapted to social issues, and the mechanical, hard approaches that could predict and control (i.e., an assembly line (think of Henry Ford‘s mass production environment)) became ―soft‖ systems and ―second-order‖ cybernetics: An investigation of observed systems became a method of inquiring into observing systems, or how humans behave. Surprisingly sounding like Latour (2005),24 Checkland (1981)25 affirms that systems thinking is not a recipe but a way of looking at the problems of social reality we wish to tackle because ―the latter is not a ‗given‘ but is a process in which an ever-changing social world is continuously recreated by its members‖. On the other hand, a combination of cybernetics and systems thinking is what is needed in design education, according to a Metropolis survey (Szenasy, 2003), seeing that this hybrid can provide ―the very basis of sustainable ethics, aesthetics, and processes‖ in design. 21 22 Cf. Chapter 4. It would be more accurate to say that ―merging‖ rather refers to an integration of our research capabilities at this stage because an officially curriculated and government-approved program that contains practical and theoretical elements of both design and informatics has yet to emerge. What makes this direction a worthwhile one to follow, however, is that the students (particularly in industrial design) are naturally drawn to products and systems that require the merging of both design and informatics knowledge. 23 To know where you come from is one thing, but to know how you did so is another, and besides, the fact that you are now here changes things in terms of where you thought you were going, since you can‘t get out of here by the way you came in. 24 Should one ever be surprised? No methodology or discipline was ever immune to the directions taken by other ways of investigating the world. Bruno Latour (philosophy of science) believes the social is to be reassembled each time, Checkland (business administration) has society recreated by its members, and social constructivism agrees substantially with both. 25 Peter Checkland is the ―father‖ of Soft Systems Methodology. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 85 Still, why would cybernetics change our faith in the structure and usefulness of a discipline? This methodology (a lens, not a method!) differs significantly from other methodologies used by fully described disciplines, in that it appreciates the necessity of selecting from a wide range of approaches, plus a range of tools and corresponding methods, ―that best fit—the type of system, the purpose and nature of the inquiry, and the specific problem situation‖ (Banathy, 1996). The notion of design as a groundless field of knowledge26 follows this same pattern, of necessity sourcing what it needs from many other contextually relevant fields of knowledge, as dictated by the specific design problem. Any discipline that can be depicted as ―fully described‖ can only be seen as such because of the fully satisfied (and themselves ―fully described‖) academics and researchers who keep this scaffolded edifice in place, in opposition to the evidence of social constructivism and the contemporary acceptance of a world in flux, including its bases of knowledge. To more fully make use of new opportunities for learning, then, my constructivist design theory classroom uses cybernetics and systemic thinking as if they were one system, a combined way of seeing those things that have been in full view but ―hidden‖. In other words, we seek ways to bridge the gaps between Jonas‘s (2004) disparate islands of disciplinary knowledge, and so realize what Polanyi (1962) meant when he spoke of arriving at the edge of another reality, once crossing this gap. I regard cybernetics + design as a Nigel Cross-type designerly way of knowing, hence my use of the term cyberdesign,27 both a thing and not anything (cf. below); thus, this expanded, groundless field of possibility (making use of more than one field of knowledge) that allows us to see the world through Dooley‘s (1995)28 ―cybernetic lenses‖, with the consequent unsettling effect this perspective has on our unproblematic and safe way of viewing knowledge and its relationship to the world. It was in this reenlightened sense that I read the following definition of a discipline as seen through the lens of interdisciplinarity. Parncutt (2007), in discussing what he identified as ―controversial terms‖ (musicology, discipline, interdisciplinary), attempted to clarify what was meant by the term discipline, both in terms of a chosen field of knowledge (musicology) and in terms of what we could mean by using the term interdisciplinary, since the scope of any academic field of knowledge, surely, will obstinately transcend its own boundaries if defined too narrowly. Reading a particular passage from his work, it struck me that the questions Parncutt was dissecting so carefully also applied to my own discipline, and, in fact, to all contemporary academic disciplines. If we are prepared to admit—even if simply for the sake of a rhetorical argument—that in our modern, connected world, with its dependency on information-sharing technologies, we would find it nigh impossible to keep any discipline as pure as we would like, then the term natural hybrid springs to mind. What Parncutt seems to be saying (my interpretation and transformation of his text) is that the academic study of any field, besides containing a core fidelity that differentiates it from other fields of study, contains yet larger areas of overlapping interest; thus, if researchers in both music analysis and music history discover that analysis is strengthened by history, and vice versa, then the core fidelity of music can only be enhanced by an interdisciplinary approach 26 Wolfgang Jonas (2004) has long been a proponent of an undisciplined field of knowledge for and in design, since what we, as designers, need to work with looks like islands of potential knowledge floating in a sea of disciplines, but not yet connected to each other, that is our contextual responsibility. 27 My use of the term cyberdesign is not meant to be associated with the manner in which unsuccessful (in human interaction terms) and badly navigable website design is foisted onto an unsuspecting user public. Trawl through the links to ―cyberdesign‖ and you will find many promises from capitalist companies that your new website will outperform your rivals and beat them to the next goal post newly established by Moore‘s Law. The term mechanistic comes to mind. Cyber- was never meant to indicate beyond human and was never meant to replace our bio/meta/physical space of possibility with electronic control. I am demanding that this term, cybernetics (original Greek for steersman, and later, Latin, for governor), be reinstated so that the affordances of the term can, again, be allowed to aid our search for the humanly driven direction of design sustainability. 28 Dooley speaks of ―The process of things being cybernetic together‖, and further describes the cybernetic way of seeing as essentially constructivist. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 86 (while, of course, questioning the very meaning of the term interdisciplinary). 29 I would assume, at this point, that design researchers would not find it problematic if I call the discipline of design a natural hybrid and, given the potential of the Parncutt example, I transform this passage from his work merely by substituting the term cyberdesign for musicology, and the term design for music. In the result, then, we can begin to discern the undisciplined nature of contemporary design investigation. Cyberdesign is design scholarship. It is the academic study of any and all design phenomena. It addresses the physical, psychological, aesthetic, social, cultural, political, and historical concomitants of design, design creation, design perception, and design discourse. It incorporates a blend of sciences and humanities and is grounded in design practice. It involves a wide range of non-design disciplines and corresponding research methods. Our Faculty‘s research group has found this integrative approach to be closer to the systemic thinking we surmised would be necessary to our merged research efforts—hence, our focus on the broad question of designing interaction spaces. We have to keep in mind the network effects of the interactions between the hybrid and co-existing human and non-human actors who populate our fields of investigation. We simply have to become undisciplined to deal with a blend of sciences and humanities, especially if we are willing to listen to non-design disciplines, as our Informatics staff have found to their credit.30 Our research efforts are based on the qualitative aspects of social reality, relying on a wide range of corresponding research methods, since our approach is largely interpretivist. I thus consider the concept of cyberdesign as a hybrid lens, an approach that, in finding its investigative level, continually generates undisciplined moves toward a coming-into-being of individual, as well as of ―disciplinary‖ understanding. In the next section I question the viability of the old working definition of a discipline. Unlicentious Freedom Undisciplined: what do we think of when encountering this word? Would we not assume that the design researcher is without discipline, working in a disciplinary vacuum with no official support for whatever results may emerge, no official network of opinion against which to evaluate those results? How else is one to maintain rigour in design research and design education? What is this thing called a discipline, and why would we need one? To put these questions in context, we have to take notice of the emerging scenario of a networked socio-technical society, one that requires undisciplined design theory and consequent practice, which is not to acknowledge that this is something unforeseen or even radically new. All designers are likely familiar with Simon‘s (2001:111) definition of design as changing existing situations into preferred ones, but how many believe Jonas‘s (2004) definition of design as a groundless field of knowledge? These two definitions, in combination, point to the necessity of an ‖undisciplined‖ approach to design‘s renewal because the notion of preferred situations, today, implies innovation and creativity in order to integrate (systems, manufacturing processes, technologies, etc.), and therefore to change (the designed artifacts we surround ourselves with), while the concept of a groundless field highlights, not a serious disciplinary vacuum, but the added advantage of being able to share in an array of foundations of knowledge. 29 If music, analysis, and history are subjects integral to three independent disciplines, how is an analysis of music history possible? Or indeed the history of musical analysis? What happens to the ―original‖ discipline when selected elements are used in such crossborder raids? 30 It is worth mentioning that many of the authors in the information systems field have backgrounds in ―non-design‖ disciplines (e.g., Terry Winograd (Mathematics & Linguistics), Bonnie Nardi (Social Sciences & Ethnography), Yrjö Engeström (Educational Psychology), Kalle Lyytinen (Economics), Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko (Public Administration & Local Government), and Bruno Latour (Philosophy & Anthropology). Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 87 In our modern and technology-scaffolded everyday lives, can we identify any designed object that is the product of a single discipline? Were the products of the Industrial Revolution based on single-disciplinerestricted thinking? I can only assume that we have become so used to the perceived safety of a ―discipline‖ that at all costs design must be disciplined into submission; the original meaning of the word discipline is thus enforced without being adapted or understood in modern terms. As Cohen (1999)31 states, the hierarchical organization of a university segments fields of knowledge, but trying to teach within rigid disciplinary frameworks cannot satisfy the demands of a complex modern society. Increasingly design has to deal with the networked society, 32 and once having exposed itself to this natural hybridization, the next step has to be that (silo) disciplines will have to network as well. These are real world challenges, and in Brighton 05-06-07 a number of international designers33 ask that the design community take on the challenges confronting design today—something that sites such as NextD, Doors of Perception, and dott07 (the U.K. Design Council‘s designs of the time 2007), amongst others, have been doing for some time. We should rather ask the question, why does it take the design community, and design education, such a long time to change the course of this lumbering ship? In the Brighton declaration Boddington et al. are asking designers to seriously look at ways to transform society through the powerful influence of design. What does this mean? What will give us the freedom to manoeuvre within/without the present disciplinary boundaries, and yet retain the un-licentious regard for order that rigour promises? Move beyond personalities, move beyond vested interests, and we hear Boddington et al.; we hear the many voices that have sounded the call to change design in a fundamental way. Let‘s accept the necessity for change, and ask how do we change? and change quickly. Perhaps we are obtusely refusing to ask our friends and cousins what they think. The following paragraph was suggested by and deconstructed from the work of Rees (1995), a theoretical astrophysicist. In the new world of emerging (hybrid and interactive) design, there's always the thought-provoking possibility that the way we see design, and the way we use design thinking to view the world and our interactions with the world, are by now inadequate and should be changed. Design ―as subject‖ is beginning to interest people more and more, as more designers and ―designers‖ launch projects visible and accessible to the public. Design can be seen as asking fundamental questions dealing with the very world we live in and on—theoretical/practical, figurative/literal questions that allow people to focus on their interactions with the world itself (recycling/sustainability/reducing the carbon footprint), and to question their interactions with their fellow human beings (advanced information systems technology). Perhaps we should look on this general development as an extra motivation for change, and look to this willingness to explore our world and the way it operates for ideas for design‘s renewal. The modern world of interactivity that today‘s youth and tomorrow‘s designers find themselves inhabiting can provide them with the very reasons for studying an exciting and revealing design course - one that will help them to become designers-of-living-circumstances and explorers of what‘s out there and, to me more importantly, what‘s in here (below). Another and very fundamental reason for design to change is that designers need to begin to understand how societies evolve to deal with the undoubted world of complexity we face every day. Too much of our thinking is still based on simplistic cause-and-effect perceptions, while the world has to cope with, for instance, the complex and networked causes and effects of global warming. Possibly the best reason for change is that the-world-out-there can be treated as a living laboratory that allows designers to 31 32 33 Eli Cohen (1999: 213-219). Cf. Manuel Castells (2000). Cf. Boddington et al. (2008) in ―Brighton 05-06-07‖. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 88 explore the hybrid vigor34 effect of design on the world and all its living ecosystems. By going out to the world and, in addition, finding innovative ways to bring that same world-in-motion to an educational setting, we can extend our knowledge, not of design principles per se, but of the reasoning behind human interactions. Latour (2005:149), a sociology of science philosopher/anthropologist, regards texts, in his ―discipline‖, as ―the functional equivalent of a laboratory. It‘s a place for trials, experiments, and simulations‖. This same laboratory situation that Rees and Latour have in mind is fundamental to the intellectual activity of Castells (2001), since his version of social theory is a form of grounded theory based on a combination of theory/research. ―That is, I literally cannot think without observing and understanding what‘s going on in the world‖, and that world is defined by ―the interaction between the network society and the power of identity and social movements‖. Bovina Sancta! Ask not what a single discipline can do for the many, but rather ask what creating a socially situated problem space can achieve, inspired by multiple disciplines. To talk about the big issue of a discipline—that very wide view of what we would call our knowledge in design—I need to step back and, as it were, look away toward who is doing the viewing, toward the individual. That would mean looking at both the networked effects of social change and design intervention, as well as the forming of identities within those networks. To understand what‘s going on in the world, as Castells (2001) says, is first to understand what‘s going on within your own world of identity formation, which in turn means looking at this interaction between the networked society and the identity of both the designer as individual and the designer as the person-within-the-discipline35. This is a viewpoint that can help you ―design‖ and re-assemble36 your own new self, and the new ―self‖ of your discipline, by exposing it to what it can become, in true Heideggerian fashion. However, this is a vast topic of investigation, and in this article I can only focus on one necessary aspect that could help in our search for an undiscipline, namely death. A personal identity, as much as a discipline, needs to die so that it can live; it needs to reassemble itself. A discipline needs to be undone for its own sake. According to Genosko (1998:13), Baudrillard regarded the concept of death as a theory of symbolic exchange, ―an incessant cycle of symbolic reciprocity obliging the code to respond in kind‖. A cybernetic conversation, between observer and what is being observed (the knowledge contained in a discipline), has to include this element of reciprocity: Each partner has to give up something of its safe ground to reach out to the other; to understand is to lose, before regaining. I subscribe to the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger,37 which deals with the ongoing and developing relationship between ―the world‖ and the self—a relationship between the out there and the in here that uncovers the processes of coming-into-being. Not only does Heidegger not make any distinction between ontology and phenomenology, but he stipulated that its essence lies in possibility rather than actuality. As such, we may experience a moment of recognition of our new selves, and we can do so precisely because we do not and cannot uncover the processes of coming-into-being alone. It is these formative moments of recognition that take us forward, especially in design education, as long as we remember that the world of education, of the classroom, is but another aspect of the world out 34 Cf. The Hybrid Vigor Institute (2001), ―in pursuing the goals of interdisciplinarity, they are not trying to persuade academics to abandon their own disciplines in favour of new ones, but, rather, they are encouraging collaboration between academics in order to discover the new working methods that are called for in dealing with our contemporary and quite complex problems‖. 35 Following the lead of the accepted term ‗athletic identity‘ in sports psychology, Crick and McCardle (2008:112/2) introduce the idea of a ‗design identity‘ that encompasses the two modes of being afforded by a cognitive structure and also a social role. 36 Bruno Latour states clearly that there is no such ―thing‖ as a society, except as an assembly of individuals, and even then they have to recreate or reassemble that thing they wish to name society; see Latour (2005), op cit. 37 Martin Heidegger (1962). See also Anne-Marie Willis (1999). Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 89 there. This world of people, designed objects and events, contains three elements that are always at work in our phenomenological and ontological development: the observer, the observed, and the results of that observation. It is the importance of this third element that we should focus on, instead of assigning too much relevance to the authoritative discipline, the observed, that is only one of the aspects of education. Baudrillard used theory as his instrument to undermine, to undiscipline, the disciplines. For him, the results of observation is this undisciplined and inbetween theory that refuses the absolute authority of the disciplines, and its very inbetweenness, its positioning of itself in this new nomansland between the disciplines, this act creates a refusal ―to reconcile itself with the disciplines and the disciplines with themselves‖ (Genosko, 1998:4). For a design student, this taking of a position inbetween would normally be an impossible task, given the rigour with which any design discipline is deployed in too many design schools. The self is not encouraged to develop; indeed, it is discouraged to develop except as a carrier of ―design knowledge‖, as a solver of linear design problems. To really see what a design discipline can become, we cannot afford to neglect the future architects of that discipline. Design students must be taught the meaning of learning, and how to deal with the relationships between the ―I‖ and the ―other‖.38 It is for this reason that I use cyberdesign as a way of knowing, since this allows designers to act as transformative change agents. Emancipatory and transformative, as working ideas, must equally apply to the individual as much as to the basis of knowledge used for learning (i.e., the discipline). The rigour of new design disciplines should be redirected at the new associations between designer, user, technology, designed objects, and the contextual and social systems within which all these actors have to network. Rigour should be emphatic in nature when reassembling methodologies because of hybridization and integration (while asking what was rigour for in the first place?), but rigour, as a concept, should be scaffolded, given a backbone, in shaping network society alliances. The way to change anything (and how to know why a change is necessary) is the way shown by ontological phenomenology, or as Maritain (1939:52) put it, this journey or method of discovery ―must be steeped in logic; not in the pseudo-logic of clear ideas, not in the logic of knowledge and demonstration, but in the working logic of every day [social reality], eternally mysterious and disturbing [in its complexity], the logic of the structure of the living thing‖. The logic of the continual restructuring of the living ―thing‖ constitutes the third element that education and design practice should focus on, and in this process a discipline becomes one part of that ―living thing‖ that various philosophers have described as das ding an sich (things in themselves), or the essence of ―things‖ in the world. De Integro The seeming confusion around the term de integro is rather revealing, I think. Most websites give the translation as from the beginning, while another professional site tells us that, in legal terms, it means as regards the whole. One version of the term integrity, of course, refers to the wholeness (of the structure) of something. Whatever the case may be, de integro set me thinking about the character of a discipline as the structure of a ―living thing‖. What does this word/term thing refer to, and what makes it a living thing? There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something - Thomas Edison 38 Normally, when the word ―Other‖ appears in a text (capitalised) it is taken to refer to the philosophical ―other‖, and usually a person taking up a socio-political position in contrast to yours. Here the ―other‖ is used to refer to anyone and anything outside the self. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 90 A thing is a place, or, rather, a thing is an unfolding event, but since that cannot happen without the concept of place or space, a thing can be associated, at least, with place. In Afrikaans 39 a thing is a ding, and a ding an sich, despite Kant‘s opposition, can be known; the question is how we come to that knowing/understanding. In Afrikaans we say hier kom „n ding (―I see a thing coming‖), which of course does not refer to an object, but to an event that has yet to take place. How do you take a place? By positioning yourself, and it is this positioning that we can trace and describe. A discipline develops by exactly this same means because, as a discipline, ―it‖ is not alive but is constituted by the people who participate in its construction: It is socially constructed. As a constructed thing, or a ding an sich, a discipline should follow the human rules of thingness, or, in this argument, the rules of the topoi, as Latour (2002) reminds us: like the renowned Icelandic Thing, or the Athenian agora, topoi are both places and events (assemblies, or meeting places), but never objects; indeed, they are places where ―new interpretations and revisions of history‖ take place. Design has moved from objects to processes, but this in reality means it has moved to focusing on human interactions—with object-things, yes, but more importantly, also with topos-things. What Latour had tried to do with the Making Things Public exposition is what design researchers and practitioners should be doing with their discipline: as participants, they should realize that a renewal will entail a process that will ―reassemble them and make them part of a totally new Thing‖. Design participants will have to redesign themselves and then their own discipline. To understand something, or to come to know this ding an sich, the self must realize that this knowing is only possible ―through the subject surrendering itself to the idea as subject-object‖ (Eldred, 2007). You cannot take part without jumping into the water, as it were, the way I was rudely taught to swim at age 9. A much bigger boy pushed me into the deep end of the municipal swimming baths, a very big and alien place, and a watery environment that you have to make your body part of, surrender to, or drown. I died as a non-swimmer somewhat afraid of the water and was reassembled as a non-drowner; only with practice was I, later, able to more fully adapt to this alien watery environment and become a full participant, a swimmer, my new self. With hindsight, what I learned at that early age was how to redesign myself by phenomenologically rethinking my changed environment, one that suddenly changed from terra firma (familiar and safe) to terra aqua (unfamiliar and dangerous). As an individual I had to reassemble my ―self‖ by surrendering to something undisciplined, and, perhaps not so surprisingly, this process still works today as an ontological sive phenomenological reorientation of thought. Not Last-Wording but Tagging We, designers and users (that means just about everyone on the planet), can and should use every means at our disposal to make this world, this manufactured, socially constructed, and (let‘s be honest), for the most part, artificial world, a better place in which to be human. Design can change the world and transform society, but we are not enough since we, as just the small design community, cannot do so from within the parameters and confines of any of the design disciplines as we know them today. If we want to keep up with the contemporary flux in world affairs, we need to learn how to start conversations/dialogues, and learn how to listen to the other, all of them. At the Cumulus Kyoto 2008 Conference, titled [Cu:] “emptiness” Resetting Design – A New Beginning, a Declaration40 was signed stating that all the people of the world live in interdependent systems for living, a veritable groundless and perfectly cybernetic field for design investigation. This Declaration calls for the merging of the sciences and humanities, technology and the arts, and puts it clearly that design thinking places itself in the midst of this important paradigm shift and must therefore redefine itself. Findeli (2001:11) has 39 Described by Wikipedia as ―an Indo-European language, derived from 17th century Dutch and classified as Low Franconia Germanic‖. 40 Kyoto Design Declaration, Cumulus Kyoto 2008. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 91 warned designers about this transformative paradigm shift, and he called upon them to ―open up the scope of inquiry … and push back the boundaries of our system in order to include other important aspects of the world in which design is practiced‖. The Kyoto conference gives us a valuable clue about how to do this—by listening to the other, which is hardly a conquering alien, but constitutive of the new self in possibility. Through the term basho, expressed as emptiness and nothingness, we are offered a cure for what ails us—this Western duality of mind and body. A very natural death is again announced because basho refers to more than simply the place where one lives, physically; it also denotes the space within which we can reassemble our relations with the other. We seem to be afraid of terms such as death, loss, emptiness, and we use negative expressions such as deathly quiet. I can, with gratitude, claim that I have experienced this last sensation in a positive sense, in a town like Arniston. Go past the turn-off to the cave (tourist attraction), down the last incline to the sea, round the bend, and over the line of dunes to your right. Suddenly, the roar of the ocean disappears, and it is deathly quiet. An all-encompassing presence has seemingly been withdrawn, although the ocean is still ―there‖, except that I am now in a place where a silence (expressed first as a lack of the ocean‘s roar, this absence of a previous presence), an ―emptiness‖, comes rushing in to fill the void. But now a new presence can be felt, one that represents all possibility. I learned to swim again, only this time in an emptiness that filled itself with an awareness of the other. What I now realize is that I had found a basho that has never left me, this ―whole paradigm of conceptions of place, field, topos, or context‖ (Cipriani, 2008), and yet, as Cipriani further puts it, ―we are less and less well disposed to ‗empty‘ ourselves with care and consideration‖, because what we ―fill‖ our consumerist lives with is truly and contradictorily empty. The absolute nothingness that is basho is not a thing (object) but a thing (space for reassembly), a relational principle, the so-called empty centre that is a consequence of ―the betweenness of selves in the world … one becomes a social self by rejecting one‘s individuality. The real self … occurs between these two contradictions‖ (St. Clair, 2003). This approach by the Japanese philosopher Watsuji is explained by Carter (2004) as a loss of self that, in fact, reassembles the self as authentic, but only because the self can forsake its claim to independence from the other (read as the non-dual relational principle of basho). I can only reiterate that our design discipline(s), and in fact, any other academic voice, can play the role of the other; indeed, our Faculty‘s research focus of designing interaction spaces for usability and usefulness depends on this happening. The process of the subject surrendering itself to the idea as subject-object (above) applies equally to the self and to a discipline, seen as the principle of basho and not as a definitive dictionary. Our renewed disciplinary resource for design thinking can resemble the aggregation of a tag-cloud phenomenon, a topos for design‘s (re)assembly. Using Web 2.0 technology as a modern prompt to achieve basho, this redesigned and real-time configuration for reassembly is possible because this new platform has ―a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from the core‖ (O‘Reilly, 2005). It seems to me that what O‘Reilly calls the architecture of participation can also be achieved by means of this tagging phenomenon 41—a place, topos, a transformative basho that will, by its very open-source cybernetic nature, help to undiscipline design thinking, to the benefit of all. 41 I do not refer to cloud computing in the business sense, but to an open source, interactive method to display and change / add to ―data packets‖ (information) and the links between these. By now everyone is familiar with the ―tag clouding‖ addition to a web site that displays ―tags‖ or key words and terms in a static ―cloud‖ – now imagine this as a virtual, four-dimensional cloud reacting to your interest in it, and doing so in a research-based, academic way in real time, as a full-blown image-and-text communicative tool for learning. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 92 Reinjection42 I wrote this article initially as a paper for the DRS 2008 Undisicplined! Conference, but as I could not attend at the time, it was subsequently published in Design Issues. The focus of the article was firmly on the question of what the term discipline meant for design, and as a result, what that would mean for a theory of design – are we dealing with a disciplinary theory of design that belongs only to ‗design‘ as a discipline, or to design as a process, and would that distinction make any difference to the theory itself? The article begins with a reference to the unprecedented changes taking place in our lifetime, something no-one can deny, although the use of a term such as paradigm shift will always remain a contentious issue. Whether one views the basic idea of a paradigm as an epoch-making and truly historic development that, as a result, can only be appreciated in a linear fashion (and usually with hindsight), or whether one can also view a paradigm shift as a quite small, individualized event that has a multisource origin and unfolds in a parallel way, at an amazing speed, is really up to the (disciplined) mindset of the individual. We should not be surprised that a ‗paradigm shift‘ can take place in an instant, since our use of metaphor serves exactly this purpose, used to good effect in e.g., literature and in graphic design, where the visual use of metaphor can at times be indispensable. I also make use of the gestalt concept of figure and ground (cf. below), a switching device that can move our perception, and with it our ‗understanding‘ of what we ‗see‘, from one way-of-seeing to a totally different one. A paradigm is simply a way of seeing that we become used to, a patterned example given in culture and history, and a model of the world (usually ‗our‘ world that excludes the ‗other‘), hence this shifting of perception can generate a fundamental change in what we assume to be the truth, of anything. In the article I mention Michael Polanyi‘s notion of arriving at the edge of another reality, comparing this to crossing Wolfgang Jonas‘s ‗groundless sea‘ from one island of knowledge to another, and creating bridges between these shores of reality, or ways of seeing. This particular approach is borne out by Casti‘s (2001:1-2) notion of paradigms that have to be regained, not in the sense of returning to a disciplinary way of knowing, but a re-gaining (re-designing) of a reality-generating way of seeing (creating the new ‗Mode-2‘ paradigm, as it were) that ‗true science‘ adheres to, ―always subject to revision in the light of new evidence‖. In Chapter 5 this line of argumentation is developed more fully, with reference to Jonas‘s (2006) use of an evolutionary approach to design theory, supported by the claim from Nowotny et al. (2003:179-180) that science today contextualizes knowledge as a Mode-2 production, an argument in support of Casti‘s realitygenerating mechanisms and in support of an argument for a theory of design to undergo a paradigm shift, not in and for itself, but in the way we use any theory as reality-generating mechanisms to construct Mode-2 types of knowledge, subject to constant revision. It is against this background that I asked the question, Why do I see a discipline being buried and do not see something else? Being undisciplined does not mean that the idea of a discipline is wished away or an attempt made to demolish what has existed for so long. And yet, as I wrote in Chapter 1:17, in adopting a constructivist approach it is inevitable that ‗traditional‘ ways of knowing would be ‗undermined‘, as it were, because constructivism is ‗radical‘ only in the sense that it dares question accepted wisdom. Both Derrida (1993:919) and Gadamer (1975:246-247) avoid the trap of absolute authority (while sidestepping the dangers of absolute subjectivity as the origin of human-thought-discernible-by-others) by respecting traditional (social and cultural) boundaries while, at the same time, transcending them in 42 I chose this term, instead of unpacking the article, because of its descriptively constructivist nature: to paraphrase Latour (1997), it is impossible to understand what holds the text together without reinjecting (creating feedback loops) in its framework (its first communicative structure) the new information manufactured by the actant text and its relational effect on the author, and on subsequent reading acts. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 93 order to access knowledge of the ‗other‘. In the process of transcending the known and the safe I came across systems thinking and cybernetics, which, as reality-generating mechanisms, enabled me to understand Mode-2 knowledge construction more inclusively, and in keeping with the Gadamer / Derrida respect for disciplinary boundaries, I simultaneously accepted but nevertheless buried a discipline. Why do I see a discipline being buried and do not see something else? A discipline, with reference to all its theories and methods, dare not represent the full extent of the horizon of expectations of any field of knowledge, i.e., a discipline needs to ‗bury‘ itself in the social stock of knowledge within any field of knowing, thereby becoming at once a part of a larger whole while forging new links within and without its own form, so changing its function. I do see something else because Mode-1 knowledge production does not sit well with a constructivist inquiry. A discipline needs to die in order to live. Our newly reconfigured faculty simply gave impetus to a natural process that has been seen unfolding elsewhere in the world, especially in the field of interaction design, a perfect hybrid between Industrial Design and Informatics, and the ideal proving ground for the infusion of such new blood as activity theory and actor-network theory. Under these new circumstances it would be very awkward indeed if our two sister sections in the new faculty remained at odds with each other due to disciplinary differences. In our specific and fortuitous case the merger gave rise to not just one but two disciplinary revisions; we could, as it were, bury two disciplines for the price of one. This development is of course not as easy as it might look on paper, and at the start of such a deliberate stepping-away process not everyone is convinced of the necessity of such a radical questioning of old knowledge, but sufficient evidence exist and emerge constantly to warrant this research-driven direction. Still, I asked, why cybernetics? Design, as it has become, is an investigation of human experience and service, having moved beyond the practicalities of design as object and even design as process; design seen as a process now means the process of human development, a paradigm shift for both design and for user studies, hence the study of cybernetics, which focuses on an inquiry into observing systems, or how humans behave, including the observer of that observation, the designer. Cybernetics, being the perfectly circular method of investigation that it is, is constructivist to the extent that the feedback loops from the observation induces (and are used in) the constant reconstruction of meaning; it is reiterative in the sense of having no beginning and no end, and while it seems to return to the beginning of any design process, seen horizontally (as a flat circle), it moves away from that so-called beginning, seen vertically (as a rising spiral), because it is continually adding to itself and thus developing: as a methodology (not method) cybernetic design (cyberdesign) is evolutionary to the extent that it buries its old self as sediment in the (old) stock of knowledge, thus respecting previous boundaries, while invariably moving away in a processual movement of discovery, both of self and of what is not-self. A discipline very naturally dies in order to live. Cyberdesign is thus a phoenix, and ideal for designing interactive spaces using the hybrid undisciplinarity of what is, in effect, a contradiction to the fully described disciplines, in Luhmann‘s (1995:367) sense that a contradiction may destabilize a system (in this case, a discipline) by removing the system‘s secure horizon of expectations (cf. comment, above), a reality generating mechanism it uses normally to protect itself against changes (cf. the reference, above, to Newton‘s mechanistic lens that was surpassed by something much more subtle and inbetween, shifting the focus from the behaviour of bodies to the emergent activities between them). Design, as do living systems (including, by analogy and inference, social systems), cannot ―protect itself against changes but with the help of changes against rigidifying into repeated, but no longer environmentally adequate, patterns of behavior … it protects through negation against annihilation‖ (Luhmann, 1995:371-372). A discipline dies a very natural death through a process termed creative destruction, because its baseline is environmentally and ecologically descriptive (and hence adaptive) but never prescriptively obedient to any form of fundamentalism. Creative destruction can be seen as negative only because it supersedes established ideas and science (Popper and Kuhn) and because it privileges the primacy of process over product, but Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 94 it is, in effect, positive in the sense of being an evolutionary code for change through a continuous transition between what is and what can be (Mode 1 to Mode 2 knowledge production), and described as the engine of innovation that re-allocates the freed energies from the liberated resources caught up in the baseline stock of knowledge (Bunge, 2003:189; Charlton, 2007; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000:113; Tuomi, 2001). Mode 1 knowledge becomes sedimented as a fully described discipline since that is the result of narrowly focusing on controlled outcomes, a process that is also called black-boxing and that ―contains that which no longer has to be reconsidered‖ (Callon and Latour, 1981:285). Simon‘s (2001:111) ―courses of action aimed at changing exiting situations into preferred ones‖ will not be achieved with known and sedimented knowledge that need not be reconsidered, questioned, and in the process of Mode 2 knowledge production put itself, as an interface between product and user, in constant danger of dissolving and vanishing. The latter two terms belong to Simon‘s (2001:113) description of design as a boundary science, and agrees substantially with Luhmann‘s (1995:372-373) notion that contradiction does not make that much of a difference (therefore it can safely be considered) since events disappear as soon as they occur: design as a boundary event draws from the sedimented stock of knowledge, even in its imminent disappearance, since its very coming into being constitutes its function: to facilitate the transition from the old to the new. In the article I contrasted Simon‘s viewpoint with Cohen‘s (1999) statement that the hierarchical organization of a university segments fields of knowledge, in opposition to Jonas‘s notion of design as a groundless field of knowledge that has to be unified (through a fitnessfor-purpose framework) on demand by linking several fields of knowledge. We can take heart, however, from the fact that Mode 2 knowledge production was the norm in society and the university before Mode 1 was institutionalized as disciplinary knowledge production in the 1800‘s (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000:116). Just before the introduction of this journal article I asked, What is this effective agency in social science and design terms? Mode 2 knowledge production, with reference to Gadamer‘s (2006:301) situation, and Giddens‘s (1986:xxi) locales that both point in the same direction, i.e., the open spaces of Heidegger‘s place of discovery43 and revelation, can be seen as a topos that has a very strong rapport with the contemporary open-source cybernetic nature of interactive design and, interestingly enough, the groundswell movement towards open-source academic publishing of research results. The latter has bearing not only on the direction of design‘s widening scope, but at the same time has bearing on the widening scope of interest of the new Millenium student, who needs access to new modes of production44. The challenge is to find a way to engender this very particular topos, a place of discovery sive revelation that serves as the proving ground for both individual and ‗subject‘ (design as discipline) identity-formation, a meeting place that is a thing and at the same time is a no-thing in Bateson‘s (2002:10) terms of an emptiness that allows nothing to settle for very long. Mind is a no-thing in this place of possibility, and so are ideas, which are only immanent and embodied in their examples, but are in themselves no-things, being, in the eyes of the world, ephemeral in terms of worldly and objective proof, an immanence that speaks to Simon‘s (2001:113) position (i.e., his stance, or CS) that design‘s function as an interface is in constant danger of dissolving and vanishing, being, as it were, a map sive territory.45 A thing is a place (cf. article, above) in which an unfolding event can find its being, because 43 Given the epistemological sive ontological, constructivist, basis of this thesis, it has to be emphasized that my use of Heidegger‘s term discovery is much closer to von Foerster‘s (2003:273) term invention, since (cf. :76. above) our dispositional capacity, our very ability to think about things and to interpret the resulting process set in motion by this dispositionally-driven thinking engagementwith-the-other-and-the-self is, ultimately, an individual sive group invention, and not a (re)discovery of something objectively preexistent to our cognitive involvement with the world. 44 Cf. Chapter 2: these new Millenium students are constructing totally new social and cognitive maps to follow, and if we wish to compete at all with the Internet, and especially the newly imagined Semantic Web, then design education needs to offer the grounds for such a new mapping. 45 What is design‘s function? If ‗design‘ is part of the space / place of discovery in which our own identity is revealed, then the emerging map is also the territory at the same time, both being as ephemeral as consciousness itself. If design‘s function is to serve an other, then the map is not the territory, and additional observation is needed. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 95 of being observed and co-produced by the observer / participant, and it is this positioning that simultaneously forms the individual‘s CS and identity-in-action. It is the human who becomes the constructed thing, or the new ding an sich, in this place where ―new interpretations and revisions of history‖ take place (Latour, 2002). For this very reason Gadamer (2006:301) speaks about the embeddedness of knowing in specific situations, with a warning not to imagine that we can step outside this created space of knowing and pretend to objectivity. We are the thing sive meeting place (i.e., the renowned Icelandic Thing, or the Athenian agora, above) while ‗it‘ depends on us to survive. The world designs us as we design the world, and it is this ‗natural‘ interaction sive relationship that becomes the effective agency we are looking for. Mind, ideas, designed objects, these area all no-things in the sense of being immanent, in the sense of all being both the map and the territory, which points to the human being as the constructed ‗thing‘ sive place of discovery. We are our own (half of an) effective agency, but only because of our participation in the Thing / Agora that opens up the space for possibilities within which Gadamer‘s ‗embeddedness of knowing‘ can happen; the uncovering of a form of knowing happens first, but only because ‗it‘ is already and always embedded in a specific situation, which forms the other half of an effective agency. Previously I had described this process as The floating pattern of behavioural action takes its direction from the swamp46 it is constantly interacting with, since a floating platform or raft will yield to the forces inherent to the swamp itself. The swamp is the ―standing effective agency‖ that directs this activity of discovery, ―the social medium in which an individual lives, moves and has his being‖ (Dewey 1916b: 1933). An intelligent direction thus depends on yielding to this interaction by taking cognizance of the value of social conditions and observed relations, and consequently planning and executing action in view of this knowledge. (van der Merwe, 2000) Donald Schön (1987:3) differentiated between the high ground of academic theory and the swampy low ground of everyday problems spaces, and emphasized the fact that the high ground taken by (fully described disciplines and ) theory is of little concern to ordinary people, i.e., the users of designed artifacts, ―while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern‖. The swamp, that grey and ill-defined real world situation conducive of wicked47 problem spaces, represents every social context that design has to deal with, interact with, and therefore the social, the lowland swamp of complexity, becomes the setting for this standing effective agency composed of designer sive society. The call for design to respond to the pressing needs of contemporary society (cf. real world challenges, above) is at the same time a call for design to adapt to the world of complexity we face, and thus design‘s adaptability as an evolutionary process will be discussed in Chapter 5, to include ―the conception and projection of human conditions of living‖ (Jonas, 2007:188). For this reason its makes sense to take into account the views of Latour (2005:149) and Castells (2001) who both regard their work as researchers (cybernetic researchers, since they are observers of observing systems) as taking place, as it were, in the laboratory of social and lived events. Not only Schön but Jonas (2002) refers to 46 This reference to a swamp came about when I was trying to describe the relationship between teacher and student, and how a teacher of design can contribute to the knowledge process of a student designer. In building a metaphorical road or path from notknowing to knowing, in research and in design terms, there are no hard-ground surfaces to facilitate this linear and unproblematic construction. Instead, the ‗road‘ that is built starts off with a less-than-finished blueprint of minimal use in constructing this road of knowledge, until the process-of-knowing encounters the ground it has to depend on, the context for and within the whole of the design environment. Having lived in Pretoria I know about high and rocky ground, and low, wet, clay-dominated soil. On the high ground you can build a house with normal foundations according to the accepted method, and, essentially, ignore the soil conditions (the territory, the conditions being stable in any case). In the valley, where a different foundation is needed, the method for construction is prescribed by the soil conditions: the design and the environment simply have to interact, or the house walls will crack pretty quickly. You need a floating foundation, not wide and shallow as in the method books, but deep and narrow, allowing the house (compared directly to a road surface) to literally float when the ground shifts, as it safely does, continually, but with catastrophic consequences in cases of flooding. 47 ―Wicked problems are ill-defined, ambiguous and ... there is often little consensus about what the problem is, let alone how to resolve it. Furthermore, wicked problems won‘t keep still: they are sets of complex, interacting issues evolving in a dynamic social context‖ (Ritchey, 2005, after Horst Rittel). Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 96 design‘s activity as taking place in a swamp of complexity, with Jonas also making the link between design activity and scientific activity, claiming that the latter is, in fact, acting within this wicked and uncertain environment where a path to discover has to be constructed in much the same way as designers do, except that science calls this environment the laboratory 48. Against this backdrop I asked in the article, what can be achieved by designing a socially situated problem space, infused by multiple disciplinary forces,49 this approach being only one of the reasons for gramma/topology to combine the four lenses of investigation that are cybernetics, actor-network theory, autopoiesis and phenomenology (next chapter). The latter will be strongly linked to ontology, since, as is mentioned in the article, within this socially situated problem space we have to find a way to discover-as-uncovering the means by which an individual can think like a group (cf. Chapter 1:3, the individual-group interrelationship), but also investigate how the individual‘s (designer / researcher) identity is formed while the same ontological process is actively shaping the discipline. As Schön (1987:4) states, design‘s complementary acts work within a ―problem setting [that] is an ontological process – in Nelson Goodman‘s … memorable word, a form of worldmaking‖. A theory of design thus comes closer to what Genosko (1998:79) called the undisciplined inbetween, going so far as to state that ―instability is the character of undisciplined theory in and of the between‖, thereby linking Deleuze and Guattari‘s concept of the rhizome (‗natural‘ network) to Luhmann‘s (1995:367) concept of contradiction as a destabilizing force (above, and further discussed in Chapter 5). Theory as the inbetween, figure and ground, territory and map Susan Vihma (2007:219-230) develops an argument for a design semiotics approach, an overview of design as process and product that diverges from the argument for design semantics, e.g., the Product Semantics theory of Klaus Krippendorff which includes insights from Wittgenstein and Heidegger. A semiotics approach, on the other hand, derives from the type of literary and linguistic studies exemplified by Umberto Eco, while the work of Roland Barthes (:225-226) is associated with both semantics and semiotics. I believe that both approaches have contributions to make to a discourse of and for design, and specifically the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, whom Vihma (:227) considers as important to a theory for design, since Peirce‘s non-linguistically based work avoids what she calls the traps of verbal metaphor. All the authors mentioned above will be referred to in Chapter 5, and the argument for the inclusion of semantics / semiotics made, including the claim that all designed objects are carriers of semiotic significance, making it possible for all human artefacts to be read as texts (Eco, 1976:57), and Paul Ricoeur‘s (2005:145) exploration of the question, what is a text? reassembled as what is a design (as a semiotic text)? Suffice it to say, here, that this methodological slant would not be possible if design is considered to be one of the fully described disciplines (cf. Design Issues article, above) that generates its own internal theories-for-use along the lines of the Cartesian mind / body dichotomy, a discipline that evolves theory from theory (mind) without the messy intrusion of the world (body), a discipline that does not show due care for the interaction between existing theory and changing real-world situations. Adding to the argument above, Gui Bonsiepe (2007:26) warns against the popular use of the term design, especially if taken to signify the visible-in-public creations that promise a certain lifestyle (itself a perverted form of semantic / semiotic visual language). The German language makes a differentiation between design and project (Entwurf), or more properly, projecting, since entwurf means draft, sketch, or framework, and the etymological origin of entwurf / entwerfen includes the concept of geworfen, 48 Words are both wicked and patient, depending on your intended use of them. What Jonas (2002) refers to with the term science laboratory, is more closely linked to the conceptual use of laboratory by Latour and Castells than to the isolated space within a building. 49 Cf. the cybernetic design conversation argument in Chapter 5, and the notion that inputs and outputs be replaced with force fields. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 97 derived from the horizontal weft thread being ‗thrown‘, by means of the weaving shuttle, through the vertical warp threads on the loom in the process of creating a tapestry picture or representation. Design as projecting or throwing (cf. the later discussion on Heidegger‘s notion of thrownness) thus has a different focus to design as object50, and as Bonsiepe (:26) further warns, in the debate around the nature of design research and design science, it would be best to ―create free space for reflection and thus avoid making premature characterisations … In this situation, a fluid physical state is preferable to a solid one‖. Design as Gestaltung is Bonsiepe‘s preferred term, further emphasizing the difference between design as a thrown idea / sketch / framework and design as a finished object, since the realization of gestaltung refers to the process of coming-into-being more than it can ever refer to the finished product, something I understand because Afrikaans has inherited the term from the Dutch via German. In my language we say om gestalte te gee aan iets, meaning, literally translated, to give form to something, to bring it into existence, but it also means more than this, since exegesis translates the Greek morphe (= form) as gestalte, which in turn means that in taking on the form of something (else), or ‗giving‘ (= throwing, projecting) that form for others to see and understand, the term form does not refer to the physical or to outward appearance, but to a disposition of being that is being taken on, as it were – a process that automatically presupposes the other of the self, or ‗the other‘ of existing design in the world. On the other side of the disciplined / undisciplined divide, Nigel Cross (2007:42) refers to the rejection, by notably Christopher Alexander and John Chris Jones in the 1970s, of the design methodologies (which they helped establish) based on scientific principles, rational, empirical, and above all, formalisable (continued to this day by many designers who argue the case for design to be definitively classified). Cross admits that ―there had been a lack of success in the application of ‗scientific‘ methods to everyday design practice‖, a realisation of the need to expose any theory to the practical everyday lifeworld wherein relationships between people and their environments are conducive to the adaptation processes that ideas and so-called reality have to go through, in order to each ‗find themselves‘ (cf. the interaction between existing theory and changing real-world situations, above). Design, whether it can be classified as a science, a discipline, or as methodology still has to work within the real world scenarios that include the many political, social, economic, and historical influences that act as stimuli for change or progress; design cannot effectively be design in isolation to other factors that normatively help change the course of human development. As will become clear (cf. the argument in Chapter 4), theories such as e.g., cybernetics and autopoiesis, had to be adapted to the structure of the social instead of being used as is, since the scientifically guaranteed control achieved by first-order cybernetics works badly when forced on a social system, hence the adaptation of the theory to a second-order cybernetics; furthermore, the insights of autopoiesis that deals with biological selfgeneration cannot unproblematically be transferred to a study of social relations. Likewise, gramma/topology has to find justification for its very existence in the malleable and on-going dynamic of social involvement, i.e., it has to be able to cope with (sometimes unforeseen) change on a constant basis, and for change read ‗complexity‘ and ‗wicked‘51 social problems. I can thus not sympathise with Cross (2007:46) who still seeks to develop a domain-independent approach to design theory and research, despite the fact that he admits to design having to accede to the drift 52 towards interdisciplinarity – the very fact of calling for an interdisciplinary discipline is not the same as highlighting the need for design as an undisciplined field of study (cf. the argument in A Natural Death 50 ―Conceptual projection is a dynamic process that cannot adequately be represented by a static drawing‖ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2003:305). Especially in graphic design (visual projection of a story-line), design as throwing / projecting a suggested idea works very well, since the idea / story only comes into being in the mind of the viewer, hence conceptual blending (a coming together of the elements in the ‗static drawing‘, e.g., an illustration in a book or a poster), and hence design as ‗idea-product‘ and not design as concrete product. 51 Rittel and Webber (1973:160): ill-defined and wicked ―Social problems are never solved. At best they are only re-solved – over and over again‖. 52 Compare the beginnings of an argument, here, to the discussion (Chapter 5) on (autopoietic) co-ontogenic drift, a naturally occurring phenomenon. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 98 Is Announced, above). An interdisciplinary discipline is somewhat of an oxymoron, perhaps not when the intention of such an endeavour is aimed at increasing the interactions between disciplines, but definitely when speaking about first principles (Cross, 2007:51) as one of the very important aspects of a designerly way of knowing. I shall argue (Chapter 5) for a very different understanding of first principles, and base that argument on Aristotle‘s explanation of what this proposition (i.e., his proposed scheme / plan, which is closer to design as gestaltung than design as description) can mean for design and for an alternative view of a designerly way of knowing. Normally, first principles refer to foundational propositions which are rational and can be empirically substantiated, statements, in fact, that seem to turn themselves into accepted truths if only through repetitive and normative use. All my viewpoints on design are opposed to this way of knowing that is reliant on a type of disciplinary knowledge that cannot make room for social constructivism (social inclusion), i.e., being able to handle and adapt to what might seem at times to be irrational (read, emotional) variables, and constructivism, meaning the openness of dealing with a shifting knowledge base and the fact that meaning and knowledge is constructed, by us, at this moment. Cross (:46; 50-51) seems to argue for a widening of the design research network that would move design as a discipline forward, citing research on the thought patterns (working habits) of outstanding designers that work somewhat outside normal design practice in what he calls ‗boundary conditions‘, thus being able to achieve a wider and systemic view of the problem space through encouraging conversations between designers and non-designers (following Simon‘s example of an engineer and a composer being able to communicate via a type of ‗design language‘). The argument, so far, is quite sound, and seems to follow contemporary trends, but then Cross (:46; 5152) makes it plain in which direction he intends steering these inquiries, which presupposes a control attitude that manoeuvres design back towards a disciplined discipline; Cross still wants to keep the wolf from entering the door despite inviting him up the garden path, and this cannot be done with impunity. You cannot speak53 Simon‘s suggested ‗design language‘ and not expect it to have an affect 54 (make a difference to) but only an effect (bring about a result); I would suggest that this is exactly what Cross has in mind, that the interaction with the other is put to use as if the observer / researcher / designer, and crucially, critical thinker can escape any contamination from this ‗artificial‘ (to design) contact. When Cross refers to a designerly way of knowing (inclusive of thinking and acting) he allows contact with non-design knowledge, but then wants to turn this interaction into something that is peculiar and unique to design; ―we must avoid swamping our design research with different cultures imported from either the sciences or the arts‖ (:46), which means that we must be ―wary of importing models of behaviour from other fields‖ (:52), and, as stated above, develop a domain-independent approach to design theory and research. Boundary crossings strictly within a single discipline is the oxymoron, as is an interdisciplinary discipline that returns to its own silo after contact with the outside world, even if the intention is to enrich design itself through such ‗external‘ contact. Domain-independence is the goal of a separatist way of thinking about, and consequently of viewing, the (non-design) fields of knowledge and the areas of practice that contemporary design has to engage with, and Cross‘s argument includes not only the interpretation of first principles as personal perspective (:51), but he (favourably) compares his research on expert designers to that of Lawson, who found that these expert designers rely on ‗guiding principles‘ that translates to working ―in a seemingly intuitive way, and a repertoire of ‗tricks‘ or design gambits‖ (:51), finding this route to be the most effective and therefore most ―relevant to the intrinsic nature of design‖ (:52). 53 54 Cf. the discussion, in Chapter 5, on Complexity and Design, and the question of how one can ‗speak‘ complexity. Crick and McCardle (2007:112/2) make a point of highlighting the ―interplay of affect between the designer‘s social psychological behaviour and design activity‖, which means the very thing you do (a) affects and (e) effects what you do in an endless cycle of influence. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 99 Wolfgang Jonas (2007:187), on the face of it, seems to agree with Cross, as least as far as adopting research through design (RTD), as a way of designerly knowledge production, is concerned. However, after restating Cross‘s claim that design can be a legitimate means of producing knowledge, Jonas maintains that the definition of design research has made no substantial progress. This amounts to a shift in focus, from Cross‘s claim for an inherent but still, really, undefined designerly way of knowing suitable to a domain independent approach to design theory and research, to a perception (the beginnings of a theory?) of design as a whole that broadens its self-conception, an apt use of words, since conception (also) implies giving birth, and a renewed self-conception, a planned self-(re)birth, is what I understand Jonas (:188) to mean with this new direction. Design has to re-invent itself by claiming ―an appropriate share of the definition power regarding future conditions of living‖ (Jonas, 2007:188), a view I argue underpins the need of making use of the affordances of social constructivism, and, to add to my own developing argument for gramma/topology, this shift in focus can also fruitfully make use of the generative possibilities to be derived from a cybernetic design conversation (cf. Chapter 5). Jonas (2004) has contributed, and steadfastly defended, the following seminal insight to design‘s inherent nature: design is foundationally a groundless field of knowledge; my interpretation of his work, influenced no doubt by my own development-of-understanding / self & subject / and my personal constructivist habitus leads me to translate foundation as a malleable and transitory term, formed and reformed on demand, groundless as unstable and dissipative, in the same sense that being human, we are evolutionary but dissipative systems, this last notion being derived from Prigogine‘s (1980:83) description of structures organizing themselves in a nonequilibrium world. Being human, we seem to have acquired structures that allow us to perform as dissipative systems that persistently squander, disperse, waste, and fritter away matter and energy, depending on your point of view, of course. However, as dissipative systems these same, acquired, structures allow us to persistently disperse, disseminate, and otherwise send out into the rest of the nonequilibrium world the stuff of life, namely communication, without which we would not exist as knowable entities, to others or to ourselves. A theory of design knowledge production, such as gramma/topology, must follow this same ‗groundless‘, ‗dissipative‘ and ‗unstable‘ pattern of living logic, in opposition to rational logic that requires a stable system, firmly grounded,55 to sustain itself, for even when dispensing its logic this system is (must be) at pains to consolidate and bond its meanings and influences (power), the exact opposite of ‗dissipation‘, which gives away for free56 what is there in the moment, i.e., information transmission without any guide as to the ‗correct‘ interpretation. Design must be free to construct and reconstruct its contingent foundations from a continuouslyemitting-information ground to its own, and our, figure. Design as a discipline, and the designerresearcher, must be the ever-becoming57 figure to the available information-in-the-world‘s ground, in what has been recognised by Gestalt Theory as the figure / ground relation, famously illustrated by the duck / rabbit (young girl / old woman) type of drawing that, depending on your focus and the information you draw on and how you draw on it, can be read as two ‗figures‘ (‗realities‘) that somehow exist at the same time, in the same situation, but utilising for its realization a different context 55 Groundless thus means the opposite of the traditional approach to a discipline, a belief, and knowledge: being grounded means drawing from a defined and fully described set of beliefs, while a groundless approach allows the maker of meaning the freedom of a catholic and contextually-driven choice. 56 57 Cf. Stuart Kauffman‘s (1996:71) argument of ―order for free – self-organization that arises naturally‖. Cf. the argument (above) regarding the difference between the map and the territory. Design as a discipline, and the individual as an ontological entity, both come-into-being as the territory, the ‗real‘, deriving its source material from the map, the concept and thus the ‗unreal‘. However, under normative circumstances what we come to recognise as the territory becomes the primary figure, which we then acknowledge as ‗reality‘, while everything else is a mere (back)ground map, from which new information may be sourced, as long as it does not conflict with the first reading of the figure. Design must work from a fluid and contingent map in order to reassemble a new figure of reality, every time the process begins again. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 100 (ground), which is supplied by the viewer‘s perceived understanding of the total, possible, information being emitted by the drawing (as context / ground[ing]). Figure 2. (1) Duck / Rabbit & (2) Young Girl / Old Woman. Source (1): Jastrow, J. (1899). The mind's eye. Popular Science Monthly, 54, 299-312. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duck-Rabbit_illusion.jpg Source (2): Psyche The University of Sydney Psychological Society. http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/psyche/optical/11.html In an act of cognition, perceiving a figure constructed from any ground, means that, if we focus just on the drawings as all there is to see, the duck or young girl is what we think we see, as the figure, and the rest of the information in the drawings becomes the ground, literally forming the background, still present as information, but now seen by us as support to the figure and therefore of secondary importance. All this can change in an instant, however, and the ‗duck‘ seem to change itself into a rabbit or what we thought was a young girl change into a sad old woman, and this happens without the drawing, in objective reality, changing at all58. Say, for the sake of argument, that we think we perceive a duck and a young girl at first glance; the information we base this assumption on is not the total amount of information in the drawing, but just a fraction of the information that is factually present, and all the rest of the present-as-possibility information becomes the less-important ground to this ‗fragment‘ we use as figure. As human thinking beings we are pattern recognition organisms, and are used to dealing with what might appear to be fragments (parts) instead of wholes. Condensing information as pattern in memory is simply a cost effective way to deal with the world, specifically in our complex modern world with its ever-threatening information overload. Our patterns of perception, in the first place, are mediated by thought … processes that are constructed 58 It has to be noted that this comment applies to ‗normal‘ and non-ambiguous drawings, or any other source of information. The two examples shown are deliberately ambiguous to offer the possibility of two figures and two grounds at the same time, as an illustration of the ‗switching‘ effect. However, under the right circumstances (contexts) this same phenomenon occurs without the ‗source‘ being at all ambiguous, since the context itself (and the individual having that particular experience) constructs the ambiguity, e.g., a coat hanging from a hook on the back of the bedroom door is mistaken for (‗read‘ as), at night and in half-light, either a ghost or an intruder, depending on the individual‘s mindset at the time. This does bring up the interesting question of how much of an individual‘s ‗mindset‘, at any one time, is due to the imagination? Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 101 because of our interactions with everything external to our self as individual ... (van der Merwe, 2010b) In Chapter 2:52 I discussed the beginnings of an argument underpinned by Peirce‘s notion of an abductive argument (cf. Chapter 5 for the full argument), and stated that the Latin abducere means to lead away, an ‗abduction‘ in the true sense of the term that leads one away from the figure of what we think is there, to the so-called ground filled with probability and possibility 59. We may ask, what is the territory and what the map, and why should we be led from the territory (the figure, representing the ‗real‘) to the map (the ground, the less important ‗not-real‘)? ―Gestalt psychology is based on the observation that we often experience things that are not a part of our simple sensations‖ (Boeree, 2000), meaning that we seem to ‗see‘ things that are not there in fact, but only there as imagination / perception. In Chapter 4 (especially in the work of Luhmann) I will discuss how we (and consequently the productions of design) are used to working with the entirely not there, the virtual meaning (figure) to the world‘s available information (ground), and yet, here in this duck / rabbit example, the converse is applicable. The ‗real‘ meaning (whichever picture you ‗see‘ / perceiver first, i.e., the world‘s accepted wisdom) is the obvious figure, the primary information and meaning (instilled in the source), while the probable and possible alternative ‗seeings‘ / perceptions are reduced to secondary ground, at best. With a fully-described discipline, and its companion theory (or theories), you will be constrained to only see a duck or a young girl, and nothing else, because the figure and the ground, for the sake of argument60, are one and the same thing, so melded one into the other that nothing else can emerge from this disciplined package. The map becomes the territory, and the real can change places with the not-real, due to a strong argument. The informative stock of knowledge in both the discipline and the theory begins to act as an insular entity in its own right.61 A strong theory will provide the answer to whichever picture is the ‗real‘ one, what is the figure as primary information, and what the ground as secondary, at best, but a strong theory, being fully described, seems to offer only primary information, with no possibility of deviation from the norm. There can be no rabbit if there is a duck in the equation, and the function of strong theory is to ensure this stability. To counter this, design must be a reciprocal conversation with everything it comes into contact with, including theories of and for meaning, since the act of ‗design‘ is very much like the act of abduction – design not as the object, nor even just as the process, but design as a deliberative act of interactive and therefore abductive thought, this ‗design‘ represents fully the person doing the ‗designing‘, in conjunction with the people (and objects, events) that are being designed for. This means that design is a leading away from so-called reality so far, or the material forms of life as they exist now, towards design as the symbolic forms of life and living, towards design as a preferred situation. The new figure (of the individual and the discipline) has to emerge from the comprehensive ground(lessness) of design‘s catchment areas; design has to consider a situation in which a map sive territory condition prevails, depending on the needs of the context. Foundations for a groundless theory As I have written earlier (van der Merwe, 1997) and can now amend, the ‗text‘ potentially contained in the productions of design follows the same basic communication model that all information follows - has to follow. In the processes of communication, the acts of speaking, listening, seeing, assimilating, and understanding, perceptual organization plays a large part, with the figure/ground relation, the need for 59 60 61 Cf. the later discussion of Heidegger‘s open spaces of discovery, Chapters 4 and 5). Itself an example, here, of not only a paradox, but a non sequitur. The use of the term ‗entity‘ refers to the viewpoint adopted by Actor-Network Theory, in which humans, objects, and even ‗events‘ such as groups and societies are regarded as actants with equal rights (of meaning-making), hence a particular social stock of knowledge acting as if it represented a person or a group of people. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 102 grouping stimuli, and the human need for closure as three of the most basic elements in this organization (Schiffman and Kanuk 1983:148). Graphic design (my initial design degree subject) makes extensive use of gestalt concepts, as does any study of consumer behaviour (hence Schiffman and Kanuk‘s book), and so does the ‗other world‘ of art, since these ‗design‘ principles are ones that we stole from them, in an act of border-crossing appropriation, otherwise known as undisciplinary behaviour. Design as a ‗making profession‘ makes knowledge (Mode 2), as Dunin-Woyseth and Nielsen (2001:27-28) suggest, an epistemological premise for design that means in the process of making meaning (to us, on a personal level, knowledge) during the (broad) act of designing we use the art of being human, on both the biological (body) and psychological (mind) level, using the term art in the sense of a (combined nature and nurture) skill. Gestalt Theory is just one of the theories or areas of knowledge that we can draw on when we construct a contingent theory of design knowledge and (contextual) knowing, and it is this processual62 art of being human that draws on and from the groundless and dissipative patterns of living logic. Given a rational disciplinary ‗ground‘ to draw from, our human need for grouping stimuli and for closure will not work, or at least not as creatively or imaginatively as the contemporary design-as-thinking-tool can make us capable of. When confronted by disparate elements (different opinions or needs in a group), or when deliberately choosing (in designing a poster, say) several information-bearing elements that might at first appear to be unconnected, our brains naturally attempt to group these as a meaningful unit, by searching for the commonalities they might share, such as similarities of form, texture, colour, or any other aspect that can be used to present them as a group with meaning, instead of as a selection of unconnected items. Similarly to the visual quality of graphic design, when we select and group information ‗parts‘ we are looking for meaning because of the grouping, and this meaning often only emerges because the resultant ‗whole‘ is much more than the simple sum of the parts; connections are made between these previously groundless63 parts from different fields of knowledge that lead to new insights not apparent before. The gestalt concept of closure also plays its part, and becomes even more important when the entirely not there is involved (above), since this aspect of the human need for making meaning will manufacture something that does not exist in the real world, but gains a presence by virtue of our human will alone, not the individual, but the collective. Choosing to look for the similar in the dissimilar is looking for Bateson‘s (2002:10) pattern that connects, a pattern of recognition64 of possibility in the complex world-situation, from which socially-inspired viewpoint a (as opposed to the) solution may be derived. Using the notion of a groundless field of knowledge is looking for the no-thing in Bateson‘s metapattern, in which ideas are the closest one can come to something concrete and ‗real‘, and even these ideas must remain ‗groundless‘ until contingently ‗grounded‘ in the social-technical context(s) of the conditions of living. Originating from an ‗everywhere groundlessness‘ 65, ideas are then, as ephemeral entities in themselves, transformed by the future conditions of living (the preferred situations) into a grounded presence that can be used in the practical world. It becomes, then, doubly important that, if we wish to broaden design‘s self-conception in terms of theory-building, we cannot just leave this endeavour to other disciplines that do reflect on ―the conception and projection of human conditions of living‖ (Jonas, 2007:188), but we can learn from them, if we recognise that we all have roughly the same goal. In Chapter 1:7 I asked, what is good 62 Cf. previous comments (pp. 98-108) on cyberdesign, ―cybernetic design (cyberdesign) is evolutionary to the extent that it buries its old self as sediment in the (old) stock of knowledge, thus respecting previous boundaries, while invariably moving away in a processual movement of discovery, both of self and of what is not-self. A discipline very naturally dies in order to live‖. Cyberdesign and the art of being human can be directly compared as processual movements of discovery. 63 When ‗designing‘ or constructing new meaning from the parts of old information elements, we detach them from their anchors in disciplinarity / set theory, causing them to become ‗groundless‘ and so allowing them to form new associations and connections. 64 Bateson‘s pattern that connects is a metapattern: ―Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are, again, no-things‖ (2002:10). 65 Cf. my use of the term basho in the article A Natural Death is Announced (above), expressed as emptiness and nothingness. Basho also denotes the space within which we can reassemble our relations with the other, and where Bateson‘s metapattern forms an everywhere groundlessness, from which new ideas (new assemblies from old parts) are born. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 103 design? and part of the answer is that it is not that what sells well is good design, because we also have to ask, whose ‗good‘ are we talking about? We have to investigate what the ‗social good‘ might mean, and what design as a change agent might contribute to these future conditions of living. I also asked in Chapter 1:7 where a product designer might find direction, and if the social good is at all important to design - and my argument includes the notion that to rely on established (past) theories to help fashion (future) action is not good enough in this complex world - we have to fashion / make / design the ‗theories‘ we need, for these ‗future social conditions‘, from the hybrid mix we will find in the problem spaces of contemporary design-for-civil-society situations. We have to broaden the comprehensive ground(lessness) of design‘s catchment areas. The foundations66 for design thinking and gramma/topology are not formal foundations that become rules, methods or formulae, or for that matter, formal theories of know-how, but are closer to the principles that underpin the theory of living systems, a subset 67 of General Systems Theory (discussed in Chapter 4). These foundations are not only to be formed by the interactions between the informationbearing elements (parts that need to be carefully chosen, and, as a system, designed as an interactive whole) that are to be sourced from any area of study that contains information pertaining to cyclical feedback systems; any discipline that concerns itself in any way with the conception and projection of human conditions of living; all areas of knowledge production that combines critical theory (read, critical thinking) with critical care, but these foundations are also to be formed and reformed on a continuous basis by the developing, living, context. The parts that can be sourced from a groundless field of knowledge are indeed information-bearing elements (not knowledge-bearing, since they have to be re-worked and reinterpreted, re-integrated into a new system or argument, as it were), and as such can be words from any text that takes on a new meaning, visuals that resonate / connect with stored (remembered) images the design research is calling on, auditory (music; the roar of a crowd, in excitement or anger; the definitive soundpatterns of machinery that talk back, as definitive as the human voice; something said in a lecture; an idea that emerges from a discussion (proto-words), olfactory, a powerful sense that can recall memories and associations (successfully used by supermarkets: making you smell something delicious as you enter encourages impulse buying), objects in the environment, anything from the smallest designed artifact that seems to be in your space, to the biggest building that seems to include you in its space. The foundations (as catchment areas) for design and for gramma/topology, then, are formed interactionally, the parts for its make-up are sourced from various fields that deal in cyclical feedback systems, the conception and projection of human conditions of living, and critical theory twinned with critical care; this last concept is dealt with, by Slamat (2009), as compassionate rationality. The question, what is design? can be answered in part by Slamat‘s (2009:1148) question ―What is education?‖ Slamat regards education as a practice, just as many design researchers regard design 66 Our approach to design education should rather follow the examples of Gadamer and Maritain. Gadamer (1975: xvii; 5) was not against method as such, but against an inductive method scientifically concerned with establishing conformities. Maritain‘s likeminded anti-foundationalism described this type of strict rule ―as a collection of self-adjusting formulae and processes, an orthopaedic and mechanical truss for the mind‖, this method being open to anyone as a formula instead of the habits that ―are reserved for the few‖ (Maritain 1939: 41). 67 Rather more complicatedly, Miller (1978) categorised living systems as subsubsets of the larger (supra-)systems theory: General Systems Theory > subset = concrete systems > subset = living systems. Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 104 research as research through design (practice). Theory and practice cannot be conveniently separated, and for Slamat the theoretical framework informing his approach to education is the certainty that an educator (and therefore also the students) must be capable of critical rationality, with the proviso that the traps of a strictly adhered to critical theory be avoided: ―Such a version of critical theory makes use of quasi-causal and functional explanations68 and pretends to know what the ‗real interests‘ of people are‖ (:1148-1149). This strongly suggests that the theoretical ground can be offered as if it were the researcher‘s figure (cf. above), meaning that the results of research can be pre-empted and therefore ‗pre-decided‘ by the (strong) theory, instead of the results being arrived at through the researcher‘s interaction with the problem space: the way we ‗see‘ anything is constitutive of what we think we understand. For this reason gramma/topology must be a ‗weak‘ theory69 of translation and interpretation that enhances the designer / researcher‘s capability of ‗designerly knowing‘ (hopefully a multiple-vision70 way of ‗seeing‘) instead of a strong theory of prediction and prescription. Being part of what is being observed, a systems-oriented and social constructivist researcher (educator) cannot but feel the need to ‗look through the eyes of others‘, a state of being that Slamat (:1152) feels an educated person should be capable of, and the way to achieve this is to temper critical rationality with care, resulting in a compassionate rationality. To be critically rational is to be scientifically ‗objective‘, an approach to research and argumentation that is not only anti-constructivist but, making full use of first-order cybernetics which regards research as successful if full control can be gained over both the process and the outcomes. A design for a theory of meaning (Turner, 1994) cannot afford to be neither subjective nor objective, since neither really exists except as (false) constructions of mind 71; instead, the designer-researcher can use a paradoxical way of seeing (perception) that turns itself into a way of knowing (interpretation), and arrive at Protagoras‘s fitness of a conceptual system. ―Fitness is not a measure of correspondence to objective reality but rather a measure of success. By inference, fitness is a measure of capacity … In principle, two unlike conceptual systems for attributing meaning could be equally fit‖ (Turner, 1994); to design this means that a solution to a socially-based problem must answer this question: would the solution put forward fit the total environment (circumstances being investigated, people involved, expectations and constraints taken into account)?, and when using critical theory that demands rational thought, that process is transformed by a care for the ‗total environment‘, for sustainability, for peoples‘ well-being. An educated person, an educated student, should not only be capable of critical thinking which automatically implies some form of rationality, but through a systems-constructivist education the student can be made aware of the responsibility involved in design theory, research and practice, a responsibility towards those whose world, and in many cases, whose whole (total) environment we will be influencing and changing. Just as the ‗theory‘ of gramma/topology has to be changed and transformed by the circumstances within which it will be used, so the very tenets of rationality have to be transformed by the use to which it is put, and Slamat (2009:1149) uses Cohen‘s argument that an educated person not only puts forward personal reasons that are real and authentic to that individual, meaning that these reasons are persuasive enough to base decisions and action on, but that an educated person uses a critical rationality, transformed by care, to put forward reasons that are at the same time ‗compelling‘ to the other people involved in the discussion or dialogue. 68 69 Cf. the contrast to Richard Jung‘s (2007:21) use of the term functional explanation (Chapter 5: 248). Cf. this statement from Chapter 1:10, ―Design is being described as a ‗weak‘ discipline because it has to deal with increasingly complex real-world challenges, which means design is seen as interpretative instead of prescriptive, forming a social discourse about reality in which hard facts are subordinate to perception and experience‖. 70 To ‗see‘ the emergent possibilities in any design problem space we must acquire the capability to see what there is to see ‗out of focus‘, as it were, to avoid seeing too clearly and too quickly what we would normally notice because we are used to a way of seeing and interpreting. 71 Protagoras suggested that complete objectivity and subjectivity cannot exist: ―[the] capacity for attributing meaning comes exclusively from the individual brain--therefore it is not objective--but nothing about it is private or arbitrary--therefore it is not subjective‖ (Turner, 1994). Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 105 The Bridge This chapter was intended to be the start of a process of finding a theory for practice in design (the more fuller expression of this process to reveal itself in Chapter 5), one that design students can make sense of, as a tool for thinking, in their own search for epistemological designerly knowledge (what is design?) and ontological designerly ways of knowing (how do I manage to know anything?). As a design educator I have always asserted that the research process and the design process are, to all intents and purposes, one and the same, both being the same path of discovery so clearly described by George Kelly, with this proviso: his narrative of this process of becoming stems from his being a human first, before it (also) stems from his being a scientist. That very fact acts as a pointer to the hybrid nature of our communal voyages of discovery in this laboratory we call everyday life, the swamp of complexity that constitutes our socio-technical interactions with the world. Design needs research, but it also needs critical thinking of the systemic kind, tempering rationality with care and compassion, since our research processes are aimed at understanding humans first, before we understand the ways of the concrete world. Neither is privileged over the other, but any symbiosis has a centre of being that focuses more on one aspect than the other(s), and in nature this aspect is the survival of the ‗owner‘ of the process, although inhabitant would be closer to the mark, since a term such as participant will not do for autopoietic reasons. The problem with design theory, with design communicative description, is that everything we say is immediately mediated by the context in which it is said, and also by the very words and terms keeping company with the term we are trying our best to get right. Alas, as with the correct design solution, that is somewhat of a false narrative that you never quite get right. I will keep company with the term inhabitant, however, since this decision can forge links with the discussion in Chapter 5 regarding Bourdieu‘s notion of habitus, practice and field. One of the inhabitants of the system within which these interactions of life are taking place is usually the instigator of the process, but being an autopoietic symbiosis, all of the parts of the (new) whole need to benefit, and none suffer any form of depletion, or ‗emptying out‘. Theory and practice, then, need both to benefit from any partnership, as long as both can adapt to the new environment in which both are newly arrived inhabitants, and the same reasoning is valid for the socio / technical relationship, and yet, whatever the argument, humans do come first. The inhabitants of this domainindependent free space for reflection will then be able to broaden their self-conception (yes, even designed artifacts), but they do so in order to claim ―an appropriate share of the definition power regarding future conditions of living‖ (Jonas, 2007:188), in the process making the human swamp of living conditions the guiding principle for future design directions. Theory and practice, design and research, humans and objects, all these relationships-of-purpose should be designed to let each find their own new self through the other being able to do exactly the same. Unfortunately, as happened to the Design Methods movement, the urge to ultimately control the process seems too much to contest, for some people, although by its very nature the evenly balanced participatory process described above lends itself, paradoxically, to this interpretation, and hence transformation into a controlled situation. It is for this major reason that a theory for design cannot allow some humans to be privileged above others, as some animals always turn out to be more equal than others in an act of usurpation. To usurp is to seize for own use, and I seem to be continually arguing against myself, because that is exactly what I advocate. Each design student studies design theory not for the sake of the theory, but because of what that individual can extract from the source of information, can, in fact, seize for own use. But, I also teach systems thinking, whose main tenet is the Hippocratic Oath, first, do no harm. We are all newly arrived inhabitants of a free space, but all that anyone has is a map we share; the territory has yet to be established to the benefit of all. Autopoietically, each inhabitant in nature seizes for itself what is necessary to survival, but without destroying its environment on which it ultimately depends. When we seize for own use and the consequences are to the detriment of those around us, Theories and other narratives: designerly knowledge production 106 then our interpretation becomes a domain-dependent issue with our own concerns as the main focal actor in any scheme of things. How to seize without doing harm is the equivalent of how to think like an individual while still thinking as if constituting group. All human actions, surely, tend to privilege those who initiate the process. Isn‟t that what you claimed, above? Not at all, even though the words may lead one to think (reason) that way, until we remember Slamat‘s use of Cohen‘s argument that your reasons put forward should not only be compelling to you, but also compelling, and (reasonably) acceptable, to the others involved in the (ongoing) dialogue. Deliberately ensuring the continuation of this dialogue is a necessary step to symbiosis. In the next chapter I will be discussing Heidegger‘s ontological phenomenology, an ongoing and developing relationship between the world and the self —a relationship that uncovers the processes of coming-intobeing. Heidegger does not make any distinction between ontology and phenomenology, instead he stipulated that its essence lies in possibility rather than actuality. For most of the reasons outlined above, and despite the words appearing as if they are appealing to an anti-rigorous research language, I can fully endorse Rosin Chow‘s (2003) proposal that we have to shop around in our search for design theories. Epistemology sive ontology sive phenomenology is a complex relationship that no single ‗theory‘ can accommodate, and since theory in general is distrusted (the truth of Chow‘s statement is still too prevalent today) by both design staff and students72, it becomes the better argument in allowing a theoretical presence to reveal itself during the interaction between thought and deed, and to allow students to discover for themselves what a reflective practitioner means. However one might cloak this process in academic language, it remains a personal shopping around in the space for thought made available by my introduction of various circular theories and the student group discussions of these new ways of seeing the world around them. My students confirm Chow‘s (2002) statement that ―the value of theory for design education is to be created through transforming theory to practice‖ in their own studio projects, since to them, in the context of every new design project, the intrinsic value to be had from this thing called theory must be discovered anew, because of the contextual project and not because of a foundational knowledge somehow captured by any particular theory. Chow (2002) sees the value of a collaboration between theorists and educators as one that allows for the emergence of design theory-for-use, taking into account the needs and working contexts of the educators. My own focus is much more on fostering the collaboration between, initially, educator and student, but centred on the student‘s own developmental skills; learning how to learn includes learning how to forge individual sive group collaborative links between the various appropriate theories and design practice. The contingent theory for design that works in any particular socio-technical design context will not and cannot be one that is envisaged by either a theorist or an educator, but by the student collective insitu. My task in Chapter 4 is thus to show how gramma/topology is formed and reformed 73 (and the ‗original theory‘ transformed) in the process of making use of cyclical feedback systems, the conception and projection of human conditions of living, and compassionate rationality; the concept of a groundless field as interpreted in this chapter is likewise used by gramma/topology to add to a flexible foundation for design thinking, a foundation that takes on the character of a floating platform guided by the swamp of social concerns. 72 From my own perspective and experience: staff who have no interest in research and students who have had no exposure to any effective theories for thought. 73 The term ‗reformed‘ is used in the same sense as Latour‘s (2005:247) use of the term ‗reassembly‘. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 4 107 Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing The Gate In the previous chapter this line appears: ask not what a single discipline can do for the many, but rather ask what creating a socially situated problem space can achieve, inspired by multiple disciplines. This is an idea that came to me as I was writing the text for the Undisciplined! conference, but an idea that now strikes me as appropriate to the way gramma/topology works, as an undisciplined and inbetween theory, although I have to qualify that immediately by saying gramma/topology cannot be seen to work on anything, except on the imagination of the observer of phenomena. Ask not what a single theory can do for the diverse design researchers who have to deal with a complex world, but rather ask what creating a socially constructed and critically situated problem space of alethic uncovering1 can achieve if initiated by multiple theories … a hybrid theory of knowing that is in practice more than the sum of its parts. What is gramma/topology? I don‟t quite know, and would find it difficult to answer such a question in a few short sentences, so I wrote this chapter instead, to ask my second-order cybernetic self2 what the answer may be. In the last chapter I stated that theory is neither one thing or another, that it isn‟t really any thing, but is a thing in Latour‟s sense of a meeting place of re-associations and renegotiations between all manner of actors. This meeting-of-minds space … what do we mean when we use the term mind? I‟m afraid that I seem to veer off course when thinking about these things, which reminds me, in Chapter 1:21 Martin Simon (quoted in Fosnet, 2005:286-287) compared the learning journey of discovery to the trajectory of a sailboat setting out for a destination, but then has to veer off course because of the prevailing winds and currents, thus continually having to make adjustments to the original course that was so linearly and cleanly set out on the map from here to there. In the section on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (cf. :204, below) it is suggested that ANT is comparable to Deleuze and Guattari‟s concept of the rhizome, a root-like network that seems to tack from side to side much like a sail boat driven by the wind, and if you accept the possibility of a gramma/topology of design knowing you must also be prepared to be tacked3 from side to side by the forces of social and ontological (self) structuration. A meeting-of-minds space, according to ANT, would then seem to presume that objects have „minds‟, which would further mean that they must have consciousness, which is quite a nonsense and a wrong interpretation. Are minds and consciousness synonymous? I don‟t know, because I don‟t know what you believe. Already a constant and enduring theory of knowing seems to recede as a possibility, and a contingent-dependent theory take its place. I can only tell you what I believe is the case, and present such arguments as would be acceptable and reasonable to you as well. I do not know where mind is, or quite what it is, because I have no great interest in the concept, but I do think that I know where consciousness is. It is where „I‟ am, and the „I‟ can only be brought to life, as it were, when you are 1 Heidegger (in Dreyfuss, 1991:270), associated truth with unforgetting, derived from the Greek alētheia / truth or sincerity, since only then (when we open our minds to otherness) can something else (that was there the whole time) be brought forth from a space that was previously hidden from us, and we can uncover what we need to find. 2 If second-order cybernetics can be seen as the cybernetics of cybernetics, i.e., that the observer has to account for himself in an act of collaboration (Rawes, 2007:1489), then I can ask my being-constructed self the answer to a question, an answer I do not possess in the now. 3 I know that this can be considered to be wrong, but think about it, in a sail boat you can only tack to the wind, which means you are not quite fully in control. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 108 conscious. That did not get us very far, but then you do not have to go anywhere, because when you are awake and alive, when you open your eyes, you cannot help but interact with „the other‟, if only in a very unaware and desultory way. Every waking moment is a switched-on moment of possible recognition for consciousness, and the „you‟ is to be found, metaphorically speaking, in the air in front of your face; not in your head, not somewhere subjectively inside, and neither are you to be found objectively outside. This space in front of your face stretches as far as your imagination can conceive of, and your real self, your consciousness-of-knowing, is somewhere between us and can only emerge, and be recognised by „you‟, in moments of interaction, cybernetic conversation, in those moments of recognition when you make distinctions between your system and its environment. Unfortunately for some people‟s peace of mind that us includes inanimate objects, the designed artefacts that we surround our lives with, and that we have conversations with, because any interaction is a type of conversation between two entities, whether human, animal or non-human. A meeting-of-minds space, according to gramma/topology, would then presume that objects have „minds‟consciousness, and in this space of alethic uncovering human consciousness and non-human consciousness intermingle, reach out to each other, interrogate each other, circle around like two dogs meeting for the first time (who are you, where do you come from, where are you going, who‟s that with you), asking questions, sometimes, simply for the sake of asking questions and a sense of curiosity, a wanting to know. A simple thought experiment proves that this is true, and that we react to inanimate objects as if they were proxy people, 4 simply because we cannot conceive of communicating with another presence that we find in our space in any other way. Try to imagine using any object on your desk without „communicating‟ with it. I see a red pen, some highlighters, my overused stapler, a few books I took from the shelf … I cannot „use‟ any of these without giving „it‟ some thought, in a very literal way, as if my thoughts (regarding my use of …) are transposed to the object, and the no-longerinanimate object communicates with me, if only to say, no, I am a red pen, you cannot use me as a highlighter, or the stapler says, you cannot use me to look up a reference. Do objects have real consciousness? No, but they do talk back to us, and if we consider that (written) texts talk back (Hülsmans, 2003:76) and that Eco (1976:57) essentially stated that all human artefacts can be read as texts, and we admit that all designed objects can be carriers of semiotic significance (cf. Chapter 3:112), then we do imbue objects with consciousness, as if. It is not that „things‟ “have the unity the modernists believed they had, nor do they have the multiplicity postmodernists would like them to retain. They are lying there, in the new assemblies where they are waiting for the due process that will give them their unity, at the end, not at the beginning” (Latour, 2000:120). Things talk back when we „use‟ them, and the same insight should be appropriated for a theory of knowing, thereby confirming Chow‟s (2002) statement that “the value of theory for design education is to be created through transforming theory to practice”, and in use gramma/topology will talk back, since its voice is the developing conversation(s) that emerge in these new spaces of assembly and association. As Heidegger knew (below), and as contemporary designers know, the very essence of communication flows are as important features of designed objects as any other consideration, if not more so, and there is only really one way that we can understand communication, and that is if we imagine we are talking to a real person, another sentient being who can answer back when we observe something in their behaviour and actions that we need to question. These are cybernetic design conversations, including conversations with objects, this is gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing. This chapter sets out the theoretical and philosophical inputs that provide the core of what can become gramma/topology, an argumentative theory of knowing that pretends to the performativity of Casti‟s 4 Cf. Lakoff and Johnson‟s argument in support of this statement, Chapter 5, ftn. 28. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 109 reality-generating mechanisms. Design students should be able to use gramma/topology as a selfgenerating tool for self-generation, an aspect of complexity theory (discussed in Chapter 5) that has self using self to produce self. In a search for both epistemological and ontological ways of knowing we need what amounts to a hybrid way of seeing the world, to lay the contingent „foundations‟ for a groundless field of knowledge in design. Gramma/topology offers a model of sorts, but it is the self-constructed model that follows the pattern of involvement suggested by McKean for design education itself: how we learn and with what we learn become the ready-to-hand equipment that co-designs both student and design subject, and in this same way gramma/topology and user act as models for each other. Gramma/topology, as a designerly socio-technical discourse, follows the concept of free invention, itself formed and re-formed while transforming each of the original theories discussed in this chapter, and, as theoretical ontology of equipment (cf. :190-2, below), gramma/topology migrates the aura of the original5 theory to those open spaces of free association and reassembly that design innovation calls for. It must therefore be made clear that my treatment of the theoretical and philosophical inputs that contribute towards a gramma/topology of knowing is in no way to be interpreted as definitive of any original text, since design observation means, inevitably, that we observe in order to discover some form of use value in what we observe, therefore changing the very thing we observe in the first place, making „it‟ disappear in the act of observation, and leaving us with the task of observing not the obvious but the emergent differences. Through learning how to observe differences, we learn how to learn. Introduction The reason for looking at external-to-design sources for inspiration in finding a theory for design is simple: design in essence is external to itself, since there cannot be any defined centre that remains unchanged, and there cannot be any purpose for design that is teleologically deterministic. Design as process and design thinking as a critical tool for observation is outward looking, and we should focus, like Socrates‟ pupil, not on the teacher but on the learning spaces ahead of us, and use whatever lens we can borrow to conceptually illuminate what there is to uncover, and this chapter is about using a number of these borrowed lenses that can help the observer not to manufacture a new reality so much as to allow this design researcher (design student) to have the courage to allow the landscape being investigated to reveal itself for what it is, in toto and unconfined. In this chapter I will present each of the theories in turn, which does not necessarily indicate any linear importance but illustrates my own arrangement of them as they flow one into the other according to my own thinking, and like design itself, when trying to explain something we of necessity have to use artificially segregated means to do so, and risk the impression that these aspects can be understood as if they do not overlap, which they most definitely do, as I hope I make clear enough in the papers and articles offered here. The first section presents cybernetics as a science of prediction, but not in the normal, hard sciences way of predetermination. Prediction can also mean projection, a proposal for research whose outcome is anything but a foregone conclusion, making cybernetics a science of purpose and bildung as opposed to causality. Design makes use of a second order observation technique, which means design cybernetics is the study of observing systems, and includes the observer in the study as an integral part. I touch on a short history of cybernetics with a focus on the dual rationale of this investigation of circular action and feedback, the reason it can include both humans and machines in its scope. The influence of cybernetics 5 Latour and Lowe‟s (2008) concept of the migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimile will be discussed in Chapter 5. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 110 on design thinking is demonstrated by the article The Magic of Three, in which I incorporate a typical student voice responding to my explanation of a topic rather unfamiliar to our students. In the second section General Systems Theory and Radical Constructivism are dealt with as companion parts to a much bigger whole, with Soft Systems Methodology as a form of social constructivism added on. It is a moot point to students whether one uses the term design cybernetics, systems theory or, indeed, systemic thinking to describe the impact and import of this way of seeing through the problem spaces of Rittel‟s wicked situations, for the students understand and very happily use all three terms interchangeably, unless a more specific description of the effects of design action is called for. For the purposes of design, systems thinking and cybernetics can be considered as close enough allies for the one to be mistaken for the other under certain circumstances, all dealing with forms of observation and circularity. The conference paper The Construction of a Dancing, Dangling Conversation illustrates how a constructivist systems approach can influence the planning and subsequent development of a design class, playing on the strengths of design as an iterative subject that reconstructs itself while allowing students the opportunity to develop framing models of purposeful action. Both cybernetics and systems thinking provide us with the notion of a conversation, but it is all too easy to overlook that most important of conversational partners, the designed object, and to give the student access to what can amount to the denizens of an underworld of mostly unnoticed presences, the theory of Actor-Networks proves most illuminating to focus our attention on the role that objects as non-human actors can play in our daily lives, and how they can influence out thinking processes. In this third section, instead of regarding „the social‟ as the principle actor, we focus on the associations entered into by all actors, human and non-human. I include a quick discussion of the phases Problematization and Interessement, since this forms an adequate basis for design‟s use of ActorNetwork Theory, concluding this section with the article The secret lives of ANTs, which asks the question, where and how do the products of our material culture fit in? The fourth section concerns the question of transposing the biological theory of auto-production, autopoiesis, to a study of social systems. Autopoiesis is the study of auto- or self-generating living systems that are operationally closed (their internal structure) but at the same time informationally open to the environment or medium in which they find themselves. There is no problem with looking at human life through the lens of autopoiesis, since that way of seeing the worlds we create (as representations of our inner thoughts, as far as that is possible, which makes this view of autopoiesis similar to the social constructivism of Berger and Luckmann) can allow us a much deeper insight into human consciousness, even if it is through the mediation of the designed life of objects. The real problem is using autopoiesis to look at social systems, and even two students working as a group form themselves into this thing called a social system (in miniature). A way past this impasse has to be found, and in the article From Problem-Solving Paradigm to Co-Ontogenic Drift: How do Learning Narratives Self-Generate? a colleague and I demonstrate how the autopoietic concept of co-ontogenic drift6 can help student groups come to grips with learning from and with each other, and consequently learning from and with other „actors‟ in their environment. In the last section Heidegger‟s ontological phenomenology is discussed using Willis‟s article Ontological Designing to anchor an explanation of phenomenological affordances. Heidegger‟s ontology of equipment is of importance to design students, with the emphasis being on the fact that here we are again looking at how the roles between humans and non-humans can be designed, intentionally or 6 Maturana and Varela (1998:180): when two organisms (two systems of knowing) „meet‟ (we can call this „communicate‟) in the medium in which they exist, they „structurally couple‟ and, because there is some form of mutual involvement, i.e., benefit to both, they „co-drift‟ while coupled in this way, and since ontogeny is the history of an organism‟s development, this co-action is called coontogenic drift, which gives “rise to a new phenomenological domain”. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 111 otherwise. In the companion paper Changing a phenomenal change I portray an ontological phenomenology as a reassembly of the self through a new ethics of negotiation, using Marco Susani‟s visual representations of human communication flows as examples of inter- and intra-personal-object communication networks. The principal cybernetic / systems / constructivist / networked / autopoietic / ontologically phenomenal question I can ask regarding design teaching and learning is the following: how can a design student acquire the (learning) structure that will allow her to deal with all aspects of the complex world she finds herself in? My only answer is that I cannot answer this question directly, because it is up to the individual, working in a (radical and critical) constructivist medium with others, to find individual sive group answers that can serve as a solid enough basis to engender and enable design solutions, and to that end I offer the following circular theories of knowing that can form a hybrid conceptual blend that, for want of a better classification, I call gramma/topology. 4.1 On being Cybernetic and Systemic Cybernetics is a science of prediction, to get straight to the point. Even before the Second World War the complex nature of systems control was felt to be in need of a new language that could act as a medium between scientists from different disciplines. Termed “a no-man‟s land between the established fields” (Wiener, 1982:2), these areas of concern to all the sciences had not seen a universal intellectual approach since Leibniz, with the several and separate sciences each specializing and thus developing an own but exclusive language, i.e., the sciences had become domain-independent, much like Cross at al. argue today for design‟s development (cf. Chapter 3:113). Cybernetics thus came into being as a practical way of dealing with the world using interdisciplinary communication as a medium of interaction, a clear call for theoria to be integrated with praxis. This shift in focus is quite important, since it represents a re-turn to what was deemed important before „modern‟ disciplinary necessity placed cross-boundary communication out of bounds, for the sake of clarity and domain-independence. If I may be allowed a measure of historical and narrative interpretation (aka artistic sive designerly license), Leonardo da Vinci would have dismissed this type of differentiation between theoria and praxis, otherwise he would not have dissected so many bodies of people and animals to establish, at first hand, what was really going on beneath the skin. He wanted to know what the various parts looked like, what they were for, and crucially, having gotten this far and having succeeded in drawing the parts as one would today using CAD to draw parts from all angles and observational points, he went on to study the parts as wholes, which could only be done by visualising how the body would work both in space and in time (movement), by making the parts move in unison with the body, even studying the flow of blood in the heart and the blood vessels. However, in stark contrast to Leonardo‟s version of theoria, which can be taken to mean contemplation in the spirit of (scientific before artistic) inquiry on behalf of the observer, the surgical dissection of bodies was carried out in the spirit of theoria as the illumination of a supreme authority (the original Greek term having taken on a religious colour), not on behalf of the surgeon (observer) performing the actual work, or for the benefit of the medical students who were supposed to learn from the process, but dissection as a form of liturgical theoria, or confirmation of the authority of the medical texts being read by a professor while the surgeon did the work, a text that was taken as more correct than the empirical discoveries being made on the operating table. The main text used was written by Claudius Galenus, or Galen, a Greek physician to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius; Galen was known to have dissected monkeys and pigs. The problem is highlighted by the appearance of the humerus; while the 15th century surgeon described the humerus of the (human) corpse as straight, “the professor stated that it was one of nature‟s jokes to make the bones seem straight when in reality they were curved. Galen‟s assertions were a dogma which could not be criticised, because he, and not nature, was the Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 112 true authority” (Riva, 2010), and yet Galen‟s description of the humerus was that of a pig‟s. The idea of theoria turned theory as the supreme disciplinary authority was rejected by Leonardo, who wanted to gain new knowledge mediated by experiential observation instead of relying solely on established wisdom. It is thus ironic that Galen‟s original contribution to epistemology was swamped by a disciplinary and prescriptive rigidity that ignored the fact that he, like Leonardo, was an undisciplined scholar in the sense of being educated in several disciplines7, and specifically, that Galen, as Leonardo also believed, “later declared that students should „look at the human skeleton with your own eyes‟” (Boylan, 2005). Again directly comparable with Leonardo‟s approach, Galen based his methods of investigation on those of his predecessors, admittedly, but with this difference, he was prepared to add to and correct the knowledge base he started out with, and “Thus Galen began with a problem and a number of observations and sought to make sense of the seeming anomalies via his overarching biomedical principles” (Boylan, 2005). Not only did Leonardo, likewise, emphasize the need for visual descriptions and the capturing of this information in drawings, but he realised the importance of working with and from models as mediators in the investigation process; he advised his peers to make models of the organs they wished to dissect, because “one must reconstructs reality before one can represent it” (Veltman, 1992), thereby deviating significantly enough from the professor / surgeon epistemological pattern to be called a Renaissance constructivist 8 . Additionally, what makes Leonardo‟s intellectual contribution to research so remarkable, with regard to the development of perspective “Leonardo took these studies considerably further by recognizing that perspective in its literal sense was not just looking or looking into but looking through”, a viewpoint on cognition that was later corroborated by Dürer, who used the term Durchsehung, or seeing through, a form of transparency that “became a fundamental dimension of knowledge” (Veltman, 1992). I can personally confirm Leonardo‟s viewpoint of working with and from models of human organs, since my first work experience (1975) as a graphic designer9 (officially termed as medical illustrator) was to don the cap and gown of the operating theatre in order to photograph several standard operations as they took place, making a visual record as best I could of the organs as they were exposed. The main reason for this slightly bizarre procedure was that you can hardly see a thing in there; it all looks roughly the same, messy and red. How do you distinguish between the bits, if you cannot rely 100% on sight alone? Based on my photographs and comparing these to standard medical illustrations, I made new illustrations of what I saw and what was described to me by the doctor-surgeons, or rather, I constructed models of operating procedures and human organs that could serve as knowledge-creating mediating devices for medical students in the lecture hall10. It really is necessary to reconstruct reality before one can represent it, or form our own version or model of reality before we can represent it, even to ourselves. This cognitive understanding of the world (the environment we wish to observe, rather) needs more than direct observation, or mere sight, since we do rely to a great extent on what Turner and Fauconnier (1995) call conceptual integration, or blending of two or more input spaces, some conceptual and others visual: a call, as stated above, for theoria to be integrated with praxis. What Leonardo and Dürer realised was that seeing through the problem space was a seeing with what is there (direct observation in praxis) plus seeing with what is not there (indirect observation turned contemplation, or theoria) – this is the true integration of theory and practice, or knowledge in the 7 Cf. Boylan, 2005, “This pluralistic sensibility influenced the philosophical/scientific method of Galen”. 8 Cf. Chapter 1:3, ftn. 5: this is another example of the combined use of constructionism (focusing on the artifacts) and constructivism (focusing on the learning process). 9 I refer to this experience as the start of my career as an information designer. 10 From this primitive (with hindsight) beginning it is now possible to equip a simulated operating theatre with multiple-task electronic work stations that allow trainee surgeons to practice on high-definition 3-D „patients‟ – the „models‟ have become three dimensional and as „real‟ as makes no greta difference, thanks to modern visualizing techniqies. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 113 head (what we‟re thinking) blended with knowledge in the world (what we‟re seeing) 11 . This fundamental dimension of knowledge is added to our ways of seeing the world, and, in design terms, can be called a cybernetic theory of understanding. Hold on. You claimed that cybernetics is a science of prediction, and in Chapter 3:120-121 you stated your opposition to the results of research being pre-empted by strong (i.e., predictive) theory. To now state that cybernetics can be a theory of understanding for design is a contradiction. That is quite correct, and in 3:120-121 I also stated that the way we „see‟ anything is constitutive of what we think we understand, and hence the results arrived at through the researcher‟s interaction with the problem space is due to a constructivist process. It is for this reason that gramma/topology must be a „weak‟ theory of translation and interpretation that enhances the designer / researcher‟s capability of „designerly knowing‟ instead of a strong theory of prediction and prescription. Design as process and as practice (theoria-into-theory, for practice) demands critical thinking skills plus the ability to handle a systemic inquiry, since the contemporary and wicked problem spaces are not susceptible to a methodical application of theory (adhering to strict disciplinary rules), i.e., the real life situation becomes an opaque problem space that cannot be „read‟ with the help of existing theories from a text book (cf. Chapter 3:90). I started off by stating that cybernetics is a science of prediction, but cybernetics is also a science of purpose, as opposed to a science of causality. The alliance of prediction and purpose can be called design thinking, but prediction and causality cannot. Cybernetics came into being as a result of a need for an interdisciplinary language of communication, thus cybernetics cannot be described as a method for doing anything, and it is not applicable to anything, in the same sense that Latour stated that Actor Network Theory “isn‟t applicable to anything”, being a negative argument because it refuses to “say anything positive on any state of affairs” (Latour, 2005:141). Cybernetics should be seen as a lens, just as a particular language becomes a lens to help individuals focus the world, their total and inclusive environment that they have to deal with. Cybernetics, for design purposes, can be seen as a domaindependant, Mode-2 reality-generating mechanism along Casti‟s (2001:1-2) lines of paradigms to be regained, just as Leonardo did in the face of a strong and authoritative, and unswervingly predictive, theory of knowledge. Design is not, initially, about finding answers or solutions, but about observing the system that needs design intervention, and in this way design becomes primarily an investigative system to redefine the problem space (cf. Chapter 1:5), but design thinking can include a prediction-and-purpose combination because design is a relationship of purpose. Alexander Manu (1999:35) states that “A product is designed for its relationship with the Experience in the context of the Event for the purpose of the Big Idea”, and since the artifact-product is not the design, the „product‟ is seen as the relationship that can be designed into the interactions between user and the event(s) surrounding the physical use of the designed artifact (concrete product), leading to a new relationship between the user and the Big Idea of design, comprising both concrete product and its meaning sive consequences in the world, leading to we design the world and the world designs us. A relationship of purpose, then, presupposes positive feedback loops, which changes the meaning of the term prediction. Norbert Wiener (1982:2) spoke of the no-man‟s land, boundary regions of science as the most important, which correlates with design‟s inbetweenness on the groundless fields of knowledge where it has to reconstruct its very nature, every time a system-of-knowing is investigated. It can be appreciated that, 11 Cf. Norman (1992), “Internal information, „knowledge in the head,‟ is subject to the limits posed by memory and attention. External information, „knowledge in the world,‟ plays important roles in reminding people of the current state of things and of the tasks left to be done. Good design practice, therefore, will provide external aids to memory”. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 114 working on the edges of everything, too much is as bad as too little (as a student of design experiences when asked to deal with either a prescriptive curriculum that leaves no room for mental participation or a laissez-faire attitude to teaching and learning gone mad that offers no help at all). It can further be appreciated that human systems need some measure of control, which, unfortunately, immediately smacks of authoritarian rigidity. The term prediction can thus be used to denote either an absolute control that emanates from an external (to the self) authority, or it can be made to serve the purposes of being human, if we use it as geworfen (Chapter 3:112). To predict becomes to throw (cf. Heidegger‟s thrownness, in the phenomenology section), to project an idea ahead of completion (of the project, of the product, of the experience), and thus prediction becomes proposal, a research term that means this is the type of thing I wish to investigate, given that this and that situation will pertain. Projecting a design idea in this way becomes the prediction of an incomplete framework, a model for thinking-with that can “create [a] free space for reflection and thus avoid making premature characterisations … In this situation, a fluid physical state is preferable to a solid one” (Bonsiepe, 2007:26). Cybernetics and design are thus „sciences‟ of prediction, in the sense of bildung, in the sense of what is yet to come, in the sense of not applicable to anything in the world, at this moment. Granted, cybernetics, or the first concrete manifestation of this type of thinking, was used, i.e., to physically predict the desired outcome of a working anti-aircraft gun, since the development of aircraft was such that the speed at which they travelled made shooting them down virtually impossible, unless one could predict where they would be, at some time and space, in the future, and predict these co-ordinates accurately enough in order to aim the gun at that space where the aircraft was not yet. Physically projecting anti-aircraft bullets at an empty space, in real time, and watching the trajectories of both bullets and aircraft come together in space and time (Wiener, 1082:5) is but one manifestation of cybernetic thinking. To simplify a complex situation, the first outcome of cybernetic thinking was a form of bildung prediction, in fact, a design that served a relationship of purpose. Arturo Rosenblueth (physiology), Norbert Wiener (mathematics) and Julian Bigelow (electrical engineering), three of the core members12 of the Macy Conferences that began c.1942, a discussion group that created what became known as cybernetic thought, are at pains to establish the purposefulness of cybernetics (1943:18-24), and despite the historical position that so-called First-Order Cybernetics has been burdened with, and the quite undeniable fact that a variant of this direction, now known as Second-Order Cybernetics, was felt to be necessary when considering social systems as opposed to mechanical systems, cybernetics as an interdisciplinary language of communication is not about control but about observation, and the results that can be obtained (the knowledge gained) from that observation, using feedback loops to regulate the system itself. Put very simplistically, what emerged in practice are two versions of cybernetics: First-Order Cybernetics that is a study of observed systems, using negative feedback to fully control mechanical systems, and Second-Order Cybernetics for the study of social systems. When the cyberneticists turned their attention to the problems of social systems, adaptations had to made, because it was realised that the focus had to shift from studying an observed system to studying an observing, living, system, and, crucially, that the observer was an integral part of the system being observed. What is important to not forget, is that control in some form is still important (above), with the difference being that now positive feedback loops are used, sourced from the output information of the system itself, and fed back into the input information stream; the idea of fully predictable control adapts and changes to the 12 Cf. The Macy Conference Attendees. Members came from fields as diverse as social science, neuropsyciatry, anthropology, psychology, ecology, medicine, logic, linguistics, biophysics, and even a literary critic. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 115 notion of intrinsic13 regulation, by the system itself, to enable it to move from an existing situation to a desired one (Simon, 2001:111). Rosenblueth et al. (1943:18) explain the purposefulness of cybernetics in a way that corresponds to Manu‟s notion of design as a relationship of purpose, and if we can teach ourselves to „see‟ (perceive, and conceive of) the big idea of any situation (the larger system within which the smaller system of the designed artifact, and our own self-as-design-as-an-observing-system has to function), then “we merely trip the purpose and the reaction follows automatically”, not in a mindless or careless way, but because “The basis of the concept of purpose is the awareness of voluntary activity” (Rosenblueth et al., 1943:18). All observed behaviour can be classed as either purposeless or random behaviour, or it is purposeful, which means that the activity is directed at a goal; if that goal is to be achieved through directed activity, the mechanism to do so is linear and fully controlled, being a pre-conditioned design, but if the goal depends on voluntary human activity in a social system, then the mechanism to do so is non-linear and can only be controlled intrinsically (cf. the discussion of Beer‟s notion of a regulatory principle, below). It is for this reason that I can accept the notion of negative feedback in terms of a social system‟s voluntary activity, even though it sounds contrary to the (simplistically put, above) use, in socio-cybernetics, of positive feedback loops as opposed to mechanistic negative feedback. Design is a relationship of purpose, and the human systems that design has to deal with still need a smidgen of negative feedback, but not in the sense that the voluntary activity will be controlled, making this a nonsense and involuntary, if anything at all, but in the sense of a willing and acceptable intrinsic control, very much in line with how von Foerster (quoted in Waters, 1999) described the idea of the dialogue inherent to cybernetics: it is like an invitation to dance, and von Foerster‟s example of a conversational dance is quite apt, since a true dialogue needs the willing interaction of both sides, and as in a dance, “when we are talking with each other, we … invent what we both wish the other would invent with me” (Waters, 1999). In this respect Glanville (1999) also introduces the concepts of generosity and creativity, and argues that agreement and understanding requires both, but that this would fail “unless we are prepared to look well on what our conversational partner offers us”. This type of intrinsic control, though positive in a metaphysical sense, is negative in a practical sense because in any relationship of purpose each partner has to give up something, willingly, to accommodate the other as part of the new whole, without which generosity and creativity all human activity remains one-sided and purposeless. Behaviour, then, for Rosenblueth et al. (1943:22) is purposeful and subject to the principles of teleology, another pessimistically interpreted term seen to be as bad as the notion of fully controlled negative feedback; teleology has been interpreted as a type of discourse to end all discourses (if we go by its root definitions), fully goal directed and purposeful but containing a directive principle, the goal and the purpose being external to people‟s awareness of voluntary activity and therefore deterministic of their behaviour. For my own part I can only regard this approach as the ultimate in non-feedback for deterministic control, a situation that Rosenblueth et al. (1943:19) calls non-teleological, since behaviour based on non-feedback means the usual signals from the goal that modify the activity of the system are absent, the goal being set and needing no input from the system itself. Their definition of teleology is therefore quite different from the deterministic use of the term, and just as they declare that the basis of the concept of purpose is the awareness of voluntary activity so they assert that teleology must avoid causality and focus on purpose, which leads to voluntary activity, thereby paving the way for all cybernetics to be thought of as Second-Order Cybernetics, despite the fact that teleology is in their view not opposed to determinism, only to non-teleology (meaning, in effect, opposed to non-feedback). It all sounds very contradictory, but “Both teleological and non-teleological 13 My use of the term intrinsic will follow von Foerster‟s (1983:275) constructivist position of responsible invention (as opposed to discovery), a notion “that refutes ordering principles attempting to organize the other by the injunction, „Thou shalt‟, and replace it by the organizational principle, that is, organizing oneself with the injunction „I shall‟” (also cf. Chapter 5:250 onwards). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 116 systems are deterministic when the behaviour considered belongs to the realm where determinism applies” (Rosenblueth et al., 1943:22), a statement that more fully explains the subtitle of Wiener‟s 1948 publication Cybernetics, which reads, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. There is only one form of cybernetics, although its use has split into First-Order and Second-Order, with both being teleological to the degree that the behaviour considered demands it, and deterministic only when the behaviour considered places itself in the realm of determinism, whether that behaviour stems from the animal or the machine. The following text came about through an effort to explain how cybernetic thinking morphs into design thinking, for action, via a better method of decision-making, and to show how the theory of cybernetics could influence and enhance our understanding of a theory of design. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 117 Acknowledgement of text The following (edited) article was published in a special journal issue (Cybernetics and Design), Kybernetes 36(9/10): 1436-1457 (van der Merwe, 2007c) The Magic of Three A cyber prescript, yet to be concluded So, what‟s this magic of three stuff? The most difficult aspect to teaching „design‟ is that it does not exist, yet. To help in the construction of what can be termed „design‟ we have to establish a team of at least three (a cybernetic triad): you (the designer), the user, and… and then we run into trouble, for we cannot talk about the (real) object you call design (not yet, anyway). I believe that cybernetics is in the same conceptual boat, and like Bruno Latour 14 (2005) I would hope that you would not make either design or cybernetics apply to anything. You can‟t be serious … I am being serious. This is a design theory class, where we talk about being human, and how people communicate. But we also have to talk about the third member of the „design team‟. I‟m not interested in practical design … You simply cannot be serious … Why not? What were you looking for? In this class we talk about design … So teach me about design and stop this … this nonsense. I can only agree that it makes no sense to you, now, because I cannot teach you anything, but I could ask you what it is that you want from life. Oh, for heaven‟s sake, is this a philosophy or a design class? If you don‟t want to teach me about design I might as well leave. I did not say that I did not want to teach you, but that I could not „teach‟ you about design, which is not quite the same thing. The only thing I can do is to ask transformational questions, much like Socrates demonstrated to his young friend Meno, who asked, “… but what do you mean by this idea that we don‟t learn anything, and that what we call learning is just remembering?” By way of a demonstration Socrates had Meno call over one of his young slave boys, and after what seemed like a good start to the process, said, “You see, Meno? I‟m not teaching him anything. All I‟m doing is asking questions” (Plato, 2005). You, on the other hand, seem to want me to supply you with some sort of easy formula for practical design, but for you to learn anything you must avoid copying me as the teacher, and for you to learn about a designerly way of thinking and about design innovation you must learn to avoid copying the designs in those books you got from the library. 14 Bruno Latour is one of the best known theorists in Information Systems dealing with Actor Network Theory, and the relationship between what he calls human- and non-human actors (people and designed objects). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 118 Now I know you‟re joking – what other way am I going to learn about design? I heard you saying that nobody starts from scratch, from a blank page, so what on earth am I to do if I can‟t …? If you can‟t do what? Is there nothing else you can do besides simply copy what you see and hear? What if you try copying yourself? Now you‟re really being facetious. I‟m sorry if it sounds that way, but that is where you have to start, so let‟s begin … Introduction That defining moment of recognition, of who and what we are, begins with the admission that we are not alone – if we really want to act as homo sapiens we have to question what it means to be wise and knowledgeable, to be able to judge. Formative moments of recognition enable us to act as sapient beings and knowledgeable selves capable of learning. We make a mistake, however, in thinking we can do so unaided, when pragmatism shows that we learn precisely because we are not alone. There are always the minimum of three elements at work in education, and in any environment that contains people and designed objects: the observer, the observed, and the result of that observation. It is the latter that I called the third member of the „design team‟ (above), an as if member at best, it being a virtual construct, but a result of the observer interacting with the observing system nonetheless. Glanville‟s (1997a) description of the characteristics of Pask‟s Conversation Theory is applicable here, in that the process of learning is described as “a process of conversation about and with Topics”, and the fact that “any one Topic entails at least two others”, a triad that engenders meaning. I see the observer and the observed as acting the roles of two Topics in conversation, which, by their very interaction, engenders the becoming of the third, and virtual, Topic. Design students, it has to be said, find this a problem, since they are expected to find ways of dealing with their individual creative input contextualized by socially communal creative inputs, aka a social stock of knowledge. The first thing that often happens to them is that they fall prey to the dreaded scourge of plagiarism, and although you can teach students the mechanics of technical and legal plagiarism, the question of what that really means, in practice, is not as easily understood by a first year who has no idea of how to deal with a „normal‟ mixture of individual and communal input. Speaking about formative moments of recognition, seemingly based on other peoples‟ work, appears to be nothing short of a ridiculous contradiction in terms. I teach (I should really say I tutor) Design Theory, a third year Industrial Design class that is supposed to be based on, and extend, the previous two years of design history, stretching from the Assyrians to the Alessi‟s of the design world. However, I have never been very good at following rules, especially educational rules. Perhaps because of the fourth year of art history that I attended as a (mature) student, a course that did not deal with just another year of history, but asked questions about the very existence of art objects, I have felt increasingly uncomfortable in teaching the design course as outlined by my predecessor. Students surely have had enough of the factual history of design by the third year, and the need is surely for asking, what on earth do we do with this knowledge? What is it good for? There is only one answer: theory for practice, and immediately I have to qualify this: the focus of my research and my teaching is on theory creation, not on practical application. Coupled to this way of thinking was the notion of introducing, from the first year, principles of design research that would enable students to enhance their communication and presentations skills, in other words, to help them become critical and analytical thinkers. I do not „teach design‟ as such, and I do not teach theory-forpractice that is unproblematically applicable to practical design problems. I teach systemic thinking skills, using elements of contemporary social design problems as vehicles, and I can only do so successfully by adapting cybernetic principles of observing systems to suit a design educational Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 119 environment. That is the only claim I can make, and this work will not attempt to either define the original cybernetic principles, or to justify a definition of practical design work. What it does attempt to do is follow Ken Friedman‟s guidelines for theory construction in design research: Critical thinking and systemic inquiry form the foundation of theory. Research offers us the tools that allow critical thinking and systemic inquiry to bring answers out of the field of action. It is theory and the models that theory provides through which we link what we know to what we do. (Friedman, 2003) This article is thus an attempt at addressing the quite problematic learning situation in any design school where innovation and creativity is highly sought after, but where, at the same time, difficult social constructivist questions must be investigated and answers tried out „on the shop floor‟, as it were. How can a young person understand the formation of an individual and „new‟ (design) identity when the necessary academic and practical design knowledge can only come from someone and somewhere else? It is undoubtedly a question of the requisite combination of the „I‟ and the „other‟ that causes the problem, and that is something that students have to be taught, along with the idea of how anybody can learn anything at all. I have only one answer, and that is the use of systems thinking (you may prefer the term systemic thinking), which, like design, is everything and nothing at the same time, and already and always elsewhere. I will thus weave a story that combines what I see as the viable characteristics of both design and cybernetics as if they were one discipline, because I do not wish to distinguish between the two ways of knowing. Design, like cybernetics, can and must act as an agent for transformation and change. Based on Heidegger‟s notion of a phenomenological ontology in pursuit of uncovering or disclosing the processes of coming-into-being, this systemic and circular mode of investigating human ontological understanding can be compared to Maturana and Varela‟s concept of autopoiesis (auto-production as applied to social systems, cf. below), which I regard as another form of disclosive phenomenological ontology. In this article I will focus on what emancipatory and transformative moments of recognition entail, and how students of design can construct their identities, and that of their discipline, by using cybernetic principles adapted to a design conversation. In my class I require students to construct what amounts to models of design inquiry, based on a model of their personal identity construct. But first, why should systemic thinking be called for in design education? The state of design education The prevailing notion of design (and hence how design is taught) still seems to be based on a linear cause & effect process that relies on logic, rationality and scientific rigour, a very orderly practice that guarantees control and defined outcomes (deterministic teleology). We know that this can result in fixed structures protective of design „truths‟ and hence restrictive of thought patterns, and by concentrating on what is being designed and not reflecting on why these objects are being designed, we offer a design education that still concentrates on styling and form-giving, and a curriculum that does not challenge students, one that makes it too easy to move from logical idea to the logic of the finished form is not conducive to development and innovation and most definitely does not encourage critical thinking skills. “Perhaps design today is a reductionist parody of what should be a truly systemic activity” (Broadbent, 2005). To rectify this situation design education will need to concentrate on the learning process itself, and introduce ways of seeing and knowing the world that can act as filters to help the students un-learn conditioned and uncreative habits, and to further help them create their own learning scaffolding and learning models. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 120 Is the educational landscape really in need of all this? Michael Fielding (2006), a Professor in Educational Innovation (University of Sussex), seems to think so: “ We currently face a significant contemporary crisis, not just of student voice but of compulsory schooling and the social and political contexts that shape it … [we need to] encourage approaches to student voice that take seriously the education of persons, not merely the thin requirements of an overly instrumental and ultimately diminishing schooling … while Bannister et al. (2001) highlight the problems students entering higher education face in terms of self managed learning, since they are not prepared for this at school. Given the increasing scarcity of resources, teachers are expected to do more with less, which inevitably means a greater student/staff ratio. If the aim is to produce self-confident students who can increasingly take responsibility for their own learning styles and processes, then attention needs to be given to this facilitation process from (tutor and content) dependence to independence. With this type of suggested design education in mind, it comes as no surprise that Bruce Nussbaum, a previous editorial page editor for Business Week, has written an article that questions the integrity of many contemporary designers, especially when it comes to a question of (a lack of) sustainability, and he further asks the question, “how do you switch gears from designing for to designing with?” We may not agree with all he has to say, but the following has great resonance with a number of people15: Maybe the object of design is not a finished product … In fact, design has evolved from a simple practice to a powerful methodology for Design Thinking that, I believe, can transform society. By that I mean Design, with a capital D, can move beyond fashion, graphics, products, services into education, transportation, economics and politics. Design can become powerful enough to be an approach to life, a philosophy of life. But it can only do so when Design by Ego ends and Design by Conversation begins. (Nussbaum, 2007) How can any design education succeed in persuading a design student that Design by Conversation not only is design learning, but can become a worthwhile approach to a sustainable life? Again, my only answer is to adopt systemic thinking and adapt cybernetic principles for design usability, since even Gordon Pask called cybernetics “an art, or a philosophy, a way of life” (Beyes, 2005:405). Cooperative voices in conversation Cybernetics and system theory both started out as ways of investigating the complex behaviour of systems, with a view to regulating their organization, with modern cybernetics expanding from a firstorder, deterministic approach based on control and prediction, to a second-order, sociologically applicable analysis of human, hence variable, structures. Systems thinking followed the same path, dividing into a „hard‟ approach that studies observed systems, and a „soft‟ approach that studies living, observing systems, including observers of that system. From the various descriptions of second-order cybernetics and soft systems methodology, it seems the aims and methods are similar enough (Geyer 2000; Heylighen and Joslyn 1999; Heylighen et al. 1999; Warren and Ragsdell 2002), for the purposes of design, to use both as if they were a collective way of constructing “a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools … to make the full patterns [of a complex life] clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively” (Senge, 1990). It follows that, what I simplistically call systems thinking for design, is a “methodology for tackling real-world problems [and] for exploring social reality … the latter is not a „given‟ but is a process in which an ever-changing social world is continuously recreated by its members” (Checkland, 1981). Peter Checkland‟s description of soft systems methodology could have 15 For a response to Nussbaum, see NextD Journal‟s special issue Beautiful Diversion at http://www.nextd.org/02/index.html Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 121 been written for design, and it is no wonder that Susan Szenasy (2003), the editor of Metropolis, calls cybernetics / systems thinking “the very basis of sustainable ethics, aesthetics, and processes” in design. Furthermore, and using language that agrees with both Checkland and design theory, Banathy (1996) sees systems methodology as different from the methodologies usually employed by fully described (and, really, operationally and environmentally closed) disciplines: “In system inquiry … one selects – from a wide range of approaches, methods, and tools that best fit – the type of system, the purpose and nature of the inquiry and the specific problem situation”. In that sense, then, and as a conceptual framework for tackling real-world problems, I use both systems thinking and cybernetics, combined with design thinking, as teaching tools to engender new ways of seeing, much like John Shotter‟s (1994) „practical‟ way of knowing that can „call out‟, not simply responses and reactions, but also a “stance toward our own construction of our own abilities”. In this way design theory can function very much like theories of social structuration in building up a shared stock of knowledge, and, provided it remains useful in everyday reality (theory for practice), this integrated stock of knowledge can be enhanced from many different fields of knowledge, thus, in effect, agreeing with Jonas (2004) who describes design as a groundless field, of necessity sourcing what it needs from many other contextually relevant fields of knowledge (cf. Banathy, above). Consequently, I can only regard both cybernetics and design as tools of perceptual / conceptual investigation, and, for the most part, as one conceptually blended (new) image schema that affords (you, me, any student) the opportunity to cover new ground, and on this „new ground‟ (which I will investigate as a spacetime fitness landscape, below) you can find amazing new constructions not noticeable before. The simplest example I use in class is to take off my glasses – without them (technology to aid „vision‟) I am divorced from much of the information available in my (classroom) environment. I might be „aware‟ of this information, but in such a way that I cannot react to or act on this information in an optimum way. One of the main points I try to make in my constructivist classroom is that “Considering the implications of seeing the world through cybernetic lenses can have a devastating effect on our traditional view of knowledge and the nature of things”, since we have to rethink our certainties about what we can know, about the very nature of existence, and (theory into practice) how we manage to get anything done (Dooley, 1995). By deliberately performing an action (putting on my glasses), after making an informed decision, I restore my „way of seeing‟ (extending my natural abilities through technological innovation) which enables me (literally and figuratively) to engage with the possibilities in the environment and to „see‟ new things. Sad, normal life is lived without „cybernetic lenses,‟ without the aid of some enlightenment, but, given the „technology‟ (any addition to what you think is the total) of cybernetics and design, the „new‟ becomes inevitable. For that reason I will use the term (cybernetics + design) cyberdesign, an expanded groundless field of knowledge that, by making me look differently through (and not just at) the descriptive problem space, removes the (logical) gaps “between one's current state and the goal state” (Ohlsson, quoted in Langley and Jones, 1988). The construction of one’s goal state Boje and Al Arkoubi (2005) see the need to move beyond open systems theory, which they equate with second-order cybernetics, to a version of Bahktin‟s heteroglossia (a term used to denote both the social/multi-voiced and individual use of language, the latter through appropriation), or dialogics (the new third-order cybernetics). One claim that drew my attention is that “dialogism overcomes binary opposition of signifier / signified, text / context, self / other …”, meaning that this is an evolving narrative taking its meaning from those spaces to be found “between bodies (physical, political, social, bodies of ideas, etc.)”. This viewpoint seems to agree with David Bohm‟s version of Dialogue, which stands for an image of a „river of meaning‟ flowing around and through people (Bohm, Factor and Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 122 Garrett, 1999); this is a description of social structuration that engenders the construction of meaning. Using the concept of Dialogue, designers can “explore the individual and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that subtly control their interactions”. No surprises here then, and calling this open systems or second-order cybernetics amounts to the same thing: a democratic and inclusive way of appreciating the situation that you, as designer / manager, have been asked to help transform from the current state to the proposed goal state, although I much prefer Herbert Simon‟s (2001:111) description of design as devising “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”. “The third order cybernetic revolution in system theory brings us in touch with dialogic forces”, Boje and Al Arkoubi (2005) maintain. What they refer to are the language forces of heteroglossia, namely the opposing centrifugal (deviation-expanding) and centripetal (deviation-counter-acting) forces. What I disagree with is that second-order cybernetics can be simplistically equated with an open system that only promotes “deviation-amplification, known as Law of Requisite Variety”, while a first-order cybernetics promotes deviation-counteraction. According to Beer (1979), Ashby‟s Law of Requisite Variety is still poorly understood, a statement proven by the example above, in that Ashby‟s Law contains both variety („deviation‟) „amplification‟ and „counteraction,‟ thereby, by default, giving second-order cybernetics (my interpretation of Stafford Beer‟s work) the same goal as Bahktin‟s heteroglossia (cf. :120, above), and removing the need for a third revolution. Ashby (1956) made it quite clear that not only are the principles of cybernetics applicable to biological systems as well as to mechanical ones, but that the very complexity of human life makes it the ideal system to be investigated by the “peculiar virtue of cybernetics”. Ashby described his Law of Requisite Variety as intuitively obvious, and used the example of a press photographer (regulator) using a camera; if this regulatory system (photographer) wishes to „control‟ (more correctly, regulate) the variety in another system, in this case, say, twenty subjects each requiring different (focal) lens settings, then the means to do so is to increase the regulatory system‟s own variety capacity, and being all too human, the photographer does so by extension – the camera he uses has to be capable of twenty lens settings (in modern day situations this variety amplification is extended even further and taken care of by a software programme in the digital camera). Ashby was of the opinion that cybernetics could appreciably deal with complex systems, and that “the subject of regulation is very wide in its applications, covering … most of the activities … of science and life”. My particular application, used in a social constructivist design classroom, is based on an adaptation of Beer‟s notion of the Muddy Box16 recursive and regulatory principle, as I explain below: Our adaptation has the adjuster (feedback and organizer) and the manager as being one person – the teacher. While the muddy box (classroom + students + questions) produces variety as a matter of course, it is the task of the feedback adjuster (teacher) to manage the system via the feedback loops, both for immediate feedback in real time, and for „delayed feedback‟ in terms of re-planning the input, thereby reducing operational variety, but at the same time the task of the teacher is to not-manage in the sense of being an adjuster organizer, whose task it is to induce organizational variety, adjusting the viability of the box to progress from structured solvable problems to dealing with ill-structured wicked problems. [In this classroom] Schön‟s Law (the least amount of control) has to include – in the light of the above – the notion of the regulatory process of intrinsic control, which “sees to it that Ashby‟s Law is automatically obeyed; therefore there is no loss possible in balancing the variety equations” (Beer, 1979). (Van der Merwe, 2005) 16 A „Muddy Box‟ is halfway between an opaque Black Box that retains all information, and a utopian White Box that is completely transparent; Beer‟s Muddy Box principle equates with Rittel‟s messy and wicked world problems. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 123 Now, there are two notions here that need to be addressed, in design terms. Firstly, there is the cybernetic construction of the Black Box (Glanville, 1997b), a description in opposition to Beer‟s notion of the Muddy Box, and, I believe, Maturana and Varela‟s notion of an autopoietic structure. The only way I can make sense of what is undeniably a difficult matter, namely communication by means of conversation between at least two parties, or cybernetic systems, is to envisage the interface or space between them as a space of emergence, a potential space, that cannot be either black or transparent, but much closer to a muddy or grey colour. Something emerges from a space of hiddenness that yet cannot fully declare itself until appropriated and used, since it is something new consisting of a blend of inputs from the self and the other. My argument is that a Black Box17 cannot function as an interface, unless one is satisfied with only dealing with the old-style design thinking that favours the object above all else. Design thinking in terms of user experience minimizes the role of the object – the computer‟s innards, the console with buttons, the latest phone/camera/networking device – and rather concentrates on the real interface design, namely the use that the person who deals with the hardware/software combination puts that object to. Here we have another triad consisting of self, other, and a space for emergence: the magic of three. The Black Box should not be placed over the signal, even though it is only a metaphorical construct. We are looking in the wrong place; the only reason I used the Muddy Box notion for a classroom is exactly because one can then envisage this construct as outside both the observer and the observed. If you encounter a real Black Box situation it is shown you deliberately, like the fraudulent Enron18 case demonstrated, or you are attempting to „see‟ inside another person‟s mind, which we all know is impossible, hence the difficulty with so-called „ordinary‟ communication. Do not follow the signals to their reception-point, because you cannot truly follow, even with imagination, but, rather, watch the signals come out again, as they must (assuming some form of communication is taking place), changed, but recognisably signals. Again, the selfobserver cannot be sure of an exact interpretation of these changed signals, but that is not quite the point, because in this „interface space‟ is where new meaning is being constructed, by the self (with reference to its original signal sent), in conjunction with the other‟s re-broadcasting of that signal (the other‟s interpretation of the self‟s original signal), and the new emergent meaning: the virtual meaning in the virtual space of becoming between the self and the other. You see, the Muddy Box is, in fact, the interface of design education. I can readily accept each personal construct (each individual autopoietic system) as being a Black Box, even to the self who supposedly inhabits that emptiness. There is nothing there. But out here in the virtual constructs of interfacing, that is where we „are‟, or more correctly, where we are continually becoming. “The interface is observing. Where observing is, in the space between, is where the interface is” (Glanville, 1998), and in my adaptation of cybernetic principles, the Black Box can only be mistakenly constructed “When we assume the interface is „as if‟ it were on the Object of our observing, [and] we give no space to that Object to help form that interface” (Glanville, 1998). If we mistake the interface as if it were synonymous with the Object, then “within first-order cybernetics the observed object is interpreted as a black box that does not disclose its mode of operation” (Glanville, quoted in Beyes, 2005). I rest my case. Which brings me belatedly to the second notion that needs to be addressed in design terms. Glanville (1990) states “that a distinction cannot cleave a space”, but he also states that “The distinction‟s purpose is itself: its own becoming”. In his preface to the second half of Autopoiesis and Cognition, Stafford Beer (1980) wrote, regarding Maturana‟s notion of freedom from the ego, that this forms a natural contradiction of autopoiesis. „It‟ survives, as it must, but what is this it? Self-preservation is the ultimate goal of any being, but this then means that the ego / id cannot be formed in complete isolation 17 If a Black Box were to be a designed object, it would be so complex that no one knows how it functions; if a person, no one knows what makes him or her „tick‟, i.e., they are either uncommunicative by nature or deliberately so. 18 The Enron Corporation in America filed for bankruptcy after its accounting fraud was exposed. Its accounting practices operated as a black box in the sense that no outsider had access to the information being generated inside the black box, hence no investor could predict the downfall of the company. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 124 from that which it depends on – the other. Freedom from it / the ego would mean freedom from a selfcentred interpretation that does not allow dialogue or that does not take others into account. Making distinctions is „making‟ the self; the self‟s (distinction‟s) purpose is itself: its own becoming, and yet it cannot accomplish this without an „external other‟ – a paradox for both cybernetics and design. If we can accept that the self is this very fundamental cybernetic distinction, then the self as it – as distinction - has to „cleave a space‟ for becoming: the triad of self, other, and virtual space where we can „observe‟ our distinctions-in-the-making, as it were, communicating and bartering for meaning. Compare, then, this interactive space, this interface to Glanville‟s (1997b) Black Box construct, and you will see that the observer (which Glanville rightly says includes the designer) cannot either determine the relationship between the input and output signals, nor control the Black Box situation, since the designer is always part of a triad, that magical number three: you (other / user), me (designer / self), and the product, as long as we remember that it is not the product (for itself) that forms the third leg of the triad, but rather the interface design (the virtual entirely not there space) that plays the role of the third member of the triad. And yet “The observer controls the Black Box … [which] equally controls the observer … The control … is circular” (Glanville, 1997b). It is this (controlling) view of cybernetics, I presume, that allow Kenny and Boxer (1990) to come straight to the point and claim that the framework of second-order cybernetics does not allow us the freedom to think and act that is necessary if we (and the problematic of self-reference) are to move beyond its paradoxical circularity. The observer (designer) does not control any box, and all the boxes in the world cannot control the observer, as an autopoietic system: change can only happen as an internal structural event, and not be forced from the outside. The „control‟ that is circular should be equated with everyday organizational management (it is this absolutist view of the term control that I dislike), and the „control‟ in machined systems can retain the original meaning, but „control‟ in human systems needs another term. Let‟s have another look at Beer‟s formulation of the Muddy Box notion: our constructivist classroom (the scene for the Muddy Box construct) has the feedback adjuster and the adjustor organizer as the same person, who also manages everyday occurrences (dealing with real time problems in the real world). In terms of re-planning the classroom input (derived from the signals rebroadcast by the other), this self reduces operational variety (otherwise chaos can result because of too much variety / playfulness / noise, as in too much information), but at the same time the task of this self is to not-manage in the sense of being an adjuster organizer, whose task it is to induce organizational variety, adjusting the viability of The / Space / Box to progress from structured solvable problems to dealing with ill-structured wicked problems. In this classroom the notion of the regulatory process of intrinsic control must hold sway, which “sees to it that Ashby‟s Law is automatically obeyed; therefore there is no loss possible in balancing the variety equations” (Beer, 1979). Replace the term control with regulate, and the original meaning of cybernetics (steersman) shall be closer to the truth of human life than a mechanistic and absolutist view. A steersman denotes a boat; that boat floats, and we can ask, floats on what? You steer from the back, with some „control‟ of course, but that which you float upon (depend upon) has more control in the long run than the self. Design‟s cybernetic boat floats on the shared stock of social knowledge we each can have access to; this substance, as the collective other of design, has more „controlling‟ power than any individual can handle. There is no black box, only as-yet unknown associations and newly possible combinations of variables: these can be regulated and innovated by means of this notion of variety, but still, each self has to struggle with this process, „alone‟ as it were, which can be a frightening thought to a student of design. For that reason I can agree with Kenny and Boxer‟s (1990) statement that the self-referential paradoxes of second-order cybernetics “can generate much anxiety, especially as the observer recognises that there is no solid ground upon which he may stand in order to make definitive pronouncements”, but for the purposes of design education that is exactly what is required. No solid ground, no definitive Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 125 pronouncements. Listen to others, conceptually blend what you know with what you experience, and only then find the ground to stand on. Second-order cybernetics does not and cannot give you the freedom to think and act in this way, but as a thinking tool, as a conceptual instrument, cyberdesign can induce this way of seeing that leads to „solid ground,‟ at least until the next problem comes along. The ambiguity surrounding observing systems begins to dissipate when we realize that SOC [second-order cybernetics] is not so much about an observer as about a self-observer … [which is] the study of his / her interaction with the world, of which they are a part. (Julia, 2000) In that sense Kenny and Boxer‟s anxiety should be read as necessary cognitive dissonance (Duit and Confrey, 1996), a notion similar to what Schön (1987) expects the student (designer) to experience in the “indeterminate zones of practice – uncertainty, situations of confusion and messiness where you don‟t know what the problem is”. You cannot teach design by rote, and neither by „good example‟, for that will only take you so far. The truly cybernetic principle is self-steering, but to get to that point (of departure) you need to unlearn, in the sense of Socrates asking Meno, So by making him [the slave boy] feel baffled … we haven‟t done him any harm, have we? … At any rate, this should have helped him towards discovering the truth. Because now he will be happy to try and find out what he doesn‟t know. (Plato, 2005) In searching for design solutions you should not look at the object but at the process (of design, of which you – the self – is the beginning part). Designers should use a paradoxical way of seeing turned into a way of knowing, and enquire about that which they do not know by looking at that which they do know, only not directly at but through what they know (van der Merwe, 2002). However, what I most disagree with is Kenny and Boxer‟s claim that second-order cybernetics “mistakenly assumes an identity between the observer and the observing process”, leading them to call for a third-order cybernetics to solve this self-referential circularity paradox. Heinz von Foerster (1991) did not say we could not go on to third-order cybernetics, merely that an external-to-second-order cybernetics action would not create anything new. By immersing yourself in the creative circularity of second-order cybernetics “One has stepped into the domain of concepts that apply to themselves”, a cybernetic endorsement of autopoiesis and consequential self-discovery. The space of discovery (cf. spacetime fitness landscape in Chapter 5) that is created by cyberdesign thinking relies on observers (designers) being able to, ontologically, re-design, as it were, their new identities, and consequently that of their discipline, because change in an autopoietic system is only possible as a renewal of the internal structural dimension/s of the system, while this very change / transformation / evolution is only possible because of something external to the system itself (van der Merwe, 2005), this possibility of an „identity‟ / identification between the observer, the observing process, and the (virtual + real) environment. The hidden order that this scenario presumes is acknowledged by Scott (1996) in quoting the work of Gotthard Günther (1972): “Cybernetics … will only attain its true stature if it recognises itself as the science that reaches out for that which is hidden”, and Scott‟s rephrasing of Günther‟s First Law as: “There is an exchange relation between knowing and being” strengthens my argument that the creation of an own identity as well as the identity / ontology of a design discipline is exactly this: the relationship between Heidegger‟s Dasein (everyday man) and Being (what we can become) is the same relationship between the design process (inclusive of the observer) and an evolutionary ontology-in-themaking. The „space‟ of discovery corresponds to the idea of „place‟ (mental as well as physical space) which Heidegger (1969) reminds us used to have the same meaning as the word end (still used today, Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 126 i.e. Forster‟s novel Howards End, and one of farmer Brown‟s fields called Bottom‟s End), and this correspondence has the sense of a continuous movement. Consider your own situation: when anything (normally) ends, it means it is finished, but you (the self) cannot end your coming-into-being in this way, you can only find your self in a space or place, from which to move on, again. “Self-reference (or better, self-referring) constitutes not so much an end – an accomplishment to be formalized or simulated – as a beginning” (Julia, 2000). If an ending constitutes a beginning, and we can see that end thus connotes place (space from which to begin) it can be appreciated that convergence leads to divergence, echoed in Bohm and Peat's (1989) notion of enfoldment and unfoldment, or implicate and explicate order. They maintain that there is no separation between the two concepts of order that would have any lasting meaning, thus what is implicit in the enfolded convergence of abstracted order is available and explicit in the unfolded divergence of „natural‟ order - or 'reality' as we remember it (van der Merwe, 2000). What is implicit in the „end‟ of anything is the explicit possibility of a new beginning, a moving from place to place, moving, continuously, from Dasein to Being, from now to then, with no separation that should make any difference. Not only is there an exchange relation between your (now) old self and your (then) new self, but this same exchange relation between knowing and being „moves‟ you to re-construct / re-construe the fitness landscape of this space. Relating and exchanging What we understand and what we ultimately „see‟ depends on what we are prepared to exchange (give something to get something else), using the social spacetime landscape. It is here that the self creates fundamental cybernetic distinctions, – where the self can „cleave a space‟ for becoming. It is here that the triad of self, other, and virtual space communicates and barters for meaning. However, this is still a social and virtual construct, an entirely not there space, and Scott (1996) reminds us of Günther‟s notion of cybernetics as a science that needs to make contact with that which is hidden, or as yet unseen. To Heidegger (in Dreyfus, 1991:270), the concept of truth was associated with the Greek term aletheia, equating truth with unforgetting, and when one unforgets, something is brought forth from a space of hiddenness, thereby equating truth with discovery (i.e., self-discovery, or self-construction, the antithesis of an objective „discovery‟ of pre-existing phenomena19). In that sense the truth of our daily phenomenal encounters can be discovered anew, every day: it simply means that the possibility of a learning interpretation-of-disclosure is available to anyone, and as design teachers we must bring this to the attention of students. Yet Scott (2000) questions the “constructivist epistemologies of secondorder cybernetics” (quoting von Foerster, 1982) by focusing on Stewart‟s call for a third domain, that of „observer valued imparities,‟ or “how observers construe themselves as observers” (quoting Kenny and Boxer, 1992). Again quoting Günther, Scott emphasizes that there is an exchange relation between epistemology and ontology, and that the existing cybernetics worldview is inadequate to deal with these problems. If we can imagine the fitness landscape of spacetime and its fitness peaks as these observer valued imparities, then there is no question that second-order cybernetics can deal with these problems of complexity, and that there is no need for another outside viewpoint, because there is no „out there‟. As Maturana and Varela (1980) state, a description of absolute („outside‟) reality is impossible, because that would imply the observer is capable of describing an interaction with this outside reality, and the facts are that the image we would receive from this description would be mediated by the autopoietic nature of the observer‟s system, making it not an accurate and absolute description of „out there.‟ How observers construe themselves as observers is determined by the self-conscious and self-observing 19 All pre-existing phenomena (rocks, birds, trees), these are the stuff of thought that lead me ever onward towards my own developing thought patterns. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 127 behaviour of the observer, and this cognitive reality is relative to the observer (Maturana and Varela, 1980). Yes, there is an exchange relation between „out there‟ and „in here‟ – as long as you realise that neither exists as objective realities, but are virtual constructs. Any „out there‟ will be a construct of your individual autopoietic system created by uncovering a space of hiddenness, in Heidegger‟s sense. “Elements are elements only for the system that employs them as units and they are such only through this system”, declared Luhmann (1995), but in the domain of epistemology, even if this were true, you will not find any common ground with any other „out there‟ (Luhmann, 1995). Observers inevitable create „imparities‟ but only in relation to someone else‟s observations. Biologically speaking, there is no modernist metanarrative (third-order cybernetics) to neatly deal with problematic constructivist epistemologies, only postmodernist multinarratives that have to be dealt with via a completely different view of the world and of culture. Perhaps that is what Bateson (2000) had in mind when he suggested (1972) “that an entirely new epistemology must come out of cybernetics and system theory, involving a new understanding of mind, self, human relationship, and power”. I do not pretend to have a definitive answer, but am convinced that a form of autopoietic cyberdesign can prompt, at least, some sense of what it means to be a truly observant system among other living systems. It is here that we encounter multiple realities, and yet multiple „out there‟ perspectives can be dealt with through the notion of autopoiesis, a truly cybernetic approach to human understanding, because, as Bateson (2000) believes, as societies we form complex cybernetic networks, and that every “human body is a complex, cybernetically integrated system”. Maturana and Varela, (1980) “claim that the notion of autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to characterize the organizations of living systems”. Life in the form of human beings is autopoietic, which means that autoproduction takes place: we reproduce ourselves as ongoing and constantly evolving products – we are at the same time the product and the producer (Dimitrov and Ebsary 1997; Mariotti 1996). Maturana and Varela introduced the idea of autopoiesis as a form of system organization where the system as a whole produces and replaces its own components in an ongoing structural coupling with the surrounding environment (Dimitrov 1998), a conscious interaction with the environment, while the changes sought by a living system are only possible in its internal structure. This makes an autopoietic system both open and closed at the same time, with a unique boundary that both suspends and renews the system‟s relationship with its environment (Dimitrov 1998; Maula 2000:158). Heidegger (1969) called cybernetics the new fundamental science that corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being. For it is the theory of the steering of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor. Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news. In terms of design education this is news, for the system (student), about its environment (the integrated cybernetic networks), and seeing that we can perceive only differences, when Bateson (2000) says that information equates with news of difference, we can argue that living systems depends on the exchange of differences. Alienating everybody Luhmann (1995), in his description of what amounts to an exchange of news (information), warns that “every observation must hold to difference schemata” or, to put it a different way, students of Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 128 cyberdesign must learn to dissociate themselves, from themselves, a form of necessary self-alienation. Geyer (1994) believes that a certain degree of alienation in today‟s complex society is inevitable, but also that the relationship between alienation and participation is not that of simple opposites. Maturana and Varela (1980:xvi) turn the question "How does the organism obtain information about its environment?" into "How does it happen that the organism has the structure that permits it to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists?" Dissociation, or alienation, from so-called reality can, through a fitness landscape of one‟s own desire, uncover what real participation should mean, and reveal the relationship between the two. Teachers of design should follow Maturana & Varela‟s method of changing semantic questions into structural ones, and, instead of asking, How does a student obtain information about design, they should ask, How could students acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment? Cyberdesign is all about structure, and the structure (of understanding) that forms the spacetime landscape corresponds to the idea of „place‟ (above), an „end‟ to the old self and the acquiring of the new structure. Luhmann (1995) puts it very well in positing a structural relationship between the I and its world as congruent but endless at the same time: you can find the new structure you need in this spacetime landscape, but there are no limits and no boundaries. The circularity paradox of an observer‟s self-referential moment of recognition is precisely what is necessary in today‟s world of multi-level complexity. The other I that Luhmann (1995) says is required by reflection – translated by me as the other I that can deal with the news of difference, news of alienation – is a you (“another I of the same type”) that prevents any „ontological self-fixation‟. Commenting on the (then) new trend in university education of regarding students as products fashioned by the institution to better serve industry, Blacker (1993) steers away from this modern „cult of efficiency‟ and focuses instead on the intrinsic value of education itself. In defending what he calls a somewhat old-fashioned direction, he bases his reasoning on Gadamer‟s appropriation of the interpretive tradition of hermeneutical exegesis, which, in design educational terms, I would translate as the explanation that teaches. In line with his stance against the „narrowly utilitarian‟ view of education, Blacker supports Gadamer‟s claim that education uses us, and furthermore, that “education as Bildung eludes us when we obtrude too severely on its proper sphere”. If we wish to follow Heidegger into his landscape of Dasein‟s possibilities and prevent Luhmann‟s ontological self-fixation, we cannot but agree with Gadamer‟s positioning of education as this worldedness within which Dasein can find what it needs to find, but only if it surrenders – more properly, offers itself up – to this potential worldin-waiting, thereby allowing „education to use us‟. Heidegger (1962) states “that the entity which in every case we are, is ontologically that which is farthest”, meaning, in effect, that we will never fully attain this (doubtful) goal of irretrievably becoming, should, indeed, not want to finally end this quest for Being. A cyber postscript, still not concluded So, what‟s this magic of three stuff, again? I could give the frivolous answer: you, me and baby make three, and hope you see that it is anything but a joke. Remember we said that the most difficult aspect to teaching design is that it does not exist, yet, until you and the user (your other-self or other-designer, however you might wish to describe it to yourself) communicate-into-being the real essence of design‟s purpose. What on earth are you talking about? I can see the design right there … That object you refer to is not design proper, but the outer styling / giving of form that engenders the experience. I believe that cybernetics is in the same conceptual boat, and like Bruno Latour (2005), I Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 129 would hope that you would not make either design or cybernetics apply to anything concrete. Let me remind you, firstly, that Latour treats human actors and designed objects (as non-human actors) as equal partners in the communication event, and secondly, that Actor Network Theory focuses on the interface created by this communication event. Even when dealing with designed objects directly we should look beyond their physicality and realise the third and important member of the cyberdesign triad is the interactive space wherein the new meaning can be found. Even when dealing with physical objects they only represent the designer‟s understanding of the effects of designed objects on the user, and so we have roughly the same triadic formula: you, me and the new baby, the emergent solution / answer / understanding. You as the user of an object and / or system, me as the designer, represented by my designed object / designed system, and the third, most important cyberdesign element: a space for possibility … You can‟t be serious … Why not? What were you looking for? In this class we talk about design … So teach me about design and stop this … this nowhere nonsense. You do remember that I stated that I cannot teach you anything, but I could only ask you what it is that you want from life, as a designer. I also said that in this design theory class I require you to construct what amounts to models of design inquiry, based on a model of your personal identity construct … What?? This is just getting worse …. Hold on. Richard Boland and Kalle Lyytinen, two Information Systems researchers at Case Western University, has made out a case for using identity, process and narrative as a basis for a renewal in their discipline, since disciplinary questions “are fundamentally misdirected because they ask about the things that should be part of our identity rather than the process through which we should construct it” (Boland and Lyytinen, 2004). These two researchers, as designers of themselves and their discipline, believe that this new way of understanding “leads to a questioning of the structurational processes in which researchers are, at the same time, both representing the socio-technical world (it is our medium) and shaping it through our knowledge generation (it is our outcome)”. Oh, for heaven‟s sake, is this a philosophy or a design class? If you don‟t want to teach me about design I might as well leave. You‟ve already said that. I did not say that I did not want to teach you, but that I could not „teach‟ you about design the way you seem to expect. Design understanding is not copying the other, although what you come to understand about yourself depends very much on this other of the self … Now you‟re just contradicting yourself – what other way am I going to learn about design? I am very much afraid that the only answer I have is that you should you try copying your (new) self, through a questioning of your own structurational processes. Now you‟re really being facetious. I‟m sorry if it still sounds that way, but that is the only place you can start, so let‟s go back to the beginning … Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 130 Reinjection There are some students who grasp quite quickly what I‟m talking about when I begin my discussion of design by denying things, e.g., introducing a group of Industrial Design second years to what they will be experiencing with me in their 3rd year, I give them a quick lecture on systems thinking, but, having overheard one student saying It‟s been real, I take the opportunity to make it clear that this remark will not do in my class, that nothing is real and everything is constructed. That design is not what you are looking at (holding up one of their cell phones as example) but that design is always elsewhere; that what is absent is very often more important than what is present; that this type of designerly negation simply isn‟t negative, but the positive stuff of thought. It‟s simple, really, because what other design students lack is what I taught my graphic design students in their foundational year – which isn‟t true anyway, because I didn‟t teach any „graphic design‟ students in the first year but all the students of the dedicated first year foundation course irrespective of the design or art subject they wished to specialise in during their second year. What I taught was graphic resonance or design thinking, with the focus on communication, or old-fashioned story telling, using such visual media as any graphic designer would have to deal with. The result was that we more often than not concentrated on what wasn‟t there: the white space between letters, aka the negative spaces that act as positives (especially if you get it wrong), as well as the „white‟ spaces between elements in any composition, aka the background, which too many designers treat as if this is a negative (i.e., not that important, or as important as the foreground), until a gestalt switch proves them wrong, because you cannot control the way the viewer will interpret your message. The first and foremost thing to deny in any design process is your own self, since what you think you know merely gets in the way most of the time, and you simply cannot listen to the one you are supposed to design for, there being no conversation or dialogue possible between designer and user if a pre-judged position has already been taken, even if this pre-judgment or foreknowledge stems from legitimate and shared knowledge base. Every design situation is different, and every conversation has to be treated as if you don‟t know how to dance, and therefore cannot know how to speak to your dance partner. Which reminds me of a denial I am most fond of, e.g., that words simply do not mean what you just thought they meant, so be careful, and make sure that your listener will understand, because there is no such thing as a designer. Just as you do not really understand what the word speak really means, you do not understand what listen means, otherwise you would have asked me to explain what it means, pointing to another denial I hand out quite early on – never merely accept what I say as gospel, but query everything by „asking‟ another source and checking the source that I represent. Never accept anything at face value, especially words such as conversation, speak, listen, understand, and never accept that you finally know enough. When I begin to tell the students about this thing called cybernetics which includes, as a most important cyberdesign element, a space for possibility, I am trying to tell them about something that does not exist, yet. I am trying to teach them something I cannot show them, that they cannot read about in a text book, and then, worst of all, I try to convince them that I cannot teach them anything at all. As I said, there are some students who grasp this quite quickly, but others who feel threatened and become angry at my audacity in expecting them to think for themselves without teacher acting as pilot. What I am leading up to, eventually, is the notion of intrinsic control, that the space for possibility is their space and that I cannot help them „see‟ or construct this space, unless I „play at‟ being the user, the other in the cybernetic conversational dance of negotiation. One comment that I could have used in the article, as part of the student voice, is I thought this was a design class, and now we have to learn how to dance? Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 131 I used the term a defining moment of recognition, because everything hinges on that phase transition between the old and the new space of understanding, when the student suddenly finds herself wearing new lenses, and everything is different, when she is dancing with this invisible partner, this as if member of Pask‟s Topic trio in a dance of infinite entailments that immediately negate themselves in appearing, and it is as if each dance invents itself but also renews itself, and uses the humans to do so, in the same as if sense that Gadamer claimed that education uses us (quoted in Blacker, 1993). The most difficult thing about design and cybernetic thinking is that the moment of recognition only comes when the observer sees herself observing the observed, and recognises her old self among the observed; part of systemic thinking skills is to experience this phase transition, which is the foundation of a theory of design (Friedman, 2003), a new hybrid theory that acts as a change agent, principally on the knower, making of gramma/topology the ultimate positive feedback loop, and more, granting gramma/topology the presence of circumambience, by letting the knower be surrounded by this new hybrid like a living system environment. A combination of Michael Fielding and Bruce Nussbaum‟s words tell us that design students face an increasing problem, and that design itself, and therefore also design education, cannot be offered as a finished product, that it is not a product on the open market at all, as the new managerialism would have us believe, but that we need to go back to the basics of university education, which in Pask‟s words is to teach a philosophy, a way of living. Corresponding to this observation are the views of Senge and Checkland, which condense into a combined approach to systems thinking and cybernetics, a sociocybernetics that offers a set of conceptual frameworks (the user adjusting and adapting) to help tackle real-world problems, enough reason for me to use cyberdesign as a conceptually blended (new) image schema, a tool of and for perceptual / conceptual investigation, the change agent that sparks a revelation of new ground to explore, as if. This allows the design student to construct her own goal state, to construct her own purposefulness, before she tackles the wicked real-world problems of others, and has to find a „purposefulness‟ something in their situation, a vantage point she will find impossible without cybernetic insight, when someone else‟s existing situation has to be changed into their preferred situation. Ashby made it clear that cybernetic thought was not only a peculiar virtue, and quite intuitively obvious (to those students who are willing to let go their pre-judgments of knowing), but that this way of seeing the world becomes an extension of the biological mechanism we call life, and the idea of extensions expand to include our socio-technical devices, allowing us to connect in a far-reaching manner, to network with as much information as we can handle, to hear and see from afar, to communicate with others as if in person, and even to be intuitively in contact with something that simply isn‟t there in reality, through haptics research, e.g., medical procedures that allow the surgeon to „ignore‟ the mediation of the machine, because he can „feel‟ and „see‟ what he is doing, at a remove. Ashby was confident that cybernetics could deal with all manner of life‟s complexities, even the ones he could not quite have foreseen, and that the notion of regulation (cf. control and communication in the animal and the machine) was so extensive in its application that the idea of requisite variety could be made to embrace all of artificial and natural activity. My adaptation of Ashby‟s approach (with Beer‟s mediating input) is thus to focus on intrinsic control, which, on a personal and biological level works as well as an autopoietic system can, and on a social level works well because this approach dances with the other, both constructively critical and ethically caring. For this approach to life to work, we have to understand how black boxes work, because, unfortunately, and paradoxically, we need to create a certain amount of, and certain level of, black box type situations, and hence, doubly unfortunately, black box devices. For Wiener (1982:xi, ftn. 1), both black and white box terms were regarded as expedient terms not to be taken literally, even when the black box represented a real situation, because, reminiscent of the later Latour, the object is simply another Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 132 actor in the network of relations between inputs and outputs. A black box can be something designed (and I presume this applies to designed artifacts as much as designed systems), as Wiener stated, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed. A white box, however, seems to be quite similar, but with this very important difference, that the designers “have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation” (Wiener, 1982:xi, ftn. 1). How do you explain to a design student that a white box is a distinct possibility for socio-cybernetics, but at the same time a complete illusion, since for this white box to be effective it has to have our compliance? That the real world deals more often than not with Stafford Beer‟s Muddy Boxes, a cross between a black, opaque box (random and hidden behaviour) and a white box, capable of being fully controlled? I can only solve this dilemma by suggesting to the students that the designed artifact (even though it can be made to serve the purpose of a black or white box) is not the real interface, and therefore not the real focus of socio-technical observation. The Muddy Box, as a learning environment, is the interface of design education, depending on the willing participation of the actors in the system. Inside this muddle of real-life complexity, I tried to make sense of the making of a distinction that cannot cleave a space (Glanville, 1990), to which I respond with, , which symbol-use I had better explain. It is derived from Spencer Brown‟s symbol system, and relates to the making of distinctions, and, as I write in Chapter 6:304, Luhmann (2002:190) says, Observation is the use of a distinction to designate one and not the other side. To draw a distinction is to mark a border, with the consequence that one can reach one side from the other only by crossing the border. Spencer Brown calls this „form‟. Instead of using a full circle to denote the boundary between self and world, Spencer Brown (Robertson, 2000) used the symbol distinction gives us A and from this we extrapolate that by placing the self [A] within this which means, because we made this distinction, the self [A] now implies the [Not-A] self, which is symbolised by placing a minus mark over the A. I think we do need to reserve the right to adapt the most basic generative memes that can be sourced from a study of cybernetics, and the making of distinctions is what humans do best by dint of their nature as cognitive beings, and, however difficult it may be to help a student towards this space of seeing and being, I have to try, and the only stuff for thought that I can pass on is my own adaptations of what I find. In this sense I am quite likely doing Ranulph Glanville a disservice by claiming that he cannot state “that a distinction cannot cleave a space”, but a roving miner of cognitive sparks does not linger to ask if this is real, or if this that I am taking away with me is true to the original (cf. the argument in Chapter 5, based on Actor Network Theory and the migration of the aura of the original). My brain, filled with its inclusive mixture of hybrid information and especially its Heidegger-fuelled dispositional space, will not wait, and immediately tells me that when you make a distinction you are „cleaving‟ a space for something else, which just happen to be the new self in its new environment. When you make a distinction, you create , which means the distinction drawn around [A] implies [Not A], and the space that [Not A] occupies is the space that [A] has to morph into: the very act of cognition equals the making of distinctions, equals the opening up of a new space of possibility, at a price. This can only be done if the (old) self can manage both the amplification and the reduction of requisite variety, in order first of all to „see‟ the (new) self in [Not A], and then to be able to project the not-yet new self into that opened up space of possibility. For this quite personal and human reason I Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 133 stated (cf. 128-129, above) that the term prediction can be used to denote either an absolute control that emanates from an external (to the self) authority, or it can be made to serve the purposes of being human, if we use it as geworfen. To predict equals Heidegger‟s (1962:185) thrownness, to project an idea ahead of completion (of the project, of the product, which is in this case the new self), and thus prediction becomes proposal. To cleave a distinction is to propose a new self, a new understanding of and with the world, but, this can only be accomplished if and while the product and purpose of the self is incomplete and not-yet, while Dasein is still reaching towards Being, and the knowing-self remains an unfinished sketch in Aristotle‟s terms (discussed in Chapter 5 as the argument to first principles). Having just written the above, I find myself, for the second time, in agreement with Kenny and Boxer‟s (1990) view that the self-referential paradoxes of second-order cybernetics “can generate much anxiety, especially as the observer recognises that there is no solid ground upon which he may stand in order to make definitive pronouncements”. I acknowledged in the article that each student of design has to struggle into the unknown future „alone‟, on a metaphysical level at least, despite the very real support from everyday group discussions, and from whichever angle I approach this issue the fact remains, when you cleave a space, as it were, you have no guarantee that this is the right decision, because we are dealing with two questions: [1] am I making the right decisions for myself, and [2] am I making the right decisions, as a designer, on behalf of the users? Of course this sounds wrong, and a designer does not (should not) make decisions on behalf of others without inviting them into the decision-making process, yet when you „cleave a space‟ it is the individual who does that (internally and tacitly). Here I am already touching on a discussion in Chapter 5:223, where I write: Theory-as-information-as-presence helps you realise that, as I wrote in the Prologue (:ii), the two questions that gramma/topology is concerned with (who are you? and, what is a theory?) are so intertwined that any answer you arrive at still leaves you undecided as to whether you answered the first or the second question, and enlightenment comes when realising that it is no threat to the development of the self that you answered both at the same time, and that our new self is dependent on (information that can be had from, communication with) mere objects. Similarly, when I am „cleaving a space‟ and certain decisions have to be made as to the design of the „new self‟, as a designer, I do so alone sive not-alone (I do so as [A] = [Not-A]), and the „answer‟ to the two questions [1] am I making the right decisions for myself, and [2] am I making the right decisions, as a designer, on behalf of the users? is that they are in fact one question, in the same sense that asking who are you? and, what is a theory? cannot be „answered separately‟ because the two are so intertwined. I know when I am making the „right‟ decision for „myself‟ if the form of that new „myself‟ also depends on the well-being of the others that helped design this new self. Seen against this background, then, when you cybernetically project into the future on behalf of the user you can more easily and clearly construct the (more) solid socio-technical ground you need, because „the product‟ is a real world product that has to work in the socio-cultural system of the users, but when you do the designing on your own behalf, „the product‟ is not a product, not an artifact, because it is your own new self (your new, co-designed „self‟ sourced from [Not-A]), and that is very difficult indeed, especially for a student. And yet, I believe that „the personal‟ has to be achieved first before the same can be done for the other, for the users, one of the reasons I wrote (above) that a cyberdesign approach allows the design student to construct her own goal state, to construct her own purposefulness, before she tackles the wicked real-world problems of others. The article next dealt with the fitness landscape of spacetime, which, to all intents and purposes, is the space being cleft in our everyday world, to reveal something else beyond what we know now, but we Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 134 have to brave a phase transition to derive any benefit from this move, and I am convinced that everyone can recognise a phase transition when it appears or is made possible, even though they may not have the words to describe what they feel. This is nothing out of the ordinary, but it does conform to Kenny and Boxer‟s notion of anxiety being generated by a new future, and it does correlate with Günther‟s exchange relation between knowing and being, which can lead to an ontology-in-the-making, a process never without some anxiety or doubt. The fact is, when recognising the virtual world we can surround ourselves with, and if we‟re honest, that we do surround ourselves with, then we can start to see the impact that our own decisions-for-action can have on the lives and ontologies-in-the-making of other people, for, as Kauffman states, you can see the spacetime patch procedures reacting to and acting on each other. In this new spacetime landscape, that I cannot help but see as Heidegger‟s open place of disclosedness, the exchange relation takes effect, and [A] morphs into [Not A] when the distinction is blurred to such an extent that it makes no sense to speak of anything external to the moment of becoming. I wrote that, given that we follow Heidegger in seeing cybernetics as an exchange of news, in terms of design education this exchange of news is, for the system (student), news about its environment (the integrated cybernetic networks), and seeing that we can perceive only differences (seeing that [A] can only perceive [Not A]), when Bateson (2000) says that information equates with news of difference, we can argue that living systems depends on the exchange of differences, i.e., we depend for our ontological self on news-as-information of the difference that makes a difference, which we find in the spacetime landscape (more fully discussed in Chapter 5). Cybernetics as a discourse, as a lens, as a way of seeing the world differently by opening up a space of disclosedness in Heidegger‟s terms, this thing20 called cybernetics is one of the nurturing mediums that design finds indispensable, that I now find indispensable to my design thinking. Thinking back to Chapter 2 and the argument that young students find their identity, in part, using the new technologies available to them, we may say that cyberdesign can, for our design students, become, if not an antidote to the prevailing persuasiveness of digital media, then at least another and very important window onto another form of reality and a different way of being, as the work of Boland and Lyytinen (2004) attest to. As I interpret their work, they are researchers who have made out a case for using identity, process and narrative as a basis for a renewal in their discipline (Information Systems), and through this process they become designers of themselves and their discipline, since this new way of understanding “leads to a questioning of the structurational processes in which researchers are, at the same time, both representing the socio-technical world (it is our medium) and shaping it through our knowledge generation (it is our outcome)”. If we believe with Pask (above) that cybernetics is an artful (and one may add, a mindful) way of life, and agree with Heidegger (1969) that cybernetics can be regarded as a fundamental aid to the purpose of human agents as acting social beings, then its efficacy can be in no doubt when it comes to the student‟s defining moment of recognition, when each individual has to decide to take the next step towards a phase transition or not. We next look at Systems Theory in the form of General System Theory and Radical Social Constructivism, to see how questioning the structurational processes may help design education. 20 Cf. Chapter 3:104; a thing can be associated with place (i.e., also with space), making of theory things an open space of interpretation and revision. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 4.1.1 135 On being an open user of systems In a rather shocking development, to those who are ignorant of or who ignore history 21 and refuse to credit the lessons to be learned from the past, the reasoning behind General System Theory (GST) was both a design reason and one that has more than a whiff of evolutionary theory in the form of autopoiesis. Reminiscent of Margolin‟s (2002:119) definition of how we design the artificial world, Locker (2006:297-298) states, “In the most general sense systems are designs set apart from a surrounding environment”, and once realising the artificial or real border between the environment and the systems we create, we also have to admit into discussion that “systems, to a certain degree, constitute self-contained and self-referential entities”. What was shocking and still remains so to some, is that GST became critical towards the belief in universal truths, and hence declared itself to be an interdisciplinary approach, and instead, through Ludwig von Bertalanffy recognised the concept of reality as originating from distinguishable systems as opposed to having an a priori existence (Locker, 2006:297). Bertalanffy (2008:109) describes GST as “applicable to all sciences concerned with systems”, much as I would describe cybernetics as concerned with all methods of investigation concerned with circularity, and then come to the conclusion that all systems, except closed mechanical ones, are concerned with the circular interconnectivity induced by feedback, a communicative exchange of necessity. Admitting that the mechanistic principle does not work for many disciplines, Bertalanffy (2008:110-112) concludes that the biological sciences, and much more so the social sciences, are too complex for narrow and precise formulae, and that as a consequence GST must expand the scope of its investigation in the same way that Findeli (2001:11) warned designers to “open up the scope of inquiry … and push back the boundaries of our system in order to include other important aspects of the world in which design is practiced” (cf. Chapter 1:8). “General Systems Theory should be, methodically, an important means of controlling and instigating the transfer of principles from one field to another” (Bertalanffy, 2008:112); in design research we need to push back the boundaries of investigation, in practice systematically, and in theory systemically, so that our scope of inquiry, our legal and ethical phishing net is cast as wide as possible, and part of this simultaneous process of uncovering and allowing-to-be-revealed, called preunderstanding, is this means of controlling and instigating the transfer of knowing principles from one field to another, or, rather more complex, from one multiple field of knowing to another multiple field of knowing, there to serve as a bridge between the two larger systems. No single or unproblematical transfer is possible, just as no model of knowing can be used successful in two separate systems, which highlights the necessity of adaptation and adjustment (cf. Chapter 1:16). Teaching and learning in design takes on the meaning of as we design the world and the world designs us, and the first and most difficult step is to give up some measure of control and adjusting to an other discourse besides your own; the second step is appropriation, when the new discourse is adapted to your specific and individual way of looking at the world, and in this reciprocal process we design the discourse and the discourse designs us, in this simultaneous and reciprocal process we uncover and allow what is there to be revealed by appropriating this thing called gramma/topology, not a theory in the normal sense but a means of allowing transference of ways of seeing and knowing from one domain to another. What is further of interest to design thinking is the development that took place in the scientific mindset from exclusively Mode 1 knowledge production to contextualizing knowledge as a Mode-2 production (cf. Chapter3:107), so much so that Bertalanffy (2008:112-113) can typify GST as “a new scientific doctrine of „wholeness‟” but without what he calls the vague and mystical tendencies attached to some of the terms due to misuse, e.g., „system‟, „gestalt‟, „interaction‟, etc., and instead 21 Cf. Chapter 1:18; Vico was “the first true constructivist” (Von Glasersfeld, 1984:17), “but it might be good to remember that there are constructivist suggestions as early as the Pre-Socratics” (Von Galsersfeld, 2008a). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 136 proposes a number of concepts that disclose the formal character and conditions of the systems under investigation. One such concept is the difference between open and closed systems, and here Bertalanffy in fact touches on a facet of complexity theory, in drawing attention to the organization of a (e.g., cellular) system that may appear inactive or stable from a larger point of view, but that is, on quite another level, continuously changing by simultaneously destroying and constructing material successfully, because feedback loops are in play to allow the necessary (no more, no less, i.e., the viable amount) importation of new building materials as the existing ones are consumed; this characteristic of systems, this organization, is applicable from the lowest level to the highest, from the cell to the universe, as a whole systems requirement. The very important point to remember is that feedback is the definitive difference between open (and living) systems, as described above, whether these be biological cells (natural systems) or corporate organizations (artificial systems), and closed systems that allow no feedback, no inflow and no outflow of materials that can change the system in doing so. A second GST concept that resonates with design thinking is equifinality, which holds that the final state of an open kinetic system may be reached by taking different routes and starting from different circumstances, showing equifinality, in contrast to the rules governing a closed system, in equilibrium, since the final state of such a system depends on the initial conditions at the start of the process (Bertalanffy, 2008:115-116). This approach to (open and kinetic) systems thinking is almost verbatim the approach of John Chris Jones (1988:224) in stating “the „right‟ requirements are in principle unknowable by users, customers, or designers at the start” (cf. Chapter 1:5). When we observe, plan and execute a design(-ed, -erly) system it means that we have to accommodate a redefinition of the problem requirements, whose stable nature cannot be relied on, since very little or no innovation is possible in a closed system whose final state was determined by the requirements decided on and accepted at the start of the process, the „initial conditions‟ of a strict goal-orientated and controlled mindset. Systemic thinking, then, can be taken to mean the overarching approach to deal with a world that includes human agency, as opposed to systematic thinking that deals with the laws of a mechanical universe sans human influence (which is not to say that the former denies the latter). Systemic thinking moves away from an over-specialization by the disciplines, and while this new(ish, harking back to Greek thought) approach can make use of all manner of systems theory it doesn‟t follow that all of them do, but all seem to base their viewpoints, to various degrees, on systemic and cybernetics thought, in the sense that “Each of them covers another part of information needs for humans to understand and master their lives and circumstances; it has therefore its own information capacity” (Čančer and Mulej, 2010:285-286). All of the systemic, cybernetics thinking and systems theory aspects that I deal with here are meant to be interpreted in this light, that these different approaches to facilitate human information needs are valued each for their particular information transport and delivery capacity, which does not denote linear communication channels but the instigation of a transformation process in the transporting from an existing situation to a preferred one. Gramma/topology, as a means of allowing transference of ways of seeing and knowing from one domain to another, makes use of this transport and transform capacity to facilitate the coming-into-being of an inclusive appreciation-before-understanding space of possibility that can help to master the individual‟s life and circumstances. 4.1.2 On being a Radical Social Constructivist So, how are you going to explain the necessity of dealing with yet another theory when some of the protagonist of radical constructivism are also regarded as cyberneticists and, worse still, can be seen to work in fields of inquiry, or disciplines, that are far removed from cybernetics? Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 137 If I am to take this question seriously, I have to answer that you forget one very important fact, and that is that cybernetics is none of these things, i.e., it belongs to no specific field of inquiry, and is therefore resolutely interdisciplinary. In essence, as long as the field of inquiry is one that deals with circularity as part of its core business … That doesn‟t mean anything; „deals with circularity‟ … that could mean anything you want it to mean. „Circularity‟ observably points to the presence of feedback loops, a rather curious term that seems quite odd, until you remember that in dealing with the conversational aspect of cybernetic thinking, you are acting as if inviting someone to dance with you, and this willingness to share a forward sive backward motion could, again, seem like pure foolishness and pointless, that is, if you were dancing on the spot, as I believe some people lost in the moment do. In any dance that is a dance, you might perform circular movements, but you never end up in the same spot that you started out from, instead, the dance of conversation describes an elliptical spiral more than it describes a circle. So what? You‟re not answering the question. Circularity means feedback loops, which means that you, and by „you‟ I refer to at least two actors in this drama, are engaged in a purposeful activity that has a direction … oops. That is one of the biggest problems in design, the fact that a „circular‟ design initiative cannot afford to be „directed‟ by a „goal‟ at the start of the process (cf. Chapter 1:5), otherwise you are mindlessly following a pre-planned rulebook. You are engaged in a purposeful activity that has to have a goal, admittedly, but in working within a system larger than your own, you need to network with as many systems as are in your project‟s orbit, communicate with these other systems (meaning ask for information), and then bring that information back to your working system, in order to change something (if not, you‟re just going through the motions), and this iterative process helps to find and define a viable goal. You are literally feeding back into your own system the results of purposeful action towards another system (asking questions), and you do exactly the same thing, again, in what looks like a circular motion, but is, in fact, a mutual forward movement of development. What this means, is that any discipline whose adherents are open-minded enough to be prepared to add to their stock of knowledge instead of rigidly preserving it, can be called cybernetically minded. The more I try to describe cybernetics the more it seems to develop a tendency to disappear like the Cheshire Cat‟s grin. In Chapter 3:109 I spoke of Mode 1 knowledge that is sedimented (preserved) as a fully described discipline, and the fact is, Simon‟s (2001:111) changing existing situations into preferred ones cannot be achieved with this deferential attitude towards accepted wisdom, i.e., with sedimented knowledge that cannot be questioned or changed (which is what adding to means). The production of Mode 2 knowledge, on the other hand, is not without its own problems, because in the case of design, and I believe in the case of any discipline making use of cybernetic thinking, when seen as a boundary science, the creation of Mode 2 knowledge acts as an interface between product and user, and it is this course of action that is in constant danger of dissolving and vanishing (Simon, 2001:113); not only the grin but the whole cat disappears, and yet, like Norretranders‟ exformation (Chapter 2:52-53), it is still present in its absence. Cybernetics, radical constructivism, and design thinking as incubators, and the Mode 2 knowledge that can be generated using these ways of seeing, are not products that need be preserved and can be looked at; these reservoirs of knowing are meant to „disappear‟ like Norretranders‟ exformation, which is nothing other than the unspoken and „invisible‟ information we accumulate and that is as much a part of our communication strategy as is the „visible‟ information being used as the worlded and worded vehicle of language. Far more is being expressed during Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 138 languaging than the words themselves can contain, and far more is designed than the artifact can convey at face value. Let‟s deal with Radical Constructivism (RC) first, since Ernst von Glasersfeld, who coined the term, is also considered to be a cybernetician. What I am interested in is any expression of interest in human observation that can reveal in some way what consciousness means and how it could possibly work; by human observation I mean perception as well as cognition 22 , and heaven knows what consciousness means, although RC would maintain that I cannot know anything about this except as it pertains to myself. Granted, but since I agree with Luhmann (2002:156) that only communication can communicate,23 I would have to ask myself why it is, if my consciousness constructs my communication, and that goes out into the world to communicate with someone else‟s communication, why is it that I cannot have knowledge of someone else‟s consciousness? Well, I cannot persuade myself that this is possible. It is as if we experience in real life what is demonstrated on some news programmes: the presenter in the studio asks a question of the interviewer in the field, but the time delay caused by technology means that the presenter has finished speaking (constructing his communication), but the interviewer is still listening to the communication streaming in to his position; there is this time delay between one individual constructing a communication and the other individual receiving it, and a further time delay for the receiver to decode the original communication; these „time delays‟ act like barriers to flow or borders of distinction between self and other. There simply is no direct route from consciousness to consciousness, therefore I cannot have any knowledge of any form of consciousness except knowledge of how I experience consciousness. However, this does not mean that we cannot know anything of the world, it simply means that we cannot have direct access to an objective world as if we are reading from an authoritative textbook. We each live in our own constructed reality, yes, but Radical constructivism maintains … that the operations by means of which we assemble our experiential world can be explored, and that an awareness of this operating … can help us do it differently and, perhaps, better. (Von Glasersfeld, 1984:18) We are aware of our own consciousness, which means that we can be our own observers in this cybernetic study of observing systems, and this self-observation can be explored as an assembly of our experiential world; this process can be of help in moving our convictions, our beliefs in what is true, from an existing situation to a preferred one, or, help us do it differently and, perhaps, better. Von Glasersfeld (1984:18) further maintains that RC holds the individual responsible for his own thoughts and his own actions, in fact, focuses all responsibility on the individual, and yet, if we remember that the RC environment is a mutual one between all individuals, a social environment, that would mean, in addition, that this self-responsibility extends by proxy to the experiential world, which is only possible because of inputs from the external world, and self-awareness means that we know the possible consequences of our decisions, making of I-responsibility an ethical issue inclusive of the other. This is a very autopoietic response, since a self-regulating system would not, by its own actions (and decisions), endanger the environment that it has to use as a medium for existence. 22 By using these two terms I refer to the mind / body issue (not a „problem‟ any more); we literally see things and people, we see interactions, and we „see‟ with our spatial awareness; then we have to „cognize‟, i.e., we have to interpret (decode) the information we have gathered; we live and become in both a spatial / bodily world and a virtual (mental) one. 23 Luhmann‟s viewpoint on this corresponds to that of autopoiesis and constructivism: we can have no direct access to the consciousness of another system, therefore, for the sake of argument and the clarity of the structure of that argument, we can say that, when two systems (people) interact, they do not do so directly but through their communications, hence only communications can communicate. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 139 Our interaction with the world, this environment that is external to us and with which we form a cognitive bond, should not be seen as an objective fount of knowledge that we merely have to tap into, because knowledge as a concept does not exist outside of our own autopoietic experience, and everything else is mere information. As Von Glasersfeld (1990a) emphasizes, RC is radical in the sense that it challenges accepted and traditional theories of knowledge which presupposes this external world of objectivity and truth, a good enough reason to specify RC as a theory of knowing instead of a theory of knowledge, and, like design shifting the focus from product to process. This reconstruction of what others still regard as the theory of (external-to-us) knowledge can be seen as self-centred and idealistic, especially given that our awareness of consciousness can only be of our own, and not that of another, leading to the charge of denying reality. To counter this criticism Von Glasersfeld (1990a) suggests another radical notion, “a drastic modification of the relation between the cognitive structures we build up and that „real‟ world which we are inclined to assume as „existing‟ beyond our perceptual interface”. Cybernetics and design are „sciences‟ of prediction, in the sense of bildung, because both design and cybernetics are relationships of purpose, hence the relation between the world we construct and the „real‟ world is Günther‟s First Law: “There is an exchange relation between knowing and being” (above), which correlates with Von Glaserfeld‟s view that this drastic modification, this relation between knowledge and reality (which one?) must not entail any question of correspondence, as those who hold to the correspondence theory of truth believe. Having said that, it would appear that Von Glasersfeld regards social constructivism as holding to the latter position, which can only be a direct relation between knowledge and reality. In that case we have to ask, what is the difference between a radical constructivist and a social constructivist? As for the (from my point of view) negligible difference between social constructionism and constructivism, I find that those writers that deal with the construction of knowledge as a social event usually also deal with a mixture of the role that artifacts play in our lives as well as the individual‟s social learning process, thereby hybridizing the two terms. Perhaps I was simply fortunate, or I simply did not know enough to interpret their work correctly (as if that is of concern), but the first social constructivist work I came across was Berger and Luckmann‟s The Social Construction of Reality, and the impression that left me with was that all social constructivists believed in the social construction of so-called reality, severing all direct ties with an objective reality. However, Von Glasersfeld (2006) is of the opinion that “most social constructivists seem to take society and language as „existing‟ apart from the minds of individuals”. I would not quite dispute that view, since I have been wrong on a number of other occasions in my (general) interpretation of, say, metaphysics, and the definition of the term ontology,24 a much misused term in my opinion; but, that is just it, as a constructivist thinker I allow that others will likely differ from my interpretations, and that a conversation would then be necessary between two willing participants, to, not reach (final) consensus, but to find out if the two views can accommodate each other. The viable fit between my construction of knowing and the answer to the question of the difference is that they have sufficiently the same purposes in mind for me to treat them as a single approach with interesting variables, curving 25 radical constructivism onto a path of radical social constructivism. 4.1.3 Soft social constructions One of the first versions of systemic thinking that I encountered many years ago was the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) of Peter Checkland, also simply known as soft systems thinking. Trained as a 24 In this thesis I have consistently used the term ontology to mean a consideration of the nature of existence, but, since the latter does not make any sense if taken to denote all that exists, and no more, it does not interest me as much as existence as movement, as the yet-to-be, existence as Being and becoming. 25 By using the term curving I mean to imply a pulling away from an original course, an amalgam of the reference (cf. Chapter 1:18) to the difference between a sailboat‟s hypothetical and actual trajectory, and the natural force of abduction (cf. Chapter 5:245), “a leading away from what has gone before”. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 140 chemist, Checkland eventually moved to the management sciences after struggling for a number of years to make sense of the systematic methods of inquiry that the systems engineers, as did the management sciences at that time (1950s and 1960s), employed. At the centre of this approach was the belief that the requirements and the objectives had to be defined as closely as possible, at the start, and then designing the process could be controlled for a maximized outcome. Checkland and his colleagues found these methods not „multi-dimensional‟ enough to help the „managers‟ deal with the “complex, messy, ill-structured situations with which professionals of all kinds and at all levels have to cope in their daily lives” (Checkland, 2010:129). These systems engineering approaches can be compared to a hard systems view of managing the world, in which systems must be engineered and controlled, while Checkland‟s SSM developed a soft systems view that did not see the world as systemic, but rather saw the process of inquiry as systemic, which meant that the observer recognised the complexity of the situation, its messiness and confusion, but also the chance to manage what Checkland calls an exploration of the system, one that turns the system environment into a learning system (Checkland, 2000:380). SSM considers the main features, those that could impact on the viability of the system, that all the SSM working situations might have in common, an investigative aspect that Adams et al. (2003) also uses; in looking at the learning situation from a complex, dynamic systems perspective, “important considerations include what elements drive the system, how the system responds to internal and external disturbances, and how the system stabilizes and evolves over time”. Both the management sciences and education focus on the people in the system, and accepts that they have worldviews that differ, that these views are not necessarily stable, but that these working situations also include people who are willing to take purposeful action, an approach that correlates with the purposefulness of cybernetics (above) as well as with design as a relationship of purpose. What I would like to emphasise, is that SSM deals with the complexity of contemporary life by constructing systems models of purposeful action, and these models are networks of (social, management, and learning) activities for the express purpose of transformation. It should be clear by now that all these systemic theories have much in common, that all the elements are considered to work together for a common good, and that purposeful action through some form of transformation is the desired state. The real problems that people can have, and that students at first may struggle with, is the fact that, like cybernetics, like radical constructivism, these models constructed by SSM “are not descriptions of (part of) the real world” and that this exploration of the system does not aspire to achieve anything like a consensus among the system‟s participants, but “seeks accommodations among differing worldviews [which] entails finding versions of the (improved) situation which different people with different worldviews could nevertheless live with” (Checkland, 2010:130), which is non other than the dynamics of a collective and negotiated compromise to be found in a cybernetic design conversation. If the focus of social constructionism is seen to be the „artifacts‟ that are designed in and for the group learning process, and social constructivism focuses on the individual learning from group interaction, then Peter Checkland‟s soft systems thinking qualifies as a social constructivist theory of knowing, one that uses explorative models not to represent reality, but to represent possible and probable change for improvement of existing situations. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 141 Acknowledgement of text The following text is from a paper that was presented at the 6th international Conference of the European Academy of Design: design > system > evolution, University of the Arts, Bremen, Germany, March 29-31 (van der Merwe, 2005) The Construction of a Dancing, Dangling Conversation Introduction This paper is written from a systems and constructivist learning and teaching viewpoint, and makes no attempt to either justify or defend that viewpoint – that has been done by others. What this paper does attempt to do is tell a very simple story, one that systematically developed from what my students and I have experienced over the course of a decade or so. This story is what I have come to believe in, as a methodological approach to design teaching and learning, increasingly backed up by continuous research into design thinking and design education. The latest evidence for this way of looking at renewing teaching and learning comes from Katja Tschimmel (2004), who believes that “instead of teaching in the traditional way, we should give the students tools, which provoke a new way of thinking”, and this story of mine is simply about just that, a set of tools (another set, if you must) that will enable a design student to begin “the construction of one‟s own world” (Tschimmel, 2004). This is one of the biggest problems facing teaching and learning: how to deal with too strong subjective and / or objective viewpoints or ways of understanding the world. If too subjective it is student opinion without justification, and if too „objective‟ that usually means the teacher‟s viewpoint being slavishly copied. Yet we can only learn from within our own constructed world/environment, so the teaching and learning approach that allows the students to be “initiated into the proceedings of design thinking, design interaction and the learning process itself” (Tschimmel, 2004) has, I believe, the best chance of succeeding, where other approaches might fail. Even the best teachers can fail to reach their students, can fail to teach them, if by „teaching‟ we mean giving them the tools to provoke new ways of thinking, when such tools are rejected. Michael Pearson experienced just such a situation, one in which the student body changes due to external circumstances, and one in which students demand to be taught, but equally seem to demand that it is their right not to be forced to think too deeply and too analytically. Michael used to enjoy going to work, would enjoy, indeed, being confronted by student questions that would shake his “fundamental assumptions of existence … out onto the floor in heartfelt interrogations by a vibrant student life force blazing their way with sheer bloody mindedness” (Pearson, 2004). He used to be inspired by this, but “Now, I cry in my sleep for them. Where are they?” What happened to them? Why are they “choosing „the way of the problem solver‟ – they say problem solving theory takes the world as it is; we live in this world – this is the reality – live with it!” This scenario should be very familiar to many teachers of design, and they will know what Michael means when he states that I scream (inwardly) that my students shy away from the complementary concept of critical theory, which calls into question the world as it is – the „existing institutions and social power relations … why are they not „enquiring into their origins and nature of change‟ … I struggle to get my students involved in this interrogation so that they can reap the rewards it offers: particularly as Bellamy informs us „critical theory is inherently reconstructive because reflecting upon these assumptions … is thus a necessary part of thinking anew‟. (Pearson, 2004) Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 142 Design education should be such a „reconstructive‟ process, one in which the students‟ learning, or pedagogical experience, becomes a voluntary restructuring. Being a personal experience, the teacher can have no direct contact with that experience. On the other hand, the pedagogic experience, in terms of simplistic and practical problem solving techniques, is of no interest to me; necessary, yes, but the most important? No. The real challenge lies in that kind of pedagogic experience that happens to the students in their own reconstructed (anew) worlds, where I, as teacher, have no control. You cannot observe the (conceptual) structural changes a (student) system experiences during the learning process, because “there is no way for an external observer [teacher] to determine if a system has changed its structure” (Whitney-Smith, 1987/88). This is the constructivist pedagogic experience of the individual who freely chooses to „learn‟ – or as Michael would say, the individual who has the sheer bloody mindedness to want to know WHY. This is the individual who asks that question, in class, of myself, yet cannot, must not, listen to „my‟ answer, indeed learns to know that it is not my „answer‟ that matters, but a new way of listening to the information that is available at this moment, coupled to the information that can still be accessed, must still be accessed. Learner become auto-teacher, in a systems theory sense. Do not try to understand this kind of pedagogic experience in others, but instead learn to understand it in yourself, first. The story I am trying to tell in this paper concerns this issue, the difficulty of „teaching‟, when in fact nothing can be taught in the sense of easily and unproblematically transferring so-called knowledge from one mind to another. However, this type of pedagogical experience can be provoked because what can be observed “is not „learning,‟ an internal change of state, but the behaviors associated with learning” (Whitney-Smith, 1987/88), and these changes in behaviour can be observed using the muddy box regulatory system (discussed below) as a learning device. As for the concept of a conversation in design education, “Whatever else we are doing, we are all doing language” (O‟Rourke, 2003), and using reflective and exploratory language in a design conversation becomes a pedagogical tool as a means towards an end. It is what conversation as a tool is used for that is important, and not what is being said as such. A design educational conversation is not about the what of learning but about the how and why of learning. As an example, Kees Dorst thinks of Schön‟s notion of reflective practice as a „constructionist theory‟ that describes design as a „reflective conversation‟, and during this process the design task is set and possible solutions are outlined, “all in one „framing action‟” - this happens because the designer is the structuring agent in this process, and the extent of the structuring is determined by the potency of the frame. But the designer, as recognised by Schön, also routinely uses implicit knowledge („knowing-in-action‟), which is fine for practice but extremely difficult for education. “What can be thought about and taught is the explicit reflection that guides the development of one‟s knowing-in-action habits”, or Schön‟s reflection-in-action (Dorst, 2003). Now Dorst says something that I cannot agree with: he maintains that Schön ignored the a priori structures that any element in the design mix would have as normal baggage (my description), because of a failure to link reflective practice theory to a structuring or framing model of design tasking. “If anywhere, the structure of the design problem should be found in the frame a designer uses”. Agreed. “It is a pity that Schön never addressed the questions how frames are made, and what the properties of a good frame would be” (Dorst, 2003). This paper, I now realise, attempts to address these very questions, although I think that, instead of ignoring the a priori structures that are brought into the design tasking / solution-finding mix, Schön was keenly aware of these, but focused rather on the importance of transcending the limitations of all a priori (subjective, objective, cognitive, material) elements. In that sense he did provide the groundwork for a model of framing, and, as I interpret his work , especially his reporting of the teaching project 26 26 The teachers using the Montessori bells (visually similar but each producing a different pitch) were criticizing the reflection-inaction methods of a 14-year old boy in trying to put together the sound elements that would make up the tune “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, and they were puzzled and upset that this boy, after finding each next tone in the sequence, would start all over again, Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 143 that Jean Bamburger and Eleanor Duckworth did while working with teachers using Montessori bells, he convincingly demonstrates that his reflective practicum becomes a possible all-encompassing frame for learning, and for coach (Schön‟s alternate word for teacher) and student that becomes a “dialogue of reciprocal reflection-in-action” (Schön, 1987). This conversational learning frame is the very basic one that all design students should begin to understand from their very first year of education, namely that everything, absolutely everything, depends on the relationships between all the elements you have chosen (or, very often in design practical circumstances, have chosen or found you) to work with, be these good, bad or indifferent choices we make in the indeterminate zones of practice. This frame of relationship building, this stepping into a new world in the making, is, as Schön says, full of loss and uncertainty, because the teacher cannot tell the student what to do or how to do it, much like Meno had to be shown by Socrates that the student had to construct his own world of meaning, that all students have to “plunge into the doing, and try to educate themselves before they know what it is that they‟re trying to learn” (Schön, 1987). How then is it possible to learn anything? A constructivist classroom setting, mixed liberally with cognitive psychological insights (so often so close to MerleauPonty‟s version of phenomenology as makes no great difference) and systems thinking provides the background wherein answers to Dorst‟s questions can be found: how are the frames made, and what are the properties of a good frame? One viewpoint could be that frames are made through autopoietic structuring and restructuring, as I explain in this paper, and the properties of a „good frame‟ are fluidly restructured each time we encounter a new design problem space, because “the behaviour of an organism is determined by its structure” but unfortunately also by its often pre-set patterns of belief, due to the fact that “perception operates as a „self-organizing-information-system‟” (Tschimmel, 2004). Confronted by each and every new design problem space we as designers have to become this new person, renewing our belief structure or at least tailoring it to each specific design situation / environment, and, I believe, only systems theoretical thinking can fully explain how this seemingly impossible and contradictory notion could possibly work. If Dorst‟s view is correct that the structure of a design problem must be found in the frame used by that designer, then how can this (re)structuring happen, and how are the frames made if we as human beings operate as self-organizing-systems? These are questions I attempt to answer by including the designer in both the structure and in the frame, and as Adams et al. (2003) put it, when looking at learning from a complex, dynamic systems perspective, “important considerations include what elements drive the system, how the system responds to internal and external disturbances, and how the system stabilizes and evolves over time”. We may blithely accept that designers must be problem solvers, but Restrepo and Christiaans (2003) remind us that design problems need a lot of structuring, and good designers are the ones that can move quickly from gathering information to using that information, that, indeed, designers, far from being mere „problem solvers‟ are, in fact, information processing systems able to cope with uncertainty (lack of information, therefore lack of structure). A complex dynamic systems perspective will therefore include the designer and everything and everyone connected to the design problem environment: here we find the potential frames within which, often, multiple restructuring must take place. Human systems are structured, hence are fluid structures that require constant maintenance. Restructuring brings innovation and renewal, and a social system may find its new configuration, not specifically in any particular property of a constituent part, but in the new perspective gained by the system as a whole if it allows this new property (which is usually a familiar and always-been-there ringing each bell in turn. What these teachers were forgetting, or rather completely overlooking, was that this boy was employing the reflection-in-action method by searching not for individual elements, by sight (in this case impossible), or even by single (and therefore isolated) auditory clues, but by searching for the „correct‟ relationship between the previous tone and the one that should follow, and the quickest and surest way of doing so was to sound each bell from the start. When challenged by Jean Bamberger to do it „their way,‟ not one teacher could do what they expected the boy to do. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 144 property) to influence the direction the system takes in its development, a development towards the asyet-unknown. In that sense design cannot be isolated from the world, and design must change in order to keep up with „the world,‟ and change in an ontological sense – as a human system it must reinvent itself and continually begin itself from within while looking to the outside 27 . This paper deals with design education in just such a changing environment, as a question of communication, in which speaking and writing design is a circular and reciprocal communicative act between designer and the social world, creating the transitory, dancing and dangling conversation that invites participation, memory and a Schönian flair for artistry 28 . Design students have to learn how to look beyond themselves, their own circumstances and immediate environment, and begin to see the possibilities of and for the future. There is no such thing as a designer, without a partner, without the other of society, and when Von Foerster (Waters, 1999) equates an invitation to dialogue with an invitation to dance he is speaking about a type of willing or consensual togetherness: “when we are talking with each other, we … invent what we both wish the other would invent with me”. I am tremendously encouraged by Artemis Yagou‟s questioning of the conventional methods of teaching design history, and even more so that she regards our duty to students as one that will “engender understanding rather than knowledge, and encourage intellectual engagement and articulation” (Yagou, 2004), which echoes Peter Lloyd‟s (2002) view that design education must expose students to multiple viewpoints, because design education‟s task “is to show students how they can construct their own „world‟ and for this to happen what one needs to teach is how to learn. That is, to a great extent, all”. It is in this sense that I declare that I cannot teach you all about design knowledge because I do not know what that means, and even if I did have this knowledge I cannot teach you what it means by transference. What I can do is ask transformational questions, based on what other people seem to know and what they get up to. I am inviting you to a conversation that is like a dance in an effort to teach you how to learn, but it also has to be a dancing, dangling performance in the sense that it has to avoid being static and boring, and above all hold out the carrot of promise: what can all this do for me? My performance was exposed by the first year student who said: Now I know what he‟s doing. He‟s leading the horse to water and fooling it into thinking it‟s thirsty. A first encounter with autopoietic structural coupling of boundaries. A constructivist classroom What is this auto-poi..poem type nonsense? And how can you say there is no design knowledge, no such thing as a designer, and on top of that, you tell me you cannot teach me what design is? What am I paying you for? You‟re not my shrink, so go ahead and teach me! Have you ever considered that a designer might be what is now recognised to be a knowledge worker? This worker is being described as the new journeyman, much like the artistic term bricoleur29, denoting, let‟s say a worker in stone, going into his shed, and whatever he finds inside, that‟s all he has to work with. It‟s called „making do.‟ So, what do you have that we can work with? I am willing to share with 27 I will not attempt to discuss, at this stage, whether referring to design as a system in its own right is correct, since I do not believe it is, following Luhmann‟s lead in stating that language is not a system but operates as a linking device during the structural coupling of system boundaries (Luhmann, 1997). What if design is just such a linking device, and like language becomes another tool to facilitate social communication? For the sake of argument and clarity of meaning I will continue to refer to design as a human system, for want of a better term, but in doing so I also believe that design can only manifest itself through the individual, through observation of how the individual, as a system, learns to understand the world of which it is a part. Design as a human system then really refers to the use it has to make of the active agency of the human system. 28 Not to be confused with artistic subjectivity. A flair for artistry should be read as that balance between analysis and creativity that designers should be able to communicate to the user. 29 “The methods of qualitative research thereby become the „invention,‟ ... even though, as bricoleurs, we all know we are not working with standard-issue parts, and we have come to suspect that there are no longer any such parts made (if ever there were)” (Lincoln and Denzin, 1998:426). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 145 you what I have, and much like the shrink you say I am not 30 I could possibly help you tell the story of what you do know so far, and help you decipher some of the stuff you have come across but have not assimilated yet. I‟m supposed to teach myself? What‟s going on here? So far you haven‟t said a word about design. Oh, but I have. Perhaps Jim Howell could explain this better than I can. In his presentation The Knowledge Worker (Howell, 2002:155-162), these points were emphasised: 1] the social context of solving problems, 2] the correlations between individual and group level problem solving, 3] the value of intangibles (variables) in this process, and that 4] the knowledge worker is seen in the context of information rich business environments … Here, hold on! You‟re doing it again. Teach me about design, don‟t talk about business! I think I may have something that should help. Let‟s deviate to George Kelly for a minute. In formulating his theory of personal constructs Kelly wanted to get away from the Pavlovian stimulus-response concept, and he did this by changing the focus to anticipating instead of responding, which should mean that you can start to recognise motivational features in any conversation, and turn these into some form of predictive behaviour. This paraphrasing may take liberties with Bannister and Mair‟s text (1968:13), but not too much. Do you see that you do not have to wait for a morsel of „design knowledge‟ to which you can then respond as a stimulus, but instead it becomes possible for you to extract from any conversation „motivational features‟ that can be „turned‟ into what you would call design knowledge, that you can, in effect, learn to „anticipate‟ in the sense of „I will recognise it when I hear it‟ – which simply means that you will start to explore and make connections, from previously (design) unconnected bits of information to connecting or applying these to design situations. The way you listen to any conversation … Now wait a minute. I ask you to teach me about design and you prattle on about conversation this and conversation that. What on earth has this to do with design education? We‟re talking, aren‟t we? That‟s a „conversation‟ isn‟t it? We may be talking, but are you really listening? As I was saying, the way you listen to any conversation, and here „conversation‟ can also mean reading a book, can mean the difference between waiting to be fed and helping yourself. Kelly was of the opinion that “Anticipation is both the push and pull of the psychology of personal constructs”, and as Bannister and Mair (1968:13) further stated, what Kelly believed was that you are a form of continuous motion, and that the way you listen, given that you do so with „anticipation,‟ gives direction to the motion of your development. The way you listen can also apply to (visual) perception, and in that sense I would include this active and investigative human ability in a broad notion of conversation. Everything a designer does - a verbal conversation with others, reading any book / document both visually and textually, observing the environment through visual perception – is an act of mental communicative interaction that has understanding as the motivating factor (cf. Pask‟s Conversation Theory, below). Therefore, when Katja Tschimmel (2004) maintains that you must realise that perception is an active and searching process led by your own expectations, she is underpinning what Kelly meant with conversational anticipation, a new way of listening, of seeing, a new way of thinking, even. The force of this conversation is determined by the listener, you, because, as Kees Dorst (above) mentioned, the extent of the structuring is determined by the potency of the 30 Cf. Reference in Chapter 3:75 to George Kelly‟s reasoning that it is their human character that makes scientists (designers) what they are. In his dual role of research supervisor and as psychotherapist Kelly would direct a graduate student in the intricacies of research, and, as psychotherapist, help one of his patients to work on possible solutions to the problems he is experiencing in his life, by encouraging him to follow substantially the same research paths/patterns of discovery (Bannister and Mair, 1968:2-3). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 146 frame. The structuring (and in many cases the re-structuring) can only be effected by you, the student, and how far you are able to go depends on the frame 31 you develop for yourself, through this conversational anticipation, because “We have to be aware that the repertoire of patterns, which we have in our minds, will determine our recognition, our classifications, our analysis and all of our subsequent thought processes” (Tschimmel, 2004). OK, so you threw in the word design a number of times and told me how I should talk to you; now what? But I haven‟t been telling you how to … To return to Jim Howell; remember that he was making a number of points, sketching the background or environment in which the new knowledge workers find themselves. Now, if you do the Kelly thing, and listen with „design anticipation‟ you may start to make sense of all of this. Jim‟s last point was that 4] the knowledge worker is seen in the context of information rich business environments as well as the networked organization – i.e. the context describes complexity, change, diversity and interconnectedness. This knowledge worker in the new knowledge age is one who is believed to be able to „turn‟ information into knowledge, given some or all of the above contextual elements. It is therefore imperative to understand what knowledge is and how the „turning‟ process works in order to transform the perceived problem situation into an improved situation – lack of „knowledge‟ (despite a surplus of information) „turned‟ into Jim‟s „performative‟ knowledge (Howell, 2002:155-162). I‟m not sure I quite understand the connection between design knowledge and what I‟ve just been listening to. You have to manufacture your own „design knowledge‟ in the sense of „turning‟ information into Jim‟s „knowledge performance,‟ which means the new knowledge worker / new designer knows where this design knowledge-in-action comes from, knows how to design „the performance,‟ knows why it is done in this way. What Jim Howell is talking about is Systems Theory, which has much in common with design theory, for the strengths of both lie in an adaptability in the face of not only different cultural conceptions of reality, but of rapid change and increasing uncertainty. Designers will have to deal with the complexity of practitioner / social environment interactions that stem from fast changing variables. Design now becomes the co-producer of knowledge and meaning and designers will learn how to be open to contextual signals from outside the immediate confines of the design / research project, inputs which can have a substantial bearing on the outcome. Oh my word, you‟re not talking about me, are you? Yes, I am. A constructivist classroom, scene II This imaginary dialogue with a typical student demonstrates some of the issues that could be discussed, but also what can go wrong in a constructivist classroom, if the students do not actively participate in their own teaching and learning. A constructivist learning environment depends on this dialectical conversation between teacher and student (to begin with, at least), because that conversation becomes one of the teaching tools (Tschimmel, above) we can give to students, and to paraphrase Dorst, this conversation can facilitate both the extent of the structuring and the subsequent potency of the frame. 31 If the designer is the structuring agent in this process, and the extent of the structuring is determined by the potency of the frame, then the frame can be equated with Kelly‟s notion of personal constructs. However, it is also true that the frame refers to the other autopoietic systems in the design mix, and to be a viable design frame, it must depend on good communication among all the social actors concerned with the design problem, depend, in fact, on a very good conversation. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 147 A conversation then becomes what Maturana calls a linguistic activity, or languaging, which means that this constructivist conversation is not meant to tell you anything at all, as Piaget realised, in theorizing that “cognition is not a means to acquire knowledge of an objective reality but serves the active organism in its adaptation to its experiential world” (Von Glasersfeld, 1990b). Conversation or languaging is a tool to engender cognition, which Maturana believed does not mean conveying news or any kind of „information‟, but refers to a social activity that arises from a coordination of actions that have been tuned by mutual adaptation. Without such coordination of acting there would be no possibility of describing and, consequently, no way for the distinctions made by an actor to become conscious. To become aware of distinctions, is called observing. To observe oneself as the maker of distinctions, therefore, is no more and no less than to become conscious of oneself. (in Von Glasersfeld, 1990b) All of this means that we can usefully employ systems thinking, the notion of languaging and conversation / dialogue, as tools to understand design education and get closer to design knowledge. When we equate systems thinking with design, I believe we will find more than enough reason to justify changing the focus from design knowledge to systems knowledge for design (application) 32. This was our focus for the action research pilot project we have been conducting in our social constructivist classroom, a student-centred learning environment that requires the students to „teach themselves‟ as far as „knowledge‟ is concerned. We can supply masses of information, but who is to do the „turning‟? In the systems model of a constructivist classroom / learning environment that is discussed below, the students practice how to deal with Howell‟s lack of knowledge despite a surplus of information, and how to „turn‟ that situation around through and into a „performance‟ – they have to become their own „teachers‟ through becoming part of an observing system, but only when they achieve the level of an observer of the observing system can they, with hindsight (called reflection), truly observe their own „blind spots‟ by observing the blind spots of others, and so move beyond these barriers to learning. I therefore endorse Jonas‟ viewpoint on the „non-specific properties‟ of design education: students must become familiar with “analytical thinking, associative / connective power, synthetic and generative abilities, evaluative competencies, communicative skills of visual & verbal type, etc.” (Jonas, 2004). Students must learn to distinguish (become consciously aware), must learn how to become the maker of distinctions (cf. Luhmann‟s system / environment distinction, below) as Maturana states (thereby effectively making or constructing their own selves and then their own knowledge), and I believe the constructivist classroom can enable (or provide the level of affordances necessary for) this coordination of actions that have been tuned by mutual adaptation (above). When answering the question, what does it mean to learn, Elin Whitney-Smith (1987/88) effectively described this mutual adaptation as the structural changes a system has to go through “in response to the experience of its environment”. In the next sections I will deal with some of the influences that could be used to facilitate such a learning environment, which is an evolving and self-regulating educational conversation-in-theclassroom (an „autopoietical dialogue‟) that uses Stafford Beer‟s „muddy box regulatory system‟ as a base model (Fig. 1). Beer (1979:57-73) deals with many facets in the evolution of this regulatory system, among them the notion of a feedback adjuster plus the role of management, and an adjuster organizer – I will only deal with these concepts on our own terms and not necessarily quite in the manner dealt with in Beer‟s book. However, it does seem to me that there are so many correlations to be drawn between Beer‟s insights into organizational learning and educational learning organizations that adaptations are 32 Jorge Frascara (1999) suggests “that human cognitive performance is context-dependent and multi-dimensional, and that to really understand human cognition it is not possible to approach it as a self-contained system. Human cognition should be approached as an integrated structure, where cognitive processes vary from situation to situation, depending on situational differences that relate to a broad variety of categories which overflow traditional definitions of cognition”. Exactly. Replace human & cognitive / cognition with design and systems thinking illustrates the dependency of design („knowledge‟) on the human (cognitive) system, and even more so the dependency of design on external contexts. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 148 more than likely to work in our favour. The main idea is that this muddy box regulatory system33 “is a learning device” (Beer, 1979:69), and that we are dealing with interactive systems, which means that the manager (teacher) has to deal with the muddy box‟s (classroom‟s) impulse to reproduce variety, but more importantly, that this “proposition applies to the entire contents of the box, including those … allimportant variety proliferators – people” (Beer, 1979:57). This model is deceptively simple, but it serves as the working environment of the social constructivist classroom that accommodates as many autopoietic systems as there are students. There are multiple outputs in real time that have to be observed and fed back on two levels, based on the notion of recursivity / reflection, while the teacher-researcher has the further task of managing the participatory action research process that has a grounded theory approach to data collection and evaluation. Our adaptation has the adjuster (feedback and organizer) and the manager as being one person – the teacher. While the muddy box (classroom + students + questions) produces variety as a matter of course, it is the task of the feedback adjuster (teacher) to manage the system via the feedback loops, both for immediate feedback in real time, and for „delayed feedback‟ in terms of re-planning the input, thereby reducing operational variety, but at the same time the task of the teacher is to not-manage in the sense of being an adjuster organizer, whose task it is to induce organizational variety (adjusting the viability of the box to progress from structured solvable problems to dealing with ill-structured wicked problems). Now, to the question, why this seeming contradiction, let‟s look at Ashby‟s Law of Requisite Variety, which, according to Beer (1979:84), is still poorly understood. The first insight is that variety absorbs variety (:86), not in the sense of numbering states but in developing matching states – i.e. students, faced with information overload, deal with all this stuff out there by finding ways to match this information variety – this means structuring and frameworking the „research questions‟ with which and through which they Appropriate variety look for information. confronting information variety, at first to reduce that variety (in order to answer a specific question in a structured way) but at the same time being open to the fact that variety can and must be induced (the more you follow the structure the more that flexible structure provides you with more focused questions to ask, and the more you can …etc.). Figure 3. Simplified version of Beer‟s Muddy Box (Beer, 1979:63). The second insight is that only variety can absorb variety (:89), which means that students need to practice not only analytical thinking, but crucially, associative thinking, pattern recognition, generative capabilities and all manner of evaluation, in order to match the variety of information with their own variety of response. This, of course, is a literal and human impossibility, which is why Schön‟s Law (the least amount of control) has to include – in the light of the above – the notion of the regulatory process of intrinsic control, which “sees to it that Ashby‟s Law is automatically obeyed; therefore there is no loss possible in balancing the variety equations” (Beer, 1979:91). Easier said than done, but the balance between attenuation and amplification must be attempted, and in Beer‟s example of the learnerteacher relationship (:234) he states the cybernetic principle by which this can be achieved: “every 33 So-called because if it is a black box you have no access to whatever is going on inside the system; a transparent box in which everything in the system is equally accessible is too utopian (or draconian) to contemplate; the box / system is muddy or mes sy because that approximates the complexity of real life and of design situations. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 149 regulator must contain a model of that which is regulated”. Any viable system must contain an adequate model of the larger system it belongs to, or wishes to investigate (wishes or needs to belong to), and in student learning terms that has many consequences, the most important being that this model can become not only the new learning environment / system, but the new person. Autopoiesis evolved to the next level through Kelly‟s notion of anticipation, through storytelling, social communication, conversation theory and dialogue, and above all, through building on foundations that are not there at all. The telling … And now to continue the story. Conversation Theory, put simply, describes the constructivist classroom ideal very well: it concerns Pask‟s idea of a conversation between teacher and student with the latter being expected to “teach it back”, and using reflective practice, both parties can agree on what has been learned. Taking this process further, Glanville states that Conversation Theory, through its particular reflexivity, becomes “a theory of theory building” (Glanville, 1997a). The muddy box scenario depends on this type of „talking about it‟ negotiation, and our aim with this action research project was just this type of (learning) theory building using the Grounded Theory approach. But again we have a problem, which is that “the conversation says nothing about meaning”, because meaning cannot be communicated (Luhmann‟s the other side cannot be reached, it can only be imagined, below); we make our own meanings which are not part of the public domain (Glanville, 1997b). The eternal problem of imagining someone else‟s tacit knowledge; for that reason we shall look as closely as possible at what happens when two autopoietic systems interact (below). The second point being made here is that this conversational talking about it and teaching it back willingness to explore means „mistakes‟ are tolerated (if not encouraged and managed) in this circular and reciprocal many-viewpoint, manyparticipant communication that, in design terms, interactively allows for the emergence of the new (Glanville, 1997b). This dialectical idea of „teach it back‟ does go a long way towards the emergence of meaning and understanding, for both sides. Now, following on from the idea of emergence, there is yet another influence or viewpoint that may help clarify the process of learning, one that is directly linked to the working of autopoietic systems interaction, and that is the idea of addressing directly the gaps or spaces between communications. We mentioned (above) Beer‟s cybernetic principle that in order to deal with the proliferation of variety every regulator (every human system) must contain a model of that which is regulated (being observed) – in teaching and learning terms this means the teacher-system must contain a model of the student-system that is being observed / investigated, and every student-system must contain a model of the proliferating variety that confronts every knowing being, more so if that studentsystem wants to observe and match variety for the sake of education / research. The problem is communication, or its lack of. Because knowledge cannot be transferred directly, nor communication, gaps or conceptual spaces occur, and these can be dealt with in various ways, including conceptual models, image schemas, projection, anticipation. The way we deal with the world and its proliferation of information / variety, is to tell stories, to conceptualise and project, in short, to mentally structure the regulatory process of intrinsic control. We do so by using language (playing language games), and by creating our own versions of what we imagine we are dealing with. "Since nobody can carry the physical world within himself, the process of conceptualization is indispensable to the process of structuring and ordering called communication" (Roelofse, 1987:12). Part of this conceptualisation process is what Turner and Fauconnier (1995) call conceptual integration / blending, using mental spaces as constructions of normal cognition. During the process called conceptual integration the input from two or more mental spaces (image schemas, abstractions) are projected to a separate blended space, one that has elements of all the original inputs but that, crucially, now contains emergent structures not perceptible before. “Blending is at work in many areas of cognition and action, including metaphors, counterfactuals, and conceptual change” (Turner and Fauconnier, 1995). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 150 This is not communication, but mental projection, to make sense of the world and makes sense of „blends‟ or new configurations, new shapes, new situations. To start to communicate, student to teacher, that excellent Paskian notion of „teach it back‟ comes into play, but we are still dealing with two autopoietic systems that are interacting, and according to Luhmann (1994), communication between the two is impossible. This is in accord with Conversation Theory that states “the conversation says nothing about meaning”, because meaning cannot be communicated (Glanville, 1997b), and Luhmann‟s “the other side cannot be reached, it can only be imagined” means consciousness is inaccessible for communication (Luhmann, 1997). Consciousness can only interact with communication through language, and these two “have a relation of interpenetration” (Jonas, 2003), which means they can at best have a virtual relationship one to the other. … of virtual spaces … In that sense we can turn to these virtual words / worlds and try to imagine what happens, because as Turner and Fauconnier (1995) point out, conceptual integration and blending can lead to conceptual change, and we should realise that we are the conceptual blends. You realise, of course, what this means? In design at least, we become the observer of our own observing system, and that is perhaps where a particular „design knowledge‟ as a way of knowing comes to the fore. We can see our own „blind spots‟ and not just those of other systems we are observing, and therefore we can really learn, or more correctly, evolve. I wrote (above) that students must do the „turning‟ in Howell‟s sense of information-into-knowledge, and that students have to become their own teachers through achieving the level of an observer of the observing system, but now, instead of becoming aware of your own blind spots through an awareness of the blind spots of others, two systems observing each other, you are both the observer and the observed. It is at that moment, when these two systems are still, potentially at least, equal for being the same34, that learning can be lost because no evolution is possible (for various reasons: cultural, social drawbacks, fear). I further wrote (above), paraphrasing Beer‟s cybernetic principle of the regulator having a model of what is being regulated, that this model can become the new learning environment / system, and it can become the new person. This can only happen if you recognise / admit the existence (although a virtual existence) of the new possibility, the new blended self, and have the courage to travel to this new country, for as Polanyi (1962:123) argued, this step really allows us to “gain a foothold at another shore of reality”. Schuhmann (2004:610) interprets Beer to suggest that ontological identity be replaced by differences, and thus we can understand Luhmann‟s system / environment distinction, which leads to: “the same distinction of „system / environment‟ that generates the system is copied into the system and produces a model of its form”. I suggest that this is the same as Beer‟s model, and that both are system projections that can lead to these new conceptual blends: “A system is always an observer that gives birth to itself” (Schuhmann, 2004:611). This process, as do all processes, depends on information, and “In order for information to be understood, the creation of an additional space for possibilities of selection is required” (Luhmann, 1994). Everything is circular, and we have been discussing this very point from the beginning. Learning is only possible as an individual undertaking, while, paradoxically, no learning is possible without other peoples‟ knowledge, without two system boundaries interacting and the other being available to the self. Change in an autopoietic system is only possible as a renewal of the internal structural dimension/s of the system, while this very change / transformation / evolution is only possible because of something external to the system itself. Design is a social act, and when Luhmann speaks of additional spaces for possibilities of selection, he does not only appear to refer to Jonas‟ groundless field theory, but to what Ohlsson (Langley and Jones 1988: 181) calls „gaps‟ “between 34 In concpetual blending, when you are the subject of your own blending, the original „inputs‟ - which represent your previous self and your levels of knowledge / awareness up to that point – are still so strong that you will not want to let go (the control you have). You might reject the new blend that represents the evolution of your autopoietic system from one state to another, opting instead to believe that there is no difference. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 151 one's current state and the goal state” when a designer is confronted with a seemingly unsolvable problem. When this happens, and restructuring can occur or be induced in the learning environment, it means looking differently through the descriptive problem space. Looking from while looking through this descriptive (induce variety) problem (create perturbations) space, as part of the original input, to the new possible conceptual blend where new meaning can emerge, requires these additional and virtual spaces (discussed below), which we find in the writings of Luhmann, Kelly, Winnicott, Dimitrov and De Weerdt. … that lead back to a new beginning Life itself is autopoietic; as human beings we owe our existence (who we are) to how we autopoietically evolve – we are at the same time the product and the producer (Dimitrov and Ebsary 1997; Mariotti 1996). Many would agree with the statement that an autopoietic system is at the same time (information, cognitive) open and (operation, organization, normative) closed, and that therefore a very unique boundary is formed that both suspends and renews the system‟s relationship with its environment (Dimitrov, 1998; Johannessen, 1998:360; Luhmann, 1997; Maula, 2000:158; Metcalf, 1999; Navarro, 2001). Design education fits this description of autopoiesis, largely because what really matters is not „design knowledge‟ or „design content,‟ but the human systems that make up the contents of Beer‟s muddy box learning environment, and so design can become its own producer and its own product, and of course, being what it really is, a people mix looking for a new conceptual blend, design is both open and closed at the same time. Now, we have stated that change can only happen as an internal restructuring because of something external to that which needs to change / evolve, but at the same time this system carries within itself a model of that which needs to be regulated (Beer model), while the system / environment distinction (that which is external / other) copies itself to the system (Luhmann model). This means that the Turner / Fauconnier model of projection makes sense: there is really nothing that is new in the sense of never having existed before, and we carry within us a „Luhmann-Beer Model‟ of the future, a model of „possible otherness‟ that is the real generator of these „additional and virtual spaces‟ – we are not autopoietically restructuring under the influence of (operational and normative) externals because those impulses come from within, from the model / copy of that which is possible, in the outside world, that we already have as part of our (cognitively) „open‟ system. Just as I have been telling my students, ad nauseam, that design is always elsewhere, we can now state that understanding and learning is always elsewhere, but, given the above, it is our own „elsewhere‟ that is already and always present to us as the model / copy of these „elsewhere possibilities‟. Nothing we encounter and interact with, as autopoietic systems, will ever make any sense if we cannot „foretouch‟ it with our minds, if we cannot „feel‟ our way cognitively into what this could possibly mean, if we cannot succeed in copying „this other‟ into our own system. We are dealing with virtual reality, with things that are not there, yet, which is why Metcalf (1999) could interpret Luhmann‟s vision of an autopoietic system as one that “constructs itself upon a foundation that is entirely not there”, which makes of design practice and design education a virtual reality process. All the elements that comprise a design conversation are autopoietic systems (people) or are sub-elements, creations (ideas, events, objects), of these systems, and thus we can say that a design + educational system conversation preconstructs its own environment that then already contains its own unique distinction - social and design realities and meanings are autopoietically constructed inside the system, so it only influences itself, in that respect, and change takes place as an internal restructuring. Yet this system is still „open‟ to the world in the sense that the „unique boundary‟ of an autopoietic system, separating it from the environment through allowing only internal influence but also reuniting the system to an „external environment,‟ consists of the roles and functions performed by people (designers) who form not an isolating but “a connecting and absorbing surface” between the system and its environment (Maula, 2000:160). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 152 This people-boundary of a design + educational system in dialogue, as a connecting and absorbing surface, cannot afford to be influenced (as far as restructuring is concerned) from outside the system, since a conversation that is goal-driven “suffers from directional overdose”, and the participants encounter fixed agendas and perspectives that insist on agreement and attempts to control the discussion (De Weerdt, 1999: 66). This is not and cannot be Beer‟s version of intrinsic control of variety proliferation, for it will completely negate the necessary paradox of real-time oppositional inducement of variety. Yet, as Kelly has pointed out, and De Weerdt confirms, there is a need for direction, which Kelly treats with personal construct „anticipation‟ and De Weerdt calls a space for emergence. Virtual Systems Methodology (VSM), on the other hand, wants to discover the virtual connections that are brought into being by the productions of human activity systems. “Virtual logic is not logic … It is the pivot that allows us to move from one world of ideas to another. The meaning of what is going to emerge is a virtual meaning” (Dimitrov, 1998). VSM, in dealing with autopoietic systems, creates a limitless free virtual space for the “self-organizing capacity of complex dynamics to reveal the characteristic signs of its nature” (Dimitrov 1998). These additional, virtual and emergent spaces, that Luhmann, De Weerdt and Dimitrov are talking about, are generated by our Luhmann-Beer models of otherness, in the same way and for the same reason as Winnicot‟s notion of potential space and Kelly‟s psychological space – these all describe how the connecting and absorbing surface of the autopoietic boundary is formed, and they all use the intensional, virtual logic of the story structure of narrative. The stories we tell of virtual events are descriptions of conceptual blends, and since we can establish that we are these conceptual blends, that we are our own virtual reality, it would make sense to use systems methodological tools to investigating design + education as a human activity system, and to realise in turn that this is dependent on the larger scale social structure, but more importantly on the smaller scale single personal construct that every person creates. “Each man erects for himself a representational model of the world which allows him to make some sense out of it and which enables him to chart a course of behaviour in relation to it” (Bannister and Mair 1968: 6). This virtual logic explanation of Kelly‟s personal construct model is entirely not there, just as Luhmann‟s foundation for an autopoietic system is entirely not there, both corresponding to Winnicot‟s potential space that is “neither inside the individual nor outside in the world of shared reality [but is] the location of cultural experience itself” (Fuller 1988: 202). In these spaces or gaps between „knowing‟ and „not-knowing‟ are to be found the locations of design knowledge (manifested in cultural experience), because it is during the appearance of these entirely not there potential spaces that we can observe the structural coupling of autopoietic system boundaries, and it is here, in this charged and active conversational space, that learning / understanding takes place. Conclusion The focus of this paper is less on the research project than it is a telling of an unfolding and continuing story that looks at and for systems methodological tools for investigating design + education as a human activity system. Systems thinking crept up on me without warning, without Kelly‟s „anticipation,‟ because I was not even aware of such a category (to look forward to). A happy (reading) accident allowed me to compare what had been emerging quite naturally in the constructivist classroom situation to „knowledge in the outside world‟. Systems thinking acted as a key to allow me further access to what was at first a really muddy-to-black box situation regarding design education. I have merely been describing the developmental understanding of what has been working for me and my students for a number of years now, and since sharing this approach with others, I find that it seems to be working for them as well. It is not the content of a design curriculum that matters, but what is done with that content, and even more importantly, the fact that any real conceptual restructuring (understanding, learning) is for the individual concerned a magic moment, an arrival at Polanyi‟s „other shore of reality.‟ This is what makes of conversation such a revolutionary and evolutionary tool for teaching. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 153 Reinjection Paul Simon‟s song, The Dangling Conversation (Risa, n.d.), is the phenomenological opposite to what I had in mind when I wrote this paper, since Simon‟s lyrics do not celebrate the virtual spaces of possibility (made „visible‟ and brought to presence by conversation) but instead highlights Dasein‟s unwillingness to take that next step towards a phase transition, being only too comfortable in its Verfallen state, in its safe and unknowing relationship with the world, and hence also with other people and their ideas, a mutual shrugging off of a lurking change of direction. As Simon sings, You‟re a stranger now unto me Lost in the dangling conversation. And the superficial sighs, In the borders of our lives. The borders of our lives are where we are, and where we find our being, but also where we can lose it, as these lyrics show, making of this dangling conversation an ongoing and soporific flow of inconsequential data bits, much like the vast amounts of so-called information on FaceBook. I think that Simon shows a phenomenological insight with And you read your Emily Dickinson, And I my Robert Frost, And we note our place with bookmarkers That measure what we‟ve lost. It is just too easy to „read‟ and pretend to be literate (cf. Chapter 2:78-80), but what happens after a student has „read‟ the authors you suggest, and even after they have „discussed‟ the issues among themselves? Do they register in their own minds their „places‟ with Verfallen bookmarks without measuring what they have potentially lost? Without further intervention from design educational probing (in the shape of, e.g., this hybrid thing called gramma/topology), the students find themselves in a position described by Heidegger (1962:222) as, “When Dasein, tranquilized, and „understanding‟ everything, thus compares itself with everything, it drifts along towards an alienation [Entfremdung] in which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it”. In educational terms, being exposed to new information, new ways of seeing the world and therefore of judging your own self as a design that can cope (or not) with this newly discovered world of otherness, can be a bewildering and perhaps a shattering experience for a novice student, and, in this borderland of our lives, between the old self and the yet-to-be-constructed new self, it is a fact that people can become alienated from „themselves‟. But, anything can be turned to good account, and a dangling conversation, I realised, should contain just enough intriguing content to wake students up, in the first place, to make them take notice, and then to entice them onwards with promises of more. The real problem with design education, then, becomes not delivering on your promise, like a politician, but finding ways of helping the students acquire the learning structures they need to „deliver on this promises‟, held out in the original conversation, by themselves. The roles have switched, and learner becomes teacher-of-self, capable of self-organization and self-production (cf. the section on Autopoiesis), but learner becomes capable of self-generation within the collective. In giving students conceptual tools for thinking-with, we provoke new pathways of thought, but, of course, it is not the „we‟ creature that does this, it is the dynamics of the collective that makes this possible; we do not do the fishing and attach the lure, the fishermen do their own fishing and their yearning for what is possible is the „lure‟ – as a design educator I can only do tricks to make them see their own bait, and these students begin to design their own world from within their own perspective: they begin “the construction of one‟s own world”. Design education becomes a Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 154 voluntary reconstructive process, well on the way to teaching itself the intricacies of ethical and purposeful action, and, yes, I know what is wrong with this sentence, but I also know where this sentence is going. Whitney-Smith lamented the fact that “there is no way for an external observer [teacher] to determine if a system has changed its structure”, but if you will allow me to pre-empt things just a little, if one combines social constructivism with Actor-Network Theory (next section), then there is a more certain way in which this can be accomplished. A constructivist learning experience places „the individual‟ in a position that enables the (one + one +) combination(s) to learn-with, in which scenario my answers are simply a part of the possible mix of learning inputs. When a learner becomes an auto-teacher in the systems sense, that individual sive group acts within a network of knowing actors (and I haven‟t told them yet a book can be regarded as a „knowing‟ non-human actor). When we thus admit the notion of framing actions, it should remind us of the intentional act of purposeful cybernetic action, a move towards the unknown that explores new possibilities, but does so in the open spaces of both Heidegger‟s „forest clearing‟ and Latour‟s (2002) space of negotiation and reassembly (cf. Chapter 3:104). We are part of the human system(s) that have evolved over millennia, and despite the fact that cultural systems may appear as if they do not change, from within the slow passage of (real) time, with historical hindsight we can see how quickly these systems of belief can change when confronted by changing circumstances, and how quickly they can die when unable to adapt. Human systems are socially constructed, and as such they need to remain as flexible as possible, which situation, granted, was not that obvious in the past, but within our technologically-driven social sphere has gained an uncomfortable momentum. Design education has thus to take notice of all manner of resistance to constructivist thought, as well as those circular, investigative „performances‟ that can only add to the social stock of design knowledge. From this perspective I began telling the story of how a constructivist classroom could function, and the notion of a design conversation comes very strongly to the fore as a very important element of the mix, highlighting the fact that the interaction, this communicative exchange, between at least two partners in this dance of knowledge trading can become the starting point of something beyond all the initial inputs. Everything depends, really, on each participant being able to perceive themselves as some thing35 with the ability to move, and be moved, from an existing situation to a preferred one, i.e., we are then capable of learning how the „turning process‟ works, how the lack of „knowledge‟ (despite a surplus of information) is „turned‟ into Howell‟s (2002:155-162) „performative‟ knowledge. The constructivist classroom conversation effectively runs on systems-type inputs from all parties concerned, but above all the one element that can make a huge difference is Pask‟s Conversation Theory, a „theory‟ that is not only a theory of knowing (von Glasersfeld) but a theory that helps build other theories, or other ways of knowing, because the notion of teach it back (educational feedback loops) can help the process, the knowing object being moved, to begin the design and construction of a Bailey Bridge across the divide between knowing and not knowing, these gaps or spaces between communications. A real WWII Bailey Bridge may have been constructed from pre-fabricated parts that were small enough to be transported by lorry, but reassembled they could span gaps of 60m, and what are our own bits and pieces of memory information but „pre-fabricated‟ parts that need reassembly? We need to span virtual gaps between here and somewhere else, between what we have now and what our purposeful action can achieve, and this journey is a constructivist learning process that tends to reveal both the nature of and the possibilities open to the individual and the discipline. 35 At this stage I cannot come closer than saying, we are at the same time a subject, a knowing object and part of the translation process. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 155 It would seem natural, then, to extend the scope of this constructivist conversation to include cybernetic partners other than humans, since we are dealing with designed objects and the relationships between human and non-human actors, hence the next section that investigates the theory of Actor-Networks. 4.2 Actors and networks What exactly is Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the masses cry, and the answer comes back, you are „it‟, with „you‟ denoting every one and every thing. My first encounter with ANT came through reading Latour‟s (1992) article, Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door, and as I explained in Chapter 1:37, Latour‟s missing masses example focuses on the role that these designed objects play in our lives, and the fact that we do not seem to notice them, and are therefore „in the dark‟ as to the effect sive affect they can have on our lives, especially when things go wrong, when these designed objects break down and refuse to do our bidding. According to Latour (1992), a „groom‟ is Frenglish for that device (non-human actor) that automatically and politely closes the door for you after you have opened it and passed through. When it works, of course. A notice on the „French‟ door Latour was about to pass through one cold February day said36 “The groom is on strike, for God‟s sake keep the door closed”. Do we not often look upon our mechanical „servants‟ as if they were people, these non-human actors, and address them accordingly? We assign roles to these designed objects, but too often do not realize exactly how important the roles are that they play in shaping our (human+) ontologies 37 , the very existence we lead, who we think we are. We are not so much mapping the external world by „talking‟ to grooms and doors, but mapping our own internal worlds according to how we respond to these external stimuli, to how we choose to interact with the objects and events that „populate‟ our environment. For design this insight from ANT works both ways, it simultaneously helps illuminate what was presentin-absence but an obscure source of socio-technical influence (that is, until the ground becomes figure, until the groom refuses, and you notice „him‟ for the first time) and it shows the contemporary slide towards a situation wherein our socio-technical progress can de-illuminate, i.e., darken, the effect sive affect of these „grooms‟, hence making it more difficult for us to map our internal worlds in response to „the world‟. The fact is, although design, as a change agent, is recognised more than ever for the role it plays in contemporary life, and hence the designed objects we surround ourselves with are more visible (prominent and under discussion) in one sense, in another we want these servants of humanity to become more invisible, and Latour‟s question, where are the missing masses will answer itself by disappearing. The designed and artificial world we construct is now so complex, in terms of sociotechnical scaffolding, that we want and need more of these grooms to retreat into the background and become black-boxed38, thanks to ubiquitous computing, which fact now means that designed artifacts (and systems, even more far-reaching) are becoming more embedded and situated in our everyday existence39. This scenario can become a bigger problem than just a groom refusing to obey us, making the visible / invisible debate40 a contentious issue, since each side of the argument has good and bad points. Our contemporary socio-technical position is somewhat ambiguous and undecided as yet, since it is not technology per se that is the problem, but our particular use (and understanding) of the possibilities offered by technology, and when we ask should we be in control of technology (cf. Chapter 36 How can a notice „say‟ anything? We very easily assign „human‟ roles to inanimate objects, since they refer to human action or intent. 37 Are we in a trans/post-humanist phase of development? 38 As humans we deal most successfully with abstractions, since we cannot „deal‟ with too much information at any one time, hence the „natural‟ development of black boxes, devices that “contain that which no longer has to be reconsidered” (Callon and Latour, 1981:285). 39 40 Cf. Latour (2005b:73): “objects are nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt”. Being so complex, designed interfaces, for instance, need to make some features „visible‟ for affordances‟ sake, but also must make most of the inner workings „invisible‟ (black-boxed), as non-essential to the human-machine interface. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 156 2:63) that means design education should introduce students to the affordances of a mode of investigation such as ANT, to prevent, at least, an uncritical attitude towards the human-technology relationship. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a way of observing the relationships that develop between human beings and all manner of designed objects and systems, and it treats people as human actors while treating machines, designed artefacts, systems and even events as non-human actors that play roles within this created relationship cycle. ANT, as a way of seeing and understanding the world, is thus normally concerned with the human / design interface, thus ANT can tell you what to look out for, but it will not, and cannot, help you make up your mind, since ANT is not applicable to anything (Latour, 2005:141). ANT considers the observation of social systems41 as of necessity having to include both human and nonhuman actors. However, there is no such thing as „the social‟ in ANT terms (Latour, 2005: 5), since „the social‟ (as a „solid‟) is itself a social construct; what is more important are the associations entered into by the members of that „social‟, and because ANT is also known as the sociology of translation, everything we reach out to we simultaneously „translate‟. That would normally mean we interpret the phenomena confronting us, in order to understand, not the phenomena themselves, but to understand our own selves, in translation, in movement. Everyday contact with the other, every association we enter into, is a translation of our old into our new selves. We are not so much interpreting or translating the other as moving our old understanding from its previous to its new position. The trouble with ANT is the word theory in the equation, since ANT is not a traditional theory at all, but a theory of knowing, which equates ANT with a systemic cybernetics of knowing when we drop the term theory and, instead, refer to these paths of discovery42 as ways of seeing and knowing, aka a lens onto another reality, a constructed reality as yet unformatted but potentially existing, in part, in Jonas‟s groundless field of knowledge. The trouble with ANT is that it is of no use at all, if you are looking for method or an underlying framework for your research, since ANT is not applicable to anything (Latour, 2005:141; 156). However, ANT is applicable when a „thing‟ is a negotiating space (below), just not to your discipline or to your work. In discussing the problems of constructivism, 43 Latour (2003) points to the misconceptions that [1] society as a grounded and lasting framework provide the strength for the more fragile structure of laws and regulations (solid:social > fragile:sciences), or [2] that the solid facts of science and its laws of nature provide the framework for a more fragile society (fragile:social > solid:sciences), or yet another view [3] that stresses that it is the solid relations between the social and the laws of science that provide the basis for the construction of reality (fragile:social >solid relations< fragile:sciences). Nothing is permanent, nothing lasts forever, even if the movement or transition from one phase to another is so slow that it appears that way, which is why Heraclitus could declare that we can never step into the same river twice. Between the terms social and relations and sciences there isn‟t a solid one amongst them, since they are all made up, impermanent constructions of our need to organize the world and our lives; it is the human wish for permanence that makes us pretend to the safety of the term solid, and it is likewise our fear of death, uncertainty and the dread of impermanence that makes us avoid the term fluid, the very thing we need (fluid:social >fluid relations< fluid:sciences). 41 The observation of social systems, a cybernetic approach, should not be confused with the (unifocal) study of social networks, since the type of investigation argued for in this thesis (by implication inclusive of cybernetics and radical social constructivism) cannot be confined by or restricted to the capacities or capabilities of one individual, the actor, “but extends the word actor – or actant – to non-human, non individual entities‟ (Latour, 1997), implicitly providing the platform for any individual to think like a group (cf. Chapter 1:6). 42 I admit that this term can be misleading, and have to add that, as used here, it does not refer to knowledge „out there‟ that can be discovered without mediation or interpretation, but refers to the path we open up towards that clearing-in-the forest (Heidegger) that can become the open space of negotiated meaning. On its own a path of discover leads nowhere if travelled alone (not socially constructed) or leads to a predetermined goal (rote learning) which entails no „discovery‟ at all. 43 Latour is referring to the many interpretations of so-called „constructivism‟ that are, really, behaviourist in principle. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 157 An impermanent and fluid condition, rather, is the business of design due to its „everywhere groundlessness‟ (cf. Chapter 3:119), a situation that I described in A Natural Death is Announced using the term basho, expressed as emptiness and nothingness, which in turn denotes, not a negative position 44 , but the space within which we can reassemble our relations with the other, and where Bateson‟s metapattern forms an everywhere groundlessness, from which new ideas (new assemblies from old parts) are born. It is in this same space of reassembly that Latour (2003) uses to “understand how science and technology were providing some of the ingredients necessary to account for the very making and the very stability of society”. The term fluid, of course, has an affinity for and with the term contingency (cf. Chapter 3:115, Design must be free to construct and reconstruct its contingent foundations from a continuously-emitting-information ground to its own, and our, figure), since fluid also denotes the terms flowing, graceful, elegant, while the term flowing also leads to: sinuous > adaptable > flexible > unstable! These are all terms that to various extents are applicable to design as a thinking and becoming process, becoming, that is, with regard to both the discipline and the individual. ANT follows this same non-path, in the sense that here, on this Wittgensteinian research landscape (cf. Chapter 1:23), there is no true map to the territory, no pre-determine path that can lead to success, instead, ANT and design adhere to no such basic metaphor as a defined and fully describe network, and choose to reject technical sive social determinism45. OK, so that‟s another string to add to your bow, but why would an aggregation of several theories, or ways of knowing, help you make up your mind? It‟s not a question of making up my mind, as if I were out shopping for pre-existing items … what happens is that I read a lot, and what I read has an effect sive affect on me, which means that … So, you become what you read? No, it‟s not that uncomplex … if you observe me46 from your external-to-me position, perceptually sive conceptually, you might think that I start to resemble a hermit crab (who disguises his true self – i.e., advertising to bigger creatures, eat me - by gluing ocean detritus on to his shell, in effect camouflaging himself) and as if I draw these influences towards me deliberately to form hybrid constructions much like the scaffolding on new building sites ... You‟ve overreached yourself now. You claim that your new self is a hybrid of the old self and new influences … … but not an unchanging core self that wears a Joseph‟s multi-coloured coat on the outside. A chance but fortunate etymological mistake explains it better: the Latin root of lens refers to a lentil (roughly equivalent in shape), so strictly speaking, when we refer to ANT as a lens, we use the direct gramma/ part of gramma/topology to imagine the ease with which we can now interpret something present in our environment that was previously „unknown‟ to us in terms of information. The phase transition between acquiring information and the production of knowledge is facilitated by the /topology part, in the sense that the investigative lens is turned into a lentil, and ground comes to the fore in a gestalt switch to become figure, and it is as if we first „look‟ at and then „eat‟ the information (cf. the section on autopoiesis and co-ontogenic drift), making it an intrinsic part of our knowing being. There is indeed an 44 This stands, despite the fact that a positive is here achieved with a negative: Latour (2005b:141) states that ANT is a negative argument in the sense that it refuses to say something positive about any state of the world (refuses to provide a method or an underlying framework). 45 The quintessential ANT „network‟ resembles a rhizome more than it does a computer „network‟ that is rigidly pre-formatted and requirements engineered. 46 When is a „me‟ just a simple, unmoving and historical fact, instead of a dynamic and emotivating subject-in-development? Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 158 exchange relation between knowing and being in the sense that this exchange relation also entails a relationship between „external‟ information and „internal‟ knowledge, as if this foreign body of information is ingested and our (digestive) system turns this into (system-unique material) knowledge, which in turn re-designs our knowing self; the ground is switched for the figure and design is then free to construct and reconstruct its contingent foundations from a continuously-emitting-information ground to its own, and our, figure (cf. Chapter 3:115). When a relationship is first put in motion between the self and the not-self, when we perceive, are made aware of, or when something in the environment gradually draws near (as happens when we look for a something in the research process, but cannot at first say what that could or indeed should be) we look upon this outside-the self as the ground (possibility), with our self-being as the figure (fact). With a lens such as ANT we choose deliberately to enhance what there is to see, and if we find what we seem to be looking for, when that something in the environment gains enough attraction for us to allow it ingress into our system, what was ground switches to become part of the previous-but-yet-new figure, as the external information drifts coontogenically to meld with our new-self. I beg your pardon?! What? The lens>lentil / ground comes to the fore in a gestalt switch, what was mere information becomes an important part of who we are and what we know, hence what was ground is now become figure, because we consumed the lens>lentil / ground: there is an exchange relation between the holistic process of knowing and the result of that knowing, which is our new being, our new self. I might be flippant (again) and state that this exchange relation is a trick, a sleight of hand that switches the one thing for the other, and yet they are both (exformationally) still there, but in altered roles. Perhaps I could explain this in another way, to bring ANT closer to design thinking so the two could begin to describe each other. Acknowledgement of text The amended text below was taken from my Chapter in Silva and R. Simões (eds.), Handbook of Research on Trends in Product Design and Development: Technological and Organizational Perspectives. (Van der Merwe, 2010b). As a way of sharing this knowledge among a group of like-minded people, ANT is a methodology that works well for designers, but we must remember that, as a theory, ANT is not applicable to anything (Latour, 2005 141). Any good methodology, as a good theory, is not a method for doing anything, and it is not a recipe that guarantees an outcome. Latour‟s (173-74) description of how ANT can be useful includes “specific tricks to help resist the temptation to jump to the global”, because, in the very act of communication, in forming networks (even if only between one local actor and a second), we are moving („jumping‟) from the local (the individual) to the global, to the many, to the away-from-us. “A ploy has to be found to make the two social theories diverge, letting the sociology of the social go its own way while the sociology of associations should be able to keep drawing more and more accurate maps”. ANT is, simply put, [1] a way of looking at the roles that human and non-human actors play in any one situation, with non-human actors identified as designed objects, rocks in the road, the snow in winter that will not let your car start, the window that sticks and will not open. Non-human actors are all the external-to-being-human objects (even events) we notice when they do not work as they should, and, more seriously, objects that intrude in our (un)consciousness and our decision-making processes even though we are not aware of the fact. ANT looks at the relationship we have with these objects, and considers the observation of social systems as of necessity having to include both. More to the point, but more difficult to „see‟, is the ANT approach to the context of the social. There is no such Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 159 thing as „the social‟ in ANT terms, because “In the alternative [ANT] view, „social‟ is not some glue that could fix everything including what the other glues cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many other types of connectors” (Latour, 2005 5). When ANT speaks of the social, [2] what is meant are the associations entered into by the members of that „social‟ – which can be a single conversation between two people, or a whole group of like-minded designers coming together in order to decide on the way forward, for the sake of a sustainable, living future. The „social‟ is a temporary concept, which might last for many years, or centuries even, but change it most certainly will, and in our contemporary age change is not only inevitable, but quick (van der Merwe, 2008). So, what has all of this to do with design education, and, more to the point, with design practice? What can help people who wish to adopt a way of life that focuses on long-term sustainability? ANT proposes a number of phases any individual (in joining a like-minded group) has to go through for the theory (of looking at the world differently) to be given any chance of changing your mind, about anything. ANT can tell you what to look out for, but it will not, and cannot, help you make up your mind. Because ANT is also known as the sociology of translation, everything we touch (everything / everybody we reach out to, whether physically or with our thoughts, we „touch‟ and explore phenomenologically) we simultaneously translate. That would normally mean we interpret the phenomena confronting us, in order to understand, not the phenomena themselves, but to understand our own selves, in translation. Everyday contact with the other, every interpretation of the external, is a translation of our old selves into our new selves. We are not really interpreting or translating the other, but moving our old understanding from its previous position to its new position, in relation to this new association. As far as I understand the ANT process, most descriptions seem to agree that there are four major phases to go through, and, it needs to be said, I am appropriating this theory to the extent that my understanding is a design-based sociological translation of the actant texts I work with, and we will only deal with the first two phases: Phase 1] Problematization, which simply means you, the focal or main actor in the system, identifies something outside your system / knowledge environment that does not fit into your scheme of things (who, what, and how you understand, anything), and, this is so important, you must suspend disbelief, must imagine, for a moment, that you do not know all there is to know. That is the first moment of translation, the first obligatory passage point (OPP), when you „recognise each other‟, when you recognise that there is something external-to-the-self that you need; where design knowing would start to veer off is in ANT‟s recognition of the focal actor‟s role, not so much in this first phase, but the implications for the second phase, and, particularly, with what Callon (1986) writes about this focal actor “rendering itself indispensable”. Phase 2] Interessement, the second moment of translation (and here understanding will start to founder if we do not acknowledge that translation must be admitted into the process as transportation, which in turn, creates the environment for transformation), is usually the persuasive phase of enrolling others in your network of belief / understanding. However, here is a second point on which the usual ANT process, as described (a little too pre- and in-scribed?) by certain texts, differs from design / systemic thought. Interessement, as a second phase of translation … stop. What are you „translating‟? In the first phase, Problematization, the focal actor (you, as the individual „I‟) identifies that, as a system, something is lacking, something that is vitally necessary for the continuation of the (your) system. Your gaze upon the world-out-there, the other systems external to yours, is initiated because of a need within the system itself. It would be a falling back into (cf. Heidegger‟s Verfallen, below) the trap of concepts that ANT can replace (in terms of constructing a human as opposed to a social world viewpoint), in the sense that these concepts manufacture meganarratives, or stories of conduct that become inscribed, in no uncertain terms, in the social book of conduct, the very notion that Latour says Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 160 is false! So, what are you translating, with a weather eye kept on transformation, if what you need for the survival of your system depends on the acceptance, by the other systems, of your narrative, or system of survival? Allied to radical social constructivism (RSC), the notion of autopoiesis (selfgenerating systems) and second order cybernetics (observation of observing systems) position our understanding on the knowledge plane where each system reacts „selfishly‟, because “it” needs to survive. This, on the face of it, seems to support the contention that the focal actor should render itself indispensable, but that would be a one-sided interpretation with no transportation at all. An autopoietic system has no interest in rendering itself indispensable to its environment, but it does have an interest in rendering its conduct – its interaction with the external environment – congruent with a sustainable future: a system cannot draw from its environment to the extent that this environment becomes unstable and therefore unsustainable (to its own survival). Cybernetics tells us that, as a designer, you want to keep the second phase of Interessement as neutral as is humanly possible, therefore you let the „translation‟ circulate where it will (along with its shadow, meaning your specific version of „it‟) to, not „persuade‟ others into your circle of knowing, but to offer your new-self-understanding of /an object, a person, an event/ to whomever needs it and can use it. That is called metadesign thinking, which is nothing, and potentially everything (new). For a design understanding of ANT we need not go further, and it is my contention that Callon did not affirm the necessity of the focal actor‟s indispensability, on the contrary, what he described were “attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definitions of the situation on the others”, in clear violation of the first ANT principle of agnosticism, i.e., impartiality between actors (Callon, 1986). What Callon was describing in … domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay was an unbiased commentary on all the activities of all the actors concerned, from the scallops, the nets, the anchors, the boats, the tide, the fishermen, the scientists, and their colleagues back in the city. When Callon speaks of the scientists as designing their roles as the first obligatory passage point, and therefore establishing themselves as the main focal actors, Callon was merely reporting each event neutrally and not making value judgements, which he later put in context by admitting to “a venial sin [of oversight] … ANT has often been criticised for presenting actors guided by the quest for power and solely interested in spreading networks and their influence [which was unintentional, since] In a network of pure scientific mobilization, the actor resembles that dreadful white male enamoured of power and aligning the world around himself” (Callon, 2005a:193). In his original St Brieuc Bay document Callon (1986) described the situation as follows: “Transactions with the fishermen, or rather, with their representatives, are non-existent. They watch like amused spectators and wait for the final verdict”. The designer, as only the first focal actor (somebody needs to set the ball rolling), must deal with issues of impartiality, and be willing to become just one of the actors in the design relationship with the users and the potential product designs-in-the-making as developing nonhuman actors, which further mean that ANT (as indeed the whole of gramma/topology) is ideally suited to the investigation of participatory design environments, touching as it does on the relationships between all the actors, and being inclusive of the tenets of activity theory. Of scallops and square pants The definition so often attributed to Callon, that the researcher (main actant) really persuades the others to occupy certain predetermined roles that suit the main actant but not necessarily the other participants, will not work for design. It is said that the scallops are the main beneficiaries in the end, and all the roles of all the actants should have this same aim, but can this work if interessement is allowed to run its course? Spongebob Squarepants, who lives under the sea in a pineapple… Every time Nick Marais (a DJ on one of our local radio stations who left to study law) played (the intro to) this song, he stated that this will put a smile on your face – the main actant-role player states something, but the action /result focused on does not depend on participating in the belief of the main actant … like Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 161 design, the belief in this will put a smile on your face must come from a form of participation that is turned back on itself, a participation because of benefit to those that participate. Callon (2005a:181) later confirmed that one of the strengths of ANT is the fact that a theory of the actor is an unstable one, and not fixed; biological systems need stable environments (above) for symbiotic survival, but social systems need unstable environments for learning and development; “rather, it [ANT] assumes the radical indeterminacy of the actor” which approach breaks with orthodox social science viewpoints, but agrees with that of RSC, which also supports, as does ANT, the dissolution of “the sterile individualism / holism dichotomy” (Callon, 2005a:182). The quality of a user and a designer who can construct the capability of moving between the individual and the group, of answering the question, how can individuals think as if each constitutes a group? is dealt with by social constructivism, by ANT, and, as we shall see, by an ontological phenomenological approach. In focusing on the after-ANT scenario, Law (2005:10) makes it clear that, in dealing with complexity issues, the diasporic nature of ANT means it transforms itself, perfectly adaptable to the design contexts it can help illuminate, and like RSC the framework for understanding is constructed inside contexts, using the elements from the grouping, in the relational context surrounding the design problem space. In concord with the issue of memory storage and more from less, Law (2005:12) describes the understanding of the after-ANT scenario as one that recognises neither singularity nor multiplicity or plurality; “this is something that is indeed more than one and less than many”, refusing the easy single / plural opposition in favour of a relational emergence, much the same way that Giddens (1986: 3; 14; 24) refused the opposition between agency and structure. Understanding, as a framework-for-action, has to be constructed somewhere inbetween the single and the multiple, the individual and the affordances for structuration to be found in the „quality experience‟ of the group. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 162 Acknowledgement of text The following article was published in Objets et Communication, a special edition of Médiation et Information 30-31:279-288 (van der Merwe, 2009). The secret lives of ANTs Introduction This is an article on design‟s ability to communicate with users through designed objects, and as such (design) semiotics should be seen as the study of how human beings observe and interpret the worlds they have created. The argument being assembled here is thus one that uses the theoretical frameworks of social structuration and of constructivism, but it does so through making use of the affordances of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and as shall become clear, this leaves structuration / constructivism intact while largely negating the „social‟ as an entity in the communicative process of negotiating everyday meaning. This approach is particularly fruitful for design as a process, for designed objects are meant to communicate with specific groupings of active humans; „active‟ as in performing tasks in real-world situations that change over time and even change from region to region. Design, as an intermediary between the user and the object, cannot rely on „the social‟ as an unchanging entity that can be communicated or reasoned with. Meaning is constructed by individuals, and yet it is never subjectively individual, nor is it social, although we have become used to attributing meaning-making and meaningkeeping to this amorphous mass. That is the problem, the fact that something we have made up, an artificial something, is imbued with so much authority of signification and structuring power. Is it any wonder, then, that most people would deny the communicative ability of designed objects, since they cannot speak to us, can they? In that case, where and how do the products of our material culture fit in, if we construct patterns of „reality‟ that shy away from any reliance47 on the non-biological, the constructed? We lead double lives: on the one hand we behave as if our words, intentions and actions are definitive of the worlds we inhabit, i.e., as if the world (and hence the meanings we find in it) can be created subjectively. On the other hand, we are also happy to inhabit an other world filled with the objects-for-life that we design (plan), manufacture, and then proceed to treat as if they were the same as the rocks and the trees, i.e., as if we live in a world where (outside-of-us) knowledge of things can be extracted from the objective environment. We do construct our own meaning, construct our very selves (identities), but we do so surrounded and influenced by our designed artefacts, anything from a pencil to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The former has a circumference of about 27mm, while the latter is built into a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27km, yet both are mere tools, designed with the help of our technologically advanced capacity to delve ever deeper beyond 48 our present horizon of expectation, in the quest for more knowledge. Which is the more powerful, the pencil, or the LHC? Both are objects external to our beingin-the-world, if we believe, on the one hand, that our lives have sufficient meaning without objects and without further knowledge. On the other hand, both designs are also representative of more than external-to-us objects, since we need them to think with. Which is now the most powerful? That is the 47 How is it possible to discuss, and even to philosophise, about „the fruits of man‟s labour‟, if we then do not award this aspect of being human a respectable place in the history and development of our very social existence? 48 Even mixed metaphors can work; a sense of curiosity knows no boundaries because it operates in three dimensions. Wittgenstein (in Arnheim,1967:146) reportedly said "... die Wörte sind wie die Haut auf einem tiefen Wasser" (words are like the skin on a deep pool); we not only use words (and what they stand for, what they denote and connote, i.e., the many different ways words are made to signify a state of the world) as tools to delve deeper into the here-and-now, the visible and concrete, but, precisely because we do that, also as tools to go beyond what we think / imagine the here-and-now may or can represent, towards the as-yet invisible. In Wittgenstein‟s terms we have to mistrust, as it were, the words that form the skin (boundary to the other) on the surface of so-called reality: words, the act of naming and thereby establishing the „truth‟ of things, are not to be trusted as if they were the last word (unintended but revealing pun) in any human being‟s quest for understanding and the making of meaning. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 163 wrong question: designers (as is ANT) are not concerned with the designed object so much as with the relationships that can exist between human beings and what they need to think with. Meaning does not reside subjectively in people (either as individuals or as groups, i.e., „the social‟), or objectively in things-in-the-world, because meaning is made when a relationship is negotiated between humans and their designed, artificial world. What, then, happens when this viewpoint on the world is given away, or when, in fact, it is not acknowledged to exist? If meaning, the whole of the semiotic signification of human life, is centred on and in „the social‟ as the authoritative source, then we often find the conditions conducive to the following of rigid laws without question. My argument is that this „normal‟ (socially formative) way of experiencing the structuring of society results in us abrogating authority in favour of those who rule us (cf. Hobbes‟ Leviathan, discussed below), and that, given this normative human-to-human relationship, we can easily allow a parallel authoritative correlation to develop in the human-to-designed-object relationship. Designing in a Greek Bubble When air traffic controllers feel themselves “in the flow and in control” then they are said to be in the bubble (Thackara, 2006:1). In control of a complex and fourth dimensional activity space that illustrates the relationship that must exist between human beings as thinking machines and everything they need to think with, especially when that knowledge is „invisible‟ for being only accessible through technological mediation (weather patterns, flight paths, number of aircraft). Aristotle makes out a case for the inbetween and the incomplete, for the question is, concerning any form of study, “what degree of accuracy is to be expected in any of them, in order that we may not unnecessarily complicate the facts by introducing side issues” (Aristotle, 1971:40). Apropos of how designed objects speak to us, Maturana (in Winograd and Flores, 1988:48) states that organism and environment (air traffic controllers and instruments) cannot be regarded as two separate things, but must be seen as a unity that “specifies the space in which it exists, and in observing it we must use distinctions within that space”. We can expect no „degree of accuracy‟ from outside this unity49, which is why observation, interpretation and consequent decision-making is inbetween and „factually‟ (objectively) incomplete, with reference to the outside, since only „distinctions within that space‟ will place you in the bubble, where only the flow of information is constant, and everything else is mutable. Aristotle (1971:29) had a similar response to Maturana‟s unity of organism and environment, in the sense that he saw an incompleteness as preferable to a set piece that repeats itself, and a sketch as having more worth than the finished painting (:39), and when he makes a case for arguing to first principles it is because the „fact‟ (in-motion) of the organism and environment interaction, as new beginnings (each time), constitutes first principles (:41). This should make us rethink the very idea of what an experience is, can be, and can afford us, as human actors, in our knowing interaction (first, coordination) with design objects, which contact leads to (second, intelligible relationship50) a space of understanding in the moment, in the bubble. More importantly, in this new world where the fact of ubiquitous computing is making designed systems less visible, and therefore almost outside our spheres of influence, a knowledge of the designed objects and systems we will increasingly come into contact with in our total world space is a way for us to deal with the complex socio-technical world. The first principle of affordance modeling For McKean (2001:85) life equals paradox and complexity, and he sees a link between the processes of research and design, which offer design students “roles for their own practice to model”. What is this 49 … and some people would find it shocking that we can expect no outside „degree of accuracy‟ from air traffic controllers inside the bubble, since the reality of the moment, the accuracy of the interactive situation, is being created in real time. 50 The essentials of The Nicomachean Ethics are rendered in Aquinas‟ social theory as two-dimensional order: co-ordination and an intelligible relationship (Finnis, 1998:35-37). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 164 practice, and what are they modelling? Design practice is thinking objects into existence for humans to interact with, and the focus should not be on the materiality of the objects but on their affordances, i.e., on their potential to speak to people. Here we may ask how it is possible for designed objects and events to speak to humans, when „they‟ have no voice except the affordances we designers instil 51 in them. As for modelling, we all wish to deal with the world in a sensible way, despite it being too big and too complex, filled with too much information (cf. the air traffic controller‟s in the bubble space). We therefore abstract information into models of that which we want to understand and deal with, and Beer‟s (1979:234) cybernetic principle 52 by which this can best be done is to acknowledge that “every regulator must contain a model of that which is regulated”. Any viable system, meaning all thinking, human, observing systems that have „mastery of their own action‟ (Aquinas, in Finnis, 1998:35) in the very process of drawing some of the material-for-building-thought from the socio-technical intelligible relationship, must contain an adequate model of the larger system it is part of, wishes to investigate, or needs to belong to. What are students modelling when they learn, and what are users modelling when they move on from Aristotle‟s „beginnings‟ and allow the newly created relationship (this space of becoming between the human, the environment, and designed objects) to influence their very thinking, their dispositional habits or ways of construing the world53, if not a present-compelling-itself-into-thefuture learning environment, one that at the same time affords us the grounds for designing the new person? What Beer is in essence talking about, and what Aristotle points to with first principles, is control, but what both focus on is a first principle intrinsic control. Modern control hands the „intelligible‟ relationship focus to the Leviathan we elect to govern us (discussed below), but instead of the leadership exercising the appropriate authority balanced by “the exercise of autonomy by the parties to the co-ordination” (Aquinas, in Finnis, 1998:35), we are creating a contemporary world space wherein designed objects and systems (cf. ubiquitous computing) will become forms of the Leviathan, and speak to us with voices of authority, turning users into unthinking consumers. When we take control of our life world spaces, we use this intrinsic control by modeling an abstracted version of the thing we are dealing with, and in the case of designed objects and systems that includes the voices with which they seem to speak to us. Designed artefacts speak to us initially with the (designer‟s) „voice‟ / message that was instilled in the design, but then it enters the (larger) world of socio-technical narratives where it speaks with and also through other designed objects, because the original „designed voice‟ was meant to compete with other voices (as in, e.g., packaging design), but also because the original voice was designed to fit into a larger narrative, which is the context within which the artefact has to function. Bateson (2000:317) speaks of the immanent mind that works within the larger system made up of people and their environments, and he illustrates this with an example of tools (designed objects) that talk back. Bateson‟s woodsman is working with an axe, a tool he „knows‟ and has become accustomed to, which means that there exists a relationship between man and axe, and between man (as woodsman) and tree. Like the carpenter and his hammer, each blow of the axe on wood is, in the performance of metal interacting with wood, a conversation that can be read by the human part of the system, in order to (non-unilaterally) „control‟ the process. “Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke [and the previous stroke was caused by 51 More properly, the affordances we instil in the minds of the human users who interact with these designs (environments). An example that has always worked well, precisely because this is how the human / object interaction works, is the propaganda poster that „affords‟ the viewer the space-of-mind to turn an old version of a narrative into a new one, neatly replacing the viewer‟s beliefs with that of the „designer‟. Nazi propaganda posters spoke loudly and clearly to its intended audiences, as did the „civic‟ c all to „patriotism‟ in all walks of American life after 9/11. 52 Very condensed: Second-order Cybernetics (the Greek origin kubernetes means steersman) is the study of observing systems, meaning, really, the study of human beings as they observe the world around them, and the results of that observation. 53 Pierre Bourdieu (2000:11) describes (a specific) habitus as a sense of the game (whose rules are not set out / imposed explicitly) that follows the specific logic of a field (of interaction, say); this is a gradual, imperceptible process, converting the original habitus; thus we construe the world-in-the-moment, in the bubble. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 165 the actions / decisions made by both man and axe, i.e., the next stroke is „controlled‟ by the behaviour of those system parts at a previous time]. This self-corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind” (Bateson, 2000:317). As a design theorist I believe that Actor-Network Theory 54 (ANT) can best reconcile the parallel discourses we call our human, ontological narratives with the larger narratives of socio-technical reality, within which cultural practices and product design have to acquire knowledge of each other. We are so used to designed objects and systems that we do not „see‟ the axe anymore, thus objects become Latour‟s (1992) missing masses; it is as if the designed objects we surround ourselves with are leading a secret life and communicating only with each other, and yet they are carriers of semiotic significance, making it possible for all human artefacts to be read as texts (Eco, 1976:57). ANT can afford us the opportunity to see where and how the products of our material culture fit into our own lives, but also where they might take over our role in the decision-making process. Actor-Network Theory Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a way of observing the relationships that develop between human beings and all manner of designed objects and systems, and it treats people as human actors while treating machines, designed artefacts, systems and even events as non-human actors that play roles within this created relationship cycle. ANT, as a way of seeing and understanding the world, is thus normally concerned with the human / design interface, thus ANT can tell you what to look out for, but it will not, and cannot, help you make up your mind, since ANT is not applicable to anything (Latour, 2005:141). ANT considers the observation of social systems as of necessity having to include both human and non-human actors. However, there is no such thing as „the social‟ in ANT terms (Latour, 2005: 5); what is more important are the associations entered into by the members of that „social‟, and because ANT is also known as the sociology of translation, everything we reach out to we simultaneously „translate‟. That would normally mean we interpret the phenomena confronting us, in order to understand, not the phenomena themselves, but to understand our own selves, in translation, in movement. Everyday contact with the other, every association we enter into, is a translation of our old into our new selves. We are not so much interpreting or translating the other as moving our old understanding from its previous to its new position. These paragraphs were removed to the beginning of this section on ANT to avoid duplication. So what happens when we enter into an association with non-human actors? In design terms you are „translating‟ your old self (Aristotle‟s factual beginnings leading to intelligible relationships) to find out what, ontologically, can be designed as your new self, and all this happens via the mediated discourses with designed objects and systems. We design the world and the world designs us. However, what ANT apparently allows us to see, is that, in becoming the focal actor in any relationship or association, you then recruit others into the new system, persuading them of your role and place, rendering yourself indispensable: this is the connotative message of many texts that put forward an explication of ANT principles (i.e., Linden and Saunders, 2009:22-23; Kraal, 2007; Şeker, 2004; Sommerlund, 2007), but it is a false message. Callon (1986) clearly states that “attempts by … researchers to impose themselves and their definitions of the situation on the others”, in clear violation of the first ANT principle of agnosticism, i.e., impartiality between actors, is wrong. Rendering yourself indispensable is the equivalent of elevating yourself to the position of a macro-actor, while everyone (and everything) else is assigned roles as micro-actors, not „acting of themselves and by free choice‟ (Aquinas, in Finnis, 1998:35). If you are one of the micro-actors you hand control to an „elected‟ Leviathan who will speak to you with a voice of authority (cf. above). Callon and Latour (1981:278) discuss the social contract of Thomas Hobbes (17th century philosopher), that has much in common with Aquinas‟ co-ordination and resultant intelligible relationship via the exercise of (deputized) authority by a ruler. For Hobbes the sovereign, although not speaking on his own behalf, yet becomes the focal actor, the Leviathan (supposedly benign). The question now is, how can macro-actors (the state, organizations, social classes) be distinguished from micro-actors (individuals, voters, users) when they should be the „same size‟ (according to Hobbes‟ social contract) and thus have the same voice? What happens when the Leviathan becomes less benign? 54 This is on the understanding that ANT is not an applicable theory that can be appropriated as a practical method by any disci pline, but is instead a way of knowing. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 166 There is no such thing as „the social‟, but there are associations entered into, some willingly, and others, perhaps, unwittingly, for who would think that in dealing with designed objects - and with the use of the internet, cell phones, wireless connection, Bluetooth, now with systems - that we are entering into an association with non-human actants who can take on the role of the defining focal actor, this new Leviathan? “We behave as if … the object world, so close and yet so radically other, did not need to be taken into consideration” (Droit, 2005:73). In the contemporary intelligible relationship between users, objects and systems we are handing the voice of authority to these black boxes55, these indispensable actors who become the obligatory passage points (OPPs) through which all members of that association must pass. In the process of design we have to be aware of the modes of signification we instil in objects, since they most decidedly take part in the making of meaning, and the way they talk back to us is our doing. The theoretical framework of a semiotics of design has one purpose, to account for “the immanent [cf. Bateson, above] relations that … predispose the manifestation of a certain meaning effect” (Mattozzi, 2007). ANT, as a lens to view the immanent process, is ideally suited to this purpose, for its impartiality shows us both sides of the argument. Designers have to pay attention to the semiotics of design in use, since a Leviathan-based approach will design objects as macro-actors in an asymmetrical relationship, leaving “to others the control of the world of meanings” (Chandler, in Hodge, 2003).56 At last The well-designed human-artefact relationship, then, centres on imbued semiotic affordances, e.g. in the case of a flute, such that it becomes difficult to distinguish “whether the person plays the instrument or the instrument the person” in our effort to understand the infinite variety of “the grammar of gesture and posture” (Droit, 2005:193) involved in our contemporary, ontological, sociotechnical discourse. This does not produce asymmetries, for the unity itself specifies the space in which it exists (cf. above), creating our ways of thinking (grammar) and our ways of acting (gesture / posture). But, I am afraid that the secret lives of these missing masses, these designed objects and systems, this “proliferation of efficient and complex machines, highly sophisticated and eminently logical”, when we do not see or recognize them as conversational partners, “leads also to the proliferation of stupefied and passive states of mind” (Droit, 2005:116). Epistemology, the competence of acquiring knowledge, is nothing without the affordance of personal ontology, the way we actively design our presentcompelling-itself-into-the-future identities, and for that „we‟ need to maintain a joint socio-technical, intrinsic, control. 55 A black box is anything that has been decided on, and packaged, as it were, as the last word in argument. A stop sign and an automatic teller machine are black boxes, and so are authoritative figures who have been invested with certain responsibilities, and whose position, once established, becomes “A black box [which] contains that which no longer has to be reconsidered” (Callon and Latour, 1981:285). 56 It is an acknowledge fact that we are beings that have to work with and live with abstractions (we are symbolic-system manipulators), for abstracted communication contains more information that can be said, written, or designed. However, the black box-effect of abstraction has to be guarded against; “Abstract systems deskill … The deskilling of day-to-day life is an alienating and fragmenting phenomenon … because the intrusion of especially expert systems into all aspects of day-to-day life undermines preexisting forms of local control” (Giddens, 1991:137). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 167 Reinjection Design is a process that starts with people thinking or imagining objects and systems into being. Our self-generated design as a human society has always included the affordances of objects which design us as much as we design them, as these objects „speak‟ to us. However, most people would deny or seem unaware of these relationships between humans and objects. Knowledge of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can reconcile opposing views, since ANT is concerned with the relationships that are formed between ourselves as human actors and the non-human actors (artefacts) we design. The focus in this article is on how this relationship can become asymmetrical, allowing designers to produce „black boxes‟ (opaque systems) that cannot be questioned in the process of making meaning. The concept of arguing to first principles is put forward to counter this tendency, since the affordances of everyday existence should not be constructed by anyone but ourselves, but in practice are unilaterally designed, or rather, decreed. Design, as a social, constructivist, activity is also a communicative device, and as the example of ANT shows, design can also become a network of affordances on all possible levels of cognition and inducement to thought and action, i.e., design as an actant can instigate cybernetics-inspired purposeful action. In the article I spoke of design as an intermediary between the user and the object, and because the designed artifact is not „the design‟, just as the pencil itself or the LHC as objects are not the actant design that communicate, we may well ask, then what are they? That question I will attempt to answer in Chapter 5, as a serious question that needs a more in-depth answer, but the short version is that each of these objects are non-human actors … … then design cannot be an actant as well, if design is not the object, surely? Design is not synonymous with „the object‟, and yet design can be an „object‟ for us to observe, but as a „relational object‟ that acts as another form of intermediary, an extension, if you will, of the intermediary role that the designed artifact can play. It is only too easy to „design‟ an artifact that does not and cannot act as a non-human actant … Stop right there. It‟s confusing if you use two terms for the same thing. Make up your mind, are we talking about actors or actants? I am not so sure myself, since Callon and Latour (1992:347) speak of “the shifts in vocabulary like „actant‟ instead of „actor,‟ „actor-network‟ instead of „social relations,‟ „translation‟ instead of „interaction‟ …” We‟re not supposed to use the term interaction anymore? No, that‟s not the idea. My interpretation (my permission to myself) is that you use the term that best fits the description you are trying to make clear, and that is how I translate the difference between actant and actor; the term actant seems to denote the possibility of being an actor, while the term actor, when assigned to a person or an object, denotes a purposeful action. If interaction best describes what you mean, then use it, but if you wish to afford the reader, or in design terms the user of your own purposeful action-in-waiting, the opening to a further area of investigation, of revelation, then use the term translation, because interpretation should designerly mean there is more to come than meets the eye (and the cognition) at this first moment. Or you can just forget about all of this and just use that pencil to write a note. We do lead double lives, or play double actant roles, with other people (human actors) and designed objects (non-human actors) as the possible cybernetic dancing partners, and yet … Some treat the whole process (inclusive of all possible actants) as if we could construct meaning Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 168 subjectively, and some treat the whole process as if nothing is easier than extracting objective knowledge from the world; in both cases you interact with the pencil and the LHC as if they are mere objects, and no translation takes place, no movement of your previous state of being or the „shape‟ of your knowledge. If you choose the third path, then these objects become, to you anyway, as if dancing partners, like a good verbal sparring partner in a debate. The two of you beget a third „topic‟ in Pask‟s sense, and that is the „design‟ (non-human) actor that has a becoming voice that is more than one and less than many (Law, 2005:12); it is neither your voice nor the voice of the object, but a conjunctive/disjunctive device57 that lets descriptions associate in contextually relevant permutations of meaning (cf. Chapter 3:85). If we want to know whether the pencil or the LHC is the more powerful, then it is indeed the wrong question to ask, but we have to contemplate the character, the objectness of designed objects and ask how powerful a role can they play? I regard the nature of the object and the nature of design as an actant conversationalist in the same light, and will attempt in the next chapter to address this issue, which involves the thought of complexity hidden in the concept of more than one and less than many. The argument I made in the article is that if we dare not think with the voice of complexity in some shape or another, then we give away the semiotic signification of human life by handing authority to a Leviathan in the guise of a human or a non-human actor. In the absence of accepting the affordance of an intrinsic control mechanism we can hardly be the main focal actor in our own lives, let alone be play that role in any socio-technical intelligible relationship, which cannot (should not) be a one-way communication street. Bateson‟s axe is a good example of the inbetweenness of the relational conversation between humans, non-humans and the events (circumstances, environment) within which this interaction>translation takes place. Does the axe or the tree „speak‟ to the woodsman, or is it a combined voice? None of the three, although I have heard myself (simplistically) explain it in this way. More than one and less than many also means that all the voices are to be taken into account: count them; axe1, tree1, man1; >feedback: axe2, tree2, man2; >feedback: axe/man1, tree/man1; axe/tree/man … you get the point (cf. Figure 18: The wickedness of design education in the section The affordances of ontological phenomenology). These conversations are numerous and self-generating, and, in a sense, we black-box most of this complex interaction > translation > transportation voice and concentrate on what is, really, an abstraction of the (real, complex) conversation, which is what can make a design voice (having to work through the object) so difficult to put across. Some designers, as do some scientists (i.e., Linden and Saunders, 2009:22-23; Kraal, 2007; Miller, 2002 (in Callon, 2005); Şeker, 2004; Sommerlund, 2007), solve this problem by opting for the control mechanism of the main focal actor, in the process not understanding Callon‟s (1986) article, perhaps because the creation of a Leviathan has always been the easier route to take, i.e., “As an alternative to Callon … Miller examines the increasing ability of economists and other agents of abstract models … to transform the world into closer approximations of their theories and models” (Miller 2002, in Callon 2005), and “The Hansard department is powerful enough that it can compel the heterogeneous actors to follow the scripts assigned to them” (Kraal, 2007), in discussing ANT-inspired design research. This is a position that design education should avoid, because as McKean states, education should offer design students “roles for their own practice to model”, and we should ask what is this practice, and what are they modelling? Design practice is thinking objects into existence for (other) humans to interact with, to translate, and the focus should not be on the materiality of the objects but on their affordances, a major aspect of which being the ontological structuring of identity (mutual, human and non-human). For this reason the notion of a first principle intrinsic control was discussed (and will be further addressed in Chapter 5) as an 57 Richard Jung‟s (2007:19) sive principle. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 169 agnostic symmetric position … Since it is impossible to take only one of many ontological positions in order to account for the way scientists bring in nonhumans, we the analysts have to entertain the whole range. One way to do this is to extend our principle of symmetry to vocabulary and to decide that whatever term is used for humans, we will use it for nonhumans as well. (Callon and Latour, 1992:353) Intentionality is most definitely not extended to the realm of objects by taking this position. As I state in Chapter 5 (cf. the article Cybernetic Conversations), conversations are not about concepts, however much they may be the focus of each conversation, but about each participant in the interaction (Pask, 1996:357). Conversations can speak to each other because they are proxy humans, and in the same sense I regard objects as proxy humans, which is still not to say that agency and intentionality can be extended to objects, at least not in the sense that we reserve these terms for humans. When boundaries become blurred it is easy to mistake the one for the other, as Droit (2005:193) realises in using the example of a flute, when it becomes difficult to distinguish “whether the person plays the instrument or the instrument the person” in our effort to understand the infinite variety of “the grammar of gesture and posture”, again a possible gestalt switch that can lead to enlightenment, or wreak havoc, as the example Latour (1999:21) uses when he refers to the Mafalda comic strip. The little girl watches her daddy quietly enjoying a smoke, and innocently asks him What are you doing?, to which he replies, from within his structure of understanding (translating his own version of things), I am smoking a cigarette. The human actor is carrying out a purposeful action by making use of a non-human actor. That is, until the gestalt switch takes place, and Mafalda remarks, with the cybernetic perceptiveness of the very young, Oh, I thought the cigarette was smoking you. We are translated and transported to Polanyi‟s (1962:123) other shore of reality, to find that, against all expectation, a non-human object has seemingly been granted agency and intentionality. Seemingly. Objects can be seen to act as if they were proxy humans, because we allow them to do so. One theory of knowing that can help in this regard is discussed next, because when we can accept that we, as human actors, are on an equal footing with non-human actors regarding an understanding of the flow of information, then the principle of autopoietic co-ontogenic structural drift can disclose some of the layers of communication that would otherwise have been hidden from us. 4.3 Autopoietic social systems What is autopoiesis? To be classed as autopoietic, a system must be self-generating, from the Greek auto, for self, and poiesis, for creation or production, hence the auto-production of a system. For any system to produce itself, to generate its own structure, sounds impossible, but then any social system should be an impossibility as well. In this respect we need to remind ourselves that Actor-Network Theory does not recognise the social as a system, and, apparently, neither does Niklas Luhmann, the German sociologist who adapted autopoiesis to social systems, and even more confusingly, neither do Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the two Chilean researchers who first introduced the world to biological autopoiesis. That is, if we still think of social systems as if they were autonomous living systems that are self-directed, like some giant biological machine, and forget that the social is only a human construct. Our language is limited, and when we use the term system it has to be used in context, that is, the context has to explain the real nature of the term „system‟ as either a biological living system or a metaphorical, constructed one. It needs to be asked, therefore, whether we are talking about the observer or about the phenomenon, what is being observed, and, confusingly, we could be talking about a system observing a system, but cannot talk about a phenomenon observing a system; i.e., a person observing a person, but not the social observing a person. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 170 Scientists make statements and do so in a language that has to take into account the extent of the ramifications of words, since there is no such thing as a carefully neutral, objective language; scientists are people too. When we make a statement, based on an observation, what is tacitly communicated to whomever this statement is addressed to, is that here is an observer acting as a system which possesses certain properties that allow the observer to carry out a purposeful action, although Maturana‟s (1978:28) actual words are “perform these operations”. Accordingly, these properties of the observer are determinant of the domain of knowing, i.e., we can only know what we know due to the „properties‟ we possess, but where do these come from? As systems we are possessed of properties, classed as the characteristics of a unity, which in turn is a unity if it is capable of the operation of distinctions, thus, if we speak about these properties we automatically even if tacitly refer to observer as well (:33). Why is the sky blue has no answer except the one given by a particular observer, even though I can ask Google for the answer; the blueness of the sky is a particular property of a single observer, and only convincing (i.e., reasonable) to other observers if the observer making the scientific statement is deemed to be the standard observer capable of performing the operation that leads to the answer to the question, why blue? What Maturana (:29) is saying is that to be able to communicate this to other people, to give answers to questions in the domain of science, the observer doing the answering must be accepted as the standard observer, that is, he is given the role of the standard scientist who can be believed, a manner of social black boxing due to necessity; we cannot all be scientists, even though they are people too. But is the scientist acting as a person or as a spokesman for science; i.e., are we listening to a „people‟ observer (an observing system), or are we listening to a phenomenon? Science becomes a “domain of socially acceptable operational statements validated by a procedure that specifies the observer who generates” these statements; we are in fact listening to a closed cognitive domain whose statements are subject dependent (:29), we are listening to a phenomenon, just as much as we do when paying heed to what society says, or complying with certain standards because society expects it of us. Here, hold on, you haven‟t explained what autopoiesis is yet. What are you talking about? You‟re quite right. I was a trying to work my way around to getting Maturana (2004:106-107) to explain why he thinks Luhmann cannot utilise the theory of autopoiesis in the way that he does, i.e., why Maturana disagrees with the principle that only communications can communicate. I am, after all, trying to make out a case for a social autopoiesis, and not using the theory in its biological sense. “„Thank you for having made me famous in Germany,‟ I said to Niklas Luhmann, „but I disagree with the way in which you are using my ideas‟” (Maturana, 2004:106) is a sentence that severely dented my enthusiasm for social autopoiesis, until I did some more work on Actor-Network Theory, and got the strong impression (still, at that time a vague and sketchy thought, nothing more substantial) that if I positioned ANT between Maturana and Luhmann that I, at least to my own satisfaction, might be able to reconcile the two streams of thought. Once committed to the thought patterns of radical constructivism it is not really a surprising notion that only communications can communicate, because a cybernetic conversation seems to be about just that, watching two „speech bubbles‟ trying to speak to each other, since there is no direct, absolute communication possible between two people, as if via thought transference, since everything is mediated. Our efforts at communication are always mediated by print or sound and moving images, and in person-to-person communication we simply find other forms of mediation (cf. the Cybernetic Conversations: Designing ourselves towards discovery article in Chapter 5). What, then, could Maturana be objecting to? At this point I have to reiterate: gramma/topology is not a theory that allows any form of application to translate and transform what it is, since it is a negative argument, to borrow Latour‟s description for ANT. Gramma/topology can at best be described as a theory of knowing (following von Glasersfeld), and Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 171 as a lens it cannot be affected or infected by what is being observed; moreover, under these circumstances gramma/topology begins to emulate sive reproduce some of the performative operations of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is a theory of self-generating systems, operationally closed for the sake of its structure, but informationally open to the medium in which it has its existence. In this medium (and in our case the medium is our local socio-technical environment) the one living system does not in fact „see‟ the other living system … and here ANT almost shouts out the fact that this sentence has to amend itself … a living system does not in fact „see‟ either another living system or a mechanical system (natural or designed objects) so much as react to the structural couplings between two systems, i.e., react to the relational contact between them, which is just another description for communication: only communications can communicate. No one said that communications are restricted to verbal, human, communication, or that only humans could communicate with each other, or that human sive nonhuman communication is impossible. No one told gramma/topology that you had to stick to the rules, since There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something - Thomas Edison (cf. Chapter 3:104). You‟ve painted yourself into a corner this time. I happen to know that Maturana (2004:107) objected to Luhmann on the grounds that his social autopoiesis compared the network operations of molecules directly to communications and thus placing it at the centre of his theory, displacing people … Yes, yes, I know, and seemingly excluding people in favour of what amounts to a statistical view of social systems (:107), while the theory of autopoiesis can only be called into action when considering the operations of living systems. That approach, on the face of it, would also exclude ANT, with its insistence on including non-human actors on an equal footing, ANT being a „sister theory‟ to autopoiesis. I restated the fact that gramma/topology by virtue of its fluid nature is not bound to any pre-existing, constructed boundary, being radical enough to construct its own new and inclusive boundaries, also known as the making of distinctions. I thus interpret Luhmann very differently, and take only communications can communicate to tacitly imply the continuing importance of human beings and their operations, since no communication can exist without them, but have to add that this tacit implication now includes human>non-human communications, and even when we consider object>object communication, in opposition to any form of determinism the communications between objects cannot exist if you presuppose the absence of human beings. I say all of this knowing full well what Maturana (2004:108) reported: “But why does Niklas Luhmann proceed in this way at all? He once told me that he excluded people from his theoretical design because he wanted to formulate universal statements … That view I do not share either”. I have no defence for my seemingly stubborn mindset, except to enlist one of the best aspects of systems thinking, i.e., Geoffrey Vickers‟s (1982) Appreciative Systems thinking (AS). In an interview he made it clear that an appreciative systems inquiry needs the participation of both the observer and the subject, “we need the experience of an agent just as much as we need the observations of the observer”. What I retain above all from AS is the common sense (especially to design) notion that in any human (combined, communicative) system you investigate there must be something that works, and instead of working on „the problem‟ you look for those aspects within and between people that can be of help towards a new solution (changing the existing situation … etc.), and use these as the building block for the next step in the design research journey; this „observing operation‟ of necessity includes both agent-for-change (the designer) and observer (in this case, the observations of the people in the system, by [1] the designer observer, but also [2] by each of the participants in the system), and the resulting new platform for thinking is a hybrid „theory‟ for knowing. According to Checkland (1982:262) "Vickers argues that our human experience develops within us „readiness to notice particular aspects of our situation, to discriminate them in particular ways and to measure them against particular standards of comparison...‟” and that this „appreciative system‟ is our experiential world: effectively Vickers was Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 172 saying that the world design us as we design the world. This circular operation is basic to being human, that is, if we can see beyond the requirements of a science-based culture predicated on linear thinking and the seeking of goals. Vickers suggested that we replace this aspect of deterministic goal-orientation with the „something that works,‟ i.e., “with feedback models in which personal, institutional or cultural activity consists in maintaining desired relationships and eluding undesired ones” (in Checkland, 1982:262). To design a preferred situation that „removes‟ itself from (transforms itself based on) an existing situation, it is impossible to wipe the slate clean and start as if from scratch, as if nothing had existed before, and as if no one knows anything about any of the new facets that we think should be included in the new problem space for designing. Systems methodology is different from the methodologies usually employed by fully described (operationally and environmentally sive informationally closed) disciplines: “In system inquiry … one selects – from a wide range of approaches, methods, and tools that best fit – the type of system, the purpose and nature of the inquiry and the specific problem situation” (Banathy, 1996), and accordingly gramma/topology reserves the right to select from Luhmann‟s social theory those aspects pertaining to autopoiesis that works for design thinking. To return to the description of what autopoiesis is all about … … and another thing, what is all this nonsense about structural coupling? Either you can or you can‟t, whatever it is you are trying to do … That is a valid observation, and an issue I can only address fully in Chapter 5, when I attempt to deal with what Law (2005:7; 11) calls the „after‟ in actor-network and after, in the sense that we should avoid naturalizing a single spatial form, a single topology, and find a way to study objects that are always more than one and less than many. We can and we can‟t, at the same time; we can be closed and open at the same time, only not on the same plane of operations, and not quite on the same plane of observation, even though Luhmann (2002:113-115) seems to suggest this possibility. We communicate with people but we don‟t, because only communications can communicate, and our person-to-person communication is mediated. Autopoiesis deals with the fact that we cannot know the real world „out there,‟ since, whoever we think „we‟ are and worse, „where‟ we are, all the sensual signals we receive are mediated by the lenses in our eyes, by the fluid in our eyeballs, the fact that the visual signals are turned upside down and have to be translated the right way up, by the very fact that we need nerve impulses to carry the visual signals translated into electrical signals to … to where exactly? Where are „we‟ to receive all these multiply mediated signals, and do we receive this communication all in one piece, the way we think it left the source? No. On one plane of significance and meaning, „we‟ are as isolated as if stranded on a desert island, and our only contact with the environment, the medium in which we exist, is when our closed system makes almost accidental contact with the material that fills this medium, or with another system, and, while our system remains structurally closed (some humans cannot manage this, and their identities change with every more-powerful-than-themselves personality they encounter) its boundary is permeable, which means that it can be open to information, that may be useful to it, from the environment. It must be emphasized that these elements from the environment, from the outside-of-the-self, are allowed into the system on a voluntary basis, because any change to the original system must be a purposeful action on the part of that system, that is, any change can only be motivated as an internal structural change; anything else is detrimental to that system. The system does not react directly to signals from the environment but merely takes what it needs, and nothing more. We humans may do worse than follow the example of a cell that moves towards i.e., sugar, and moves away from anything acidic. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 173 As for structural coupling, “The history of structural change without loss of identity in an autopoietic unity is its ontogeny [how the system changes without loss to its basic self]. The coupling of the changing structure of a structurally plastic autopoietic unity [its border being permeable to information] to the changing structure of the medium is called ontogenic adaptation” (Maturana, 1978:39), and coontogenic drift, an aspect we found particularly interesting for design education, comes about because systems „drift‟ in the medium they find themselves in, and for a student that medium is the educational environment. Just as there are autopoietic overlaps with ANT, so actor-networks have overlaps with rhizomatic networks (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, discussed in Chapter 5), so much so that Latour (2005a:19) mentions Mike Lynch renaming ANT as an Actant-Rhizome Ontology, a very appropriate change in designation, because we come full circle and can claim that co-ontogenic drift is engaged in a purposeful action resembling a rhizome, the opposite of a linear and fully directed plan of action. A rhizome is a bulbous root (apologies, it looks like a root but is in fact an underground adapted plant stem; root just sounds better) that looks all knobbly and any-which-way; a ginger root is a very good visual example, some of the bulbous bits (nodes) being bigger than others (as if growing faster), with all the connected nodes seemingly going off in different directions. The rhizome, despite its non-linear development, is still a unity, it is still a recognisable network: a rhizomatic autopoietic system. Coontogenic drift does not mean random growth (random and chance not being the same term for our purposes), since opportunistic would be a better term; unlike the trunk of a tree with its regular growth in one direction, the rhizome nodes grow towards the presence of food in the garden (you having remembered to feed the plant, on one side only), and grow faster or slower depending on the food and moisture available. If you were stingy with your plant food, and three months later dribbled more plant food pellets on the other side, the rhizome will grow towards the new source in its medium. I do not wish to suggest for one moment that a design educator is like the gardener who selectively feeds the plants, although I have likened the teacher to a compostitor (a hybrid between an old fashioned compositor, who arranged the metal type for printing, and a gardener who makes his own compost; a mix between directed and chance feeding, the creation of a hybrid environment somewhere between first-order and second-order cybernetics). What I am suggesting is that rhizomatic students should be able to acquire the autopoietic structures they need to help them deal with the complex and socio-technical world, and I can supply a well composted garden, but I cannot force the growth, and neither can I show them the way. Maturana and Varela, (1980) turns the question "How does the organism obtain information about its environment?" into "How does it happen that the organism has the structure that permits it to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists?" Teachers of design should follow this autopoietic method of changing semantic questions into structural ones, and, instead of asking, How does a student obtain information about design, they should ask, How could students acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment? The following article is another example of design education seen through the lenses of gramma/topology. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 174 Acknowledgement of text The following article58 is to be published in Leonardo 44(2):in press (van der Merwe and Brewis, 2011), and was edited by the Leonardo staff. From Problem-Solving Paradigm to Co-Ontogenic Drift: How do Learning Narratives Self-Generate? Abstract This article deals with a different kind of educational approach in contrast to the still too prevalent notion that knowledge can be transferred from teacher to student. It is now an accepted maxim in design theory and practice that real-world problems needing the attention of design practitioners are not neat and well-structured, but are, indeed, ill-structured and „wicked‟59 in the sense of being a part of a larger, complex social situation. It follows that, for design education to take its lead from contemporary social, political, and economic structures, it will have to seriously re-think its problemsolving paradigms, and ask whether such a paradigm, or mode of thinking, can really solve problems? Part of our answer is to investigate the use of self-generating learning narratives, and we do so through the work done by Maturana & Varela on autopoiesis, specifically the notion of co-ontogenic drift. Introduction Singh (2008:1061) reports that in South Africa, as in Britain, America and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the redevelopment of institutions of higher learning has meant that academics have had to engage with a shift in teaching and learning approaches that deals with new and changing world circumstances, and particularly with a new, wider, student intake that, in South Africa, also means catering to the needs of the poor and undereducated (Nwoah, 2008). Our design educational scenario has shown a further educational reality: that while students have a range of abilities, from totally under-prepared to “well educated”, they all have one thing in common: They have not been taught how to learn. These realities have accentuated two questions, “What is learning?” and, subsequently, “What is teaching?” We discuss both here. In answering these questions, our approach is that knowledge must be constructed by the student, based on project information gathered by the group and then further enhanced by the consequent indepth discussions of a fuller context. When bringing experience into education Dewey (1997: 73-74) believed such material should start with what students know, but which progresses “into a fuller and richer and more organized form”. Not only is constructivism 60 the official South African educational approach (Gauteng Provincial Government, 2006; Western Cape Provincial Government, 2006), but a Higher Education South Africa (HESA, 2006) report makes it clear that even at undergraduate level our universities should allow the spirit of research inquiry and orientation to be the formative approach to teaching and learning, while not denying the necessity of students being able to find a way into “the basics of the discipline where the mastery of a body of existing knowledge and practices is of the essence”. However, contrary to much of learning at school level, we have found that we need to teach 58 This is a joint article by myself and a colleague, Julia Brewis (Department of Surface Design), focused on her studio-based class projects underpinned by systems theory and particularly the theory of social autopoiesis. 59 “Wicked problems are ill-defined, ambiguous and ... there is often little consensus about what the problem is, let alone how to resolve it. Furthermore, wicked problems won‟t keep still: they are sets of complex, interacting issues evolving in a dynamic social context” - after Horst Rittel (quoted in Ritchey, 2005). 60 An approach to teaching and learning that negates the easy transfer of knowledge and focuses on the individual‟s ability to construct an own model of learning. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 175 students not to learn content but how to learn. We see this as authentic learning, a cognitive process that engenders formative change. It is never simply a feat of memory. Learning how to learn includes helping students to observe their own thought processes, and in the process helping them learn how to make their sense impressions „ring true‟ when compared to those of their classmates (authentication), and how to feed back their experiences into their (initial) line of reasoning so that the cognitive dissonances / perturbations (new information) encountered in the world outside the knowing-self can be accommodated. Our model of learning therefore acknowledges the interconnectedness of body and mind, learning and (practical) experience, leading to that amorphous sensitivity the students would recognize as „spirit‟ or a general feeling of accomplishment in their own development; this intertwining is achieved through the twin capabilities of engagement and critical theory. Seely Brown and Adler (2008:19) makes a significant point in establishing design studio practice as the training involved in “„learning to be‟ a full participant in the field” – an act of „self-generation‟ in the constructivist learning cycle that Takayama (2009) referred to as “portals of engagement … what initially grabs us” in the activities of the group, even when that participation starts out as a peripheral act (Lave and Wenger, 2007: 34). In other words, we believe that design is a social act, an approach underpinned by Nwoah‟s (2008) and Greyling and du Toit‟s (2008:958) critically theoretical stance on that questioning attitude provided by a social perspective as opposed to an individual one. Learning how to learn involves learning about the self (not learning by one‟s self) by participating in a group activity. This type of learning includes becoming part of what Lave and Wenger (2007:98-100) call a community of practice, a „portal of engagement‟ opened up by the individual into the scaffolded learning environment driven by peers, and overseen by lecturers. We do not dispute the value of a structured and rational curriculum that allows access to the basics of the discipline. Rather, our experience has shown that a critical and questioning attitude is not as likely to emerge if students are only taught to learn as individuals who operate outside any group formation. Therefore, our focus is not on the basic curriculum per se but on “developing a complete transformation in attitude of the student … [to trigger] an excitement to learn and explore and create” by reversing the Cartesian pattern of learning whereby students can spend a long time being taught subject content, instead of creating learning opportunities that begin with development of the student within the group engagement (with real life problem research) “consistent with the narrative psychology view that the realities of life and work may be seen as ongoing and emergent narratives constantly to be re-storied” (Nwoah, 2008; Greyling and du Toit, 2008:958). This article maps the learning narratives process we use in our classroom. A learning narrative is a way of evaluating what one has learned from one‟s own experience. The student learns to describe what he or she knows, assesses what he or she can do and/or summarizes what valuable attitudes and insights developed as a result of a particular task. In other words, learning helps students self-generate. Key within this is that they work in groups as well, using a guided project to develop their process of learning. This approach helps the students understand the difference between a disembodied solution to a problem and one that corresponds to Maturana‟s notion of co-ontogenic structural drift (discussed below in the section Evolutionary Drift). First Year Blues Teaching in a tertiary institution highlights that one of the biggest problems in education is the fragmented sense of self many students bring to the classroom. They often do not perceive that who they are includes an authentic self who is both an individual and a person interacting with the environment. Moreover, each student is not just a “self” alone in the world, so recognizing who he or she is is a part of the learning process. Here the term authentic signifies that students need the courage to make the difficult choices that can broaden their personal experiences and choices. Moving Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 176 away from what is familiar to them can help broaden their minds. Yet, moving toward unfamiliar territory can bring about an ontological anxiety 61 , a situation wherein they have no choice but to „actively‟ play a role in creating a learning environment that can lead to creative possibilities. But how do you make students aware of this possible transition, and make them aware of the designer within themselves, when they would naturally look to their inner world where each one is (to begin with) „alone‟ without the structure of an external environment for support? It must seem to them that this known „inner self‟ and the „outer‟ social world we all have to function in are two incommensurable areas of existence and experience, and so we need to move from a paradigm controlled by universal rational principles to one that embraces the principles of care, responsiveness and responsibility (Levin, 1989:221), or in the words of Slamat (2009:1151-1152), being able to “look through the eyes of others”. One student, Miriam, explained the process as follows: I need to take time out each day and reflect on what I have done … I need to consult my classmates, as peer learning is an important part of my education, discussing what they are doing and asking for feedback on my ideas – (Miriam). In the Cartesian model, the self was traditionally seen to be self-contained and disembodied, focusing on a non-situated relationship with the world, predictable and therefore safe. In contrast, the embodied and contextually situated self derives its ontological coming-into-being through a relational and interactional mode of existence. From dealing purely with the cognitive and intellectual, we shift our focus to the affective and the motivational. Our „inner states‟ and the resources these may represent are not so much in dispute as questioned, and students have to learn that a situated „original position‟ must have its origins in the concept of relationships, which contests a definitive, structural (i.e. static) position (Levin, 1989:221), a viewpoint that highlights the paradigmatic shift from seeing design as product to seeing design as process, one that entails relationships, mutual interdependence, and a responsive way of seeing the world. This sketches a proto-profile of our first year entry level „Surface Design‟ student, the nomenclature for a programme originating in the old Textile Design course – now a new hybrid that has the opportunity to make use of the fields of knowledge previously, and exclusively, used by textile, fashion, product and interior design, as well as information systems. It was found that during the first „embodied line‟ project most of the students were, to begin with, influenced by a disembodied frame of reference that included extremely high levels of „noise‟ (i.e. external social and cultural influences). By using only a single drawn line (i.e., „design by constraint‟), which progressed from being inactive to becoming active, the students had to teach themselves the difference between such (communicative) terms as meaningful, beautiful, clichéd, predictable, sensitive and hesitant. This approach is based on the notion of critical rationality, since an educated person gives reasons for his or her decisions that are also compelling to reasoning others (Slamat, 2009:1149), thereby communicating some of the principles of care and responsiveness alluded to above. The end results were printed as lengths of fabric as well as a three-dimensional product, an ottoman, which was sold as office furniture. We felt that the embodied line project should not end there, and the core was developed further to become an Figure 4. Student free-flow performance „Ontological anxiety‟ should be compared to „perturbations‟ or disturbances leading to re-examination of the known. Cf. Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984:36). 61 Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 177 instructional public performance where the students performed as a collective, in essence illustrating their journeys of discovery from a disembodied to an embodied experience. Accompanied by appropriate music, and with duct tape covering their mouths in order to keep them focused on the phenomenon happening at that moment in time, they originated completely unchoreographed movements, a process that allowed individuals to create their own stories as they saw fit through interaction with the ottoman blocks, each other, and with the eight meter lengths of paper available for drawing on the floor. When the performance had drawn to a natural close, they removed the tape, and the instruction lesson started as members of the audience were invited for a drawing experience with a student tutor. The students‟ confidence grew exponentially as they embodied their work and understood how to identify with their tools and their chosen field of design. What follows begins to introduce the theory underpinning the practice. Figure 5. Students interacting with audience. Biological Origins Based on what Piaget (quoted in Doll, 2008:28) describes as „operatory logic‟, the type of logic-frompractice that stems from a particular context, we began focusing on the „logic‟ of relationships leading to action, with the knowledge that change and transformation are accepted as inherent elements in this process. This approach was meant to create awareness among the students that a social and generalized reality, acceptable to a group, might not be the same as a „single-view‟ reality that engenders feelings of authenticity for each individual student. In this way the student‟s awareness / focus on classroom intentionality, leading to the personal making of meaning, becomes a valued aspect within the learning situation. Further to this approach, we also focused on the biological response of embodiment that allowed the students to be open to a felt experience, of how to interpret line as flow from mind / spirit / heart / hand, from their first year projects onwards. The process facilitated the building of a foundation that allowed each student to understand that they each respond differently to stimuli, affording the development of their own situated self through a felt awareness of a shared environment. The intra-action taking place within the learner and the inter-action between the learner and the environment equally contribute to this field of embodiment, as explained by Maturana and Varela‟s (1998) groundbreaking work on the organization of living systems (below). In Figure 6, the environment, indicated as a wave pattern, is shown to always interact with a (biological) system-in-progress. In our educational context the system-in-progress is the designer / design process combination, where the designer, indicated as a circle in space, interacts and communicates with the environment, which can include the design idea (design brief). The „external environment‟ also includes other systems-in-progress (represented by other people / designers), in which case a structurally coupled (combined) system with another designer or designers become possible. Figure 6. Structural coupling (after Maturana & Varela, 1998:74). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 178 The social interactions that occur when designers connect in this way, and in which they can mutually influence each other, occur in the consensual domain where new patterns are formed. In this context the circle represents an individual (system-in-progress) situated in a contextual environment. The system‟s boundary is not absolute, being „porous‟ in the sense that, despite its internal organization (the set of relations between its parts) being operationally closed in order to function as a system, it can still be open to the external environment for the sake of communication, i.e., informationally and structurally open, to allow interactions to take place. This seeming contradiction, closed / open in one „working situation‟ can be resolved by reminding ourselves how a social human being normally operates, especially in a learning environment. We start off by relying on our social stock of knowledge (what has been learned), and to make this work, our system (each individual as a system-of-knowing) has to be „operationally closed‟ just to get anything done. However, no system, not even a social system (social or cultural group), can afford, in the long run, to maintain an absolute border between itself and its environment, if it is to renew itself and not stagnate. Therefore a system must, deliberately, strive to be structurally open in the sense of allowing „external information‟ to become part of its (internal) social stock of knowledge. This process is too often simply taken for granted, as if it were uncomplicated and unproblematic, and the end result, of unreflectingly „opening the borders‟ of the system in this way, amounts to surface or rote learning. For deep learning to take place, structural changes must come into play; the so-called social stock of knowledge, on which everyday, operationally sound activities are based, must not simply be added to as if the new „data bits‟ were but part of a pre-existing whole. When new data are added, fundamental changes take place in that very stock of knowledge, and it changes its „shape-of-knowing‟, its very configuration, which means the relationships / connections between parts change, creating new patterns of organization (cf. below). Structural changes must take place if learning is to be successful, but these changes cannot be enforced by external sources, hence the system being operationally closed, since changes can only be effective if they are the result of internal, and therefore voluntary, structural changes. Evolutionary drift When we consider the living systems approach as a viable teaching environment, a network of relationships will develop that opposes a hierarchical chain of command and allows for communication between people, and between people and objects, to develop. In the problem-solving paradigm, the observer is outside this (w)ebb of life 62 , whereas human beings, as observers of others and of the environment, and as their own self-observers, are regarded as fully immersed in the process we may call the ontogeny (development of individual organisms) of living systems, described below as ontogenic structural drift. “To sum up: evolution is a natural drift, a product of the conservation of autopoiesis [self-generation] and adaptation” (Maturana and Varela, 1998:117), which sums up the relationship-ofdiscovery between operationally closed (autopoiesis / self-generation) and structurally open (informationally adaptable). When any living system thus „reaches out‟ to its environment (whether unreflectively / un„knowingly‟ or „knowingly‟), it is as if that system is „drifting‟ in the „medium‟ formed by its holistic environment, which, in human terms, is all-inclusive. “Ontogeny is the history of structural change” (Maturana and Varela, 1998:74), in the living system, which correlates with Giddens‟ (1991:54) notion that “A person‟s identity is not to be found in behaviour … but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual‟s biography … must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the „story‟ about the self”. The notion of co-ontogenic drift 62 With reference to Capra (1997). This (w)ebb of life seems to succinctly encompass the strategic difference between the notions of operationally closed and structurally open. Our nervous systems are operationally closed, much like a (spider‟s) web, while, as humans, it is necessary for us to interact with our environment (aka, „learning‟), which is closer to the ebb and flow of the oceans, constantly touching and letting go, „knowing‟ the shoreline, but also, in the process, changing that very „system‟ it is in a structural coupling with. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 179 and the self-generation of learning narratives, as a coherent approach to design problem-solving in the real and complex world, serves students far better than an analytical recipe for solutioneering could, since the world is made up of other living systems in continual structural coupling with each other and with designed objects, the very subject matter we are dealing with in the academic environment of the classroom. We simply cannot accept ontogenic structural drift (a process of movement in time and in understanding) as true if we continue to treat design education as if the real world environment remains conveniently inactive and stable. Our explanation of co-ontogenic drift, in the context of design, is that an important part of our collaborative and biological meaning-making in the moment happens when we enter into a network of co-creation, before any change happens and we are diverted onto the next moment of revelation, change and adaptation. It is an awareness of life as it happens, enacting a (symbiotic individual / collective) narrative, allowing for structural changes and the co-emergence of new worlds of meaning, and therefore of worlds of constructed reality. Co-ontogenic drift is a biological and natural process of change in a life system, since it points to a continual and active selection of what is at hand, and as for design, rather than analytical and deterministic problem-solving, this process leads to the possibilities inherent to the idea of co-creation. As design educators we have to understand that the changing social and technological environment has created a positivistic concept of understanding among incoming students that derives from their school background. Upon entering the world of academic teaching and learning in South Africa this approach to „understanding‟ reveals itself as an inactive and disembodied „pseudo-participation‟ in the classroom environment. Students are generally fearful (inadequate skills), unmotivated (political profile), worried (financial constraints) or disinterested (pressurized by parents). The students who we expect to be engaged and active, instead become „objective‟, and as a result disconnected, uninterested, and some even become alienated. To address the consequent sense of a loss of being and of place, to combat the taken for granted attitudes and frozen (positivistic) states of consciousness, we initiated an inquiry into personal constructs. "Anticipation is both the push and pull of the psychology of personal constructs", according to Kelly (1968:13), which means that this human inquiry system (the student as learning system) does not respond to its environment due to cause-and-effect, but responds on a voluntary basis, because the advantages inherent in the possibilities of change are clearly seen. Students in the constructivist classroom can be made aware of this very subjective-based-on-externals (individualbased-on-group) co-ontogenic drift called the learning process, and the success of this process is due in large part to the virtual logic of the story structure of narrative. Needless to say, systems thinking with its reliance on feedback loops, as a theory (as a way of seeing), is ideal for design educational purposes, since design itself, besides being a social act and therefore a reciprocal conversation with „the social‟, relies not only on these visible and larger structures (social groups, institutions, etc.), but also relies on the singularity of personal constructs. “Each man erects for himself a representational model of the world which allows him to make some sense out of it and which enables him to chart a course of behaviour in relation to it”, and in this way Kelly‟s (1968:6) personal construct theory, which amounts to a psychological space, can be used as another mechanism to describe and experience the connections being made by each autopoietic system with its permeable and absorbent structural boundary. If we then question the importance / viability of personal constructs, it would be well to remember that Maturana regards us as structurally-determined beings, not deterministic as in cause-and-effect, but determined by choice, as it were. We are our own (co-ontogenic) history, determined not by our encounters with the external world, but „determined‟ by what we become and who we are, by choice and by narrative. It is the art of making these choices, and what to base these momentous decisions on, that is at the heart of learning for students; the second step is expressing these (learning) changes in the form(s) of designed artefacts, but more importantly, in the „form‟ of the story structure of Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 180 narrative, a development that both residues back onto / into the designed artefacts and becomes „visible‟/ intelligible to the „subjective originator‟, if that term could have any meaning at all. To effectively and affectively become aware of your own history, the progress made by your coontogenically-inspired drift, you must be able to interpret your own narrative-of-the-self as a story that makes sense and is acceptable (non-induced) to „you‟. However, this is exactly the problem that needs to be confronted in any learning situation: how much of it is „you‟ and how much is „the other‟? The prejudgment that we bring to our understanding of ourselves is largely determined by our culture and the environment that we find ourselves in, so how do we find our real self in this mix; how do we become „authentic‟ designers, let alone „authentic‟ individuals? Varela (quoted in Poerksen, 2002:100) explains that “the mind is not a singular phenomenon but an intersubjective one” and from an early age our first impulse is not to strengthen our own personality, but to build a relationship with others to secure our ability as learners through our encounters with others. This ties in with enactivism, a viewpoint that allows Davis (2006) to refer to the self as a network of relationships enacted through the eyes of many different selves. Through his investigations of colour perception Maturana made the revolutionary discovery that, in Capra‟s (1997:96) words “the nervous system is not only self-organizing but also continually self-referring”. Maturana (quoted in Capra, 1997:96) believes that the way we perceive the world must not be mistaken for an external reality, but must be understood as a continuous creation of new ways of relating and being, and in this respect relating and being implies a network of relationships with others. If design can move from existing independently outside our life to co-exist as part of our experience of life, creativity would flourish and innovation would become a natural process of adaptation. This theory was put into process within a project with the second year group of Surface Design students in 2007. A Project as Conscious Experience A conscious experience is transitory because it is composed of sensory perceptions, emotions, cognitive realizations and memories which are short lived, continually arising and subsiding. If we consider conscious experience in the social domain, our consciousness exists through language and communication. The project is seen through the perspective of interconnectivity, and should be viewed as a circular feedback system. At the end of the group‟s first year of study, the students were confident about their experience of and exposure to systems theory and embodied design. Now they had to create a 3-D sculptural form representing the concept of Caring for the Earth, and in particular, the issues surrounding global warming. It was the first time these students had attempted to build and represent a multi-dimensional layering of a lived experience. The students did not plan or draw constructed cardboard their their formed ideas first concepts into 3D but with shapes mounted on steel frames (Figure 7). The „tools‟ that they had were their embodied feelings, their memories, their imaginations, their experiences of self-becoming, and each other. Of course, no system of education can work in exactly the same way for all students: Figure 7. Heséré‟s performance & Cardboard on steel dummy Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 181 The emotions I felt while working with this project were positive, while last term negative emotions and feelings made me unenthusiastic. So, last term I did not give 100%, but this term I did – (Monita). They were exploring and co-creating, constantly moving from an inner world of reflective consciousness to grapple with the multiple feedback loops generated by group discussions and their own interactions with the real-world environment where culturally-defined „answers‟ are too easily found, as well as dealing with emergent ideas that stem from yet another complex communication network, in the sense that each time the „message‟ changed direction or content, it was necessary for them to reconsider anew what they knew up to that point. Figure 8. Weyers‟s thoughts turn to, Now What? The planning-in-action was intended to limit assumptions of linear relations when dealing with dynamic phenomena. Because human thought is constrained by the conceptual tools available, it takes care to keep the process dynamic and self-generating. Every stage in the process became an elaboration of the preceding one, and iteration of lines and planes allowed these recursive processes to develop into unexpected („unthought-of‟) forms representing global warming. Figure 9. Ashleigh & Inge. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 182 The following examples will explain how co-ontogenic drift functions within the process of structural coupling (i.e., when two knowing systems interact they structurally couple, leading to co-ontogenic drift, see Figure 6), and consequently in the process of work on this Care for the Earth Project. The students accepted information for this project from three different lecturers, and watched the video of Al Gore‟s vivid rendering of the state of the environment: four systems containing information external to themselves that they had to structurally couple with, while maintaining the existing interaction between themselves and their „usual‟ environment. I was shocked after watching the documentary that relates to global warming … I did not realize how big the problem really was – (Zanne-Marie). The students‟ first realization was that patterns of organization as well as of structure need to be understood as a point of departure. This also meant that for information to serve as learning systems they needed to test it with their own organization and structure. The outer circle in Figure 10 represents the organism‟s system boundary, while the inner circle represents its nervous system: it is as if two systems are working in symbiosis, but for our purposes we can regard the inner circle, the nervous system, as the one we need to keep track of. So when we speak of patterns of organization and of structure we mean to speak of the „knowing / knowable systems‟, represented by our nervous systems, that are accessible to us as communications, and once seen on this level, there is no great difference, to our autopoietic (selfgenerative) system, between another human system or a non-human system of communication, since these all represent the „external-to-us environment‟. Co-ontogenic drift is part of our meaning making in the moment of design; it will influence what we are busy with Figure 10. System within a system as well as influence our „selves‟ at the same time, allowing for change in the very moment of realization. In Figures 8-10, a progression in design moments can be interpreted as co-ontogenic drift where the designer and the designed object co-evolve as perturbations in the overall system influence and co-create both. In Figures 10-12, if A is the student, then B represents the elements in the environment (which may stem from another person, a photograph, a book, a conversation) which are needed for the design moment to progress, but which may not be recognised as such. There is no space for subjectivity nor for objectivity, i.e., for the designer to be disembodied from her work in this way because continual Figure 11. Contact interaction with the environment and within each system needs to be self-generated. What students need to learn-as-experience, is that, for A to make use of the possibilities of B, the self of A must, as it were, become selfless, and open itself to the other, not to invite externals-as-is into its system, which is organizationally closed , but to allow its structural system (represented by its nervous system > communicative ability > its cognitive dimension) the opportunity to change-as-progress (B, in order to be used, also becomes selfless). For that to happen, as self-generation, students need to observe their own systemic evolution in the process of co-ontogenic drift, a process we (simplistically put) normally understand as the making of meaning. Figure 12. The cognitive process in action Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 183 The students were exploring and co-creating by constantly moving from an inner world of reflective consciousness (A) to structurally couple (engage) with elements in the environment (B). However, in doing so they must learn to „loosen‟ their own self from its „origins‟, and do likewise for those elements they encounter and wish to enter in a co-ontogenic structural coupling with. System (A) encounters not linear, easily absorbed knowledge in the world external to itself, but finds „answers‟ that are culturallydetermined, forms that are shaped by technology for specific (economic, political) reasons, and always emerging new versions / interpretations of the elements it is trying to grasp and bring to itself, from this other complex communicative system. In this project the students found that, each time the „message‟ changed direction or content, they had to reconsider „what they knew‟ at all points of the progress of the project. Knowledge is always created as a form of movement, and the co-ontogenic drift that both systems A and B are involved in rely on this reciprocal movement, if you will, of communication between two systems. Speaking only for one system (A), the knowable elements that can be sourced from system (B) are moved, brought towards (A), by the necessities of the structural coupling, which in turn are necessitated by the needs of the organizational system of the organism (A) to self-generate. It is in this sense that, to allow this emergent, conceptual blending process to have any chance of success, the student / system must „loosen‟ its self from its organizational structure and from its own history. It is neither the body nor the mind that is primarily involved in this process, but the consciousness of the self in its pure cognitive state. The elements of (B) that are chosen by (A) are brought into the „grasp‟ of system (A)‟s consciousness, and, like two amoebae who conjoin with each other, find that neither is the other but both are augmented and renewed. Figure 13. The true nature of co-ontogenesis Structural changes happen only internally to the system, and as Figure 12 shows, the external elements chosen by the system become an integral part of that system, but while the (B) elements are changing into (A) elements, (A) itself, because of this process and as a knowing system, is changing as well. As cognitive systems, aka human beings, we all change in the moment of true knowing, in the moment of discovering how „the design‟ wants to evolve, since, at that moment, we are the design. A Study of Conscious Experience: A student report on Julia Brewis’s teaching methods In essence [our lecturer] has been our facilitator, merely acting as a constructive perturbing unit. In her application of holistic teaching she has perturbed us in all relevant areas of our development to trigger reactions in our structures that would result in drift, or growth. [She does not] determine the exact direction of that drift or growth [and yet] as a consequence of her experience she could trigger drift in areas of our development where it was most relevant and essential. There has been a lot of change evident in all of the students in the class. When we came from high school we had just come out of a twelve year period during which we had been conditioned in our ways of thinking, reasoning, doing and being. We had been taught to think in ways suggested by a Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 184 society created in the minds of our elders, we were taught to act in ways acceptable to this same society. We had no self-knowledge and were completely unable to define ourselves, even to ourselves. In the last year-and-a-half, one focus of our lecturer‟s holistic approach has been our self knowledge and our living within our own bodies. In order to bring about the change that would enable us to break out of the societal shell we had been cast into, Julia started to agitate our ways of thinking and perceiving … by questioning us, challenging us and forcing snippets of light through our shells that have by now been cracked by our emergence from a deep society-enforced sleep. Inside, in our minds, our ways of thinking and perceiving the world, we are changing (Weyers Marais). Conclusion We have a need as design educators and co-learners to explore an educational approach that is design specific. Inasmuch as the process of creativity is a continual intra-contextual voyage of discovery, so too should teaching and learning mirror the experiential whole. The didactical approach towards cocreational methods of design problem solving becomes a progressive journey that simultaneously seeks to motivate the aspiring designer through inward journeys of exploration and outward, risk-taking, inquiry. The journey begins with self-constructed spheres of knowledge within peer groups, leading to the situation where there is no choice but to play an active role in co-creating a group-determined learning environment that may lead to enhanced learning possibilities. We take the stance that identity depends on the capacity to keep a narrative going, and thus the process of movement in time and space is dependent on being in the here and now, in the moment. Being in the present is the awareness of life as it happens; it is precisely here that the exploration of cocreating becomes the medium for the process. In this defining moment (personal & design) possibilities emerge without interference from ego-related limitations. The personal and narrative testimonies from the students and the designs they produce are greatly encouraging, and thus we are confident that this baseline of respondents and results are in and of themselves authentic nodes of verification that will keep us inspired to pursue this method of educational inquiry. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 185 Reinjection One of the strongest suggestions to come from design thinkers, in speculating about the renewal of design education, is that of focusing on the learning process itself, but, as we have seen, a prevailing notion that still persists is that of design education as guild-oriented, and we have to query the role of the learning process in this type of scenario. Design education is very simple. Gather a bunch of students around a table and add a bunch of excellent teachers. This is the traditional „master-mate‟ model from the guilds. After a few years of practice the master has to make his „master-piece‟. (Overbeeke et al., 2004) The modern-day version of this distortion of the act of teaching unfortunately, for the apprentice, involves having to deal with the subjective opinions of several „masters‟ – seeing that the student apprentice will have to deal with a minimum of one „master‟ per subject per year of study, and, given the structure of most design curricula today, this apprentice-in-dealing-with-the-world will have to become used to sublimating her emergent realizations for the subjective opinions of as many „masters‟ of design as there are lecturers in her design course. On the other hand, if we choose to focus on the learning process, and heed what Revans (1980:277) has to say about the concept of learning, we realise that in changing the education system we also have to change ourselves, as learners (teachers and students), since these two structural changes have to correspond. As several researchers report (Singh, 2008; Nwoah, 2008; Seely Brown and Adler, 2008; Takayama, 2009; Greyling and du Toit, 2008; Lave and Wenger, 2007) on an international scale it has become necessary to re-align education to the needs of the contemporary world, and a large part of that re-constructive process is to learn how to learn, with a specific emphasis on learning about the self and learning how to become a full participant in the field, a clear link to autopoiesis, for as Maturana and Varela (1980:xxv) stipulate, you only participate to the extent that you participate, which means that each conversational partner (students learning together) acquires the „relations proper‟ to the design conversational context, acquires the relations proper to two autopoietic systems in co-ontogenic drift. Students are not taught to learn as individuals but, instead, the curriculum encourages all students to develop their own transformations, seen as ongoing and emergent narratives constantly to be re-storied. The ideas of a learning organization are applicable here, and a university becomes a place of learning where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together. (Senge, 1999:3) This description of an almost biological system should, but does not, fully describe a university where the learning processes and habits of its students are of paramount importance. This possible narrative of the evolution of human capability should, but does not, describe any design educational model. If design can in any way be described as a linear and stable system as opposed to a changing and dynamic one, then design as system is being deprived of the vital ingredient necessary to a dynamic learning organization. As Dimitrov (2001) says, this vital ingredient is the potential for emergence, “the most powerful manifestation of the unique self-organizing ability of complex dynamic systems”. The academic world should be this type „changing state‟ or dynamic system wherein academic knowledge management may be truly possible by managing the space within which knowledge is created, where Senge‟s description of a learning organization will not be out of place. It is not the organization that Senge and others focus on, but the people. It should not be the university, as an organization, that academics should focus on, but the students. A university as a learning organization can be seen as a biological system because of the students‟ learning activities, and as Henry & Rocha (1996) reminds us, Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 186 in communicating with each other, in our learning processes, we use a biologically based language that constantly re-configures the individual‟s state of knowledge, and that this process of dynamic perturbation allows Dimitrov‟s potential for emergence to „move‟ the student from one dynamic (learning / knowledge) state to another. “Instead of teaching in the traditional way, we should give the students tools, which provoke a new way of thinking” (Tschimmel 2004), and gramma/topology is simply about just that, a set of tools that will enable a design student to begin “the construction of one‟s own world” (Tschimmel, 2004). The students who enter the first year of design education are, thanks to the school feeding programme, totally unprepared for a constructivist approach to education, despite our national school curriculum stating that school leavers should be able to learn how to learn. The first year students were thus given the chance to immerse themselves in the possibilities offered by this new approach, and the fact that they not only taught and learned from each other, thereby relying less and less on the authoritative voice of the educator, but the fact that they were allowed to „perform‟ their newly acquired skills to an audience helped them gain the confidence to construct totally new social and cognitive maps, since the (personal) map we follow through life and learning is constructed by our co-ontogenic relationships with our environment. To the new Millenium student (cf. Chapter2:75) playing at (performing) is not simply an adolescent game but an everyday social interaction that Goffman calls a dramaturgical account, “the subject matter [of which] is the creation, maintenance, and destruction of common understandings of reality by people working individually and collectively to present a shared and unified image of that reality” (Kivisto and Pittman, 2005:272). We next explained the biological origins of autopoiesis, since autopoiesis, embodiment and phenomenology have much in common with the way we navigate through and understand our worlds of constructed reality. Piaget‟s constructivist-inspired operatory logic, a type of logic-from-practice, is close to Maritain‟s (1939:52) logic of the structure of the living thing, the working logic of everyday social reality (cf. Chapter 3:103), which ties Piaget and Maritain to cybernetics and radical social constructivism, since the structure of the living (systems) thing depends constructively on the individual‟s capacity to observe others and to observe the developing self, but at the same time relies on the information to be had from observing other observers, while the living thing of Maritain‟s description is the ongoing cybernetic conversation that is initiated and maintained by people in a social sive cultural group situation, living due to its committed participants whose communications speak to each other in a social autopoietic manner, by proxy allowing a constructed object such as „the social‟ to behave as an actant in the generative, actor-network process. We explained the process of co-ontogenic structural coupling, a biological process that mirrors to a great extent the very complex interactive socio-technical relationship matrix the students are asked to confront and to learn how to deal with, hence the need for educators to ask, How could students acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment? It is this structure of living and learning that Maturana and Varela (1998:34) described as the knowing action that is “rooted in the very manner of his living being, in his organization” – “the fact of living … is to know in the realm of existence … to live is to know” (:174), which points to a phenomenological embeddedness of the design expression understanding is in the doing, echoed by Maturana and Varela (1998:27) as “All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing”. Students must thus also learn how to become observers, not just of their own „doing‟ but observers of the observations of others, a point Luhmann was at pains to explain (discussed below). The evolutionary drift we describe in the article is what underpins a constructivist and inclusive learning environment, one in which it is important to keep a particular narrative going (Giddens, 1991:54), since it is in this virtual reality narrative that the individual and the disciplinary identity is formed and reformed, meaning that the individual observer structurally couples with another observing system, they then form a new combined system of knowing, which in turn Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 187 structurally couples with all the disciplinary knowledge available at the time, while also rhizomatically structurally coupling with any other single system or combined system doing the same, going trough the same reconstructing process of co-ontogenically „drifting‟ in the enriched educational environment. An important part of learning how to keep this hybrid narrative of the self sive other going is to be sensitized to an awareness of life as it happens, a difficult undertaking at the best of times, but one that must be addressed by education, and it to this type of situation that I was referring to in the article A Natural Death is Announced (cf. Chapter 3:102): Heidegger does not make a distinction between ontology and phenomenology because its essence lies in possibility and not in the factual everyday, the realisation of what this life that is happening means, a moment of recognition of our newly (coontogenically) constructed selves. Günther (in Scott, 2000) emphasizes that there is an exchange relation between epistemology and ontology, and Bateson (2000:314) does not believe that these two terms can be meaningfully separated – a clear indication of a cybernetic conversation between living-asbecoming and knowing, i.e., Maturana and Valera‟s to live is to know. This is an acknowledged complex situation, not an artificially external-to-us one (although our mediated and constructed-with-objects world makes it seem so) but a „natural‟ + biological world of complexity. When primitive man first devised a plan to avoid being eaten by the predators in his environment, in order to get to that food source, while not moving too far away from this water hole, he was designing his everyday world that was, for him, quite complex enough, but also natural (biological + tool use) enough to be able to deal with it. Even though we must acknowledge the increasing importance of the politics of the artificial and pay attention to Margolin‟s (2002:17) “larger issues of how contemporary social discourse is conducted” (cf. Chapter 1:2) we have been adapting to the world we have for a long time, and find it „natural‟ to mix epistemology and ontology in order to find the exchange relation between them. We are able to deal with a surprisingly complex situation, but the world asks much more of these new Millenium students, and so they have to learn how to manage epistemology sive ontology sive phenomenology, a complex relationship that no single „theory‟ can accommodate, and the better argument is to allow a theoretical presence to reveal itself during the interaction between thought and deed, and to allow students to discover for themselves what being a reflective practitioner means (cf. Chapter 3:123). This is the learning scenario that a gramma/topology of design knowledge production can facilitate. Can design education benefit from autopoietic social systems? Given that design education could be compared to a learning organization‟s structure, it would be advisable to also compare it to the structuration of autopoietic social systems. A knowledge-creating organization that secures autonomy may also be depicted as an „autopoietic system‟ … Each unit … controls all changes occurring continuously within itself. Moreover, each unit determines its boundary through self-reproduction. This self-referential nature is quintessential to the autopoietic system. (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995:76) A student, looking for her self as a designer inside the education system, has to learn that the with which, according to which we see (above) is largely a question of her own mental models, of the world and the knowledge that that space can hold, yes, but crucially, mental models of her own capabilities as an ontologically developing being. Knowledge can only be created by individuals, and in a constructivist learning environment the dialectical conversation between teacher and student (as one of the teaching tools, cf. Tschimmel, above:160) then becomes what Maturana calls a linguistic activity, or languaging, which means that this constructivist conversation is not meant to tell you anything at all, as Piaget realised, in theorizing that “cognition is not a means to acquire knowledge of an objective reality but serves the active organism in its adaptation to its experiential world” (in Von Glasersfeld, 1990b). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 188 Maturana agrees substantially with the above, and typifies learning as not only “a continuous process of transformations of behaviour”, but also as a process that allows the learner to realize the structure, meaning and efficiency of contextually adaptive behaviour. When asking the question „What is a social system?‟ we have to answer by proposing a system which, if allowed to operate, would generate a phenomenal domain indistinguishable from the phenomenal domain proper to a natural social system. Accordingly, I propose that a collection of autopoietic systems that, through the realization of their autopoiesis, interact with each other constituting and integrating a system that operates as the (or as a) medium in which they realize their autopoiesis, is indistinguishable from a natural social system. (Maturana & Varela, 1980:xxiv) Life itself is autopoietic; as human beings we owe our existence (who we are) to how we autopoietically evolve – we are at the same time the product and the producer (Dimitrov and Ebsary 1997; Mariotti 1996). Systems thinking complements autopoiesis in being “a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools … to make the full patterns [of a complex life] clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively” (Senge 1990:7). It follows that systems thinking is a “methodology for tackling real-world problems [and] for exploring social reality … the latter is not a „given‟ but is a process in which an ever-changing social world is continuously recreated by its members” (Checkland 1981:20). Many would agree with the statement that an autopoietic system is at the same time (informationally, cognitively) open and (operationally, organizationally, normatively) closed, and that therefore a very unique boundary is formed that both suspends and renews the system‟s relationship with its environment (Dimitrov, 1998; Johannessen, 1998:360; Luhmann, 1997; Maula, 2000:158; Metcalf, 1999; Navarro, 2001). Design education fits this description of autopoiesis, largely because what really matters is not „design knowledge‟ or „design content,‟ but the human systems of which it consists. A last objection to Luhmann Maturana wasn‟t the only one to object to Luhmann extending the theory of autopoiesis to the social sphere, because his colleague, Francisco Varela (in Protevi, 2009:101), stated clearly, “I refuse to apply autopoiesis to the social plane”. However, it has to be noted that he was not, like Maturana, responding to Luhmann, but refused for political reasons. The essence of holism, of gestalt theory, in fact, and also to a greater or lesser extent depending on your viewpoint, of social constructivism is focused on the whole being a new construct that cannot be reduced to a sum of the parts, irreducible, in fact, something that cannot be simplified, which leaves the complex, and the complex can lead to a black box. It has been established (cf. above, :138; 150; 190, ftn. 44) that a black box “contains that which no longer has to be reconsidered” (Callon and Latour, 1981:285), which means that it cannot function as an interface between people (collectively „the social‟) and any other artificial construct. The problem is not with black boxes per se, or with an approach to dealing with life that groups chunks of information in a unity (that is what autopoiesis does), because we are quite capable of dealing with acceptable black boxes if these represent the socially constructed abstractions we normatively create, e.g., I don‟t know how my computer works / the electronics and programming are a closed book to me / but I do know how my computer works / I can turn the thing on, call up the various programmes and work with these, and I even know how to search remote libraries through this thing called the internet. Certain parts of my computer are as a black box to me, as are many aspects of the designed objects we allow into our lives, and that is acceptable. The political that Varela objects to is the possibility that „the black side‟ of holism can and does emerge “each time it‟s allowed itself to be applied to a social model. There‟s always slippages toward fascism, toward authoritarian imposition” and a main focal actor is given the right to rule over a whole country, as happened in Germany and in Italy with Hitler and Mussolini, and when Allende was deposed by Pinochet in Valera‟s home country. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 189 Even if I do sympathise with Varela‟s viewpoint I cannot agree with it, at least with the inevitability of slippages towards fascism. That human beings have this innate tendency was shown by Enron (cf. :123, above), by many of the banks involved in the recent credit crunch, in my own country by many pyramid schemes63 (also known as a Ponzi scheme) whose affairs end up in court because they were deliberately constructed as black boxes. Callon and Latour (1981:278) discussed this possibility in the form of the elected Leviathan (above), that indispensable actor who becomes the authoritarian and obligatory passage point, one of the best reasons why „the social‟ should be denied as an entity in its own right, should, in fact, not be allowed to function as a black box while we effectively disown the effectiveness of the associations entered into between real people. When I make out an argument for first principle intrinsic control I am referring to exercising the appropriate authority balanced by “the exercise of autonomy by the parties to the co-ordination” (Aquinas, in Finnis, 1998:35), in our dealings with „the social‟ and our relationships with any form of elected body (business or government), and most definitely in our dealings with and relationships to our designed objects, to oppose this slippage toward authoritarian imposition and to avoid creating a contemporary world space wherein designed objects and systems (cf. ubiquitous computing) can become forms of the Leviathan, and speak to us with voices of authority, turning users into unthinking consumers (cf. :188, above). I think that Varela‟s refusal of a social autopoiesis can be understood on humanitarian grounds, but on exactly those same grounds it must be argued that a social autopoiesis has more to offer than we think we might lose, because, following Latour, we should say there are two things wrong with social autopoiesis, the word social and the word autopoiesis. Our argument is that there is no such thing as the social, and further that, when we accept the term for the sake of argument, we admit that this social cannot be autopoietical, thereby cancelling both terms. That is, if we consider a social autopoiesis as one thing only, instead of more than one and less than many. Taken individually the terms argue for a dissolution of association, but seen as a holistic concept, a social autopoiesis becomes a new construct that cannot be reduced to a sum of the parts, it becomes irreducible. Law (2005:7; 11) maintains that actor-network theory articulates some of the possibilities which are opened up if we try to imagine that the sociotechnical world is topologically non-conformable; if we try to imagine that it is topologically complex, a location where regions intersect with networks [the problem being that] The objects we study, the objects in which we are caught up, the objects which we perform, are always more than one and less than many … A dualism which, of course, also helps to define what will count as simple, and what is taken to be impossibly complex. Irreducible. Law is advocating a type of argument, a theory of knowing perhaps more radical than von Glasersfeld‟s constructivism, that turns itself into a fractional object, an inbetween rhizome that comes live only through its use, an undisciplined! theory of knowing that performs the functions of Richard Jung‟s sive concept, that descriptive conjunction-disjunction device that refuses reification much as Varela would have us refuse a social autopoiesis, and for much the same reason. Such a theory of knowing, such a device could only be set in motion if operationalised by living autopoietical systems, and I believe that Luhmann had this in mind when transferring the biological theory of autopoiesis to the study of social systems. I will argue that Luhmann was not trying to focus on communications to the exclusion of people, but that he was trying to „exclude people‟ on the grounds of their subjectivism, not exclude them on the grounds of being participant actors. Neither do I believe that Luhmann was trying to elevate „the social‟ to an objective status, which would make of a social system an authoritarian Leviathan; I can only believe in a Luhmannian argument that focuses our attention on the nature of all 63 The Krion principles were sentenced to 25 and 12 years respectively, October 2010. In the recent past we have had the Fidentia scheme for the rich, and the unsuspecting poor have been duped by schemes such as Miracle 2000 and Lezmin Textiles, a pyramid scheme masquerading as a clothing shop. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 190 observations as first-order observations, a fact of life (natural, not social) that then calls for the facilitation of a second-order observation that would allow the observers and the observations themselves to be observed. Luhmann (2002:112-113) specifically refers to the second-order cybernetics of von Foerster, which is understood to operate as a circular network, i.e., as a knowledge system that can be compared to the structure of autopoiesis, and like autopoiesis, it not simply a matter of dichotomies. A Luhmannian argument is neither first-order nor second-order, but both, except that I believe it is „both‟ in Richard Jung‟s sense of a sive (conjunction-disjunction) device. I will discuss these points more fully in Chapter 5, and end this section with a reminder that Luhmann‟s social autopoiesis sees second-order observations not only as first-order observations (cannot be reduced to), but sees their interaction as both more and less, a type of differently sightedness that Heidegger would have understood. I will discuss ontological phenomenology next, and allocate some space to Heidegger‟s notion of the communication between humans and objects as a specific kind of sightedness. 4.4 The affordances of ontological phenomenology To begin this section on the influence of phenomenology on design I will refer to an article that I discuss with my students, namely Anne-Marie Willis‟s Ontological Designing (1999). Willis, as well as Winograd and Flores (1988:163) believe in the importance of design being ontological, using this view as the reason for linking design to Heidegger‟s phenomenology. In a further disclosure, Winograd and Flores (1988:165) make the connection between Actor-Network Theory and ontological phenomenology; through their study of Heidegger they realised that the significance of the term breakdown64 indicates a positive opportunity to „see‟ something that was not there before, “a situation of non-obviousness, in which the recognition that something is missing leads to unconcealing … some aspect of the network of tools that we are engaged in using”. This is an admittance of the (undercover) roles that non-human actors (tools) play as well as the active role they can play in re-focusing our attention on the “nexus of relations necessary for us to complete our tasks”. We are, with ontological phenomenology, considering the virtual what isn‟t there yet world, in all senses of the term. On a practical everyday use level we deal with an absence as if it were a presence we need not notice (Latour‟s missing masses doing their jobs unobtrusively, in the background), while when a breakdown occurs and we experience a cognitive gap65 we need ways to bring this human-actor-absence, meaning this „invisible‟ missing relation created by an (obstinate) object-presence to the surface of our cognition, so that we can turn a human absencenegative (of cognitive flow) into a human actor sive non-human actor dance-positive. In other words, a breakdown in phenomenological terms can force people to re-instate the cybernetic and ANT-inspired conversation with designed objects they would not have stopped in the first place, were it not for the convenience of black boxing. Design education must include a working knowledge of ontological phenomenology to allow students to deal with this absence-presence problematic. [The] designation of Fry, Flores & Winograd as „designer-theorists‟ is attempting to convey that the theorisation of design is integral to their work as designers; they are neither academics taking up design as a subject of inquiry nor are they practitioners „taking time out‟ to reflect on practice. Their domains of application of ontological design are very different - ranging from computer science and artificial intelligence (Winograd) to organizational management (Flores, 64 This term, admittedly, refers to a breakdown in our cognitive flow, a gap in our construction of meaning created by something in the environment, but it also obliquely refers to Latour‟s missing masses that come to our attention only when they physically break down and refuse to play their normal, invisible, roles. 65 Cognitive dissonance is a learning device, cf. Chapter 1:14. Polanyi (1962:123) put it succinctly in stating that the personal journey of discovery we need to undertake, and the trust we have to place in the procedure, is vitally necessary, because there is a vast (logical) gap between what we know now and what we do not know, and it is as if we leave the safety of our well-known and thoroughly explored landscape and launch ourselves into the unknown, and suddenly find ourselves on this other shore of reality. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 191 who held posts as Minister of Economics and Finance in Salvador Allende‟s government in Chile) to ecodesign as applied to architectural, industrial and urban design (Fry). Their dispositional inclinations towards a theorisation of design that can transform practice means that their fusing of ontology and design is no accident. (Willis, 1999) Design education can prepare the student to deal with the type of unstable process that leads to design, research and philosophical knowledge, unstable only in the sense of becoming, when two knowing systems66 merge in communication and a third (unforeseen by both) system - more properly, space - of possibility is formed: the virtual and the probable, the new, the innovative; to do so a student will have to learn through a theorisation of design how to fuse ontology and design thinking-for-practice. A situation of non-obviousness that leads to an unconcealing is one of the paths of discovery to learning and knowledge, a transformative paradigm shift created by the changes in design practice that calls for the opening up of our scope of enquiry (Findeli, 2001:11) into the holistic nature of that which we touch with our very enquiries; an observer of a system not only becomes a part of the system being observed, but inevitably influences that system by means of the enquiry, the depth of that influence differing only in degree (cf. Chapter 3:87-88). Can students be taught to become designer-theorists? I believe that they can, except that most of the „teaching‟ is an autopoietic internal change to the system‟s structure: the students begin to acquire a knowing structure that will help them to deal with the socio-technical world of complexity. Willis begins her article with an explanation of the term ontology, and then moves on to the ontology of equipment. I will use Willis‟s descriptions but also add my own interpretations of Heidegger‟s terms. Ontology refers to the understanding of being, and ontic relates to the factual information about entities; ontology refers to the observation of what is, and ontological describes the conditional behaviour of that which is. So, ontology is the understanding of being through observation of the now, and ontological describes the conditional behaviour of, say, phenomenology or design. Willis points out, however, that Heidegger is often misunderstood when using the term being, and that many people interpret this in the same way as the term alien being, an entity that can be described. Being to Heidegger is not an essence that can be pinned down, but a constant becoming, an irreducible more than one and less than many. Ontology, as the understanding of being through observation of the now changes its meaning when seen through Heidegger‟s ontological phenomenological lens: ontology becomes the study of existence-in-the-making, not a study of what is, factual. An understanding (awareness) of being comes about through an immersion in the observation-within-observation of the circular cybernetic conversation between entities (no discrimination between human and non-human) that focuses on the movement of cognition, the being/becoming of a co-ontogenic existence. Heidegger uses the terms Dasein and Being, with Dasein being towards Being; clumsily put, but illustrative, since the everyday existence of Dasein, everyman, is usually so caught up in the worldedness of the world (its everyday concerns of work and duty) that there is no space (of thought) left for anything else, let alone for a moving of the essence of Dasein from its attachment to the world towards something else at some point that is not here. Dasein, says Heidegger, must strive for being towards Being, with both being and Being not denoting a concrete something or someone. When Dasein practices being towards Being, it simply means that a person lives life, is alive to more than what there is, factually, and wishes to move towards another state of being (ontological existence-as-becoming), a process that never ends. Dasein being towards Being is the equivalent of Simon‟s changing an existing situation (Dasein, old self) for a preferred one Being, new self), if Dasein can get away from worrying about the mortgage, the boss at work, how he is going to pay for the next holiday, etc., until there is no room left for thought, proper. 66 In the light of ontological designing one of the „knowing systems‟ refers to the role of non-human actors. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 192 What does this have to do with design? Willis next deals with the ontology of equipment, which we can now interpret as the coming-into-being of equipment, since ontology is the study of an existence-in-themaking … of equipment? Yes. That is very much of concern for design practice and even more so for design education. The designed objects we allow into our lives because we [1] design (plan) them, [2] manufacture them (according to requirements) and, [3] having bought them, allow into our lives as Latourian invisible servants (3a), extensions of our (even if unconscious) being towards Being (3b), or use them in a deliberate gestalt switch (3c). The roles that non-human actors can play in our lives are legion, but on an everyday observable level we (3a) use them as extensions of our body, i.e., telephones to far-hear with, television sets or computer screens to far-see with, or simply tools to bash things with (I have a fascinating new tool that extends my arm up into a tree to chainsaw a branch 4-5 meters off the ground, more if I precariously balance on a ladder). I can use the computer screen to far-see with, which is an (3a) activity, but when I access remote libraries with this same tool, this amounts to (3b), extending my being (towards-knowledge) capability (and being old enough, I claim that this same movement towards Being is set in motion when I use that tool called a book 67). There are people who, on the other hand, care very little for (3b), but understand the effect this can have on whoever sees them „interacting‟ with a specific piece of Heideggerian „equipment‟, e.g., an expensive German design for moving people about. The advertising-agency glamour and importance (constructed myth) that is attached to this piece of equipment is carried over to the „owner‟ of the object in a veritable gestalt switch (3c) between ground (the owner, who only contributed money) and figure (the expensive vehicle, the main focal actor in this dramaturgical performance, cf. Goffman, above, :185). Heidegger‟s notion of the ontology of equipment can be used to understand sive interpret most situations that include a combination of human and non-human actors. Willis emphasises the difference in character of the ontology of equipment between the traditional western and scientific viewpoint, which Heidegger called present-at-hand (vorhanden), the factual what is of equipment, and readiness-to-hand (zuhanden), the not-yet how character of equipment, in order to. When we bring into presence what is present-at hand, we bring into our world of knowing the types of equipment that are for the main quite „invisible‟ for being „missing,‟ for we need not take much notice except to use the blunt end of the hammer and not the claw end, which we can do without really „noticing‟. On the other hand, when we bring into presence the readiness-to-hand of equipment we do so in order to perform an action that is not readily apparent to us at first, e.g., I use a brick hammer 68 to garden with. There are two types of brick hammer, and I have both; both versions have square „hammer‟ ends, while the other, „chisel‟ end can be either flat or pointy, rather like a blunt ice pick. I thought it was just a funny-looking hammer when I first saw one, but what I „saw‟ wasn‟t just a hammer, which would simply have been an example of bringing into presence the presence-at-hand of the hammer (its facticity of hammerness), which I would have bought for building purposes without thinking any more about the affair. What I perceived was myself using this tool-to-hand in the garden where there is lots of rock, where the soil is more flaky limestone than earth, and it is very difficult to dig. To weed the garden was a nightmare when attempted with the present-at-hand, small hand tools (garden forks and the like). The pointy-end brick hammer explained to me69 the advantages of using its sharper chisel-end to penetrate into the soil despite the rockiness of the garden; I thus „hammer‟ the weeds in the sense of chiselling down to the roots to get them up and away, and weeding becomes easy because the brick hammer is acting out the (smaller) role usually reserved for a large garden pick. I did not bring into presence the readiness-to-hand of the equipment, the design of the tool did that for me, 67 My wife and I have a number of books (I stopped counting when the figure reached a thousand) which we surround our daily lives with, literally, but I have not to date tried to calculate the ontology-of-equipment effect this continues to have on our lives, being quite content with the results so far. 68 A brick hammer almost looks like a normal hammer, except that the hammer end is square and used for breaking bricks, while the other end is a somewhat chisel-shape for „dressing‟ the bricks (trimming off sharp bits after you‟ve bashed the brick with the blunt end). 69 Donald Norman would call this „tool affordance‟. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 193 even though I happily mistook the original idea of the design. Things do talk back to the user, as we saw in Bateson‟s example of the axe (above, :188). As Willis explains, Heidegger meant with the ontology of equipment to draw our attention to the type of knowing that can be engendered through the mediation of a well-designed (meaning, a re-think, a wellthought-in-advance-of-action) tool, knowledge that is not to be found in the tool itself, its Dasein presence-at-hand, but in the performative act of using the readiness-to-hand tool, which is a description of a cybernetic design conversation between a human actor and non-human one. “Here is ontological designing – based upon a circularity, in which knowledge comes to be inscribed by being with the „designing-being‟ of a tool, this in turn modifying (designing) the being of the tool user” (Willis, 1999). We design the world and the world designs us, and it is not a living-logical question to ask which comes first. It is also not that logical to ask if theory or practice comes first, and here Heidegger (1962:99) is quite clear: “‟Practical‟ behaviour is not „atheoretical‟ in the sense of „sightlessness‟”. Heidegger deals with both theoretical sight and practical sight, and on the whole theoretical sight gives one a scientific description of the presence-at-hand of equipment, factually what they are (this hammer is for …), what they are made of (a super-strong alloy to withstand all that hammering), and at best (still prevalent in some design schools) the equipment is styled to sell well. On the same plane of knowing practical sight is important, of course, and designed affordances are valuable aids to the user (where do I switch this thing on?), but should that be all that there is to the ontology of equipment? No one disputes the worldedness of designed objects as present-at-hand, well-designed artifacts, but, there are in the contemporary world more and more artifacts that have to function within other designed systems (cf. Chapter 1:39), and as Lee (2009:71) reminds us, “This is about merging computing and networking with physical systems to create new revolutionary science, technical capabilities and products”. Under these new hybrid and complex circumstances Heidegger‟s practical sive theoretical sightedness comes to the fore: theory has its „sight‟, and action has its own „sight‟, and these ways of seeing the world on the way to understanding the world (and understanding our own place in the world, mediated by equipment) can be merged and built into a design affordance, with the „product‟ of design then being-becoming a process of awareness (of possibility) in the use of artifact sive systems combinations, e.g., in interaction design. “In our concernful dealings” with the world, when we want to see more, we begin to notice and “also find things which are missing – which are not only not „handy‟ but are not „to hand‟ at all” (Heidegger, 1962:103). Even if we thought we had designed a well-integrated interactive system, the designed objects (this sightedness on the ontology of equipment applies equally to systems as it does to single objects) may be so un-ready-to-hand that they enter into what Heidegger calls an obtrusive mode of being, they call attention to themselves not as metadesigns but for the wrong reasons 70 and merely get in the way71. The designed object or even the whole system can reveal “itself as something just presentat-hand and no more, which cannot be budged without the thing that is missing”, and I believe that what is missing is the theoretical sive practical mode of sightedness that a hybrid such as gramma/topology can facilitate (gramma = theoretical sive topology = practical), which means that “this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific [gramma/topological] character” (Heidegger, 1962:103; 98). 70 Meta-design refers to early human and non-human system design, initially a framing narrative, that does not exist in and for itself, having no intrinsic identity. It structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own proto-identity, as a questioning system, in order to highlight, interrogate, and re-design (co-create) the relationship that is being constituted and conserved between emerging user narratives and evolving working realities. 71 „The way‟ can be translated as an ontological sive epistemological journey of discovery of the user. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 194 I started this section with reference to Winograd and Flores‟s (1988:165) situation of non-obviousness, and the fact that the something that is missing in the network of tools that we use can be unconcealed from a space of hiddenness, as Heidegger (in Dreyfus, 1991:270) put it, and yet this something cannot fully declare itself until appropriated and used, since it is something new consisting of a blend of inputs from the self and the other, and in that sense our phenomenological encounters, these cybernetic conversations with everything other-than-self become learning situations as interpretations-ofdisclosure, and we are confronted, again, by Luhmann‟s only communications can communicate. If contemporary design is about the process and the experience, then the flow of information and what that entails becomes an even more important part of design thinking, and we should investigate who communicates and how that is possible. Willis (1999) makes the observation that “equipment and technology proved the most easily graspable examples of ontological designing, but its power comes from extending beyond these contexts, or more accurately, an ontological thinking together of the material and the immaterial”. That is the focus of the following paper. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 195 Acknowledgement of text The following (slightly amended) paper was printed in the Proceedings of Changing the Change, An international conference on the role and potential of design research in the transition towards sustainability, Turin, 10th - 12th July (van der Merwe, 2008b). Changing a phenomenal change Reassembling the self through a new ethics of negotiation Abstract The only change we can be sure of is that over which we do have control, when we change ourselves, and even then this control is mediated by our interactions with others, by a mediating and normative environment that includes the designed objects we let into our lives. That change, seen against a broad canvas of sustainable social structuration, is necessary, is not in doubt. How to go about effecting this change has to be, even if only for the sake of not making the same mistakes as have been made in the past. Change has to be controlled from within, has to be designed into being as a normal part of the individual‟s ongoing growth process. 1. Introduction I am an anarchist, but I am also a sunflower, apparantly. I am contradiction itself, a fact that I have always known and come to terms with. That I am in truth an anarchist, as well as a contrarian, came to me very much later. Noam Chomsky would fain call me an anarchist for (some of) my beliefs, and recently I have discovered, through Marco Susani‟s work, that my ontological structure seems to resemble the networked, and strange, social environment he calls the Sunflower. But, more of that below (3. Ontological phenomenology). First, to this matter of anarchy. According to most peoples‟ definition, an anarchist is someone who throws bombs and wishes to destroy all forms of government, bad people, in fact. Most decidedly anarchy is usually equated with loss of control and chaos. However, Schön‟s First Law 72 (that I made up) states that the least amount of control is the best control, which correlates with Van‟s Law of Intrinsic Control (that I again made up, invented), a regulatory, cybernetic principle (cf. above :169-179), an approach that advocates a radical constructivist „loss‟ of authoritarian control that is not chaotic, since some form of control is still necessary.The Wikipedia (2008) definition notes “that anarchy does not imply nihilism, anomie, or the total absence of rules, but rather an anti-statist [anti-authoritarian] society that is based on the spontaneous order of free individuals in autonomous communities”, operating on principles of mutual aid, voluntary association, and direct action. In terms of the aims of this conference, does that not sound familiar? Hansen (2007) speaks of a “daos of suspicion of political authority (i.e., anarchism), social convention and traditional mores”, which allows us to conclude that this form of anarchism is radical constructivism in another culture; “Rather than speaking with an authorial voice, the text [of the Zhuangzi, written by the Daoist philosopher Zhuang] is filled with fantasy conversations between perspectives, including those of millipedes, convicts, musicians and the wind. A Zhuangzi reflective passage is more likely to end with a double rhetorical question (“is it … or isn't it … ?”) than a strong conclusion”. One of the aims of Changing the Change is said to be a strong and ambitious political goal, and to enable this transition towards a sustainable knowledge society, can we do so from within the existing socio-political structures? Changing the Change stands for a new social structure that takes control of its own sustainable future, and what it hopes to motivate is exactly this spontaneous order of free individuals … voluntary association, and direct action. Whether you prefer to call this anarchism, 72 From a teaching perspective this would not be inappropriate: Donald Schön‟s reflective practitioner can only do so successfully as a cybernetic exercise, i.e., inside a cybernetic design conversation, and using the principle of intrinsic control. Some form of control cannot be disputed, but the least amount that any context can get away with and still function perfectly is the best. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 196 minarchism (minimal statism / control), or libertarianism does not matter so much as the argument for unconcealing (cf. above) some of the social structures human societies have historically developed for their local needs, and the fact that what is needed is the anarchistic ideal of the least amount of control that any social and long-term sustainable structure can get away with. No text (and everything can be read as a „text‟ (cf. Chapter 2:58), including objects, as long as the complexity of their information „content‟ can be described as a discourse) should speak with an authoritarian voice, if by that we mean a text that black boxes itself and we are not allowed to question its veracity, which makes of the Zhuangzi an example of a constructivist and a cybermetic conversation that allows equal participation by human and non-human actors. According to Chomsky (1995) he was attracted to anarchism as a teenager, and, as a way of seeing the world, anarchism afforded him the possibilities of social boundary transcendence. No one would call Gadamer (1975) or Derrida (1993) anarchists, but Chomsky‟s experience tallies perfectly with their account 73 of social barriers (norms, habits, rules) that have to be transcended for the sake of personal/social development, while at the same time, respecting those very boundaries. No throwing of bombs, then, but always a questioning of the status quo. Chomsky has had no occasion to change his mind since, but, on the contrary, he has made it clear that his goal is to “seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. That includes … our control over the fate of future generations (the basic moral imperative behind the environmental movement, in my view), and much else” (Chomsky 1995). It is this anarchistic questioning of the status quo that aids my interpretation of Ezio Manzini (2007a), who talks about a „double transition‟ taking place, the first (1) created by our social and living / working environment increasingly being underpinned by connective and globalising technology, while, at the same time, and precisely because of this, we are confronted by persuasive evidence of having reached the tipping point of our planet‟s life-sustaining limits; and (2), since this change is „deep and fast‟, a concomitant and second transition is necessary, one that can provide a re-orientation in our very way of thinking. In this paper I will focus mainly on (2), and present a case study that highlights the active involvement, and the consequent re-orientation they went through, of students of design (3rd year Industrial Design). They will all enter the world of work as, potentially, the future of design itself, and hence also, potentially, as the future of the discipline of design. The design research results show that an abstract model for a self-organizing ontological framework can be applied by individuals, primarily to their own identities, as the start of a catalytic process, with the ensuing re-orientation of design knowledge as a comprehensive end result. It is in this sense that I attempt to answer Jorge Frascara‟s (2007) question, “How can a new direction be applied to the way things are, and change our culture into a sustainable one?” As Gadamer (1975, 238-239) and Derrida (1993, 919) confirmed, „the way things are‟ must be respected, and ways found, rather, to transcend these paradigmatic ways of thinking. Frascara‟s „new direction‟ must come from within the individual, and in this way social paradigmatic thought can be „transcended‟. However, despite this evolutionary and revelatory process being an individually cognitive one, there are ways of sharing this knowledge among groups of like-minded people, the first methodology discussed being actor-network-theory, also known as the sociology of translation. Latour (2005b:108) makes it clear that „the social‟ must be explained, from within, instead of „the social‟ being seen as an entity that can explain things. All social groupings, even the newly formed sustainable culture Frascara calls for, will fall back into the trap of normative (fixed) social structuration, unless they pay heed to the insights afforded by actor-network theory. As Giddens (1984, xx) puts it, the “concentration upon epistemological issues draws attention away from the more „ontological‟ concerns”. The second methodology discussed in this paper is thus ontological phenomenology, a study of how we look at and experience the world. Mugendi M‟Rithaa (2007) asks, "If Africa does not have a lot of 73 Gadamer and Derrida, in later correspondence, substantially agreed on this issue. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 197 money, what then does it have?", and his question implies that we have to look to what each region really has to offer. Like all other regions, Africa‟s resources are people, and the cross-cultural ethics of Ubuntu (being human through others) depends on people – individuals – to uphold the conditions for a sustainable future. Ubuntu is at the same time a social/cultural grouping approach/viewpoint, but, crucially, it depends very much on the individual recognition of the other to work, thus forming a group of like-minded people. 2. Actor-Network Theory As a way of sharing knowledge among a group of like-minded people, actor-network theory (ANT) is a methodology that works well for designers, but we must remember that, as a theory, ANT is not appicable to anything (Latour, 2005 141). Bruno Latour‟s (173-74) description of how ANT can be useful includes “specific tricks to help resist the temptation to jump to the global”, because, in the very act of communication, in forming networks (even if only between one local actor and a second), we are moving („jumping‟) from the local (the individual) to the global, to the many, to the away-from-us. “A ploy has to be found to make the two social theories diverge, letting the sociology of the social go its own way while the sociology of associations should be able to keep drawing more and more acurate maps”. ANT is, simply put, [1] a way of looking at the roles that human and non-human actors play in any one situation, with non-human actors identified as designed objects, rocks in the road, the snow in winter that will not let your car start, the window that sticks and will not open. Non-human actors are all the external-to-being-human objects (even events) we notice when they do not work as they should, and, more seriously, objects that intrude in our (un)consciousness and our decisions even though we are not aware of the fact. ANT looks at the relationship we have with these objects, and considers the observation of social systems as of necessity having to include both. More to the point, but more difficult to „see‟, is the ANT approach to the context of the social. There is no such thing as „the social‟ in ANT terms, because “In the alternative [ANT] view, „social‟ is not some glue that could fix everything including what the other glues cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many other types of connectors” (Latour, 2005 5). When ANT speaks of the social, [2] what is meant are the associations entered into by the members of that „social‟ – which can be a single conversation between two people, or a whole group of like-minded designers coming together in order to decide on the way forward, for the sake of a sustainable, living future. These paragraphs were removed to the beginning of the section on ANT to avoid duplication. When we consider the importance of communication, it has to be borne in mind that what is of essence, for understanding human relations, are the associations being entered into in the very flow, in the act of true communication. If there can be a glue that holds everything together, it is this. New associations mean new ways of augmenting existing knowledge, in fact, it means that learning takes place, and that means the new individual is at the heart of this association 74, or reassembly, as Latour prefers to call it. ANT, it must be remembered, is also known as the sociology of translation, and it is well to remind ourselves that the act of communication (any relationship with the external-self) is at the same time a transportation of both what we know and of the information we are dealing with, a flow from one contact point to the next, and in this flow transformation takes place. Giddens (1984, xx), in focusing more on „ontological concerns‟ rather than on epsitemology, meant by this statement that his structuration theory of the social “should be concerned first and foremost with reworking conceptions of human being and human doing, social reproduction and social transformation”. To designers, these „ontological concerns‟ should mean, very simply, an ongoing and constant becoming (Heidegger 1962, 359), the crucial point, to both Latour and to Giddens, being that the people making up the grouping, and the designed objects and systems we surround ourselves with, cannot be separated as if they do not structure each other. In this duality of structure, the human need to voice what cannot be seen (human-world experience) nevertheless demands shaped expression, which becomes literature, art (Steiner 2002, 279-280), or becomes design, an outward expression or manifestation of who we are, and what we want or need to become. That, I believe, can be achieved by making use of, amongst other „like-minded‟ theories of beinghuman, Heidegger‟s notion of ontological phenomenology, or at least my ANT „translation‟ of the term. Phenomenology is the study of how we look at and experience the world, and it is a study of subjective experience, following Husserl, although some have used this approach to deny any experience beyond the concrete objectivity of what is. Others have contrasted phenomenology to ontology, which studies the essence, the very nature of existence. Put the two together, and Heidegger‟s ontological phenomenology starts to make sense, in that individuals can study themselves as developing structures, coming-into-being through a movement away from the what is existence of a concrete world, towards a possible existence in renewal. Ontological phenomenology allows each individual to map their own 74 This new individual connects ANT to Heidegger‟s ontological phenomenology. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 198 progress, even (especially) from within the group, of like-minded people, of course. However, instead of describing this methodology in detail, I would like to focus on one particular manisfestation of looking for the invisible. 3. Ontological phenomenology We are adept at dealing with things contradictory, and we even deal with things invisible to a remarkable degree. When we make meaning (we usually say, when we make sense of something, but that is manufacturing meaning), we are dealing with the not-yet, the invisible that Merleau-Ponty (1968, 215) classified as meaning, emanating from the inner framework of the visible as a virtual focus that will not let itself be looked at or looked for, because it will then simply disappear. Contradictory, yes, but also normal cognitive human behaviour, and just because so much of it happens on a tacit knowledge level and as such remains out of sight (but not unobservable), does not mean we cannot investigate this phenomenon. When dealing with the human need to voice what cannot be seen, we are trying to find ways to make sense of the world, not simply as it presents itself to us in concrete fact, but in non-material, relational meaning, and especially in terms of the effect of our communicative networks. How does this outward, shaped expression come into being, and how do we voice the invisible? How do we talk to each other? Marco Susani (2002) begins this descriptive journey through the different stages of networked communication by starting with the Womb and ending with the Sunflower. Susani began his presentation at Doors of Perception 7 with a quote from Herman Melville: It is not down on any map. The true places never are. Communication between two people, two systems or entities, creates new places of meaning, with a virtual focus, as Merleau-Ponty (above) stated, because these true places are not on any map,and cannot be seen, yet we have to voice these places, or rather, we have to voice what happens in these virtual spaces. A very difficult thing to do, indeed. We are continually speaking of things that do not yet exist, which is why Susani (2002) is “trying to map places that are intangible and invisible; the flows of communication and the places where they happen”. These true places are in peoples‟ heads, and Susani appreciates this phenomenon as very rich in possible content, and he even labels this human phenomenon as “wireless, networked ubiquitous communication”, because each individual phenomenal communicative event depends on at least one other, hence the first phase called the Womb (Figure 14). Figure 14. The Womb. Marco Susani (2002). http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/susani_trans_images.html Our language use is largely dependent on the use of metaphor, which is possibly why Susani and his colleagues decided on a list of named forms to describe the communicative patterns being established when two or more people join in a networked effort to make sense of the world, beginning with the Womb, a space of communicative sharing that, in belonging to the two people so intimately sharing that Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 199 meaningful space, begins to take on this shape that seems enclosed and inward focusing. As more and more people in different configurations join the network of communications (closely resembling the networked effects of actor-network theory), the shapes or forms of these intangible and invisible places begin to vary, taking on the configuration of the actual network of communication, taking on the shape(s) of the consequential possibilities, of these communications, as it were. It would be impossible, here, to deal with all of these permutations, but I would like to focus on two others before arriving at the Sunflower. The next form, for my purposes, is the Infinite Star (Figure 15), a recognisable network of communications that resembles the space of flows – Felix Stalder (2002) gave a descriptive example in likening this structure to the Dutch East-Indian spice trade: there has to be a medium through which things flow (the oceans), the stuff that flows (spices then, information now), and the nodes between which flows happen (the harbours that served as starting and end points for the ships). Figure 15. The Infinite Star. Marco Susani (2002). http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/susani_trans_images.html The Infinite Star has groups of people as the nodes, between which groups the information flows, but all the nodes are in principle, and usually in practice, connected. Susani sees these nodes as communities that are broadcasting to each other in a peer-to-peer network of communicative flows, overlapping, because every node is connected to every other node in the system, forming “a continuous space that connects infinite points” (Susani 2002). The „content‟, Susani states, is what holds these groups together. The spices (their entailments) held the trade between Amsterdam and Batavia together, bound them in communities of practice, in the same way that groups of designers (design students!) need, not actual „content‟ but purpose, new associations, to help them create an Infinite Star continuous space of learning. On the way to the next form I, the Flames, (Figure 16, overleaf), Susani deals with an increasing complexity of communicative flows, because, being human and not being able to do anything else but participate in a group as an individual, we cause the stuff that flows to keep on adding to itself, and we are dealing with augmented upon augmented individually interpreted/translated narratives that circulate between nodes, collectively as group narratives, and between the individuals that make up each node, to again be augmented individually. Susani (2002) speaks of “a kind of viral diffusion. Sending the message of the message is a kind of social space that is infinite: we call this the Flames”. A veritable fractal space that networks in an almost biological fashion (as opposed to the clean, linear, controlled diagrammes we usually see purporting to represent these networks). Where the Infinite Star is still easily „managed‟ as a network of communicative flows, in reality communication flows where it will, and in education terms, must be allowed to connect, augment, and be virally diffused as it needs Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 200 to, given the „harbours and ships‟ at its disposal at any one time – the designers in the group of likeminded people, the members of the public that share a common goal of everyday sustainability, or the students in a design class, this potentially infinite social space that links formal with informal learning, this discontinuous space of learning. Figure 16. The Flames. Marco Susani (2002). http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/susani_trans_images.html “Now imagine the same structure with the same flames going around, but combined with the idea that then, at a certain point, they gather, they return back to a single space” (Susani 2002). This is the Sunflower (Figure 17), a networked, and strange, social environment form. We are dealing with a circularity (true to the essence of cybernetics and design) that finds order in seeming chaos. 75 That order, or comprehension / understanding, that is the relational principle behind this networked communication, begins with the individual and ends with the individual. Figure 17. The Sunflower. Marco Susani (2002). http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/susani_trans_images.html 75 Sunflowers, daisies, and the beautiful Echinacea purpura are contradictory flowers, since what we see as the „flower‟ is, in fact, not. The head of a sunflower is composed of many florets densely packed together, in this single space, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be very ordered indeed, according to the mathematical, yet biological, logic of Fibonacci numbers (the Golden Mean or Golden Section, derived from the spiral shape of i.e. the Nautilus sea shell and the head of a sunflower, is an example, one that has always inspired artists and designers). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 201 There is no such „thing‟ as a group, just as there is no such thing as the social 76 : there are only individuals and there is only communication77. We, all the individuals who make up the sunflower head, need to find a way to deal with this very compact, very complex mix of communicative flows, and we need to do so in this new, single space (Susani, above). Oh, dear. Now what? First we had the continuous space of learning, then the discontinuous, and now we‟re back to a single space? At this point many a student gives up, or it might seem that way, at first. I am trying to find out why they do not lose their way completely (cf. 4. Student case study), despite these very intricate and complex issues being discussed in class. How is it possible to speak about complexity theory, to discuss Heidegger‟s ontological phenomenology and Bruno Latour‟s human and non-human actors with a class of third year design students, and, heavens forbid, keep their interest? There is, only and ever, the individual. Everyting else is manufactured, socially constructed, and increasingly difficult to comprehend. True and sustainable group understanding of important social issues depends very much on individual understanding and endorsement of those same issues. The group does not exist, the social does not exists, except through the individual. Alain Findeli (2001:12) called for a renewal of design education, because he believes that “A system, and especially the human or social system, is best understood from within, through a qualitative, phenomenological, approach”. My version of this injunction is to focus on the new individual, within the old self. 4. Student case study Humberto Maturana (1980:2) asked this question: How does it happen that the organism has the structure that permits it to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists? (discussed below). That question had a more practical focus, namely: how is it possible for pigeons to deal with the world of form and colour? Maturana, being a biologist, at first wanted to know what form and colour looked like to a pigeon, but he got no answers. The world intruded (in the shape of student riots in Chile) and he changed his observational position; instead of asking a semantic question, he asked a structural one: instead of asking how does form and colour present themselves to the pigeon, he asked, what does the pigeon need to observe the world out there. Ergo, the Project 2 design theory essay question78 to my group of 3rd year Industrial Design students: How could students acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment? Apart from introducing the students to systems thinking 79 early on, and then moving on to cybernetics80, I deal with Alexander Manu‟s The Big Idea of Design, which asks of them to strip away everything (to do with „objective‟ detail) and instead look for the essence of any object, to look for the origin of a designed artefact and the role that this non-human actor initially played in our lives, and the (possibly) changed role that its progeny now plays. Having done that, we move on to questions such as, What is the Big Idea of a “self / identity”?, and for good measure, How does education and self/identity relate to each other (relationship of what purpose?). To put some more pressure on them, I have them read Anne-Marie Willis‟s Ontological Designing (1999), which deals with both Heidegger‟s notion of becoming, and the life worlds inhabited by both objects and people. Having come so far it couldn‟t hurt to introduce actor-network theory, could it? I purposely try not to give the students too much information (aka „prompting‟), but try to give them access to as much relevant sources as possible, and, because they have to do quite rigorous research and work in groups (always, in the initial 76 Latour (2005b:7-8) reminds us that „the social‟ is an invisible entity that only exists because of the participants, and these „elements‟ are themselves not „social‟; Latour defines the social “as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling”. 77 We are who (we think) we are through communication (negotiated, interactive building of relationships, above), or as Luhmann (2002, 156) puts it, “only communication can communicate” in the networks we have to build, and the resultant actions we decide upon are the result of our understandings generated within these networks of communication. 78 This is not an English class, so I expect, and discuss, the necessity of working from a research-based proposal structure. 79 Peter Checkland‟s Soft Systems Methodology (cf. also Donella Meadows‟ Dancing with systems, 2001). 80 Second-order cybernetics differs from first-order cybernetics, in that it does not deal with predictable and ordered systems, but studies the observation of observing systems, i.e. us. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 202 stages, to share data and in developing information platforms), we also discuss their developing understanding of the topic(s) as much as possible. The students, in fact, have to regard themselves as their own product, and observe where, how and why they acquire the structure just right for them to deal with the world of design, and then they are able to tell me (and themselves) whether they are still of the same mind (mostly not!), or whether they have discovered their own Alexander Manu moment of change. I am, in fact, asking the students to deal with the complexity of communicative flows (we discuss Ezio Manzini and Felix Stalder on the Space and Pace of Flows), networking (Maneul Castells), rhizomes (Deleuze & Guattari‟s organic networks), Wolfgand Jonas‟s groundless field of knowledge and Edward O. Wilson‟s consilience („jumping together‟)81. Oh, and complexity theory, of course. The fact that Donald Schön82 promised that students would become frustrated is no great solace, to begin with. But perturbation does work, in a kindly, anarchistic kind of way, even though it must appear as utter chaos to the students at first. Too much information, too new, and too fast! they cry, not realising that they should be lamenting I do not have the structure that can deal with these new worlds opened up by this information, hence the Project 2 structural research question: who are you and what‟s your knowledge-acquiring structure like? It is not the content of the course, not the information they work with, and not the articles I make them read that is the focus of this theory class, but the individual. The students have to learn how to learn, and to do that, with self-knowledge, they have to learn about themselves first. These are some of the insights they reached: *Somewhere along my development I made the transition from being taught to teaching myself [and] the way in which the individual react to this shift in responsibility seems to differ from one person to another; *[I have learned to] look at the holistic picture and direct my vision away from purely relying on my own opinion and presumptions; *Some people believe that the ultimate goal in life is self-fulfilment, however the only way in which to really create one‟s own happiness or reach „completion‟ as a human being is to make others happy; *My purpose for wanting to learn continuously is tied up with my outlook on life and my purpose as a human being; *Every product that I develop must have a purpose and will always have consequences. The fact that these comments are centred on the first person perspective is mitigated by the realisation that the „I‟ is here dependend on the „other‟, that the students clearly see their roles, as designers, intertwined with their roles as human beings among other human beings, and not just as designers v. users. To understand the human social system from within, as Alain Findeli (above) urges us to do, is to understand the individual inside the communicative and learning system, (cf. Figure 18: The wickedness of design education, overleaf). My design theory classroom is a social constructivist space for learning, and this illustration tries to make sense of the invisible, in fact tries to map Susani‟s (2002) “places that are intangible and invisible; the flows of communication and the places where they happen”. What should be a straightforward input / output with-feedback-loops structure is anything but linear and easy, and very difficult to „map‟. Susani‟s communicative forms and actor-network theory‟s relational principles make it rather more understandable, from the viewpoint of seeing this on paper, but what if you were inside this process, right now, and couldn‟t see anything for the „chaos‟, the oh, this is too much stuff swirling around your head? 81 Edward O. Wilson‟s work seems to be quite contentious since consilience is not just his explanation but also the basis for his Theory of Everything. I use the term consilience as a mere explanation and not as a reference to a meta-theory of knowledge. 82 Schön is famously credited with believing that students need to be „frustrated‟, because they have to learn to work in the “indeterminate zones of practice – uncertainty, situations of confusion and messiness where you don‟t know what the problem is” (Schön, 1987). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing FEEDBACK LOOP OUTPUT GROUNDED THEORY VIA REFLECTIVE PRACTICE 1. The constructivist classroom depends on feedback loops as a measure of calibration STUDENT PRESENT/ DESIGNER / MANAGER KNOWLEDGE /  PRESENT KNOWLEDGE DESIGNER / PRACTITIONER PRESENT TEACHER / MANAGER KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE 2. Design is, however, not so neatly linear, but quite grey and wicked PRESENT/ TEACHER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE STUDENT / PRESENT DESIGNER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE       PRESENT DESIGNER / PRACTITIONER STUDENT KNOWLEDGE/ / DESIGNER MANAGER PRESENT TEACHER MANAGER/ PRESENT KNOWLEDGE STAFFORD BEER’S MUDDY BOX INPUT 203 3. To make sense of the active and re-occuring patterns, we artificially slow the process down to see what’s going on   PRESENT/ TEACHER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE DESIGNER PRESENT/ PRACTITIONER KNOWLEDGE PRESENT DESIGNER / PRACTITIONER KNOWLEDGE STUDENT / PRESENT DESIGNER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE / EXTERNAL 4. Simplistically, the classroom contains three units: student, teacher and external information. But each of the three units consists of prior & new knowledge; each deals with its own input/output feedback loop 5. Even this is too neat and controlled, because each of the three units also have to contend with many other external > internal inputs in real and retrospective time OUTPUT 1 INPUT 1 FEEDBACK LOOP 1 6. Besides the real/retro & internal/ external influences on each unit, the teacher as classroom manager has to foreground the interaction between teacher & student “THE WOMB” 7. This direct link also depends on managing the input/output feedback loop, which, on a macro level follows the design curriculum ... OUTPUT 1 INPUT 1 9. How can the student learn to manage the input in real time, plus add to the original input in retrospect, when each of the many possible feedback loops are active, and effective, at the same time? “THE FLAMES” 8. ... but on a micro, classroom dynamics, level follows the active design learning situation, with the teacher/student interactive link, calibrated to the output, changing the input in real time 10. In real time, this is what the picture looks like: this is Rittel’s Wicked Problem Situation, seen as multiple input/output + feedback loops, or Activity Theory in action. This seeks to understand the unity of consciousness and activity, since the input/output relation between the student and information is neither mechanical nor given. “A much richer depiction of the user’s situation is needed for design and evaluation” (Nardi, 1996) “THE SUNFLOWER” Figure 18: The wickedness of design education. Cf. Addendum A Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 204 Imagine a student with an education-sponsored „map‟, trying to find her way towards what we would like to call „knowledge‟. Instead of the relatively easy to navigate situation of Drawing 6, the direct interaction between teacher and student (comparison with Susani‟s the Womb), this poor soul finds herself in Drawing 10, which, if anything, resembles Susani‟s Sunflower. For a „map‟ to be of any use whatsoever, it must be drawn by the student herself, inside the group, with the help of the group members, of course, and especially if she … no, when she reaches the point of being able to make full use of this „single‟ Sunflower space, she will be able to handle any situation in the real and complex world, because the new „map‟ coming-into-being is her new self and the new strucure enabling her to operate innovatively in a modern design environment. That new self emerges from the wavefunctions (below) of all the individuals in the Sunflower single space merging, when “they return back to a single space”, because sometimes, as Arato (1994, 130) said in discussing Luhmann‟s work, we are looking at “a whole which is paradoxically conceived of as its own part”. As another student reported, “a conciliate model for my design thinking can only be created when all my experiences and influences cease to be … only then can this „jumping together‟ and blending of information become conciliate”, only then can he experience Susani‟s turning back to a single space. In Figure 19 we can see another version of both Susani‟s Sunflower space and Drawing 10 from Figure 18, a system that works on two levels, depending on your observational position. You can either look at the whole classrooom as one entity, and see all the students following this same system of discovery as a group, but you can also, and should also, see all of them, at the same time, dealing with their own Figure 19 systems, while linking into the growing network, and becoming each other‟s data-into-information inputs. The data mix at both 10 and at 2 o‟clock were „consiliated‟, i.e., jumped together 83 until they formed a new hybrid conceptual entity of new information, while the data mix at 6 o‟clock could not deliver anything new that was usable to the self or to the group as new knowledge (internal strutural KN OW LED GE DATA change). “By conserving [making the distinctions and choosing] tested and examined information, I will start to form my own design identity” (Eksteen), while seeing education as a reaching outwards to the rest of the group, and beyond, in this discontinuous space of learning turned back on itself. Figure 19: The creation of a design identity. Chrispher Eksteen (student, 2007), with modifications by the author. 5. Discussive afterwo/ard I spoke of the African cross-cultural ethics of Ubuntu earlier on, a notion that depends on people, as individuals, to uphold the conditions for any sustainable future. Sawu Bona („I see you‟) is an example of this, but it can only, effectively, happen between individuals, and emerge, willingly, from within each individual, and, like this friendly greeting between two human beings, cannot be enforced from „outside‟, but is a constant becoming, an awareness of the phenomenological effect of an “open 83 Consilience resembles Fauconnier and Turner‟s conceptual blending in that the observer can deal with multiple inputs by jumping them together, i.e., placing the data in each other‟s proximity and observe the possible information flows between the nodes (each data bit being a node, active or not). If the information flows are disconnected nothing will happen, but if they start to connect (have a conversation), then Susani‟s Flames turn into the Sunflower space, and the new patter of information flows almost literally jump together like iron filings under the influence of a magnet, and we observe Bateson‟s pattern that connects. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 205 atmosphere of learning” (Grant 2005:564). As Seamon (quoted in Grant 2005:564) found, it (this phenomenological cross-over between the self and the other) can become an “intersubjective verification … to establish generalizations about human experience”. What Grant is advocating (my „sociology of translation‟ reading of Grant), is a phenomenology of practice , a cooperative responsibility that becomes the “transcendental intersubjective essence of all audiences” (Grant 2005:576), or another way to share knowledge among groups of like-minded people, a way to transcend the difficult social boundaries that too often „follow‟ (are persuaded to obey) economic and political agendas other than the direction advocated by this conference. The Sunflower single space becomes Grant‟s phenomenology of practice, within which the intersubjective essence of each individual can be shared among the members of a grouping (actornetwork), as Grant‟s audience, the members making up this audience listening to each other, and collectively saying Sawu Bona, I „see‟ you, I acknowledge who you are, what you stand for. We are dealing with a collective paradigm shift, in everyday knowledge generation, from individual „knowledge‟ to group „knowledge‟, but this process then shifts back to the individual, again; the new individual, within the group, that is not, just as the flower of a Sunflower is not (an individual flower, that is, but a collective). This is totally contradictory, and totally quantum physics: two states of existence can be „true‟ at the same time, depending on your observation position. When each individual reaches a state of augmented, enhanced participation in knowledge generation (which, as I am sure you will agree, can only happen internally, hence individually), then the wavefunctions 84 of all the individuals within a group such as the Sunflower begins to merge, and we can understand why Susani could ask us to “imagine the same structure with the same flames going around, but combined with the idea that then, at a certain point, they gather, they return back to a single space” (Susani 2002). Merleau-Ponty recognized transcendence in the new becoming-self that is always just beyond existing borders, and as Lingis (1968, l-li) states, Merleau-Ponty regarded „the visible‟ (compare Susani‟s Sunflower single space, but envisage the real group) not as an assembly of individuals fixed in space and time, but as a field, a moving, human landscape („topography‟) of possibilities that unfold by making distinctions85, but instead of disintegration, a reintegration takes place “through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and not nothing, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same thing and in the same world)”. The individuals make the group, and the group makes the (new) individuals, as long as we remember that these flows of communication can be effective only when we realise that “this system of lines of force, are not what we see; they are with which, according to which, we see”. When wavefunctions merge we are within reach of this new single space. Complexity theory gives us an insight into what has been happening to human networks, on an everyday level, for as long as we have felt the need to gather as a social group for a defined need, such as now. My argument is that our central nervous system, as a sensing organ, and on a metaphysical level („activated‟ by the memory knowledge of physical phenomenology), uses the projective functions of our consciousness in a deeply biological way that follows the structural understanding of Maturana‟s (1980:2) question, How does it happen that the organism has the structure that permits it to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists? How does it happen that the individual has the capability of operating adequately within the group in which it finds its (new) self, i.e., where the individual finds a sense of place / belonging? Monod (1997:155) has a preference for the projection of a non-verbal mental reflection that triggers an outside-self experience of forms and interactions, i.e., the structures (Susani‟s Womb, Flames, Sunflower forms) we unconceal in this new space are taken on as the knowing structure of the organism, and on further development, both sets of structures „recognise‟ each other. 84 A wavefunction is a term describing all the information content of what is being observed, at that time. Compare this to the information / knowledge content of each individual, at any one moment. 85 Luhmann (2002:3), in a statement reminiscent of the development of second-order cybernetics, affirms that “we are no longer in the realm of a foundationalist „first‟ philosophy but rather in the realm of a „second-order‟ philosophy of observations of the observations of self and other”. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 206 The work of Davies (2000:43; 243) and Prigogine (1980:89-90) underpin this argument, and quantum physics make it possible to imagine the non-local, i.e. ubiquitous presence of wavefunctions, the building blocks of socal structuration. On a sub-atomic level reality shows itself to be playing with a Richard Jung disjunction/conjunction, since atoms can be both particles and wavefunctions, thus a similar speculation on our social level is not that impossible; we can be an autopoietic system (selforganizing and „closed off‟ from external forces) and also be the environment that sustains us through „natural‟ interaction. We can be both inside and outside, more than one and less than many. In this sense we can design and construct our own internal information for own consumption, at the same time that we can „identify with the object itself‟, thereby becoming part of the environmental information, sharing with the group and sharing in the group. Human knowing, facilitated by a hybrid lens such as gramma/topology, can then be compared to two wavefunctions that collide and merge, and we can observe the two information structures in the process of forming a new entity via a phase transition.86 Reassembling the self through a new ethics of negotiation, it seems to me, becomes the new student body politic. They now comprehend their own identities by reassembling what they thought they knew, about the world, about knowledge, about themselves. Actor-network theory, networking with ontological phenomenology, allows them to map their places (of negotiation) as they map their journeys of discovery and learning, and seemingly as a matter of course locating ethical responsibility as “… more than [being individually truthful] … something much more than making wise choices … Our moral obligations must … include a willingness to engage others in the difficult work of defining the crucial choices that confront technological society” (Herkert, 2002). Reassembling the self in this fashion can create Manzini‟s deep and fast second transition, that crucial reorientation in our very way of thinking. 86 These last two paragraphs, substantially, appears in van der Merwe (2007a). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 207 Reinjection Instead of „unpacking‟ this paper as I have done with the others, I shall let it defend itself as it stands, as one way of illustrating the integration of phenomenological and design thinking, and only add a very few comments before offering a second take on design phenomenological thinking, one that continues the argument in Changing a phenomenal change, but that focuses even more on the individual as starting and end point; a differently viewed Sunflower form in fact, showing how the individual and the group are indivisibly part of the same networked, socially constructed world. In the paper above I did not deal with an ethics of negotiation a great deal, this aspect being more implied than made explicit despite the subtitle, but the article below does do so in more detail. In Changing a phenomenal change I was responding to a specific call for design research to investigate a transition towards a more sustainable future, which to me means that I need to address my students directly with the cyberentic design conversation in this paper, because the best way to make them aware of issues such as the phenomenal grounding that they are dealing with, without perhaps being fully conscious of or responsive to this aspect, is for me to use a vehicle such as this conference theme to motivate me in writing a piece on what is another aspect of a gramma/toplogy of design knowing, and offer the results to the students for discussion and comment. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 208 Acknowledgement of text The following (slightly amended) article was published in the Journal of Design Research 7(3):317-330, a Special Issue on Futures of Design Education (van der Merwe, 2008a). Ontologically shaping a designed future: Design education as revelation 1 Introduction Two questions were asked of the participants at the 9th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education: How are educators shaping future designers? and How does design shape the future? This work deals with the changing design educational scenario as the backdrop to my answers to these two questions, which are both in the negative – (1) educators cannot shape future designers and (2) design cannot shape the future, but (1) design students can „shape‟ themselves, and (2) studentsturned-designers can help shape the future, through having first shaped their own (possible) futures. This is not semantic word-play but ontological pragmatics. By learning that the new innovative future is quite dependent on, and relative to, what they conserve in the present (the choices they make), students can teach themselves how to deal with the uncertainty principle inherent in modern social relationships. I teach a third year Industrial Design theory 87 class, and make it clear from the start to all my students: do not expect me to teach you how to design products, because, as Latour (2005b) explained, all good methodologies and theories are not applicable to anything. Theory is not a method for „doing‟, and neither is it a recipe that guarantees a product that can be manufactured. Theories do have one use, though. They help designers to view the world and everything it contains differently, including, inevitable, themselves. And, as Bruinsma (1995) so telling stated, “we do not need new forms, we need a new mentality” when thinking about design and education, making of designed objects the means by which we gain “a better understanding of people, of society and of the ecosystem” (Frascara, 2001). Consequently, in my design theory class the co-respondent sociologies of both the student and the object have become of prime importance. In relation to this, we also need to pay attention to the human „object‟, pay attention to what the („design‟ of the) student, as an active agent, says about being human in a socio-technical world, and what that says about design, as the other active agent in the world. Sociology is the study of the viable, living structures that people create, how they are conceived and how they operate; but what about the sociology of an individual, how would students create and structure their own lives? Why is any of this necessary, especially in a design course? Not only does Latour make us aware of the symbiosis between human and non-human actors, but Giddens (1991:54) regards our mediated experiences as central to the way we situate ourselves contextually in the modern world, with our appropriation of the information received from all manner of information systems as part of the reason we perceive and experience the world in a „radically‟ changed way. If we then believe that design is a social activity and an instance of human communicative ability, and if we further believe that design, as a cognitive tool, can be used to realize the appropriate means of articulation and shaped expression88 we need in order to cope with Latour‟s and Giddens‟ new world, we have to re-conceptualise our idea of design as a discipline and consequently how design is taught. A much more sense making and authentic practice is called for (Gedenryd, 1998:1), thus design must be allowed to re-create itself as a systemic activity, and to do so design education will need to concentrate on the learning process itself. New educational models must allow students to construct their own learning capabilities, thus structuring their own modes of knowledge acquisition, in order to liberate 87 I have always refused to classify what I teach as narrowly focused on specific production, and have systematically erased the definitive words graphic and product from my design theory classes. 88 George Steiner (2002) speaks of the human need to find „shaped expression‟, and that “this persistence is thought made urgent, which is to say, metaphysical”. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 209 themselves from programmed knowledge („book learning‟) and, instead, allow for emergence as a creative input. Maturana & Varela‟s (1980:xvi) question, interpreted and translated by me (How does a student obtain information about design changes to how could students acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment?) forms the problem statement of this research, and this „structure‟ is the key to a model of design education, since an individual‟s self-constructed ontology89 is designed similarly to the process of innovation: the (old) parts necessary to construct the (new) whole already contain all the information necessary, except that, as Jonas (2004) reminds us, design is a groundless field of non-specific properties, meaning that the parts are not neatly lined up (serial thinking), and that newly innovative and creative interconnections are called for. That necessitates a different approach to design renewal, and further means we need to rethink our own selves, including issues of sustainable ethics. Why should this be an ethical issue? A design ontology can resemble a personal ontology, when we decide to be what we can become and take full responsibility for that decision. As Frascara (2001) reminds us, design is no longer just concerned with artefacts, but with Manu‟s (1999) relationship of purpose (between users and artefacts), and if we agree with this viewpoint, then we should realise that design “should do this in an ethical way”. In a complex social environment, and given Actor-Network Theory‟s notion of artefacts that function as „non-human actors‟, designers must now take joint responsibility for co-creating an environment wherein other human beings must make choices, hence sustainable ethics. Only thus can we know how any individual student‟s, and hence the designed, future is being shaped. 2 The curious case of pigeons and objects We can only learn from within our own constructed world/environment, and design education should be such a re-constructive process, one in which the students‟ learning, their pedagogical experiences, becomes voluntary restructuring. The trick to seeing design education in a new light seems to be to start asking differently focused questions. Instead of thinking about product semantics as (simplistically) designers imbuing objects with meaning, we can reverse this communication stream, and think of objects as eliciting responses from people. We can ask, why do certain objects make us think of comparable human actions / intentions (reference to), and because of that, why do we assign (quasihuman) roles90 to these designed objects? Even „innocent‟ consumer items 91, which we might regard as innocuous but are not, can actively shape our future conduct and the way we relate to other objects and, more importantly, to other people. These consumer items can imbue us with meaning; this is a case of the external world co-structuring our „internal world‟, a place where we thought we had complete jurisdiction. Because of this alethic truth (cf. Heidegger, below), instead of asking the semantic question, what can we learn about pigeons and objects, we should ask how does the presence of subjects and objects in the world effect who we think we are. This of course implies that you believe, as I do, that we construct our identities, our very ontologies by interacting with everything and everyone in our environment, and learning about these actors (human and non-human) becomes a very important part of the process. And since you were wondering, ontology is that branch of knowledge that deals with the nature and essence 89 This usually refers to a metaphysical investigation into the nature of existence, but is too often seen as merely a look at the past, instead of a look at how the present is being changed into a future and better existence. 90 In Latour‟s version of Actor-Network Theory he makes no distinction between human and „non-human‟ actors: all actants on the socio-technical stage play reciprocal roles, and I have stated a number of times that I regard conversations and objects as proxy humans (cf. above :193; 214). 91 An „innocent‟ consumer item would be a very utilitarian object, such as i.e. a nondescript white coffee mug that you cannot even remember buying because it has so little emotional or connotative value. This object would be „innocent‟ in the sense of not trying to be anything other than what you see, a white, boring, not very stylish, coffee mug. You hardly notice these objects. Most consumer items, however, are bought precisely because they do carry an „aura‟ of something else, and that „something else‟ is the added product semantics that the designer and/or the advertising agency attaches to the object, making of the designed object a carrier of social content other than its purely functional meaning. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 210 of things and of existence. Note the duality inherent in this description, one that should remind us immediately of Giddens‟s (1986) „duality of structure‟, by which I think he meant the antithesis of the „dualism‟ that has always existed between humans and their creations, as if subjectivity and objectivity can be clearly defined, and seen in dichotomous opposition. Dichotomy and opposition, as linguistic and phenomenological terms, should not necessarily refer to the same thing, don‟t you think? Opposition means literally just that, and „it‟ will not be allowed „in here‟, where „it‟ will only cause disruption to our way of doing things, while dichotomy might contain the term opposite but not opposition. This is what Giddens means by using the term duality as opposed to dualism, since the former acknowledges the various roles that even dichotomous black and white entities, human and non-human actors, can play in (co)structuring our worlds, worlds of our own making that allow even opposites „in here‟, while the latter postulates two very different and never-the-twain-shall-meet worlds of human and nonhuman objects. If ontology has to do with the nature and essence of things and of existence, we can see how closely entwined human and non-human natures and essences are, since we all occupy the same space, figuratively, but also mentally (they occupy space in our mentality). Who and what we think we humans are remains closely linked to what we think non-humans are (or, rather, what they stand for, what they represent); our ontologies are closely linked to their ontologies, so we should, really, be concerned with how all ontologies are formed.92 I started out by mentioning that we have to change the focus of our questions, with one of these refocused questions being, exactly how do we learn, and perhaps more to the point, is learning concerned with epistemology or ontology? The Chilean biologist93 Humberto Maturana (1980) wanted to know how pigeons observed form and colour. “After we realized that the mapping of the external world was an inadequate approach, we found that the very formulation of the question gave us a clue”. Instead of asking how the pigeon could learn about form and colour, they asked how the presence of form and colour could help structure the pigeon‟s „ontology‟. That‟s a gross over-simplification, of course, but close enough for my purposes. What Maturana teaches us is that a semantic question should be turned into a structural one, and instead of asking, how can design students learn about form and colour, learn about the external world of objects and events, we should ask, how does the presence of objects help structure the user‟s (student‟s) ontology?, leading to the question, how is it possible for designs students to acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a contemporary design environment? These are hands-off questions (to the educator), because this ontological structure can only be acquired by the subjects themselves – anything else is either rote learning or subjugation, and points to the fact that educators cannot shape future designers, since design students have to „shape‟ or structure themselves by mapping their own internal worlds of understanding. We are not so much mapping the external world by „talking‟ to subjects and objects, but mapping our own internal worlds according to how we respond to these external stimuli, to how we choose to interact with the objects and events that „populate‟ our environment. 3 So, what’s the big idea, then? Charity begins at home, and a design student who begins „at home‟ will be better equipped to deal with an „away game‟ played in a different environment. Beginning with an internal autopoietical restructuring that is triggered by elements in the external environment, i.e., co-ontogenic drift, means we acknowledge that the origins of these „internal environments‟ must come from somewhere, and that happens to be the „outside‟ – and immediately I have to add that there is no „out there‟ out there, as John Wheeler of the Santa Fe Institute so provocatively stated (Norretranders, 1999). We need not look 92 93 What do you think the term ontology represents, and why is it substantially different to epistemology? Humberto Maturana is, as far as I understand his work, a meta-disciplinary theorist who fits into the mould of an ontological phenomenologist. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 211 for answers out there, and neither can we look for answers in here, since out there and in here do not really exist, except as convenient constructions, but since they do (exist, even if just on paper, and for the sake of argument) we may look at both as not dichotomous but as sive, i.e., as a disjunction/conjunction device, which allows them both to be more than one and less than many. I am simply asking the Alexander Manu (1999) question, which means trying to grasp the most comprehensive, contextually oriented „big picture‟ I can manage, with your 94 help, of course. Manu believes in the Big Idea of Design, which tries to fathom the origins of any designed object, the reasons for its existence (its ontological coming-into-being) and how the role it has played has changed, or not. Manu‟s way of looking at design correlates with Latour‟s in that both designed object and user are seen in a contextualized environment, of movement. What we are talking about - design education, social life, business practices or an engineering discussion between designers and clients - these events take place in a movement and re-configuration of elements, where nothing is fixed until an agreement is reached for whatever reason, and even then the fixing is artificial and not „real‟ in the sense that it can always be re-designed / re-thought. Design education happens in the virtual space between us, which is neither in here (in both our minds) nor out there. Let‟s not forget what the topic under discussion is: how are design educators to shape future designers, which really asks the question, how is it possible for designs students to acquire a (conceptual) structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a contemporary design environment? No one can „shape‟ you as a future designer, since you must do the „shaping,‟ while at the same time we have to admit that some form of „shaping‟ is going on via all those mediated experiences, made possible by the objects and events we design. To find out how students can acquire a structure that allows them to operate in an external world, we simply have to begin „at home,‟ begin in here (the non-subjective, non-objective, autopoietical in here), since that is all there is, and find out how those mediated, external experiences can trigger, not force, an internal change. 4 Reassembling the self in an ‘empty’ social world If the out there of an „objective‟ world does not exist, then so too this strange creature called the social, thought of as if it were a living entity instead of a culturally contrived and socially constructed virtuality. Latour (2005b) reminds us that „the social‟ cannot be seen as a specific domain of reality, but that the associations we enter into, the connections we make and the consequent results specify anew each time what „the social‟ can become: “I am going to define the social … only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling”. This reads very much like design itself, since design, as a social act, must be redefined, in a particular but peculiar (atypical) context, every time the process is started anew. As for the sociology of the design student, this same argument is valid: I am going to define the design student … only as a very peculiar (atypical) coming-into-being (movement) of reassociation and reassembling. We can be in two places at the same time: in here as well as out there (both being virtual), because our real existence, the reassembling of our real selves, happens during the communicative „movements‟ we experience when in here and out there interact (cf. moments of recognition :132, above). Communication, seen this way, becomes a negotiation and a making of meaning, and we are responsible, as long as it can be admitted that „we‟ are made up of human and non-human actors, plus the consequent actions resulting from these communicative interactions. „We‟ can shape the future by means of these acts of meaning-making, these humanly moral actions that we know will impact on our and our children‟s lives. In asking the question, how does design shape the future, we are really asking how the collaborative „we‟ can acquire a structure that will allow us to deal with the contemporary, but also the future, sense-making world. 94 I continually insist that my students never work (i.e., think) alone, but always do so in groups. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 212 What cannot be forgotten, is that the so-called objective world only shows the traces of past decisions and actions, and it is very easy to fall into the trap of „that is how things are‟ because of „that is what the system is like‟, instead of knowing that „the (social) system‟ is in fact constituted in the future, while we speak and negotiate. What cannot be allowed to be forgotten is the power of language, and specifically the power of the subjunctive. 5 A new ethics of negotiation What if, and as if, and just imagine if; these are expressions of the coming-into-being of the future. Eco (2000) believes we are in danger of losing the use of the subjunctive, a verb form that refers to possible actions and not factual ones, and the conceptual tool that allows us to speak into the future. What if we were to lose this ability? Design education, the creation of a personal ontology – not a factual account of existence or the number crunching numbness of past achievements, but the coming-intobeing of a new and possible other-self – is a negotiation between what you think you are now, the elements you choose to include in your „knowing‟ environment, the people and knowledge you surround yourself with, plus this act of faith (in yourself), that your peculiar mix will result in a better future. Without the power of our language to project into the future, we would be stuck in the factual present, in Dasein‟s Verfallen world, and not achieve what Krippendorff (2006) calls the semantic turn, “a seed for design to redesign itself by means of its own discourse”. This „intrinsically motivating‟ process helps people to get to know themselves, helps designers to validate the changing modes of contemporary being. This carries a great responsibility, since a normative and therefore ethical dimension is added. Herkert (2002) speaks of the growing awareness of ethics as an educationally sensitive issue. As a design issue, certain commentators focus on the systemic activity that is the design process, and see ethical responsibility as: … more than [being individually truthful] … something much more than making wise choices … Our moral obligations must … include a willingness to engage others in the difficult work of defining the crucial choices that confront technological society. (Herkert, 2002) Furthermore, Dorst and Royakkers (2006) state that, when it comes to questions of ethical methodology, we seem to lack conviction that a workable answer can be found. These authors quote Caroline Whitbeck who, on the other hand, suggests a design analogy in her book Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. Questions of ethics cannot be left to analytical foundations seeking prescriptive moral principles, since, thanks to the design analogy (meaning, really, thanks to comparison with the real world of action), we are forced to deal with ill-structured problem situations that conform to no solution recipe and admit of several outcome possibilities (Dorst and Royakkers, 2006), and this willingness to engage others calls for a cybernetic conversation. In this world of uncertainty filled with complex situations, addressing ethics directly makes no sense since we will fall back into the reductive approach Whitbeck warns us about. Instead, we could look for examples of systemic thinking, such as Spinoza‟s belief that self-preservation, an understanding of one‟s own circumstances, will lead to moral decisions (Russell, 1987). This agrees with Wittgenstein‟s viewpoint that morality, revealed through peoples‟ actions, cannot be subjected to any reductive analysis (Edmonds and Eidinow, 2001). Just as Heidegger‟s Being will not let itself be expressed directly, so what we are pleased to call ethics cannot really be brought to light in direct everyday expression, except through human actions, and therefore through the consequences of the choices each individual makes. In that sense von Foerster (1991) sees metaphysics as that which happens when we find ourselves making decisions about what he calls in principle undecidable questions. This is something I can understand, and it correlates with Jacques Maritain‟s belief that we should live according to the “logic of the structure of the living thing”, not the logic of decidability, or Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 213 what Maritain (1939) called the pseudo-logic of clear ideas (i.e. positivism). Von Foerster is not alone in pointing to the ethical character of metaphysical undecidable questions that we attempt to answer by making the ultimate philosophical choice, when we decide to be what we can become and take full responsibility for that decision. When designers make that decision, when they take the responsibility for a product‟s ontology, what it can become, and knowing the possible social consequences due to its non-human role-playing capacity, then that can be described as an ethical decision. The design process, spurred on by illstructured problem environments that offer contradictory „evidences,‟ can only find a solution during the process, and only by a method of inclusiveness that fully engages those other human as well as nonhuman actors that can have a bearing on the social direction the solution is taking on. For Whitbeck the design analogy works because, to wildly paraphrase Dorst and Royakkers (2006), moral acting is that process that lets the moral problem unfold itself in company of the coming-into-being of new options, for becoming, for making a decision. This is so close to Heidegger‟s Dasein (everyday human existence) that should strive for Being (an ultimate and possible, better, mode of existence) that a design theorist can recognise the appropriateness of this type of phenomenological metaphysics, or, rather, recognise the switching that takes place between the two „realities‟ of the worldly here and the virtual, conceptual, there. Designers can be in two places at the same time, because this is a normal human ontological coming-into-being process that uses all possible realities, including those of other people and those that can be suggested by all the non-human actors we call designed objects. Within this viewpoint, perhaps, we can translate von Foerster‟s „metaphysics‟ as a process-based solutioneering, this other-engaging quest for understanding, or, going further yet, recognise „ethical‟ design as an ontological narration95 that finds its ethical behaviour in what Whitbeck called the „design analogy‟, a brave new world of negotiation. In this phenomenological world of everyday existence, where we have to make long-term decisions based on what we have to work with (and, crucially, what we think these relationships represent), Engeström (2005) considers designed objects and people as embedded in the same dynamic social structure, which he calls an activity system (Engeström‟s field is interaction design, which is based on activity theory). This activity system is everyday practice as well as being interactive and communicative negotiation, and according to Nardi (1996), all our human experiences are shaped by the tools, the signs and the systems that we use in this activity system. It is the ontological narration, the true dialogue, the negotiated, interactive building of relationships between indivisible elements that turns out to be the most important, the most „ethical‟ of decision-based action. And, yes, you are but one of the elements, or entities, in this hybrid, coexistential mix. Design education that lets you focus too much on epistemology can falsely teach you that you can be in control of the world, and hence that you are the most important (element), which is, of course, a fallacy. As I said in Section 2, epistemologically-driven education can miss the point of real communication in a socially negotiated environment, a virtual world-in-the-classroom that takes the sociologies of both objects and students seriously, not as „social equals‟, if that is what is troubling you, but as potential contributors to the conversation about design, this ontological narrative that takes no sides and will hence not be prejudiced 96 . I call these elements indivisible not as a foregone conclusion but because of their potentiality of coherence, co-creation, and the fact that they have to find ways of co-existing. You can regard the idea of indivisibility as a metaphor, if you like. The notion has nothing much to do with socalled objectivity, in any case. Although the end result can never be determined beforehand, „indivisibility‟, or unity, wholeness, should be the aim of the hybrid mix (you would typically have been 95 Most people think of metaphysics as vaguely philosophical, but metaphysics also deals with the nature of existence, which is why Steiner (2002) can state “a philosophy is an ontological narration, that is to say an account of how being originates”. 96 We cannot help but be „prejudiced‟, but this is normally a socially-derived positive prejudice, or fore-meaning (fore-knowing within the group), that forms the basis of our social stock of knowledge. What needs to be guarded against is negative pre-judgement, “a judgment that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined” (Gadamer, 2006). Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 214 taught to call it a „solution‟), even when beginning the process with what appears to be dichotomous oppositions (Section 2, above). Giddens‟s duality of structure, as opposed to a traditional dualism, has bearing on this indivisible relationship: the sciences and the humanities, two „opponents‟ playing chess, human and non-human actors in the everyday world, these are variables in the possible and fluid mix, a process that will not treat the input elements as if they were indistinguishable, which they should not and cannot be, but neither will this process treat the input elements as in dichotomous opposition, instead, this process treats all elements as if they can be of potentially equal value to the unfolding narrative, and as if the end result devalues the original dichotomy. We should not be so perfectly certain of what we think we know, but consider, instead, that our „knowledge‟ could be based on negative prejudice. If we confuse knowledge with mere information, that could be the case, and if we confuse easy-to-solve, tame problems with real-world, ill-structured and ambiguous, wicked problems then any textbook on How to Design will do. However, my authority as the teacher is not based on obedience, but on knowledge, and then only because, as a teacher (or a design researcher, which is closer to the mark), I only represent the „positive prejudices‟ (Gadamer, 2006) that culminate in what you would call knowledge (epistemology), but that I would call an ontological and ongoing process of (re)making meaning, socially. In short, that means I do not have the textbook assurance of unproblematic knowledge to pass on to you, sans the design (communicative) process 97 . You have to learn how to „listen‟ to the mutually unfolding narrative, and learn how to „judge‟ for yourself what will work or not (and, of course, learn that the process of „judging‟ or „knowing what you know‟ is, in fact, co-structuring your own world, a collaboration between all the human and non-human actors). You probably missed the anomaly in the example above. Two competing chess players cannot illustrate an indivisible relationship, since they are competing and there has to be only one winner. You can, however, use the chess example, if the two players are not „locked in combat‟, but if the focus or purpose of the game is to illustrate something else, i.e. to teach patience, or how to use mental models to plan ahead. The original „purpose‟ (original narrative!) of the input elements have to change, in order to achieve a new, and, for the sake of the end-product or solution (new narrative), indivisible character. In Section 2 I stated that we need to change the focus of our questions, and ask, for instance, is learning concerned with epistemology or ontology? We let the designed objects in our experiential lives „talk‟ to us, communicate with us, as if we were communicating with another person, and it is during these communicative interactions that „understanding‟, and consequently, meaning is established. What does that sentence mean to you? Do you think we are dealing with epistemology or ontology? 98 To establish meaning is to negotiate a socially constructed „understanding‟, which in turn means we set up a relationship between the different elements that „populate‟99 our landscape of everyday living and working. This approach to viewing the world (here „viewing‟ is equated with communicative interactions for understanding) is how society is (or ideally should be) constituted (and why should design education veer off from such a sensible path of discovery?), and is explained by Giddens‟s Structuration Theory. Giddens (1986) warns, however, that focusing too much on epistemological issues will detract from the very important ontological questions, since social theory should concern itself “with reworking conceptions of human being and human doing, social reproduction and social transformation”. That, it should be stated, is what design practice, and consequently design education, has become. This last sentence from Giddens describes interactive, experience-driven, contemporary design thinking. Design education that is mired in too much epistemology seems to be missing the point of true 97 Caroline Whitbeck‟s take on a design analogy, that highlights the impossibility of ethics being left to analytical foundations seeking prescriptive moral principles, gains credence in this view of the design process as a communicative process. 98 Bateson (2000:314) suggest that it is „awkward‟ to keep on referring to both terms as if they were neatly distinguishable; instead he prefers to use a combination of both terms to refer to the „cognitive structure‟ of humans negotiating their way to understanding their own world. 99 Our language use does not seem to allow us to move away from anthropomorphism – we „see‟ the world (inclusive of so-called inanimate objects) through our own eyes, our own actions and our intentions. We relate the world „out there‟ to ourselves (as if „we‟ were standing in for all the objects we „talk‟ to, talk about, and talk with) because understanding can only „take shape‟ within our individual, humanly phenomenological, experience. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 215 communication, and communication needs to be kept alive in order to function. Epistemologicallydriven education misses the point in that „knowledge‟ cannot be communicated and neither can it be transferred, but has to be created, by the individual, in a socially negotiated (educational) environment. Focusing on the ontological questions means paying attention to both the sociology of objects and of students (cf. above), since human being100 and human doing are directly related, with the doing part so intricately linked to design objects as to be socially, culturally, economically regarded as parts of one system. We design our own ontologies, our negotiated understandings of/with the world, by learning how to deal with internal restructuring: imagine a personal model of Giddens‟s Structuration Theory that enables you to deal with social reproduction and social transformation. This design theory class, as a social constructivist space of learning, can only succeed if we all, students among themselves, and students and teacher, learn to communicate to the best of our abilities, with, around and through the subject matter (our selves included). We have been discussing the fact that design education should focus on a personal model of learning that enables each individual to deal with an existing and complex world, and, further, a model that empowers 101 each individual to understand the continual changes emerging in that complex but everyday working world. However, reassembling the self in this complex world means you have to take the power of language seriously, and that means that, in this class, we acknowledge the crucial role that communication plays in not only our personal lives, but in our mutual and necessary understanding of the other, whether those others are human or non-human actors. Designed objects do play a crucial role in shaping our future, but we, students/designers and users, can decide to assign them, not lead roles, but co-designing, cooperative roles. The sociology of a student designer - the developing ontology of who and what you can be – can consciously be focused on, since ethically designing for other people is also a set of guidelines that can be used to reflectively allow you to work on that internal re-structuring that is triggered by elements in the environment, in this case, the re-designed educational environment that encourages the self-growth of a (personal and professional) design ontology. Using such insights as the Latourian view of designed objects, coupled with the concept of objects in activity theory (to my mind the key concepts of Latour‟s actor-network theory and activity theory are the same), we can (learn to) gain insights into how humans behave with and around designed objects. These same insights, because they are „insights‟ of relational value, can be used by any individual on a personal level to „design‟ him or herself; once we succeed in designing ethically for others, we may as well afford ourselves the same courtesy. We haven‟t been talking about designing objects at all, but about designing human constructs: this class should help students acquire the structure they will need to meet the challenges of a contemporary design world. 6 Conclusion The results of this approach to teaching and learning in design education are encapsulated in this real student voice: Somewhere along my development I made the transition from being taught to teaching myself. That is design education, which should enable the emergence of an autopoietic 102 structure that can survive in any environment. Tschimmel (2004) asked design educators not to „manage‟ traditional teaching, meaning trying to transfer content, but to find an approach that could provoke new ways of seeing and thinking, which I argue I have done. She further states that this approach should enable the design student to begin “the construction of one‟s own world”. My students tell me that this is exactly what they are now able to do. 100 In Heidegger‟s terms of becoming. 101 This term is to be associated with such socially derived terms as authorize, allow and sanction; these terms can be read / interpreted as either positive and as negative. 102 Maturana and Varela‟s notion of autopoiesis applied to a social being: „self-generation‟. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 216 This approach to teaching and learning in design education also follows the reasoning of Yagou (2004), who calls for understanding as opposed to „knowledge‟ (Tschimmel‟s transferring content, above), and the encouragement of “intellectual engagement and articulation”. Also agreeing with Tschimmel, Lloyd (2002) thinks design students must be enabled to construct their own worlds, “and for this to happen what one needs to teach is how to learn. That is, to a great extent, all”. That, to a great extent, is all I have been doing, and the student feedback tells me that in answering the research question: how could students acquire a structure enabling them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment? they are able to self-construct a viable model of learning that works for each individual, no matter how diverse their learning patterns might be. A concept of objects/subjects as seen through the eyes of a designed relationship of purpose, and keeping in mind that an „object‟ can be perceived as both a material and a conceptual entity, and a „subject‟ can be perceived in exactly the same way (which includes our constructed identities), means the very existence of an object/subject world can be transformed because of this relationship (simply noticing something „changes‟ it, for you), and this process of design (my definition) “refines both the object under transformation, and the subject who is doing the transformative work has to go beyond him or herself to explore new ways of transforming nature” (Hyysalo, 2005); in other words, the design student, as observer of the role of designed objects and as self-observer of the role humans play in this mediated context, becomes aware of how their own „natures‟ (ontologies) are being transformed, and because of this awareness, they can „design‟ a better outcome. This makes design education a phenomenological and interpretivist social inquiry, and its understandings become the actual condition of that inquiry. Heidegger (1962) made it clear how, in an ontological understanding, an alethic 103 truth may be uncovered that can serve both human and non-human actors. In the very process of understanding-towards, we strive to uncover both the beingness and the (potential) structure of Dasein (subject, student), but, in so doing we create the conditions that can further uncover both the beingness and the structure of entities that are not-human-Dasein, i.e. non-human actors. All this is possible because we are who (we think) we are through communication (negotiated, interactive building of relationships, above), or as Luhmann (2002) puts it, “only communication can communicate” in the networks we have to build, and the resultant actions we decide upon are the result of our understandings generated within these networks of communication. Designed objects, the visible outcomes of these understandings / communicational choices, become the „texts‟ we hold up to the world, and as Ricoeur (1981) noted, regarding interpretation, "Texts speak of possible worlds and of possible ways of orientating oneself in these worlds". These „design texts‟ do not unproblematically interpret the existing (epistemological) world, they are merely one of the elements (non-human actors) in the hybrid ontological mix that constitutes the communicative networks of Heidegger‟s understanding-towards. The power of language to generate this type of alethic communicative act must not be underestimated, and in design education terms, we can profit from Derrida‟s opinion that the "only legitimate hermeneutics ... is intra-linguistic: a hermeneutics which interprets interpretations rather than things" (in Kearney, 1986). If Luhmann‟s insight, that only communication can communicate, is true, then this means that learning can only take place intra-linguistically, while using language as a tool of exploration within the communicative and negotiated network. According to Jacques Monod (1997), the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, we need not look for an out there, since “No preformed and complete structure pre-existed anywhere”, but the elements needed for a working, ontological structure, as far as design education is concerned, are “present, but unexpressed, in [all] the constituents. The … building of a structure is not a creation; it is a revelation”. The constituents are, in no particular order, you, me, and all the non-human actors we are so familiar with. Through a working, socially-underpinned method of true communication we can find ways to 103 To Heidegger, the concept of truth was associated with the Greek term aletheia, equating truth with unforgetting, and when one unforgets, something is brought forth from a space of hiddenness, thereby equating truth with discovery. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 217 „express‟ or, rather, bring to light, from a space of hiddenness, the parts of this new whole we were looking for in the first place, but could not find. Steiner‟s (2002) „shaped expression‟ will remain unrevealed until we cooperate as willing partners, for, as Luhmann (1995) makes clear, we (design teachers) have to abandon the idea of authoritative exclusivity, since systems cannot “exist as elements and relations among these elements”. Either you have a class of individual design students each trying to learn as isolated individuals, or you can begin to encourage a network of communicative relationships of purpose between the students, other teachers, the world of work (all these as human actors), and the myriad non-human actors we ourselves, collectively, created. Design teachers do not control those in their charge, instead, they enable students to „know‟ their newly revealed selves through mapping their own interactional worlds. Gramma/topology: a new discourse of design knowing 218 The Bridge The next chapter continues the main argument began in Chapter 3, where I wrote that we must begin with a reference to design plus research, and the importance of a concern for the discipline‟s very formation, a mutual path of discovery for both the individual and the discipline, the human actor and the non-human actor. We depend on differences that include the other in all its manifestations, meaning that we come to realise that the world designs us as we design the world. This leads to the acknowledgement of the unstable nature of the whole process, and the first encounter with a tenet of design knowledge acquisition that entails arguing to first principles, and the necessity of learning to „think like a group‟ in order to achieve this. In this chapter we deviated from this main argument (rhizomatically tacking off course) to discuss the fundamental principles, derived from several systemic theories of knowing, that could make up the hybrid concept that is gramma/topology. It is important to restate, however, that as a designerly sociotechnical discourse gramma/topology must follow this concept of free invention that mitigates the use of disciplines (which do not disappear) and other theories that focus on practical knowledge creation. Design, as a free undiscipline should not just be a “collection of laws, a catalogue of unrelated facts. It [should be] a creation of the human mind, with its freely invented ideas and concepts”, and the theories we build to explain to ourselves what anything and everything means, by appearing as it does to us in the world, are reality-constructions, and “the only justification for our mental structures is whether and in what way our theories form such a link” with the world as we understand it (Einstein and Infeld, 1942:310). This observation must also be seen in the light of von Glasersfeld‟s (1990) view that the radical constructivist viewpoint may be viable and sustainable, to the individual, but can not be made applicable to any external-to-self agency that deals in absolutes, since constructivism remains a hypothesis, even to the individual who acts as agent for the idea, which even then might not be either viable or sustainable unless realised through a co-constructive reassembly. Laws and facts may be basics, but freely invented ideas are being towards Being, and the only justification for our mental constructs, for gramma/topology and for the ideas and concepts it may help uncover, are the links these will form with the world of other observing systems and interacting non-human actors. As a constructivist I cannot prove that gramma/topology is a single whole made up of several parts, because the resultant whole will be different for each co-constructor, and I cannot prove that gramma/topology works as a theory of knowing, since I can only do so from within my own world of meaning, and it becomes a theory of knowing only to me. I cannot prove to someone else that gramma/topology works as either a theory or as a model, since “To claim that one‟s theory of knowing is true, in the traditional sense of representing a state or feature of an experience-independent world, would be perjury for a radical constructivist” (von Glasersfeld, 1990). What I can do, to provide this weak theory of gramma/topology with what researchers will recognize as critical mass, is to follow the concept of free invention, itself formed and re-formed while transforming each of the original theories discussed in this chapter, and, as theoretical ontology of equipment (cf., above, and Chapter 5:222), discuss how gramma/topology can migrate the aura of the original104 theory to those open spaces of free association and reassembly that design innovation calls for. 104 Latour and Lowe‟s (2008) concept of the migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimile will be discussed in Chapter 5. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 5 219 Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function: A spacetime landscape The Gate To continue where we left off in Chapter 3, in the journal article A Natural Death is Announced I wrote ―If we want to keep up with the contemporary flux in world affairs, we need to learn how to start conversations/dialogues, and learn how to listen to ‗the other‘, all of them. At the Cumulus Kyoto 2008 Conference, titled [Cu:] ‘emptiness’ Resetting Design – A New Beginning, a Declaration was signed stating that all the people of the world live in interdependent systems for living, a veritable groundless and perfectly cybernetic field for design investigation. This Declaration calls for the merging of the sciences and humanities, technology and the arts, and puts it clearly that design thinking places itself in the midst of this important paradigm shift and must therefore redefine itself. Findeli has warned designers about this transformative paradigm shift, and he called upon them to ‗open up the scope of inquiry‘ … and push back the boundaries of our system in order to include other important aspects of the world in which design is practiced. The Kyoto conference gives us a valuable clue about how to do this—by listening to the other, which is hardly a conquering alien, but constitutive of the new self in possibility. Through the term basho, expressed as emptiness and nothingness, we are offered a cure for what ails us—this Western duality of mind and body. A very natural death is again announced because basho refers to more than simply the place where one lives, physically; it also denotes the space within which we can reassemble our relations with the other‖. This, as an introduction to Chapter 5, becomes the gist of what is to follow. In the previous chapter I presented what I can see as a possible framework for a designerly theory of knowing, called gramma/topology, a framework that is simultaneously a framing action in real time; it is a means towards an end. It is important enough to reiterate that this viewpoint is my own, and cannot be assumed to be acceptable to anyone else. As a constructivist I cannot prove that gramma/topology is a theory of knowing that can act as a framing action, or even prove that gramma/topology works as a theory of knowing, since this model-of-knowing-and-exploring, projected onto the world, becomes a unique construction that may look the same at first glance but differs from person to person like fingerprints. What I can and will do, in this chapter, is to provide this ‗weak‘ theory of gramma/topology with critical mass, and follow the concept of free invention, which is itself formed and re-formed while transforming each of the original theories discussed in Chapter 4. Gramma/topology becomes, as theoretical equipment-ready-to-hand, a migration of the aura of the original theories to those open spaces of free association and reassembly that design innovation calls for. To that end the framework sive framing action of gramma/topology is offered as simultaneously means and outcome, a systemic narrative of flow and survival that allows the observer to answer the question, ―How to judge the quality of reasoning in the social sciences when you are part of the same system?‖ (de Zeeuw, in Kooistra, 2002:123). Designers need a framework to work from, researchers need a (blueprint-like) proposal to base their research design and methodology on, and everyone else needs a belief system that can anchor who and what they are, a personal cognitive map that will help them negotiate the territories of the world out there. Essentially, we are talking about the same framework for understanding that humans construct in various ways, and also use in various ways, successfully or Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 220 not, and these can be called (socially constructed or disciplinary) knowledge bases, cultural practices or political persuasions, and increasingly, scientific knowledge. What makes designerly thinking, and a tool for thinking such as gramma/topology, so different, is that the framework becomes not only the means, but is at the same time the outcome of the thinking process: gramma/topology concentrates on the observer much more than it does the observed. In Chapter 4:166 I wrote that when using a type of reflective and exploratory language in a design conversation it becomes a pedagogical tool that acts as a means towards an end, and I am now saying that this means is (can be) the end as well. Why do we use conversation as a tool, if not for the how and why of learning instead of the what of learning, if not for the sake of the learner and not for what is being learned, if not for the sake of learning to learn instead of a fully described curriculum. Gramma/topology is an all-in-one framing action for the ontological sive epistemological development of the individual; the designer, learner, observer, being the structuring agent of and in the process (of this reflective conversation) also determines the extent of the structuring by means of the potency of the frame. Introduction I‘m going to start this argument for gramma/topology with a blind hypothesis: theory always contains paradox. That this belief is not far removed from what some people would call gut instinct, and others intuition, is all much to the point, and should not be dismissed out of hand, since, if we do, how would we explain the essence of qualitative grounded theory? You ‗perceive‘ a pattern before it really becomes ‗visible‘, and you name it as the hypothesis that emerges from the data, and you do this for the sake of research rigour. What you are in fact doing is claiming the existence of something that others cannot be sure of, yet, i.e., the right of ‗the invisible‘ to exist. My totally blind, intuitive hypothesis can thus be amended: theory always contains social-reality paradoxes, meaning, we are used to dealing with the invisible, with what outsiders (to a culture, a group) would not be able to perceive. What does perception mean in this case? When engaged in theory-building, whether through grounded theory, interpretative hermeneutics or some other means (except hard-core scientific, positivistic approaches), in the social sciences, and especially when dealing with culture, narrative, i.e., with what people believe to be the case, perception denotes what we can see, literally, and yet the greater part of that ‗perception‘ can only be understood through connotation, and while denotation is often thought of as the primary meaning and connotation as the secondary meaning, in real life these two ‗realities‘ are more often than not reversed. And we are used to this pattern of life, which then further amends my ‗blind‘ hypothesis: theory tries to explain social reality by … by doing what, exactly? To finish the sentence, it should read: theory tries to explain social reality by explicating the phenomenon of the ‘invisible’ paradox, by interpreting the meaning of the connotative narrative behind appearances (cf. Barthesian Eco/s, Chapter 6). This approach will only work if you are prepared to engage ‗the social‘ directly in your investigation of what seem to be paradoxes, because, obviously, you cannot investigate a paradox that you are not aware of. Is the search for theory and the essence of research so different? ―And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?‖ (Plato, 2005). If we accept the idea of a ‗naturally‘ occurring paradox-of-life, that our everyday dealings with the world and with each other signify more than just the surface and the obvious, what is the place, then, the identity, of ‗theory‘? The question, what is theory? can then be seen as the almost the same question as what is research? Both questions start out from a position of … and here the dilemma and /or paradox immediately starts to drain energy from the investigator. How will you research something from a position of non-knowledge, how will you enquire into that which you do not know? Which theory is applicable to the research being conducted in this unknown area, because, for theories to be effective, they must surely contain knowledge of the subject area, even though it is unknown to you? And if, by some miracle, you do find what you want, how will Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 221 you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know in the first place? Theories contain knowledge, but other peoples‘ knowledge, which you don‘t possess, yet. If the theory you choose helps you in any way to actually do the research (into this area of knowledge that is still unknown territory to you), then you are duplicating the ground already covered by others. Where does ‗what you want‘ come in, since your findings will disclose only what the theory already encompasses, and if that is ‗the thing which you did not know in the first place‘, then you have learned nothing, and researched even less. What does Socrates advise Meno to do under these quite adverse circumstances? Socrates plays the part of a good theory, which, like teaching, is nowhere to be seen if you are looking ahead of you, as you must, at this new territory you wish to explore, since it is what you see with that matters. Gut instinct is a folk description for perception, and intuition does not exist, as such. The two expressions are intertwined, and point to a real human need to express - and thereby to explain or interpret - what cannot be understood otherwise. Very unfortunately, for us as homo sapiens, the necessary interaction between the physical world-out-there and our several metaphysical ‗worlds‘-inhere 1 mostly result in myths-of-the-real. Unfortunately, because what is ‗invisible‘ but culturally understood can be manipulated as propaganda (the temptation being far too great), while, at the same time, the ‗invisible‘ - and quite standard - metaphysical aspects of everyday life are vitally necessary to us, as individuals, and as a society. A major shift in perspective is what teaching and learning should aim for, but this ‗major‘ restructuring can only happen within the organism, and not be brought about by external pressures, hence Fosnet‘s major shifts in perspectives (Chapter 1:24) will only serve to strengthen the position of the original big ideas, but leave the student non the wiser as to why the big idea is such a good idea in the first place. ―And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?‖ (Plato, 2005). This question from the obtuse Meno shows an unwillingness to take this first step into the foggy landscape, because the enquirer cannot see any landmarks and no signposts, and the enquirer is unwilling to create individual conditions for learning, preferring to follow the official signposts along the way. A major shift in student perspective can be achieved by introducing students to the thrownness of a theory of design knowing, by introducing them to themselves. The ontology of equipment I reviewed Gui Bonsiepe‘s (2007:26) approach to design in Chapter 3:112, focusing on his warning that the popular use of the term design, especially if taken to signify the visible-in-public creations, seems to promise a certain lifestyle2 (itself a perverted form of semantic / semiotic visual language). The German language makes a differentiation between design and project (Entwurf), or more properly, projecting, since entwurf means draft, sketch, or framework, and the etymological origin of entwurf / entwerfen includes the concept of geworfen, derived from the horizontal weft thread being ‗thrown‘, by means of the weaving shuttle, through the vertical warp threads on the loom in the process of creating a tapestry picture or representation. What is being predicted-thrown on the future canvas of design should be made to serve the purposes of being human (cf. Chapter 4:156), and this is what I would call the 1 ―… when a person looks at a tree, no matter how closely we study the physiology of the brain at that moment we discover nothing resembling a tree in the specifically physiological processes that we find there‖ (Mikhailov, 1981:15). We have for so long assumed that the in-here world is a representation of the out-there world, but this is wrong; there is no out-there, as far as direct perception, and understanding of what is being perceived, is concerned. The double paradox is that there is no in-here, either, since the tree is not to be found in the brain, as is. There is, indeed, an interaction between what we would normally describe as the world-out-there of the tree-as-object, and the world-in-here of the subjective image of the tree-as-object, but having to deal with the fact that neither can be proven to exist, as far as our consciousness is concerned, is a paradox of understanding. In this sense myths-of-the-real are simply narratives we construct to be able to deal with the world, that is, deal with our own interactions, and also to deal with our communications with other people doing the same. 2 This ‗promise‘ is not Simon‘s preferred situation, but simply a horizontal shift in the Verfallen world situation, a poor and artificial substitute for whatever existing situation the consumer inhabits. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 222 cleaving of a distinction that proposes the possibility of a new self, safe enough in that this prediction is in the form of a proposal that can only be accomplished if and while the product and purpose of the self is incomplete and not-yet, while Dasein is still reaching towards Being, and the knowing-self remains an unfinished sketch (cf. Chapter 4:163). Design as projecting or throwing (cf. Heidegger‘s 1962:185 notion of thrownness, to project an idea ahead of its completion3) thus has a different focus to design as object4, and as Bonsiepe (:26) further warns, in the debate around the nature of design research and design science, it would be best to ―create free space for reflection and thus avoid making premature characterisations … In this situation, a fluid physical state is preferable to a solid one‖. Design as Gestaltung is Bonsiepe‘s preferred term, further emphasizing the difference between design as a thrown idea / sketch / framework and design as a finished object, since the realization of gestaltung refers to the process of coming-into-being more than it can ever refer to the finished product, something I understand because Afrikaans has inherited the term from the Dutch via German. In my language we say om gestalte te gee aan iets, meaning, literally translated, to give form to something, to bring it into existence, but it also means more than this, since exegesis translates the Greek morphe (= form) as gestalte, which in turn means that in taking on the form of something (else), or ‗giving‘ (= throwing, projecting) that form for others to see and understand, the term form does not refer to the physical or to outward appearance, but to a disposition of being that is being taken on, as it were – a process that automatically presupposes the other of the self, or ‗the other‘ of existing design in the world. Design in this sense cannot afford to adhere to the concept of a bounded rationality, which would be the case if design were to ‗stick to its own‘, as it were, and become a fully described discipline through not seeking to break out of the normative confines of the cognitive limitations of the single mind (true enough on its own) that makes decisions based on the information at hand, and not the information to hand. Heidegger‘s (1962:89;98) present-at-hand and readiness-to-hand of equipment can be compared to the use of information (as theory) in the perceptual and cognitive processes, with presentinformation-at-hand being the practical know-how that does not question but uses in-order-to-withoutthinking, a tacit use of what is there already, turning any ‗theory‘ and methodology into mere method, something that happened to the design profession before and should be avoided at all costs. In Chapter 1:5-6;10 I discussed John Chris Jones‘s ‗after-Methods‘ viewpoints, in that know-how and tacit knowledge, employed as a working method, can be the worst barrier to product innovation, because ―At the start one‘s intuition is likely to be wrong, informed by what IS, but not by what is to be conjured into existence‖ (Jones, 1984: 136). I stated that I would argue that there are too many designers now having to work with complex world environments while using thinking tools and set formulas that bring about guaranteed outcomes. The rigid operational requirements of (allowed by) present-information-athand (unquestioned theory for practice) means that the initial requirements decided on can be very misleading, for the real requirements emerge from the collaborative design process (other designers, clients, users) that is, at the same time, a learning process (Jones, 1988: 223). Presence-at-hand, however, translates as information-as-presence, a readiness-to-hand of information, as long as we keep in mind that Heidegger (1962:67) made a distinction between existence and existentia, an interpretation of ontology that is today still too prevalent without designers realising the 3 4 Referring to the ‗completion‘ or attaining of the real preferred situation. ―Conceptual projection is a dynamic process that cannot adequately be represented by a static drawing‖ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2003:305). Especially in graphic design (visual projection of a story-line), design as throwing / projecting a suggested idea works very well, since the idea / story only comes into being in the mind of the viewer, hence conceptual blending (a coming together of the elements in the ‗static drawing‘, e.g., an illustration in a book or a poster), and hence design as ‗idea-product‘ and not design as concrete product. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 223 gap in their own knowledge5. ‗Existence‘ belongs to Dasein‘s worldedness, the everyday-preoccupation we have with ‗getting-on-with-it‘, and therefore present-at-hand equipment affords us only the ‗whatis‘ of a bounded rationality and not the new possibilities of ‗existentia‘ to be found in the readiness-tohand of Being (―ontologically, existentia is tantamount to Being-present-at-hand‖). Presenceinformation-at-hand, or information-as-presence, can also be seen as the ontologically-informed use of theory-as-information-as-presence; in the process of finding the possibilities (more correctly, first the probability, then the possibility) inherent to any new situation (Dasein > Being; existence > existentia; interaction between any two systems) we should use the information contained in any theory not as present-at-hand for immediate in-order-to-without-questioning use, but as readiness-to-hand information: not for ‗use‘ in the normal practical way, but as part of the bricolage toolkit of thinkingwith-the-what in-order-to change our present mindset about the situation, and so to let a new way of seeing through the problem situation emerge. Existence is extended to existentia, Dasein strives for Being, and a theory becomes a lens instead of an obstruction to renewal. Ontology of equipment thus becomes an extension of our everydayness towards something more. Heidegger used the word Zeug, a catch-all term that translates badly into English, and hence the term equipment can be misunderstood. The ontology of equipment-as-Zeug refers to the coming-into-being of an immaterial factuality instead of a material facticity, but, confusingly, both can take the place of the other. Afrikaans is much closer to German than English can hope to be, and we have a term that is used in much the same way that Zeug can be used, namely werktuig, with the focus on the tuig part. A Zeug/tuig is a thing that enables people, and the factual what that it enables depends on the context of everydayness. An airplane, e.g., is a Flugzeug / vliegtuig, a thing that enables people to move from point A to point B very quickly through the air, and the similarities become apparent when we directly translate this German sentence into Afrikaans: ―Fahrzeuge sind mobile Verkehrsmittel, voertuie is mobiele verkeersmiddels, die dem Transport von Gütern (Güterverkehr), wat die vervoer van goedere (goedereverkeer), Werkzeugen (Maschinen oder Hilfsmittel) oder Personen (Personenverkehr) dienen‖ (Wikipedia, 2010a); werkstuig (masjiene of hulpmiddels) of persone (personeverkeer) dien. Without being able to speak either German or Afrikaans it is nonetheless clear to the reader that the two languages refer to the same thing, using words that link to real world understanding. Fahrzeuge / voertuie are things that enable people to move from point A to point B, on land, and it could be anything from a bicycle, a Bugatti Veyron to an articulated lorry (truck in Americanese), contextually bound of course. Zeug thus denotes much more than the use we normally make of equipment, i.e., tools for everyday use in the garage, the kitchen, the gym, etc. These objects have the character of presentat-hand, which is a large part of design‘s function, agreed, since a well-designed tool has to speak to the user in the sense of a practical affordance (this is where you place your hand, that is how you turn your wrist, etc.), but we are not discussing design as object-making. We are discussing design as meaning-making, design as education; not education as how-to, but education as why? Design education, ultimately, that can help answer the question, as a designer, who are you? This question, to a human actor, is intricately bound up with the same question to an object, a non-human actor, who are you? 5 I consistently translate ontology to mean existence in the sense of becoming, the process of the yet-to-be, closer to Heidegger‘s existentia, while the modern usage of ontology (especially in information systems) focuses on the existence of the everyday what is. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 224 The ontology of equipment thus becomes also the ontology of the self, and as Heidegger intended, the ontology of equipment is not only meant to serve us in the capacity of changing from existing to preferable, it is also applicable to our own form, and we become our own ontology of equipment. Paraphrasing the German (from my rusty school German), we get Zeuge sind mobile Mittel, die dem Transport von Ideen dienen; equipment-things are mobile means that serve the transportation of ideas. Theory-as-information-as-presence equipment-things are ‗mobile‘ theories in the sense that they help transform our notion of existing knowledge, and then help to transport that new insight to a space of complexity that Heidegger described as an open space in the forest, and Latour described as the space of reassembly. Theory-as-information-as-presence helps you realise that, as I wrote in the Prologue (:ii), the two questions that gramma/topology is concerned with (who are you? and, what is a theory?) are so intertwined that any answer you arrive at still leaves you undecided as to whether you answered the first or the second question, and enlightenment comes when realising that it is no threat to the development of the self that you answered both at the same time, and that our new self is dependent on (information that can be had from, communication with) mere objects. ―We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern ‗equipment‘ … [and] reserve the term ‗ontology‘ for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities‖ (Heidegger, 1962:97; 31). The problem between us is that Heidegger seems to use the same term to mean different things, and as in real life situations we can mistake an entity for an entity, a person for a thing, and the thing for a person, which is not unheard of, except that we normally do not acknowledge this fact through analysis. The rich and famous are often synonymous with their belongings, and the tourists in Hollywood see a real person when shown a big house, or may mistake a well-known star for an ordinary person if seen driving a battered truck. The designed object can play the proxy role of the real person (cf. Chapter 4:107; we react to inanimate objects as if they were proxy people, simply because we cannot conceive of communicating with another presence that we find in our space in any other way), and the advertising industry thrives on this psychological fact. When unpacking Heidegger‘s terminology we need to keep this in mind, and we then read, we shall call those information-as-presence entities which we encounter in concern ‘equipment’ or things-to-think-with (which situation, coming into being at that moment, denotes an opening-up space, a cleaving of difference)… [and] while using the working term ‘ontology’ for that theoretical inquiry which is devoted to the meaning that all entities have for us, we yet reserve the descriptive term ‘ontology’ for our theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the uncovering of an ongoing process of meaning-making of and for human systems. In Chapter 4:126 I wrote that this space in front of your face stretches as far as your imagination can conceive of, and your real self, your consciousness-of-knowing, is somewhere between us and can only emerge, and be recognised by ‗you‘, in moments of interaction, cybernetic conversation, in those moments of recognition when you make distinctions between your system and its environment. The problem between ‗us‘ can only start to be resolved when we admit that ‗entities‘ denote both living and non-living systems, human and non-human actors, and that we have conversations with designed objects as information-as-presence entities, and, to bring Heidegger back into the picture, when we realise that we can and should regard ourselves as one of the environmental entities we need to converse with, i.e., that we need to regard ourselves also as ‗object‘ and not just as subject. ―Heidegger adds that there are two ways in which Dasein itself can be treated like an object‖ (Dreyfus, 1991:44), and the first is the obvious one in that Dasein, or the everyday existence of being caught up in the concerns of the world, becomes an instance of present-at-handedness. I stated above that the ontology of equipment-as-Zeug refers to the coming-into-being of an immaterial factuality instead of a material facticity, but, confusingly, both can take the place of the other. Dasein can be treated as an object in seeing itself as material facticity instead of striving for an immaterial factuality (Being), and both processes can take the place of the other, since both deal with facts, and both can remain an Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 225 inquiry into the existence of objects and nothing more. You may wish to do what is right for you, but end up using the wrong means, or you use the right means but do not have the insight in using that ‗means‘, because it is not a recipe, and like a good theory must be experienced and lived before understanding sets in. There are two ways in which you can treat yourself as an object; one is, if all that you can say about yourself is based on facts and figures, then you cannot answer the question, who are you? However, if you want to find out if there is more to life than the everyday concerns of facticity, then, paradoxically, you still have treat yourself as an object, but this time as factuality. ―Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein‘s ‗facticity‘. This is a definite way of Being …‖ (Heidegger, 1962:82). In this, second, way of treating Dasein as an object, fact changes to Fact, and we get closer to what I believe Aristotle meant with arguing to first principles, instead of arguing from the fact of existing laws and procedures. ―And yet the ‗factuality‘ of the fact [Tatsache] of one‘s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the factual occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example‖ (Heidegger, 1962:82), explaining why fact and Fact can be mistaken one for the other, why material fact can be mistaken for immaterial Fact. Following Heidegger‘s (1962:416) reasoning, we exist in this world for our own sake as a potentiality-forBeing, and in existing, we are thrown, that is, delivered over to entities which we need so that we can be what we can be,6 in factuality and not in fact, in potentiality and not in objective reality. We need these entities in order to, and it is here that a choice has to be made between fact and Fact, using what is useable in the world to stay in this world (of convenience and safety), or to move on to something else, literally another world of being and knowing that changes even this concrete world of appearances. We need entities for their ontology-as-equipment affordances, because all our investigations are circular conversations with the world, but also with ourselves, with our several selves as they are constantly designed and developed (grown or cultured in the medium in which we choose to immerse our epistemological sive ontological lives). It is for this reason that Heidegger (1962:416) could state that ―Dasein is its world existingly‖. We become our own design as projecting or throwing, and when we use any entity, including our (old) selves, objects or theories, we project an idea of the new combination (human / non-human reassembly) ahead of its completion; we not so much interpret what we work with, as interpreting our coming-into-being new selves. ―Interpretation is inseparable from the ontological designing process‖ (Willis, 1999), and interpreting a theory in an ontological sive epistemological hybridized7 way means that we interpret-understand the world as we do ourselves, using (any) theory-as-a-lens for not mere (external-to-us) interpretation, which would normally be enough in itself, but to instigate a convergent process that adapts the knower to the being-known, and vice versa. Epistemology, the competence of acquiring knowledge, is nothing without the affordance of personal ontology, the way we actively design our present-compelling-itselfinto-the-future identities, and for that ‗we‘ need to maintain a joint socio-technical, intrinsic, control (van der Merwe, 2009:287) over the whole chain of events: theory + individual interaction = new personal knowledge > individual-with-theory-as-lens + other individuals sive objects interaction = personal knowledge + new other knowledge, still engendered by theory-as-lens, but now not ‗original‘ theory anymore = ‗original‘ theory + individually-adapted version of theory-as-lens. The original theory undergoes (goes through) a process of morphing (cf. gestaltung, above) from one form to another, and this is the migration of an aura (of the original) that will be discussed next. 6 7 Cf. the self needs the self to produce the self argument, below. Bateson (2000:314) found it too awkward to keep referring to both terms as if they could be separated ―in the natural history of the living human being‖, because the interaction between the two terms forms a ―net of premises which govern adaptation [or not] to the human and physical environment‖. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 226 The migration of an aura from a stable knowledge-state to an un-stable knowledge-process A theory of and for design, gramma/topology, according to my argument, must conform to the ontological sive epistemological make-up of the designer-researcher, a creature (i.e., a creation) somewhere inbetween Dasein and Being that ―enters the mode of dwelling autonomously alongside entities within-the-world. In this kind of ‗dwelling‘ as a holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the present-at-hand is consummated‖ (Heidegger, 1962:89). A theory of meaning does not look at itself as an entity in order to (follow instructions), just as a designer cannot look at the design problem environment as if looking in a mirror; the individual does not look at the self but looks with the (coming-into-being) self, and likewise a theory-as-lens is not looked at but looked with. In a similar way that designed objects become extensions of our being-in-the-world, so too the theories we use should become extensions of who and what we are, not applicable in themselves as methods for practical use, but to enable us to dwell within-the-world alongside that which is being investigated, with both self and theory-self (as extension) holding-oneself-back, not utilizing either theory or knowledge as methods for manipulation sans the input and joint control of the other, not imposing the self on other entities in the world, but looking for a present-at-hand consummation, itself a hybrid mix of all the elements that participated in the perception of and in the problem space (and allowing us to see the fact of present-at-hand turn itself into the Fact of presence-at-hand). Perception in this broad sense meant interpretation to Heidegger (:89), and only a putting-aside of what you know and what you think the theory ‗knows‘ (holding-oneself-back) can begin to uncover the developing perception-as-interpretation, since the way you ‗look‘ and with what you ‗look‘ at a problem space merges to reveal what there is to see (this new emergent property immediately adding itself to your bricolage toolkit of understanding). ―I am not aiming to design a grand new theory‖, since the focus should be on an approach that foregrounds the dynamic and cybernetic underpinnings of design investigation (Jonas, 2007:189). I do not wish to design a grand new theory either, nor construct an argument for a meta-theory in the sense of a modernist metanarrative that ends all speculation (which is what I believe will happen, at least for an appreciable period – e.g., the ‗design methods‘ episode – if a too definitive designerly way of knowing exclusive to design as discipline is constructed and mapped onto practice and thinking, in that order). What I do wish to do is construct a ‗meta-theory‘ that acts, as it were, as a type of antitheory that operates along the same lines as my description of design as a ‗weak‘ discipline (Chapter 1:11 and Chapter 2:40). Antitheory8 as a ‗weak‘ force is the paradoxical strong force as far as design knowledge is concerned, since the traditional ‗strong‘ forces, such as the traditional disciplines and strong beliefs, are the ones that repel new ideas and new alliances with ‗foreign‘ matter, making design as a whole conceptually weak in the process. In an exhibition of the contrariness of quantum physics, what appears to be strong in one respect is weak in another; the strong nuclear (attractive) forces keep the protons in atoms from repelling each other and destroying the unity of the atom itself, but, without the so-called ‗weak‘ nuclear forces, the catalyst for the creation of neutrons from protons (the creation of the new from what is already there), the atom as an entity would not exist, since only the weak force is capable of transforming what is there (inertly, statically present and yet not ‗live‘) into something else; a ‗weak‘ force, like a weak design discipline or theory, transforms what it acts upon. The modernist metanarrative acted as a type of strong force that keeps everything in its ambit in one place, but so does a prison; a cybernetic metanarrative, like a cybernetic meta-theory, 9 punches holes in the restraining walls of these boundary concepts in order to allow a flow and a consequent interaction of 8 Contrary to my direct comparison of nuclear and design ‗forces‘, antitheory does not refer to antimatter in physics. 9 Strictly speaking, what we are dealing with in the design and the social sciences is a meta-cybernetics that translates as a higher or second-order type, that does not seek to discount first-order cybernetics but enhances what has gone before . Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 227 ideas to take place, but to facilitate this scenario, a certain loss (lessening) of control must be introduced and tolerated, hence the focus on social constructivism and cybernetic conversation. It is this same ‗loss‘ of control, a willingness to give up full control and forgo a priori guarantees that a design for a theory of meaning, that gramma/topology, should emulate by giving itself up to a migration of meaning. The migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimile ―No question about it, the obsession of the age is for the original version‖ (Latour and Lowe, 2008), and this comment on the worth of an original painting versus a copy (however good) of that same painting is relevant to the same question asked of a theory: is the original the only version (of the knowledge the theory points us to) worth the attention of researchers? Latour (2008) begins his own trajectory10 with the narrative of a visitor to the National Gallery in London, who looks upon Holbein‘s Ambassadors and is immediately taken aback. This painting seems like a cheap copy of itself, its colours too bright and its illusionary depth strangely become flat; she realises that what should have been the original (as she conceptually perceives ‗an original‘) now seems to resemble a bigger version of the poster (and large postcards) of The Ambassadors sold by bookshops. This large ‗copy‘ in the National Gallery saddens her, and she wonders why no-one else seems to notice or mind that they are ‗paying homage‘, as it were, to what is not the original, however faithfully reproduced in every detail. Worse still, she comes across a second example in the Louvre, when she sees the original of Veronese‘s The Wedding at Cana, and compares it unfavourably with the copy she saw in the Refectory of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Why would the (acknowledged) original look like a cheap copy of itself, while the (clearly labelled) copy in Venice seems so much more like an original? Even in the full illumination of the (official) knowledge that the San Giorgio version is a digitally-enhanced reproduction, she somehow feels that this copy ―is actually more original than the Paris original‖ (Latour and Lowe, 2008), but how can this be? Surely a great gulf exists between an original production and any copy of the original that comes into being? Adam Lowe developed the technology to ‗faithfully‘ scan and reproduce this huge work by Veronese (e.g., Veronese‘s brush strokes as well as the cuts made by Napoleon‘s soldiers when they cut the painting in half to ship it back to France), but ‗faithful‘ reproduction seems not enough to bring back the originality of the real painting, as demonstrated by the Holbein in the National Gallery. In The migration of the aura Latour and Lowe (2008) set out to explore this phenomenon, that something of a work‘s ‗originality‘ – the aura – can be transported with a copy of the original, in the process retaining enough of the worth of the source that it becomes its own original, a contradiction in terms if taken at face value. And yet, despite all evidence to the contrary, Latour‘s gallery visitor feels that, whatever the aura of originality the real Veronese painting had to begin with, this ephemeral quality had somehow migrated to San Giorgio when the copy was installed in ‗its‘ original setting, namely the Refectory for which Veronese first painted The Wedding (cf. Figure 20, overleaf). In terms of this argument for a ‗theory‘ of design, this lens of gramma/topology, I have to ask, who is doing the originating, who is imbuing a work with meaning, the viewer / user, or some outside source that has to be believed at all costs, even when our senses tell us there is something wrong with the object we are 10 Latour suggests that, like hydrographers did with the river Nile, we do not concentrate simply on an isolated spring that can be identified as ‗the origin of the Nile‘ (which, at that point, ‗it‘ definitely is not, yet), but focus, rather, on the ‗trajectory‘ (or anthropologically speaking, the ‗career‘) of the so-called original from its beginnings to the end result (at any time of investigation), i.e., the line of development ‗it‘ has taken (been helped to ‗take‘) from a source to a destination. Traditionally the source (‗origin‘) of the Nile is said to be Lake Victoria, from which the ‗White Nile‘ flows, and this is indeed the longest stretch of water that feeds into the Nile proper. But what makes ‗the Nile‘ the Nile? Its abundance of water (ensuring a constant flow and contributing to its eventual width), yes, but crucially its ‗soul‘ – the silt or fertile soil that is washed down the river to enrich the Nile Delta, and that comes primarily from the Blue Nile which originates in Ethiopia, the shorter of the two main tributaries (Wikipedia, 2010b). The question now becomes, which is the real ‗source‘ or ‗origin‘ of ‗the Nile‘, in Egypt? Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 228 viewing / using? Are designed objects and works of art to be valued for themselves or as commodities? If the answer is for the latter, then we know why logos and designer labels are so powerful as emblems of ‗originality‘ and guarantees of quality, even when ‗Made In China‘. The aura of the original is very powerful in today‘s market of consumer goods, and Latour and Lowe‘s the obsession of the age is for the original version is deeply ingrained in so-called modern society. Figure 20. Veronese‘s The Wedding at Cana (San Giorgio Maggiore). Source: FACTUMarte http://www.factum-arte.com/eng/texts/australia_conference.asp When Edith Farnsworth commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design what became known as the Farnsworth House, there came a point in the proceedings when she refused to pay any more bills, and also refused to take delivery of the furniture for the house that Mies had deemed suitable (Friedman, 1996:186). Whose original house was Farnsworth to be, the owner‘s or the designer‘s? How could this original design stay ‗original‘, stay faithful to the intention of the artist, as it were, or is there such a great difference between works of art and works of architecture, works of design? What is the aura of an object that is today considered to be an authentic antique? Its ‗patina‘, which is very different from the notion of an original aura, since a ‗patina‘ can only be acquired by an object through use, either the natural ‗use‘ brought about through time, or the natural use brought about by the user of that object interacting with it. Copper in church roofs and statues alike attain a green film; domestic products, whether furniture, ceramics, or toys, however carefully preserved, acquire the small scars of human contact that unscrupulous dealers try to fake; the surfaces of all works of art darken, as do the exterior of buildings, and the conceptual perception of these objects differ, depending on the gaze of a modern, or a contemporary-to-the-object viewer. Mies van der Rohe talked about ‗free space‘ but the owner of the house, although proud of owning a ‗Mies van der Rohe‘, nevertheless felt trapped in what became to her a fixed space and less than ‗free‘ Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 229 - she had to hide the garbage can in a closet instead of under the kitchen sink, since this ugly object would detract from the ‗aura‘ of the building as a whole, every single, transparent centimetre of the inside being visible from the outside, since, to all intents and purposes, it was a huge glass box (Friedman, 1996:188). Edith Farnsworth had purchased not a house, but a ‗Mies van der Rohe‘, a brand label that she had to either live with, as ‗the original‘, or live in, as a house, and thereby change the aura of the original. ―It‘s no secret that branding has become far more ubiquitous and intrusive by now‖, declares Klein (2001:27), referring back to the time when, as a grade 4 pupil she witnessed a Farrah Fawcett ‗copy‘ turning back the collars of her fellow pupils‘ sweaters and polo shirts to make sure the visible logos were corroborated by the labels. It is, certainly today, no secret that global business is built on the image of the company, and hence the brand (logo, label), more than on the products themselves, the latest example being the hype around the launching of the iPhone 4, with one piece of copywriting promising, this changes everything – again. It does? What has changed? What is the original and what is the copy? I submit that we have become used to a different version of Latour and Lowe‘s migration of the aura, from an initial ‗original‘ – the first Polo shirt, the first Nike shoe, the first Apple computer – to the multiple copies that we are (compulsively, almost) buying today, not as real originals (i.e., objects as antiques), but as ‗new originals‘, a process that somehow allowed the transportation of the aura of the original, with the result that the aura has simply grown in stature, becoming more prominent in the public sphere (known as brand loyalty) and gaining in social importance with each successive transformation from copy to copy, changing everything – again. What price the aura of the original? The Farnsworth House was not really an exception to the iPhone, both representing a designed object that portrays its worth not in what we perceive, literally, but in the conceptual perception that we buy with the acquisition to this object, whether buying a house, a cell phone, or ‗buying into‘ the meaning behind an exhibition of works of art, and with it, as stated above, this conceptual perception that is the aura of an object, that we either bestow freely because we want something from the object, or are told is the case, depends very much on the historical circumstances surrounding that object. Latour and Lowe make the point, corroborated by accounts of contemporary consumerism (Klein, 2001; Quart, 2003), that the ability of modern technology to allow us to manufacture, so easily and so faithfully, multiple copies of what used to be regarded as originals, and what only survives today as ‗bespoke‘ items, has given rise to a new sensibility towards facsimiles. However, before exploring their trajectory from declared original to fecund facsimile, it might be useful to turn to Eco‘s (1996:291-307) theory of expositions (written in 1967, after experiencing that year‘s International and Universal Exposition in Montreal). He was struck by the fact that each pavilion offered ―an immense accumulation of commodities‖ (:293) that sent out the message of not how excellent the designed objects were, but how clever of the country to offer such a grand expanse of goods, clearly a case of exchange value being elevated to a position above that of use value. Reminding us of Barthes‘s view that the use we make of something is tantamount to the new sign of that use, Eco substantiates this substitution with reference to the continuous swing between the primary and the secondary function of objects; a chair can be an object for sitting, e.g., this is a secretary‘s chair, but that is the chairman‘s chair denotes the obvious and primary use of the object, while at the same time denoting the secondary function of the importance of the owner of that object, and exchange over use value switches the primary and the secondary functions. The conceptual perception of the object, its exchange value, now becomes its primary function, and ‗the chair‘ can turn itself into a throne for a king, a use of the object that (above) we either bestow freely because we want or need something from the object (as sign sive symbol), or are told is the case, this chain of events depending very much on the historical circumstances surrounding that object, not forgetting the viewer sive user as participant observer. Eco (:294) quotes Walter Benjamin‘s use of exchange versus use value, and the fact that world exhibitions (Benjamin developed this theme to include photography and mass produced goods for sale in the arcades of Paris) ―create a framework in which commodities‘ intrinsic value is eclipsed‖ in favour of Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 230 ―an aura of amusement surrounding it‖ should remind us of the power of the brand label in contemporary consumerism. A new form of authenticity or originality is created, not for the sake of the individual‘s use value of that object, but for the sake of the exchange value ‘originality aura’ that is signed / sold / bought-into: the designer / manufacturer imbues the first copy with a message that is then allowed to migrate to its multiple copies in mass manufacture, which is then bought-into (belief) more than bought-by the users. This is the ‗shriveling‘ of the original aura that Benjamin (1936) refers to when alluding to ―the phony spell of a commodity‖ when the film industry ―preserves not the unique aura of the person‖ but the ‗spell of the personality‘ acted out by that person / actor, and we can follow the reasoning why this new form of artificial aura is not, cannot be, any compensation for the loss of the ‗original aura‘ of the first instance of anything, since ―The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity‖ (e.g., the reference to antiques, above), and the aura of the original ―depends on distance and reverence, authenticity and originality‖ (Schwartz, 2001). This means that, above all, the tradition in which that original came by its embedded aura becomes separated from the new historicity engendered by the ‗copied authenticity‘ of any subsequent version. Davis (2008), however, in his critique of Benjamin‘s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, presents a counter-argument through the focus he places on the term ontology when discussing the meaning of the aura of a work. In this case Davis uses ontology to refer to the account Benjamin gives of an authentic work of art, i.e., a ―painting [that] is a physically constituted individual with a unique spatiotemporal location‖; the ontological account of its existence plus its meaning becomes its auratic ontology, the story of its existence in the widest sense, and as such this cannot apply to the new technologies of film and photography since they represent only the medium through which something of spatiotemporal quality can be seen. According to Davis the direction of Benjamin‘s argument takes us to a point where the old ontology gives way to the new ontology, the reliance on a physical object, an ontological account that cannot be equally valid for the new technologies of film and photography, and certainly not for any technology that allows (mere) copies of these ‗physically constituted individual‘ entities called works of art, whether paintings or sculpture. Davis‘s critique centres on the unique ontology / aura of a work of art that Benjamin decreed would be put to flight by modern technology, but that does not appear to have been the case, and in fact appears to have been the exception during certain periods of history, i.e., certain periods when the aura or ontological accounts of works of art were not so rigidly applied11. Evaluating Benjamin‘s essay on its own merit, Davis finds that Benjamin did not regard ‗the aura‘ as something magical, although allied to ritual, but as something peripheral to the object. Charging Benjamin with an ambiguous writing style, Davis points to the seeming contradictions in the essay, leaving one to comment on the possibility that can have the reader interpreting ‗the aura‘ of an object in different ways, depending on which part of the essay is read, if not the whole, and that whole quite likely interpreted as an emergent whole (viewpoint) instead of as individual sound bytes that all have to ring true as statements. Davis thus extracts from the essay Benjamin‘s notion of an aura, an ontological account, that can be sourced from, not only works of art, but also from a view of distant mountains or from a tree branch – e.g., ‗objects‘ within our view that gives us pause for contemplation. For this reason Davis interprets Benjamin‘s (wider) approach to ‗the aura‘ as (at least, also including) the aesthetic experience, and therefore as a ‗text‘ that can be read semiotically.12 Benjamin‘s report of his experience of van Gogh‘s work leads to this grounded assumption, and 11 Davis (2008) states that Theodore of Studium‘s (759 – 826) view refutes Benjamin‘s reported correlation between aura and singularity, since ―the power of an iconic image ‗resides collectively and individually in all copies‘‖. Davis also points to Veronese‘s (acceptable) habit of allowing seriatim workshop production of his paintings, and whether the end result was by his sons or assistants or by himself, the patron ―was ‗buying a recognizable trademark‘ rather than an ‗original‘‖. 12 Cf. Susan Vihma‘s (2007:219-230) argument for a design semiotics approach (Chapter 3:112) Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 231 Van Gogh‘s distinctive style thus becomes the outward and visible sign of a particular attitude towards persons, places, and things within our sensory experience. In this attitude, the objects of that experience present themselves to us, evoking a contemplative pleasure at once exalted and disinterested, dependent on our senses but not purely sensual, and indicative of concerns of universal importance that nevertheless lie beyond our perceptual and conceptual horizons. (Davis, 2008) When viewing a work by van Gogh it becomes clear that one is not looking at a painting 13 but starting a conversation with an object, except that we‘re not, really. We are not that foolish as knowing systems, and realise that we are contemplating the scene contained in the subject matter of the painting, and extracting an ontological account, on our own account. In support of this alternative to the usual interpretation of Walter Benjamin‘s work, van Schepen (2007) and Indyk (2000) report that Benjamin made it clear in other texts that it is the human interaction with and within the object that should be the focus, that brings an aura to the fore, which means the aura of the work comes into existence through observation, and does not reside in the object itself.14 Commenting on collected objects (as a collection itself a unity of multiple copies) Benjamin stated (van Schepen, 2007) that it is ―not that they come alive in [the collector]; it is he who lives in them‖, an epistemological sive ontological approach to the human / non-human actor interrelationship. Speaking on the merits of criticism, Benjamin (Indyk, 2000) notes that the interpreter calls the object ―into wakefulness‖ since the observation itself evokes a response in the object. Migrating the aura, or how to explore the original self through its facsimile others Apropos of this line of reasoning, Andrew Benjamin (2007) describes an exchange of ideas, on cubism and what an account of painting types should encompass, between (Walter) Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, the latter giving preference to formal analysis while Benjamin felt that this would create an insufficiency gap between the interiority of the painting and what constitutes its exteriority, since ―the relationship between the internal world of painting and externality‖ has to be established via Benjamin‘s suggestion of evoking the power of language, which in turn ―provides it with an essential part of its conditions of possibility, namely criticism‖ (Benjamin, 2007). What this means is very simple, despite the sometimes convoluted reasoning of both Benjamins, and that is that for something to be known it has to be named, and criticism is one such ‗naming‘ process that can, at the same time, be regarded as having ‗constituting power‘, i.e., it has meaning because we give it meaning, no more, no less. What should be added, and this is important to design knowing as much as to this argument regarding the aura of a work of art, is that the extent of that meaning and the parameters of its influence are contingent upon human agency being able to determine its worth, not in connection to the work itself, for itself, but because the work of art, the designed object or the design knowing, gains meaning extraneous to the ‗object‘. One might say that an object has two ‗auras‘ that can be discerned, the first being constituted by the formal analysis of the object (vide Scholem) that attributes meaning, but that leaves off meaning-making at the no more, no less stage, as fact, and is a knowing of the object that guarantees its continuity, its very authority as an object, and thus provides the aura of originality that Benjamin (1936) initially tied to the singularity of works of art. This line of reasoning 13 One of the best examples is This is not a pipe by Rene Magritte, a painting of a pipe that he wanted the viewer to interpret not for what it was, but for what it could be, the lie that told the truth (Gauguin); it was a lie in that a painting is merely a two-dimensional canvas with some colour on it, an object that can be decorative at best for its facticity (and a painting of a pipe is not the real pipe). However, if we can look past the object itself for what it is in-itself, merely, and begin a conversation with the narrative contained in the object (the real of the painting), then the factuality of a possible truth will start to emerge; we start to co-create the meaning of the so-called object. 14 The ‗aura‘ or authority of the original theory does not reside in the theory itself (the ding as sich) so much as it resides in the exformation (the medium) within which that theory came into being and within which it operates. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 232 also seems to have found favour in what has today become known as Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), 15 the study of existence that ―puts things at the centre of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally‖ whether that ‗thing‘ is a plumber or a DVD player (Georgia Tech, 2010). This line of reasoning would not have been that important to consider, with all due respect to its proponents and in the light of gramma/topology‘s underpinning by social constructivism, if it were not for the fact that the new millennium student (discussed in Chapter 2) will in their future be faced with a stark choice between using the new internet (i.e., the ‗semantic web‘) and using their own judgment, aka powers of interpretation and therefore the capacity to make informed decisions. As Harman (2010) puts it, his focus is to ―expend all my energy getting rid of the human-world couple by universalizing withdrawal into a feature of relationality per se‖, because the focus on the human-world couple has to give way to ―any couple whatever‖.16 This any couple whatever is what O‘Reilly and Berners-Lee17 have in mind with the design of the new semantic web, which places the emphasis on the relationships between ‗objects‘ (of knowledge) instead of on the relationship between the object and the human agent, leading, with inexorable certainty, to a pre-conceived filtering of information networks akin to the aura of the work of art and its ‗authentic originality‘ as object that cannot be challenged. If we believe that knowledge comes into being due to the interaction between human agent and world, then human agency, and hence interpretation, becomes of prime importance, but if we allow the relationality (per se) of all things to enter into our consciousness, then we (including our consciousness and our selves) are reduced to the level of minor players in our own ontological development. I submit the hybridized theory of knowing that is gramma/topology as an antidote to what is becoming a powerful argument in the lives of our young students, especially with increased new-managerial-type thinking in universities to become ‗market-relevant‘ and hence to lecture to larger and larger groups of students via new technologies. As discussed in Chapter 2:49, students will turn to the internet and all it has to offer, but Robert‘s remark that High school students lay (sic) in wait for 7 hours a day until the afternoon comes and the internet explodes at their fingertips at the sound of a bell. should be a cause for concern. Traditional teaching and learning is not about to disappear, but the system can and should adjust and adapt, because in the midst of new production methods lie consumerism, and Students 2.0 will find their own ‗life teachers‘ outside the classroom, and they find them on Facebook and Twitter, and sundry blogging sites that offer unencumbered access to unfiltered and unproven ‗information‘. The proponents of the semantic web are already selling the convenience of a bounded rationality, very much like the commercial rationality of teaching to large groups in bigger and bigger lecture halls, and making out convincing arguments for distance teaching that absolves the teacher from any responsibility, and merely shifts the authority that the teacher represented in traditional classrooms to the authority of the text, or the aura of the original. Gramma/topology is submitted as an anti-authoritarian migrator of all original texts and theories to allow an unbounded rationality of the living system to emerge, that knowing system that has to deal 15 Also termed object oriented philosophy, object oriented programming (the organisation of dead things, or the way objects relate to each other rather than any action that could result; mere data instead of informaiton flow), or object oriented design (same thing as OOPr really): ―What does this mean in practice? Suppose that we are doing graphics of some sort, and are concerned with X,Y points on a screen. Now, at a low enough level, a point might be described via a couple of floating-point numbers X and Y. But with data abstraction, we define a type "Point" that will refer to a point, and we hide from the users of the type just how such a point is implemented. Instead of directly using X,Y values, we present Point as a distinct data type, along with some operations on it‖ (McCluskey & Associates, n.d.). This is design black boxing for the sake of convenience, which is necessary with computer programmes, but disasterous with regard to information retrieval via the internet. 16 The fact that Harman works with actor network theory should not lessen the negative aim of OOO, because even a non-human actor to non-human actor relationship must have an ultimate link to a human actor for it to make any sense, with the importance to the human actor of the relational issues being the focus. 17 Cf. the interview of Berners-Lee by Paul Miller (2008), and Andy Oram‘s (2002) column for O‘Reilly Media. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 233 with the larger systems of the worldedness of everyday wicked problems, situations that call for a critical thinking capability in a space of renegotiation and reassembly of meaning that no theory of knowledge can help solve on its own authority. All theories are dormant, until they are called into wakefulness (above) through our observation, of the problem space, through the theory space, which means that all theories need to allow the migration of their ‗authority‘ from the original authors to the new authors, that designerly mix of design thinkers and actors, human and non-human, on whose behalf and with whose assistance we forge plans to move an existing situation to a jointly preferred one. If we can accept that ―Dasein is its world existingly‖ (above) then we cannot accept that any theory should have authority over us as thinking, social beings; we are not objective mechanistic entities to be controlled, and as we do ourselves (as biological systems), so our systems of belief (our original theories) should undergo a process of morphing or gestaltung from one form to another. To reach that point we need to be freed from a bounded rationality and abducted by reason. Migration versus transfer In the field of education, as in other fields of knowledge, the notion of accessible and comprehensible general principles (derived from positivistic science) had long been the viewpoint held by teachers, according to Randi and Corno (2007:334), and by the 70s these general principles provided teachers with methods of teaching, and were therefore, from the teachers‘ point of view, regarded as theories of learning. However, and symptomatic of the worst remnants of academic positivistic control in our modern universities, standardized testing was used to relate the performance of the teacher to the achievements of the students. This might sound quite reasonable and even innocuous, and in fact I endorse the hopes of the 70s researchers, who ―hoped to be able to demonstrate that teachers would produce higher student achievement if they used research-based principles systematically‖ (Gage, in Randi and Corno, 2007:334). What, then, is the problem, if there is one? The main problem is this matter of ‗transfer‘ that Randi and Corno (2007:340) hold to be at the heart of the question on teaching; first, a transfer of the importance and the relevance of the already developed curriculum from the curriculum developer (designer) to the teacher (user), and second, a transfer of theory into practice through the teacher being made aware of the advantages of drawing on resources from the environment, i.e., ―identifying new situations in which general principles might apply‖. Again, on the face of it, this sounds reasonable, but is it, reason-able, I mean? When examining an argument such as this one from Randi and Corno, I have to ask, what does it mean to reason? When we think about something in order to understand, and when we realise that understanding only comes about through some form of discernment (a word appropriately formed via Latin: dis (apart) and cernere (to separate), implying a difficulty in perceiving the real something,18 thus further implying some form of obscuration) and therefore through the ability to discriminate, i.e., to recognise the presence of distinctions, we come to realise that thinking means to make distinctions, and that to reason is to separate ourselves from what is known. To reason is then to alienate, not to reconciliate. Synonyms for reason are 1] think logically, which should not overly concern us in sociological enquiry, and hence in design thinking, being usually derived from positivistic (and I contend, old-fashioned) scientific thinking that seeks strict (general) principles of authority that effects or brings about a more or less defined course of action that can be written down as a theory of how-to; follow these researchbased principles and you should arrive at this end goal. In contrast our journey of discovery must be steeped in logic; not in the pseudo-logic of clear ideas, not in the logic of knowledge and demonstration, but in the working logic of every day [social reality], eternally mysterious 18 Cf. Chapter 1:23, Wittgenstein‘s I don’t know my way about through being lost in a fog in this research landscape. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 234 and disturbing [in its complexity], the logic of the structure of the living thing. (Maritain 1939:52) To reason, i.e., to think logically, in design terms is to think with and through this working logic that is structured and restructured by the context of everyday social reality, hence the emphasis (cf. Chapter 1) on social constructivism. To reason is thus not to 2] rationalize, another synonym, since this claim to or from authority can only be based on the pseudo-logic of clear ideas19 that are written down and not questioned, in fact, turned into black boxes20 (cf. discussion in Chapter 4 on Actor-Network Theory). To rationalize is often to accept that things do not change once ‗the theory‘ becomes fact, but it also means that the human element (the variable element) is taken out of the equation and we are left with black box justifications unrelated to the changing contexts of real life, the landscape where the stuff of design is to be mined on a constant basis. To reason is also not simply to 3] analyse any given fact, situation, or sequence of events, since analysis too often means control of ‗understanding‘ by means of subterfuge 21 , i.e., by analysing the parts but not the whole, by focusing on the simplified (through isolation) parts and ignoring the complexity of the whole. Once we attempt to understand the bigger picture of whole contexts by accessing the logic of the structure of the living thing, analysis loses its potency to reconcile us to the known (the what-is) and turns reasoning into analysis-as-probe (of the what-can-be). From this I can use reasoning to 4] deduce that most general principles will not really work for design investigation, since analysis only identified some fragmented parts but did not uncover any wholes, much like a murder crime scene that offers many clues but no body. Would reasoning then mean our ability to discriminate between the parts we are analysing, in order to recognise the distinctions between them? What would reasoning as deduction tell us, if the parts are not that talkative, i.e., if the parts do not contain enough (direct) information to lead us back to the aura of an original, or back to a general principle? What if we cannot recognise an affinity to any theory in the context we are investigating, despite the suggestion of working with general principles? This scenario is often the case with a socially-based investigation such as design (cf. Chapter 2:53), for just as we are about to declare this is design or this is research the clues or parts dissolve and appear elsewhere (or worse, as something else), leaving their indexical nature, or traces of ‗the real‘, behind. Deduction will not work either, then, at least as a focus of reasoning, since to deduce is to go from particular instances to general principles, to the theory that is supposed to tell you what the phenomena signify, and no theory can do that. To reason as deduction is to infer the meaning of social phenomena by looking at them through the lens of a particular theory (general principle), and I repeat, no single theory can explain what any ‗fact‘ or part of a social whole (as a system, any social ‗whole‘ is nested within a larger ‗whole‘ or larger system) points to, in terms of the making of meaning within a changing and adjusting context, because most theories are designed to tackle problems that are solvable by means of 19 Rather ironically, clear ideas here refer to unambiguous, and therefore concrete, facts that stand for themselves as recordable data, and not clear as in illuminating, and ideas as in Heidegger‘s always farther away. 20 A black box can be a rule, a theory, an organisation, or even a person who takes up an authoritative position. We use black boxes as short-cuts, as it were, to abstract a mass of information for management purposes, but therein lies the problem: we become used to using this condensed version of a large number of propositions, for its convenience, and forget that this representation does not necessarily allow for contemporary additions to the condensed construction. 21 Political arguments are frequently of this kind, for ‗to achieve one‘s goal‘ is not necessarily to achieve what the people need, and a new myth has to be created by deception (Cf. Chapter 2:60); ―myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear‖ (Barthes, 1972:121-122). The Copenhagen Accord is the latest example of such a myth being created through reasoning-by-analysis. But politics should refer to the polity, both citizens and government, and the relationship of trust between them, instead of referring to a feeling that ―every profession is a conspiracy against the laity‖ (Shaw, quoted in Rittel and Webber, 1973:155). What George Bernard Shaw meant, and Rittel and Webber confirm, was that professional policies, as solutions to social problems, are workable as long as we are dealing with the easy problems: hospitals, roads, housing, all the trappings of ‗civilization‘, but when that has been achieved, we find that the real social problems, and now the real world-wide environmental problems that are already beginning to give rise to unprecedented social problems, are not that easy to solve with old methods. Writing in 1973 as if they had just attended the Copenhagen Conference, Rittel and Webber (1973:156) state that the ‗professionalized‘ way of thinking and doing in the fi rst half of the twentieth century was not transferable to the latter half, when the focus started to shift to open systems and concerns with equity: ―A growing sensitivity to the waves of repercussions that ripple through such systemic networks and to the value consequences of those repercussions has generated the recent re-examination of received values and the recent search for national goals‖. The Copenhagen Accord proves that politicians are still trying to transfer the old linear Newtonian mechanisms of thought onto serious contemporary social and environmental contexts that are decidedly non-linear. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 235 repeatable formulae, i.e., scientific, engineering-type methods of ‗design‘ that have proven track records. Arthur (1994) is of the opinion that deductive rationality breaks down under the weight of complexity, and specifically the type of complex problems we are faced with in any investigation of human behaviour (e.g., design research), the main reasons being that logical (Descartian) rationality simply demands too much of us as variable thinkers, because the challenges of real life are such that the model of thinking we adopt, to lend credence to scientific first (general) principles of science, has a tendency to cease being effective in the face of a bounded social rationality. The second reason for this breakdown is that away from the controlled environment of laboratory science we have to deal with other people, as depositories of information, and in this interactive and complex communicative situation we cannot rely on this human source to behave with machine-like rationality (and hence accuracy). An individual‘s behaviour, in everyday social reality, is much of the time based on subjective perceptions of the total environment that surrounds and scaffolds that individual, including the social and cultural structure(s) that can supply information regarding acceptable behaviour and expectations. However, as is discussed in Chapter 4 (cf. Actor-Network Theory), what we call ‗the social‘ is not reality but only a construct, and the bounded social rationality we are exposed to and often expected to conform to, apart from its laws and rules of conduct, does not supply the logical rationality framework (for thought) that can facilitate deductive reasoning in situations of social variability and uncertainty, i.e., social complexity. A society that does supply ―objective, well-defined, shared assumptions‖ (Arthur, 1994) that can be followed without creating extraneous problems for themselves are primitive cultures that have been allowed to exist well into the 21st century because of (geographical) isolation (and mostly because the area they occupy has no commercial value to the outside world), or because of a rigid structure of belief (many religious groups conform to this description today, and its members suffer the consequences of the principle of regression). Bounded rationality becomes its own prison in the face of 21st century social complexity, and deductive reasoning, while valued as a specific tool for reasoning in certain situations, is not the meta-tool for human thought that is needed in design. Arthur‘s two reasons why deductive rationality breaks down can be seen as one approach to the reasoning of humans in social contexts, i.e., this model of reasoning demands too much of us as biological beings because we need to change our minds, about everything, since that is what learning demand; we are variable thinkers by nature, and too often bounded to the opposite extreme by nurture. It is a fact, not disputed, that as a society we need shared stocks of knowledge (from which our knowledge of art, music, literature, science, medicine, education, and design is derived), but even in the restricted area of Western culture we encounter enormous differences in thought and approaches to this (supposedly) shared social stock of knowledge. To replenish this wellspring of ideas we need to not only encourage the differences as much needed variety, but we have to, deliberately, transgress our bounded social rationality (cf. Chapter 1:35), which is in itself an indication that society does function as a form of self-regulating system, and it is true that ―Most theories of self-regulation are founded on a negative feedback system in which people strive to reduce disparities between their perceived performance and an adopted standard‖ (Bandura, 2001:268), creating an almost ‗natural‘ barrier between existing (read ‗traditional‘) knowledge production and what Von Glasersfeld came to call radical constructivism. Constructivism ‗undermines‘ much of traditional ways of thinking, i.e., it operates in opposition to bounded rationality and the fallacy of subjective, individual reasoning as the origins of human thought for action. To transgress our social instructions, as it were, is not to rebel totally and destroy what we have, but it does mean that we can refuse to obey authority that emanates from what is, after all, only a human construct, if that construct (whether society in general, institutions, rule of law or general principles) fails to keep up with the changes that the people making up the construct are experiencing – society needs to be redesigned on a constant basis, and the stuff for thought to do so must come from the same sustainable and shared stock of knowledge that everyone Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 236 else uses, and for the same reasons. This behaviour is no more radical than the course of action suggested by both Derrida (1993:919) and Gadamer (1975:246-247); Gadamer‘s use of the notion of ‗prejudice‘ and Derrida‘s use of ‗protective guardrail‘ focus on the fact that ‗prejudices‘ are merely pre-judgments in the sense of thinking from within the safety of the social circle, leading Derrida to call these natural barriers ‗protective guardrails‘. What constructivism does is underpinned by Gadamer and Derrida‘s advice that, while these barriers to thinking need to be respected for what they are, for the sake of development and improvement they have to be transcended, ‗undermined‘ in the same way that a biological system ‗undermines‘ itself (old system) by adapting to its environment (new system). When reasoning as deduction won‘t work, will reasoning as 5] induction do? Well, not quite, either, and I will argue for design as an abductive process 22 that includes both deduction and induction, but deduction that is subordinate to both experience and speculation, and induction that may well be described as reasoning on the basis of the evidence (particular instances), except that the ‗evidence‘ is encapsulated within social narratives and more akin to Bourdieu‘s concept of field than to hard facts. Reasoning as induction, for now, requires a different type of reasoning from that which normally delivers conclusions based on facts, since I cannot infer from any (set of) social narrative(s) or from any social (worse still, from a socio-technical) context any set of direct ‗evidences‘ that will, as parts extracted from a nested complex of interacting systems and recognizably underpinned by the general principles of any theory, provide the mechanics for a workable solution. Reasoning as induction will (normally) not lead to a general (design) principle based on social data, since the particular instances that a designer has to work with can be seemingly reflected in a theory (of sociology, psychology, consumer behaviourism, mass communication, archeology, literacy, etc.), but then the general principle(s) contained within each specific discipline are found to be narratives in themselves, 23 deflecting the emergent discourse towards the values and concerns of that discipline and not towards the issue at hand, namely the socially-inspired design problem. On these grounds I argue that Randi and Corno‘s (2007:334) argument based on the notion of transfer is wrong, since to analyse ―how the theory maps onto curriculum content‖ is to reify theory, and consequently theory turns to (qualified) method which can be transferred, communicated, and taught, at which point I have to disclose, for the sake of my design education argument, that I do not believe in a curriculum content as such, and thus cannot believe in any theory that claims to explain or even to facilitate that content (but it would explain the notion of transfer). The content of any course of instruction is mere data and information, but not knowledge, and a curriculum in the 21st century needs to be about knowledge (cf. Chapter 2:61), how to acquire it and what to do with it, and not about a defined and boundary-creating ‗content‘. It is now an acknowledged fact that design, as has design education, has shifted its focus from the object to the process (cf. Chapter 1:36), that the social element, through user involvement and consideration, needs special attention, thereby facilitating the death of the individual designer as the authority figure regarding situational and contextual knowledge, and ringing in the era of the dynamics of group apprehension. 24 Learning is not an individual phenomenon, although it has to be reiterated that learning takes place only as an internal restructuring of the individual‘s knowledge-networks, and yet the development of these depend on the group and on the environment, the (whole) context within which the learning is facilitated and is made possible (cf. Chapter 1:6; 9-10). To allow any theory to map onto curriculum content is to reason from first principles (making use of the dependable general principles of that theory, and the discipline that the theory 22 Abduction has much in common with discernment, the action (for thought is a from of action) that leads to a separation of the knowing self from that which is known, since the Latin root of abduction means to lead away. 23 24 Cf. the discussion, below, on Boland and Lyytinen‘s (2004) argument for disciplinary identity as narrative. I use this term advisedly, since the Latin roots ad- (towards) and prehendere (to lay hold of) provides a link to Heidegger‘s work that illustrates the socio-technical relationship as well as the individual / group problem (cf. Chapter 1:20), a complexity-in-action process that requires the individual to thinking like the group (cf. Chapter 1:6), and this can only be achieved through reasoning towards something, and a willingness to collectively lay hold of what can be agreed on as a solution, however temporary. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 237 belongs to) instead of reasoning to first principles25, the latter being an approach to finding-out that turns away from the what-is (while still respecting the social boundaries) and, instead, turns reasoning into analysis-as-probe (of the what-can-be). We have already established (Chapter 4:207) that an educated person gives reasons for his or her decisions that are also compelling to reasoning others, which Slamat (2009:1149) calls compassionate rationality, a mode of reasoning to replace unadulterated critical theory, and in the same vein one may see ‗analysis‘ not as the cold-hearted picking-over of facts and figures that makes no allowances for human foibles, but as only a part of a process of investigation called social probing 26, which is nothing more complicated than systemic thinking in the form of appreciative systems inquiry (cf. Chapter 4:201). Reasoning as abductive thinking removes the primacy of thought from the observer, does not invest it solely in the observed, but lets it co-emerge in the inbetween no-man‘s land of Wiener‘s (1982:2) cybernetic language. The following text is a prologue to a reasoned argument based on abduction. 25 In Chapter 4:191 I argue the case for Aristotle‘s approach to observing and interpreting the worlds we create, and his opposition to arguing from first principles, a viewpoint that agrees with Actor-Network Theory‘s refocusing on associations between actors instead of fixating on ‗the social‘ as the source of authority. Aristotle‘s stance on arguing to first principles has us searching for these principles in a re-associative manner, or a redesign of what to believe in. 26 Although there are obvious similarities in intent, social probes are not to be confused with design probes (Mattelmäki, 2006: 40), based firstly on user self-documentation, with the intent of eliciting ―the user‘s personal context and perceptions‖ since design ―probes have an exploratory character‖, the latter two aspects being perfectly compatible with appreciative systems inquiry. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 238 Acknowledgement of text The following (amended) paper was printed in Proceedings of the Politecnico di Milano Conference Design (plus) Research, May 18-20, 2000, Politecnico di Milano, Milan (van der Merwe, 2000a). The Innovative Principle of a Design Language Design research can be very elusive in nature, but perhaps we are trying too hard to ‗see‘ what it looks like and consequently missing the point. This paper looks at design research from a social constructivist perspective, and considers how the structure of our mental storage ability might generate ideas for a new specified complexity that is both creative and informative. Through metaphorically treating design research as a language system it is hoped that a poetics of analysis could be seen to spark the unifying aspects of our inherent creative bent. Design seems to have something in common with quantum physics, or at least with the uncertainty principle that Heisenberg introduced to paradigmatic thought and that Bohr further defined as ambiguous (Bohm and Peat, 1989:80). The more certain we are of one state the less certain we can be of another, introducing ambiguity into visionary thought vis-à-vis design. In the spirit of quantum thinking we may say that there is no sense to be had from trying to define design practice of design research per se, since any question and answer would have no clear meaning outside the social phenomena in which design practice and design research are experienced. Just as we are about to declare this is design or this is research they dissolve and appear elsewhere (or worse, as something else), leaving the indexical nature of the work, or the trace of the real, behind. The structures of both design and of research involve the deliberate construction of 'empty signifiers' that cannot be seen outside their respective contexts. Mitchell (1994:283) asked what if that which obstructs our view also constitutes that view? The very things that ‗obstruct‘ our view of design (plus) research27 are those things that we cannot seem to look past, that ‗get in our way‘ - we cannot see the conceptual model of the wood for our close (everyday) involvement with the trees. Those traces of the real that are left behind constitute design (plus) research, in the sense that Barthes (in Hawkes, 1986:131) meant when he said ―What has filled it [the ‗empty signifiers‘] with signification is a combination of my intent and the nature of society's conventional modes and channels which offer me a range of vehicles for the purpose‖. The content of a possible discourse for design (plus) research originates in that which does not exist per se but are important nonetheless, namely those things that are left behind: the relationships between people and the world seen through social cultural structuration, 28 or the mindful artifices we construct. Design (plus) research becomes an active social system capable of drawing on all that social agents normally may draw upon. Design (plus) Research Design (+) research discourses can be so intertwined that I will dispense with (plus) and (+) and consider design research as an entity that (ana)logically stands for both. Design research, like language, can be seen as both a system of signification and a system of communication, and to be capable of either design researchers need to ‗speak‘ to an audience, using the same means of communication that the world uses. In seeing research as a design act Glanville also sees both design and research as a circular act or conversation (discourse). ―A conversation is a circular form of communication, with understandings being exchanged between the conversational partners‖ (Glanville, 1998:9), and the act of creativity is central to this relationship between design and research. It follows that this circular 27 One of the aims of this conference was to work towards an integration of design and research, hence the (plus) and (+). 28 This seems an obvious reference to ANT, but I had not come acros Latour‘s work at that time (2000). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 239 conversation, this relationship between teacher and student, between designer and artefact, between researcher and research outcomes, has to follow patterns of discovery that would allow for the maximum chance of success. Thus patterns of discovery, as design research methodologies, must of course take into consideration the use that people (students, designers, researchers) will make of them, i.e., social agents achieving an active involvement in design research for and with other socially active agents (cybernetic observation of other observations). The Little Back Room How are real life issues designed? To follow patterns of thought it is necessary to realise that we do not unproblematically ‗see‘ what we think we see. What we do ‗see‘ is mediated by thought, and the process of thinking involves a seeming paradox in that the information quanta obtained through sight is ‗mysteriously‘ increased in the image-schema areas of the brain; what we ‗have in mind‘ (store in the mind) is an improved version that is an augmented production (an interpretation or mindful artifice) created by knowledge ‗already there‘ combining with the visual data obtained from information in the world, and this version has as much relevance to us as the ‗real out there‘ (Bannister and Mair, 1968:4; Bohm and Peat, 1989:64; Pribram, 1977:172). This seeming paradox of more from less will resurface throughout this discussion, since it appears to be a natural phenomenon involving cognition, storage, and retrieval. What we are concerned with, first of all, is what Freud called the ‗primary process‘ of thought, an associative, analogical, and perhaps more importantly, a preverbal process of a ‗streamy nature‘ that Coleridge said was ‗curbed‘ and ‗ruddered‘ by conscious thought, or the secondary process of mental activity via a more or less deliberate 'reality' orientation (Rogers, 1978:14-27). Already we seem to see a disparity between creative and analytical processing, but, keeping in mind that more information seems to be stored than the quanta received, the answer to how this is possible also helps to explain what seems to be a lasting binary opposition between creativity and analysis. That answer comes from the notion that all of life can be seen as being both specified (confirms to a given pattern or exemplar) and complex (requiring a complicated instruction-set). Both patterns/exemplars and instruction-sets are abstractions, seemingly only the property of language and analysis according to many theorists. Yet all perception begins with a ‗natural‘ act of considerable abstraction that focuses on the essential features of things, much like an artists would ‗abstract‘ a human figure in a line drawing. This act of convergence-from-divergence does not require enormous storage space, being as it were compressed files, selective and ‗incomplete‘ in the sense of conforming to holistic Gestalt functionalism. The evidence points to the brain being an analog processor, with its possibilities for image organization being of a simultaneous nature along parallel paths. Thus patterns of thought are stored in the image-schema areas of the brain; stored in an amplified/enriched but compressed form, much like an optical processing system would function. The important point is that all images (call them ideas, memories, or ‗factual‘ information) are stored fragmentarily (scattered), and in the process of reclaiming them the pathways that are followed become important because of the new (added) possibility of association and (re)connection. 29 Thus, through the abstracted economy of essential inputs (visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile) that are not stored as is but combined/associated with knowledge/information ‗already there‘, it becomes possible to retrieve even more information than that stored, because retrieval requires those same associanistic pathways to different loci in the brain, working much like an optical system resulting in a hologram, and this second augmented production (reinterpreted mindful artifice) has the possibility of enhanced complexity because of the specified pathways 1977:48-51; Pribram, 1977:159-172). 29 Cf. Latour‘s space of reassembly and reassociation. (Bohm and Peat, 1989:16; Dembski, 1997; Paivio, Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 240 This notion of convergence and divergence is echoed in Bohm and Peat‘s (1989:178) notion of enfoldment and unfoldment, or implicate and explicate order. They maintain that there is no separation between the two concepts of order that would have any lasting meaning, thus what is implicit in the enfolded convergence of abstracted order is available and explicit in the unfolded divergence of ‗natural‘ order (or ‗reality‘ as we remember it). The point is that the storage of phenomena and events takes place not ‗locally‘ but ‗globally‘, and this memory sediment resembles the abstracted implicit order while at the same time it can release the original explicit order of ‗reality‘. It has been found that this ‗release‘ or trigger mechanism is activated not by the original image-schema of explicit order, or full-blown information retrieval, but by the abstracted conceptual model that implies all the rest. Thus a rudimentary (abstracted) model of a bird triggers different responses among ducklings: this bird-shape resembles a short-necked, long-tailed bird (hawk) when sailed to the right, triggering flight; when sailed to the left it resembles a long-necked, short-tailed bird (duck) and no response is recorded (Muntz, 1967:127). What this means is that abstraction or implicate order is not fragmentation, because convergence does not lose connections but may gain others (holding as it does the possibility of augmentation, or two recognition stimuli from one shape-pattern, above), and perceptual abstraction carries within itself the explicit order of the complex ‗whole‘ (Bohm and Peat, 1989:179). Why the Mind Works This notion of specified complexity admirably describes social structuration, being composed of both exemplars (specified patterns) and complex (as opposed to simplified) instruction-sets of social rules and regulations - much like a well-run traffic system - thereby equating the structural organization of social acts with that of artefacts. However, the research area I would like to emphasize concerns the question of the role that the written text plays in practice-based research, and the fact that a dichotomy seems to exist between the social act of writing the text and the private act of 'writing' the design or artefact. Research is resolutely committed to the notion of knowledge-creation, the competent (knowledgeable) use of information, and ultimately it should be concerned with how we know what we think we know. This can be done by looking at knowledge itself, as we have just done by looking at information storage and retrieval, and knowledge is widely accepted to be divided into two categories: the application of tacit knowledge in practice, and the dissemination of explicit knowledge usually though a written text. While the latter has to conform to a social pattern in so-called objectivity, tacit knowledge is often very personal and not easily expressed. Tacit knowledge is pervasive in everything we do, and this aspect of our experience-in-theworld seems to determine our approach to practice-based research as well, to a considerable extent, since we rarely break away from what Bermudez (1996) calls the paradigmatic model that uses exemplars (tradition) and reasoning in creatively shaping our world. Further to this, knowledge can be seen to operate on two different functional levels that are mutually exclusive. The example Polanyi uses, the hammer and nail, illustrates his belief that knowledge can be both static ‗knowledge‘ and dynamic ‗knowing‘. The relationship between the static or tacit knowledge (the hammer) and the dynamic focal knowing (the nail) is one of subsidiary as against focal awareness, a relationship that can be explained further by regarding all knowledge-use as ‗knowing‘ or ‗learning‘. Seen from this perspective, and although the two levels of knowledge are technically mutually exclusive, tacit knowing (subsidiary awareness) and focal knowing (focal or primary awareness) can be regarded as mutually inclusive since ―the human being is knowing all the time; we are switching between tacit knowing and focal knowing every second of our lives‖ (Sveiby, 1997). It can thus be said that new knowledge, as far as practice-based research is concerned, would be generated during this dynamic relationship between the focal primary awareness (practice) and the underlying subsidiary tacit knowledge (skills, know-how, beliefs, mental models, theories). The role of the written text would then appear to be a minor or subsidiary one, since the focal Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 241 knowledge/awareness is concentrated on the object of the situation, the artefact resulting from the practice. If the two were mutually exclusive, analytical writing30 would stop the creativeness of the dynamic knowing of practice; the focus must be exclusively on either the hammer or on the nail, positioning analysis as subsidiary to creativity. Figure 21 would seemingly illustrate this concept. Weaver, in explaining Shannon's theory of information, ―states that it is the entropy of the underlying stochastic information determines process in the source the that rate of information generation … The amount of information is equal to entropy‖ (Sveiby, 1994). The stochastic process, or process having an element of probability or chance (seemingly here equated with the associations and Figure 21. Probability curve of an artefact as connections of implicate order, above), information source sans text. that underlies the making of an artefact (as the information source), has to be increased, amount of information generated) is to be ensured. surely, if creativity (or the Maximum entropy would equal maximum information generated in the artefact yielding the maximum freedom of choice in selecting a message. Stopping this process by defocusing (shifting the focus from the creative force in the making of the artefact to an analysis of the process) would seemingly lead to a situation of minimum entropy and maximum certainty - which translates to diminishing the creative freedom of information inherent to the artefact in favour of maximum certainty or one single explanation in the written analytical text. If, however, we need to concentrate on the knowledge-creation aspect of research and its consequent dissemination of information, this model of the artefact as singular information source breaks down. Sveiby (1994) reminds us that the Latin informare means to ‗give form to‘, and that the etymology implies a demand for structure. Information is not only connected to both knowledge and communication, but it can only be so connected if it contains a structure that facilitates meaning or interpretation. Not only is Shannon‘s ‗information‘ more closely linked to the transmission of ‗signals‘ but it has to be noted that the concept of entropy means the greater the freedom of choice, the greater the information, the greater the uncertainty that the message finally selected is any particular one, making communication of particular aspects of the process so difficult as to be impossible. We would only be able to construct an artefact capable of transmitting x amount of information (signals) but without any definable structure, as Sveiby would say, since Shannon's theory contains more information than structure, and that information exists as potential only. Let‘s return to the paradigmatic model and explore Schön‘s ideas in the light of Bermudez‘s use of exemplars and reasoning (above). Taken together they add up to what could be Schön‘s altered version of Shannon‘s entropy curve (Figure 22, overleaf). Instead of seeing either maximum or minimum entropy Schön (1987) sees a dynamic movement between the two extremes (cf. Polanyi‘s switching 30 I wrote this article with the express intent of persuading dedign and art students that writing about their work would not interfere with their creativity, but would enhance the process; in this document ‗writing‘ can be seen as synonymous to ‗reasoning‘, since students who are enamoured of the doing part of design are relectant to acknowledge much benefit from the thinking part, and equate thinking about what they do with writing about it. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 242 between tacit and focal knowing, above), and comes to the conclusion that a good conversation, or we might say the active interchange within that conversation, can neither be completely foreseen nor is it wholly a surprise. The positioning of the artefact on the probability curve is thus determined by both our adherence to a tradition or exemplar and at the same time a testing of its boundaries through a combination of creativity and applied reason. Bermudez (1996) calls this ―the dialectic struggle between convention and innovation‖ during the creative process, and with Schön thinks that the creative work dynamically moves along a continuum between reason (analysis) and imagination (creativity). Figure 22. The probability curve of analytical creativity Design (plus) Research (plus) Language Switching between tacit and focal knowing is all very well, but perhaps not yet convincing for art and design students. Although in practice ―we need not think about what we are doing in explicit, verbal or symbolic terms‖, if we want to disseminate information we must think in those terms (Schön, 1987), for creativity as simply reflection-in-action remains tacit, very personal and not easily expressed. The creation of knowledge as discovery cannot adhere to the tacit infrastructure or traditional paradigm of experience we would not think of questioning, and when Bermudez (1996) speaks of a lack of a reflective or foundational exploration I take that to mean the division created between this tacit infrastructure of knowledge and the visual output of the expressive structure. To counteract this we could look at the similarities within the differences that the concept of metaphor offers.31 Design research is nothing if not concerned with the production of meaning and knowledge gained, and one of the best symbolic tools of signification is the use of metaphor for the sake of its rhetorical force, since metaphor is not only an integral part of a natural language system but a very important part of our system of making sense of the world. Applied to design research it becomes a tool for understanding creativity in the sense that, like self-labeled rhetorical ‗fictions‘, metaphor in its ambiguity violates the rules of reality-perception to become self-focusing in proclaiming its own shape that deforms meaning (Barthes, 1972:121-122; Eco, 1976:263-264; Hausman, 1989:28,51; Rogers, 1978:28) in the sense of facilitating a change of order. 31 Cf. Mountford (1990:25), ―Metaphors are powerful verbal and semantic tools for conveying both superficial and deep similarities between familiar and novel situations‖. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 243 There is one particular aspect of the use of metaphor that I would like to concentrate on, and that is the 'engine' driving this self-focusing deformation that creates a change of order. The structures of both design and of research involve the deliberate construction of ‗empty signifiers‘ that cannot be seen outside their respective contexts. This is so because in its ambiguity metaphor does not focus on content but activates a particular content (the constructional ‗fictive-for-real‘) that has yet to exist. Because of its emotional (rhetorical) force metaphor not only has a remarkable power to both focus and expand thought (converge then diverge, or abstract then extrapolate = abduction) precisely because of its ambiguous nature and referentiality, but in doing so it triggers a dynamic act of creative perception involving a feeling of tension or high energy (Bohm and Peat, 1989:3; Rogers, 1978:28;65). Just as it is possible in particle physics to induce a high-energy charge from a low-energy source by creating the circumstances for a change of order, so the metaphor acts as the conduit for this deformation or change of state in the order of things. The ‗engine‘ driving metaphor can be compared to a simple electromagnetic induction coil that creates abductive analog design patterns. These can be compared to the holographic system of information storage in the brain, but it works both ways (converge <then> diverge, or abstract <then> extrapolate, cf. above) and it works because it is functionally an abstraction or mindful artifice ―that appears to involve a simultaneous equating and negating of two ideas, concepts, or objects‖ (Bohm and Peat, 1989:33), a pattern (augmented production) of the ‗real‘ or low-energy source. The function of this metaphoric conduit is to distort or to change the order of the so-called real, not to ―make disappear‖ (Barthes 1972:121-122), because the physical ‗reality‘ of the object/artefact does not change, only its meaning is changed into another reality, which is where the real purpose of design research is to be found. This change of order will then correspond to Bohm and Peat‘s (1989:172) notion that allowance must be made in creative perception for the emergence of ―new generative orders, which go beyond the individual content‖. In this change of order that Nigel Cross (1997:311) calls a ‗creative bridge‘ rather than a creative leap, because it builds on an exploration of what has gone before. The structuring of this exploration, in its convergence, provide the ‗bridging material‘ to change from one state to another, to ‗see clearly‘ what may lie ahead. Two of the best examples of this concept of sparking the emergence of new order involve water, as fluid and as malleable as metaphor itself. The first example is that of Archimedes, who equated his own (irregular) body immersed in water with the irregular volume of the crown the gold content of which he had to calculate; it was the possible meaning of the change in water level that built the bridge, just as in the second example the possible meaning of the word ‗water‘ scratched onto her palm led Helen Keller to posit, first, a relationship between the lines scratched and two different substances (rushing and still substance = both ‗water‘) and, second, that everything had a name. This creative bridge led her further to ‗see clearly‘ that communication/contact was possible with her ‗outside‘ world, just as Archimedes ‗saw‘ the (nearly) impossible relationship between irregular volume and weight (Bohm and Peat, 1989:34-36). It is as if we were throwing a ball into the air (when we play with ideas and see to what level of abstraction / imagination we can get them), but throwing it straight up; it will come down exactly as we sent it up, and we will not have moved, because we follow tradition and the discipline we work in, safely and predictably. If we want our conceptual models to be moved, to develop, then we have to throw that idea away from us towards the outside-of-us, so that we (almost physically) mentally have to move, cover new ground to catch the idea as it comes back down to earth to re-link to what has gone Figure 23. Exploration to discovery. before (Figure 23); we have to be prepared to leave certainty behind and tackle the so-called unknown; the scary part of this type of investigation is that we know it involves our own epistemological sive Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 244 ontological frameworks of being, and the observer becomes an active part of the knowing process, drawn towards what there is outside-the-self, and to bring that back to the knowing system, just as Helen Keller did, to change the system of the self irrevocably. Analysis Begetting Creativity All that goes before is creative analysis that contributes to the moment of exchange, or the creative bridge between the old order and the new order. All that can be seen (in the result of the experiment, the new insight, the artefact) comes after this creative ‗big bang‘ when new divergence is already taking place, with all its new connotations, allusions, and references. Of course, the whole point to metaphor is that it does not 'make disappear' but only distorts or changes one order into another, therefore we should be able to follow it all the way back to the beginning (original or old order) and all the way ‗back‘ to the ending or conclusion (new order), and of course in the normal course of events we are able; metaphor would not work otherwise. However, what we are able to see in the artefact is only one ‗afterwards‘ leading back to one ‗beginning‘ while in fact there are as many multiple beginnings and endings as there are multiple realities in this world. The creative act would be an abnormally simplistic one if there happened to be just this one easy-to-follow path from beginning to end. No artefact can ever hope to embody, let alone disseminate, all of the information, the abstractions, and the progressively higher and higher charge of the induction coil as more and more connections are made. All that can be seen, if we want to call that creativity (in the artefact), is preceded by a number of steps making up all that goes before, or ‗analysis‘ (Figure 24). I strongly believe that some form of Figure 24. All that goes before can be seen. analysis always precedes creativity, but in fact they alternate so rapidly that there is no separation between implicit order and explicit order, no separation between input, creative bridge, and output on a microlevel, at least not any separation that would have real meaning. Only when looking at the whole process on a macrolevel, which is to say distancing ourselves as a necessary precondition of research, do we ‗see‘ what may be taken for ‗separation‘: the rough structure of analysis/convergence/old order, creative bridge/catalyst, and creativity/divergence/new order. This is and will remain an unsatisfactory pinning down of an intricate process, but it is precisely because it is such an intricate process that it must be abstracted to a ‗visible‘ structure that is linear or serial (which is mainly why it is so unsatisfactory to our parallel minds), since our language system is serial in structure and only refers to a parallel process: this visible must be serial but the invisible can be parallel; the real is serial or static (unchanging) but its meaning is parallel and instantaneous and mobile in principle. Below is an attempt to visually portray what can normally not be seen, i.e., the electromagnetic induction coil that creates abductive analog design patterns, or the rough structure of analysis / convergence / old order / then the creative bridge as metaphoric fuse or catalyst in the middle, then / creativity / divergence / new order, and what we then fondly call new insight into something that has not changed at all, forgetting that it is we, our mindsets, that have changed. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 245 Figure 25. The unified field theory of design. As can be seen in Figure 25 there are two pathways to follow in reading an artefact and reading a research paper, both requiring interpretation/creativity and analysis. I mentioned that the whole point to metaphor is that we should be able to follow it all the way back to the beginning (if indeed we are not there already, i.e., this beginning is a new constructivist one that replaced the old beginning) and all the way ‗back‘ to the ending or conclusion. On one level (the visible: the artefact and the text) we can follow a path that is coherent, serial, has a beginning, middle, and an ending like any well-crafted story, and whose structure makes sense: this is the orderly bar running through the middle without a change in structure, and can be equated with analysis since, in looking at an artefact (for the sake of interpretation) and reading a research paper, we are actively aware of what we are doing. On the second (invisible for being mostly and actively elsewhere) level, which can only be activated through some form of creativity (which we can read as constructivism / association / networking) and for which metaphor is such an excellent fuse, we follow another path that is seemingly chaotic for being parallel in nature (convergent and divergent), instantaneous and which has no clearly defined beginning and end, but many middles or possibilities. The point is to recognise that the creation of both an artefact and a research paper has to make use of both ‗extremes‘ along the continuum between reason (analysis) and imagination (creativity), as two of the main sense-making properties of any creative process. A Working Discourse for Design Research I began this paper with reference to that which does not exist per se, which could become the content for a possible discourse for design research. In fact this discourse is a combination of the contents of the two pathways of analysis and creativity, and especially the relationship(s) between them. Through the specified complexity of a design research discourse, by focusing on similarities and parallelisms, a poetics of design could contribute to a working discourse for design research which would contain, as two essential and inseparable elements, [1] the vertically (synchronic) creative element in which imagination and the production of image draws on knowledge ‗already there‘ (recollection or what social theory calls an ‗inner storehouse‘ or social stock of knowledge) in selecting its associative content, or more correctly, its patterns of possible connections in parallelism. Much of implicit knowledge is found there in its content of discovery that is foregrounded while expression forms are backgrounded. This element is complexity based on the specificity of abstracted structured order. The horizontally (diachronic) analytical element [2] relies, in the last instance, on thought patterns into text via combinative expression forms. It is sequentially explicit through foregrounding discursive meaning while backgrounding, though relying on, creativity's ‗content of discovery‘. This element is specificity based on the complexity of syntagmatic order. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 246 Taken in conjunction with Figures 24 and 25, Figure 26 could illustrate, in Lionel Trilling‘s words, how it is possible for us to ―put our thought in the place where our imagination goes‖ (Gunn, 1987:96). This implies a creative imagination informed, and ultimately supplanted by, thought and knowledge. This is the space where Schön and Polanyi would say the continuous ‗switching‘ takes place between tacit and explicit knowing, and these interdependent and interactive elements of a design research discourse illustrate the social structuration of a communicative system that not only has the capacity of abstraction and detachment, but also the capacity of bringing back its creations, these symbolic forms, to everyday reality as realizable objectivations (Berger and Luckmann, 1976:55). What is implicit in the enfolded convergence of abstracted order is available and explicit in the unfolded divergence of the ‗natural‘ order of our language system. In one sense the artefact and the research text may both resemble the abstracted implicit order while at the same time they can release the original explicit order of communicative knowledge (this is how Figure 25 works). The root metaphor of design research discourse would then allow this as Figure 26. Splitting the Infinitive poetics of design language to function as both a system of signification and a system of communication, through its internal structure that allows ‗switching‘ to take place, or the classic role reversal of figure and ground, truly the most natural thing in the world,32 since, in true cognitive development, switching (trading places) has to take place between figure and ground, between what is foreground information one minute that then becomes the background to a new foreground knowing. A Fitting End Practice must take a broad view of research, and embrace, rather, the interdisciplinary nature of the knowledge revolution we find ourselves in. There cannot be any space for either truly subjective or objective goals in modern research methods - instead we may do far worse than look back to the fifth century B.C. and the design offered by Protagoras in asking that we discard all notions of objective or subjective meaning from a theory of meaning. The human capacity for attributing meaning stems from each individual brain, therefore it cannot be objective, while the social capacity for attributing meaning would preclude it being private or arbitrary, thus not subjective, since the attributed meaning would be common to all of us. Rather, Protagoras talks about ―the fitness of a conceptual system … Fitness is not a measure of correspondence to objective reality but rather a measure of success. By inference, fitness is a measure of capacity …‖ (Turner, 1992). The fitness of a designed research system would then, by true communication standards, be a measure of the successful capacity of a research entity (the holistic project comprising of process, theory, development, influences, refinements, and applications) to make itself known in all its potential, including the artefact/project (which has one role to play) as well as the thesis/text (which has another role to play), each as part of the emergent properties of the whole, each facilitating the emergence of new generative orders which go beyond expectation, even. 32 Metaphor is another most natural thing in the world: ―... metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature‖ (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003:3). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 247 Reinjection What can we learn about an argument for abduction from this text? In terms of reasoning, abduction to me means a leading away from what has gone before, and although I had not come across the term when writing this conference paper, it seems to me that a systemic, social constructivist mindset will inevitably lead to roughly the same (open) space of possibility and innovation that affords the (re)searcher such tools for change that can, if belatedly, be named abduction, or cybernetics, or coontogenic drift. The Arniston landscape scene I describe in Chapter 3:91 is based on an experience from ± 35 years ago, which does not diminish the importance, to me, of the experience sans disciplinary terminology. Disciplinary know-how (as new knowledge-in-waiting) enhances 1] what there is already or 2] what is occurring in the moment, by illuminating (by bringing into the Heideggerian clearing-in-theforest) the memory of something [1] or by illuminating what you encounter [2], and it does so as an instrument of change, a metaphoric fuse, if you like, that transports what you know to another reality plane of existence, that transports ‗you‘, as if by force and in the real world, by abduction. An argument for abduction is an argument sive conversation with your outside-self that ‗you’33 control, hence this metaphoric fuse can be a damp squib or it can be a huge firebomb that you simply have to react to, i.e., adjust to and adapt (cf. Chapter 1:15), and it exemplifies the need for any theory to expose itself to the everyday life-world wherein relationships between people and their environments are conducive to the adaptation processes that ideas and so-called reality have to go through, in order that each may ‗find themselves‘ (cf. Chapter 3:97). An argument for abduction in design simply means that we design the world as the world designs us, nothing less but potentially a lot more. The innovative principle of a design language paper started off with a wish to find a way to persuade both aspirant design and art students (first year Foundation) that analysis of what they get up to was not a means to end creativity, but the opposite, that a designerly analysis could in fact enhance their creative ability, and that if practiced step-by-step, as they practice being practical art and design students in any case, the art of reflective practice (real-time switching of theoria and praxis) will come naturally to them. Traditional analysis, to our students, means something to avoid at all costs, since it would stem the tide of creativity, and the reason they do not take kindly to a critique of their work, especially if done in a group context and their work (themselves, really, since they are their work, proving that objects may be proxy people34) is exposed to a wider audience and influences farther away from their personal concerns. Instinctively, as this student behaviour shows, people shy away from ‗leaving home‘, the knowledge base where they feel safe, a very complex reaction to real world situations (cf. the ‗defence of territory,‘ below). A design language as a discourse, gramma/topology, 35 must then take into account this defensive and quite natural stance, and like constructivism (cf. Chapter 1:16) undermine such traditional ways of doing business with the world while yet following both Derrida (1993:919) and Gadamer‘s (1975:246-247) advice to respect these initial positions, as prejudgments in the sense of thinking from within the safety of a certain disciplinary code. In short, barriers to expansive thinking must be transcended, ‗undermined‘ in the same way that a biological system ‗undermines‘ itself by adapting to its (new) environment. Students must be given the means to 33 Who are you? What constitutes this ‗you‘ that can be regarded as a singular ‗I‘? Cf. the article on Cybernetic Conversation, below. 34 Whatever we do and however we do it, we do so (communicate so) through language; we are languaging the whole time, and metaphor is so pervasive in our thoughts and formation of the emerging, that it is no surprise that we should treat the outside-usworld as proxy humans. ―We have been claiming that metaphors partially structure our everyday concepts‖ (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003:46), and ―our experience with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provide the basis for an exraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances‖ (:25), with an emphasis on the fatc that ―Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities‖ (:33). 35 Gramma/topology is not a theory as fact, but a Theory as Fact; a language is not a system that we possess, and neither is a discourse or gramma/topology. These are ‗things‘ we see with. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 248 acquire a structure that can help them cope with the complexity of everyday concerns, a world in which many things change as you deal with them, and gramma/topology is one such (co-ontogenic) structureenhancing mechanism; students can be taught to see two things at the same time, analysis and creativity, writing and doing, to in fact see the self and the not-self at the same time, i.e., , a situation that Derrida (1993:919) called stereo-vision, a doubling of commentary that has a place in the critical production of meaning, and we – we as individual human beings – are responsible for our thoughts, and we are not. We are responsible for our work and we are not, in the sense that the worth of the work we produce must be judged over and against the reasonableness the work finds in the lives, and therefore the similar-to-our-own co-ontogenic developments, of others. Just as Gadamer is of the opinion that education uses us, as bildung (in Blacker, 1993), so students can learn that they (their work as knowing object) can learn from criticism because their work uses criticism as bildung, and they are merely observers of the observing system. Mitchell made a very perceptive point in stating that the things that obstruct our view of the world also constitute the view, and we can see nothing if we are looking for an outside agency to achieve the changes necessary to design, to creativity, to development in general. The principle of a design language, in this paper, is the use of metaphor in a discourse of knowing, while the principle of design knowing itself, the principle of gramma/topology, is the knower, first and foremost, one of the reasons I focused so much on how memory works and how we think, on conversation and its ontology of equipment, in fact. We design in the world of others much as we design for our own world, because that is what we understand and how our brains were collectively hard-wired; we make copious use of abstraction since the operations of convergence and divergence36 are not that strange to us, even if we are not familiar with the terminology. Normal abstraction does not mean (normal) fragmentation, since in playing with ideas we have to deal with the so-called 5+2 principle, and we can handle quite complex interactions (conversations) if we juggle with between 5-7 balls at any one time, hence the need for abstraction, or compressed chunks of information (which if let be, can turn to black boxes). To ask students to deal with is not such a difficult task, after all, but a journey of discovery that cannot be dealt with face-to-face, as it were, but has to be tackled in a round-about way, much like Simon‘s sailboat of education 37 that tacks to the wind (Simon, quoted in Fosnet, 2005:286-287), just another instance of Mitchell‘s (1994:283) approach that has us seeing with the view and not looking directly at the view. Design education is about, at first in any case, artificially slowing down a quite normal but quite rapid process of knowing, or switching between tacit knowing and focal knowing; learning how to learn by learning about the self, i.e., about , is how a student can begin to acquire an ownmost structure of knowing, while learning, in the process, that [not-A] is just a front for ‗the other‘ that the self can treat as ‗object‘ in the sense of Dasein‘s ontology-ofequipment, an extension of our everydayness towards something more, an ontology of equipment using [not-A] as landmarks in Wittgenstein‘s foggy landscape. We become, or rather, we project our own objects-as-information-as-presence entities onto [not-A], precisely because the space that [Not A] occupies is the space that [A] has to morph into: the very act of cognition equals the making of distinctions, equals the opening up of a new space of possibility, at a price (cf. Chapter 4:134). This is the place-of-knowing that I was aiming for in the paper without having the terminology to explain it as such; instead, I wrote that if we need to concentrate on the knowledge-creation aspect of research and 36 As John Chris Jones (1984:8) stated, ―The purpose of divergence is to seek questions not answers. There is no reason to fear chaos: it is our name for another form of order: that which we see as yet only in part‖. As observer researchers we act as Dasein wanting to uncover the potential of Being, but we first have to let go extrinsic control of the everyday (of our dearly held beliefs and ‗knowing‘), and allow the nothingness of this new territory (to which we are the developing map) to reveal itself, since this nothingness represents the emergence of all possibility. 37 Simon‘s ―You set out sailing according to your plan. However, you must constantly adjust because of the conditions that you encounter‖. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 249 its consequent dissemination of information, this model of the artefact as singular information source breaks down. Sveiby (1994) reminds us that the Latin informare means to ‗give form to,‘ and that the etymology implies a demand for structure. If we focus on the knowledge-creation aspects of our own lives (design education), then we need a better model than simply our own self as information source: the self needs the self to produce the self, [A] needs the new possibility of [A] inside [not-A]. Prigogine (1980:95) stated that ―most biological reactions depend on feedback mechanisms … the energy-rich molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP), necessary for the metabolism of living systems, is produced through a succession of reactions in the glycolytic cycle that involve ATP at the start … to produce ATP we need ATP ... it takes a cell to produce a cell‖. We need the self to produce the self, and therefore we need to give new form to the old self by becoming our own information-structure projected into and onto the future, and the best way for design students to learn how to learn in this complex way, is via a design cybernetic conversation using gramma/topology as lens. The engine driving this self-focusing deformation can be liked to an electro-magnetic induction coil, a low-power source that can produce a high-power output when ‗the penny drops‘ and we see something that wasn‘t there before: this is an argument for abductive reasoning, in that the self is led away from itself towards itself, Dasein is abducted by its own autopoietic reasoning towards Being. We use the switching between analysis and creativity, the switching between self and other, and above all, the switching between rationality and reasonableness to arrive at a position where the distinctions have been made and the answers available in this new space are acceptable to both the I and the Thou, a most reasonable position, since ―I require a You to become [me], becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter‖ (Buber, in Bloch and Nordstrom, 2007:17). Part of that complex encounter is the conversation with the explicit self that hides the explicit other, a switching that takes place between implicit knowledge sive knowing (the self) and explicit knowledge sive knowing (the ‗out there‘ where the self and other are intermingled), as I demonstrate in Figure 25, Splitting the Infinitive. The gestalt role reversal between ground and figure is something that constantly take place, and we are knowing all the time points to exactly this phenomenon of switching between tacit knowing and focal knowing, between watching the hammer (analysis) and watching the nail (creativity), just another version of Bateson‘s conversation between woodsman and axe, i.e., a conversation between a human actor and a non-human actor, but unfortunately we seem to find that type of conversation easier to comprehend than the same conversation between human-to-human actors. Instead of seeing the other [the not-A] as an object object, we must see this other-self as an ontology-of-equipment ‗object‘ in the sense of seeing our own (new) information in this [not-A] without fragmenting or destroying what is left when we take what we need (cf. this point discussed in The complexity of design as a wavefunction, below). Sen speaks of a fragmentary logic that makes us see only a part of another‘s identity in the [not-A], which to me means that we see only the part we can use and reject the rest, thus creating a non-person that is empty of significance, ―further to use that [empty] identity as a reason for violence‖ (in Bloch and Nordstrom, 2007:14); non-recognition of the other is the same as physical violence, and perhaps worse. Figure 25 is based on the work of Roman Jakobson, a Russian linguist who was influential in the Prague Circle and later moved to America, where he ―began drawing on cybernetics … [elements in his work] are shown to constitute a direct link between [his] linguistic theory and the newly founded … cybernetics‖ (Van de Walle, 2008:88). The top half of Figure 25 represents, as it were, the observer (the self), and the bottom half represents the observed (the other), and as has been established, an interaction is taking place between the observer of systems (including its own) and the observing system that is being observed; implicit knowledge is interrogating explicit knowledge, and vice versa. What is creative and complex is at the same time specified and analytical, for all intents and purposes, since the two alternate so rapidly that any separation makes no sense, and the I becomes the Thou; the figure Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 250 / ground reversal is no longer a dichotomy, but becomes a figure sive ground form for its own sake, and education (design) uses us as bildung. I ended the paper with reference to Protagoras‘s notion of the fitness of a conceptual system … with the term fitness taking on the meaning of a measure of capacity. The ontology of equipment of (designed) objects then refers to the fitness of a designed research system which is a measure of the successful capacity of a research entity to make itself known in all its potential, including the artefact/project, while the ontology of equipment of the (designed) observer then refers to the fitness of a knowing human system which is a measure of the successful capacity of a searching entity to make itself known in all its potential, including the complex transaction that is . The resultant self is a ―fickle traveler‖ as Richard Jung puts it, since the self comes into being somewhere between the subject and object of intention, ―an aggregate of elements appropriated from other Selves and one‘s own earlier Self‖ (Jung, 2007:26-27). Gramma/topology, as a theory of knowing, can facilitate this process of the self becoming its own ―Functional38 explanation [that] is the basis of cybernetics‖ (Jung, 2007:21). An argument for abduction is an argument sive conversation with your outside-self that (the collective) ‗you’ control, a preferred situation where the self can become its own functional explanation in the fitness landscape of complexity, and as Kolko (2010:21-23) reports, abductive thinking for design involves the forging of a synthesis framework of connections that, through hypothesizing the new via inferential inputs (awareness of and openness to the environment and context) and thus creating a designerly reframing, produces a more focused observation regarding ―what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly complex reality‖. However, before discussing the importance of complexity theory for design thinking, we need to ask how a conversation works, and through this investigation ask, obliquely and again, who are we? 38 The key difference between the everyday use of the word functional and its cybernetic counterpart, is that ―a variational pri nciple governs action‖, which makes a cybernetic functional explanation ―different from ‗explanations‘ by reference to goals and purposes‖ (Jung, 2007:21). Henceforth all references to a functional self or functional explanation will carry this connotation of being stochastic in nature. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 251 Acknowledgement of text The following article has been published in the journal Image & Text 16:22-39 (van der Merwe 2010c), and is based on the paper Conversation and control in the animal that was printed in the Proceedings of the 20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, University of Vienna, Austria, 6-9 April 2010. Cybernetic Conversations: Designing ourselves towards discovery Introduction In this article I wish to argue for a mode of critical and expansive thinking that our profession can call designerly-knowing, design thinking, or a design conversation, if this mode of thought can be understood to be undisciplined, and understood to be critical thought that owes allegiance to no directive philosophy except the one that regulates the fluid conditions of living and being of everyday existence. Merholz (2009) would rather rename ‗design thinking‘ as ‗social science thinking‘, since design needs the clarifying perspectives and viewpoints brought to its practice by the disparate disciplinary backgrounds of the non-designers on the team, while Patnaik (2009) calls these newly combined skill sets ‗hybrid thinking‘. Roger Martin (in Merholz, 2009) acknowledges the need for a different type of ‗thinking practice‘ (inelegant as my phrase may be), since the mere wish for interdisciplinarity, and knowingly putting a design team together from different disciplinary backgrounds will not be enough. I do not wish to argue for the type of interdisciplinary thinking that integrates the systems approach into design thinking as if simply adding another string to the bow would solve an inherent problem, since ‗the problem‘ is not so much design thinking but one highlighted by the contemporary, external, world of complex social interactions; the ‗problem‘ is a truly systemic problem, namely one of evolutionary adaptation. In asking what a systemic problem situation is, we have to ask what is systems thinking? The argument for the integration of the systems approach into design thinking seems to flow in the wrong direction, from an ‗external‘ theory to the domain of design thinking, a statement that contradicts the fact that I believe in design‘s ability to reach out to other disciplines and ways of thinking, and to draw to itself 39 what is needed for the context in which ‗design thinking‘ has to operate. Under the rules of logic, then, we should not be able to do this, since you (are not supposed to) solve an economic problem with theories sourced from philosophy, and neither do you solve design problems using theories sourced from business studies, engineering control systems and human computer interaction (HCI) activities. Systems thinking, as it evolved from General Systems Theory is used extensively in Business Studies (cf. Peter Checkland and the Lancaster University Management School) and elsewhere (meaning, really, not in design), and the study of cybernetics (regarded by many to be synonymous with systems thinking) is used constructively in those disciplines that need to study the many ways that inputs, communication variables and outputs can be pre-determined, i.e., those disciplines that rely on the mechanisms of determinism to control the systems under its management. However, on a very fundamental level there are two different version of systems thinking, the first-order (systematic thinking) which functions through negative feedback for deterministic control, and the second-order (systemic thinking) that functions through positive feedback for adaptation and change, and it is this version of systems thinking that is applicable to design as a process, applicable to design as a social act of reciprocal communication. We may thus regard both systems thinking and cybernetics as the same (albeit hybrid) approach to the mindful thinking processes needed to change design itself, since the aspects common to 39 Design‘s ability to reach out to other disciplines has its origins in the statement by Wolfgang Jonas (2004) that design is a groundless field of knowledge, comparing those areas of disciplinary knowledge that are needed for any one context to islands in a sea of possibility. Our problem in the design process is that we have to connect carefully the chosen islands of knowledge in a specific way, each time we make use of the knowledge of others. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 252 both, that deal with the observation of circular processes, are what is essential to design. Design‘s version of systems thinking and cybernetics is concerned with the observer and the observation process, with which terminology we may make another distinction between first-order and second-order systems/cybernetics, which is that the first-order studies an observed system (as in what used to be called ‗objective‘ science), while the second-order studies an observing system, including the study of the observer of that system. A systems/cybernetics way of approaching the whole of the design process means we acknowledge that ‗the system‘ we are a part of ‗looks back‘ at us, interacts with us, as in a real cybernetic design conversation. Systemic thinking, which implies the inclusion of the person or the group that commissions the design in the first place, used to be a taken-for-granted and integral part of the ‗design‘ process when design was still looked upon as a craft, or, for the purposes of this argument, seen as a direct and consequential conversation between maker 40 and client. For that reason, my argument for design‘s renewal can only follow Heidegger (in Dreyfus, 1991:270) in equating truth with unforgetting, bringing that which was ‗hidden‘ (or forgotten) to the fore in a phenomenal encounter of discovery through the medium of a thoughtful and cybernetic design conversation, the main focus of my argument. We need a new outlook, a new way of seeing the world; to encourage designers and ‗nondesigners‘ alike to become both critical and liberal thinkers we need to change a semantic question into an autopoietic structural one (below), and we need to find the communicative (and transformative) possibilities we lack in the simple act of conversation. In biology Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980:2) studied pigeons in order to find out how they could cope with the world of form and colour, in fact, they wanted to know what form and colour looked like to a pigeon. They got no answers, because they were looking at the end-result, looking for the solution, and not thinking, because the semantic question how does form and colour present themselves to the pigeon put themselves, as system observers, in the wrong position. They therefore changed their observational position and asked, instead, a structural question, namely how is it possible for pigeons to deal with the world of form and colour? They were, in fact, asking a question that foregrounds ‗systemic thinking‘: what structure does any organism need to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists? The question is not what can feedback from the world offer a pigeon, a living entity, but rather what does this entity do with the feedback that does exist (and ideally, what does this entity do to let feedback emerge), how does it choose among the feedback loops, and how are these choices justified? In other words, how do humans know how to cope with the world and each other, how do they acquire the knowing structure that enables them to do so? The focus of the next section tries to answer that question by offering the notion of a cybernetic design conversation based on human intrinsic control. Conversation and control in the animal The problem that any design teacher should address, but one that many in practical design simply do not acknowledge, is that of language use. Not a simplistic use, but one that acknowledges that, ―whatever else we are doing, we are all doing language‖ (O‘Rourke, 2003), and in design education an interactive conversation between multiple participants 41 is not only essential, but has eclectic ontological implications. Design as a social activity needs the dynamics of collective and negotiated compromise which a cybernetic conversation can bring to the situation. However, one of the biggest problems still to be overcome is the (human) susceptibility to the power of negative (restrictive) control. This section offers the notion of intrinsic control as a (cyber/design) solution, not to the intricacies of design and its objects as such, but to a designing of the knowing self. 40 Dunin-Woyseth and Nielsen (2001:27-28) suggest an epistemological premise for design: they have adopted the term making knowledge to highlight the essence of design as a making profession. 41 The argument in this paper is that a conversation, although possible between just two participants, usually include (consciously and unconsciously) multiple participants, and for a design student this can mean an exchange of information between the self and any other(s): human and human, human and book, human and natural / designed object. This conversational exchange can take on multiple forms as well, verbal, non-verbal, sensible- or auto-suggestive, direct, mediated. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 253 Design as an inbetween activity, as Herbert Simon42 seemed to be suggesting, can be seen as the social act of mutual recognition we should be striving for, and that position can only be brought into being within ‗a conversation‘, a negotiated interaction with the other that nobody can (or should) avoid. We may deny the results, or refuse the negotiating aspect, but we cannot avoid the interaction with the socalled ‗outside world‘ of other people and objects. We are all ‗doing language‘, and designers should learn how to use this tool-for-understanding, if only because our interactions with the outside-of-theself is an inevitable ontological activity that builds our very identities as thinking beings. Simon‘s (1992:129) ―everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones‖ may as well read, everyone who languages new and innovative situations into being is a designer, seeing that he believes design to be ―the core of all professional training‖, and we can ask, how do you language the new by having a conversation about preferred situations? Following Blevis‘s (2006) analysis of Simon we should focus on what a preferred situation means, not forgetting to language the meanings inherent in courses of action and, likewise, in the notion of situation. We are capable of planning into the future, to envisage new scenarios in contrast to existing ones, and to devise possible courses of action to achieve the decided-on preferred situation. We can do this because we can language, used as a verb in the same sense that the word design can be used as both a noun and a verb, and when we are ‗doing language‘ by having a conversation, we should be aware of its active and constructive nature. The obvious garden fence conversation Niklas Luhmann (2002:156), in the process of integrating Maturana and Valera‘s biological theory of autopoiesis into his account of social systems thinking, was of the opinion that only communication can communicate, and we can adopt this way of seeing by stating only conversations can speak or converse with each other, by means of their cybernetic qualities 43. It is, to me at any rate, of interest that converse stems from the Latin for ‗to keep company with‘, and further, that this implies ‗with‘ and ‗to turn‘, and a cybernetic conversation has these qualities, or are these user requirements? A real conversation must keep the ‗correct‘ company for the sake of progress, and its interactive nature means that all participants change in a developmental movement from existing situations to preferred ones, vistas for renewal and learning that a good conversation can begin to reveal as bildung. Only conversations speak to each other, and by this dynamic interaction they manufacture contexts, and the real-time cyclic nature of these interactions can, at any one moment, be called the content of that conversation, or learning process. The reader will no doubt have picked up the seeming flaw in my argument, which is: what exactly are you terming a conversation? There seems to be two ‗events‘ that are both masquerading as ‗conversations‘ – if two people in communication with each other constitute one conversation, then how can two conversations have a conversation? Only communication can communicate, and likewise only a conversation can ‗speak‘ to another conversation. Cybernetically, meaning that when we see the observer as an autopoietic unity, we should acknowledge that operational closure means, in effect, that people do not talk to each other as much as they are talking to (having a conversation, or interacting with) themselves and their environment, and the person you are ‗talking‘ to, interacting with, is just an element in that environment. You are not talking to a person as much as ‗talking to‘ their language use, their conversation being sent out, or communicated, to you. What we have here are two ‗speech bubble conversations‘ trying to make sense 42 Simon (1992:130-132) regards design as a discipline of the artificial (whether engineering, architectural, business, education, law, or medicine ‗design‘), and shows ―that a science of artificial phenomena is always in imminent danger of dissolving and vanishing‖ when we focus on the designed artifact‘s interface. This viewpoint makes of design what Simon calls a boundary science, a science of the artificial that operates inbetween other sciences / disciplines. 43 Conversations are not about concepts, however much they may be the focus of each conversation, but about each participant in the interaction (Pask, 1996:357). Conversations speak to each other because they are proxy humans. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 254 of one another, as much as two autopoietic systems trying to ‗feed‘ themselves 44 in the process of selfgeneration Figure 27A shows two people45 having a conversation, but since each person is an autopoietic system bent on self-generation, they can‘t actually ‗detect‘ each other directly, except through their outputs. Only the communications that make up the conversational field can ‗detect and connect‘ within that field of interconnectedness, that inbetween that is the meta-environment ‗outside‘ each system. We must also remember that the communication from system (1) is, to system (2), simply part of the background possibility, part of the medium that makes up (2)‘s outside environment, and therefore nothing special compared to the communication from (2); that constitutes the first and biggest hurdle in the communication process. However, since there is no such thing as a direct transfer of information, but only mediation, in Figure 27B we can see some of the paths that information emanating from both (1) and (2) follow, and the real-time process is beginning to look more complex than would appear to be the case when we are simply chatting over the garden fence. In order for (2) to make any sense of the conversation, the system must distinguish 46 between its own production and that of the other system (1), which has to compete with all the other streams of communications in the meta-environment. The conversational event, an interactive space filled with various inputs, shows its face differently to each system taking part in the conversational event. This ‗interface‘ constitutes the situation- understanding-interpretation field for each system, and the only ‗content‘ that can speak to system (2). Figure 27C tries to unravel some of what is being produced and received, with some of the received information stemming from (2)s own production. Cf. Addendum B. Figure 27. Conversational echolocation We not only transmit information to a receiver, the conversational partner (to fall back into old terminology), but we also receive information from that other-to-the self: we are told that, but the system does not ‗know‘ this, or cares, only seeing the field it can make use of, and all the signals it 44 Part of this process, and one of the most important aspects of conversation theory, is this aspect of teach it back, whether by a person, and object, or a whole context. 45 46 A ‗conversation‘ happens between any two or more elements. What differentiates between an informational garden fence gossip and a privet-crossing ‗bore-the-neighbours-to-death‘ monologue is Pask‘s Last Theorem, which states that like concepts repel, and unlike concepts attract (Green, 2004:1438). The concepts that ‗nestle recursively‘ within the conversation (within the interactions of actors) are either garden fence positive (unlike / attract) or boringly negative (like / repel). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 255 allows are also ones mediated by this field or ‗world‘. Then again, we also receive information from ourselves, in the act of transmission, and those are also mediated by the outside field/world. Concrete or direct narratives (2) are signals the self receives from the phenomenal world where its experience lies, but of course also from memory, where this experience is lodged or stored; to complicate matters what seems to be the same signals are received from the field we interact with, but these were not produced by ‗us‘, and are therefore virtual and mediated. As Figure 27D shows, virtual and mediated (1) signals are stimuli for our direct and memory experiences, produced by (1), and either sent in speech (virtual direct) or we receive these signals because we observe the effects of these signals bouncing off ‗the world‘ as it were, hence virtual mediated. There are also signals, if one may call them that, created by listening to your own transmissions, which are the equivalent of (1)s virtual mediated signals. All this means that an autopoietic system is ―a system of communication … that produces and reproduces through the system everything that functions for the system as a unit‖ (Luhmann, 2002:161), that two people in conversation do not ‗see‘ each other, but each system ‗needs‘ the other, or, rather, each system needs stimulation because, despite being operationally closed, it is at the same time informationally open. What if there are no real inputs and outputs47 in any working system, but only fields of force? If I do not know that ―you‖ are there, outside, since that awareness is not the point to a self-generating system, then why would I, this autopoietic system, produce any ‗outputs‘ (which is, really, for someone else‘s benefit)? That I produce something is certain, but what else is this ‗something‘ - that is necessary to the system to operate as an auto and closed system - if what I produce is used by my system to maintain itself? Can my production have side effects, as it were, or, in the absence of ‗outputs‘, can my production, as the very essence or reason for my system‘s existence, be construed as a ‗force field‘ that contains all that ―I‖ am? On reading Bourdieu‘s description of habitus as ―a structuring mechanism that operates from within agents‖ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:18), I can happily see habitus as an autopoietic force field, innate to each system. An informational gossip over the garden fence involves two unlike force fields attracted to each other, and the obvious answer to who controls this neighbourly interaction is ―The controller is controlled, itself, by that which the controller controls‖ (Glanville, 1995). But if this circular control occurs inbetween (Glanville, 1997), then what do we mean by ―control‖? Not a matter of control … Having seen off inputs and outputs that justify an artificial non-involvement by the observer (although it is tempting to use these descriptors for the sake of convenience), perhaps we can chance another radical constructivist statement: there is, conversationally speaking, no such thing as second-order cybernetics. Cybernetics is a theory that sprung to life by default; the scientists that gathered in the 1940s to discuss matters associated with the Second World War found that they could not hold a simple conversation due to their specialised fields of interests, so they asked the one question that no one knew the answer to: what is the nature of control? Consequently, according to Stafford Beer (2004:855857) the very naming of the theory and the nature of true control has the same source 48, although popular use distorts both. Cybernetic control is not meant for trivial machines 49, and the human bodyand-mind system is not a trivial machine, but then neither is a modern fighter aircraft, yet both exhibit cybernetic forms of control. However difficult this is to express and illustrate, there is, in a very important respect, only one form of cybernetics, as there should only be one form of cybernetic control. 47 I only have a vague suspicion that Gordon Pask wrote something of the sort: ―there are no inputs or outputs, but only fields of force‖. If he did not, it still sounds like him, because he did suggest an alternative to the input/output type of observation (cf. Footnote 17), and his Last Theorem is about the nature of weak and strong, positive and negative forces. 48 49 Kubernetes, or steersman, is exactly what ‗control‘ should refer to. And not meant for trivial or fake ‗participation‘ either. If the influence of observation on the observer is minimized or eliminated, then the ‗wrong‘ kind of control is present, since ―some kind of external type of observation, disconnected and controlled‖ (Pask, 1992) is chosen. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 256 All trivial forms of control, those that pull ―levers to produce intended and inexorable results‖ (Beer, 2004:857), only mimic the surface nature of cybernetic control, while all non-trivial machines, including ourselves, need the edge-of-chaos disposition of the only form of control that nature allows. While it may seem strange to speak of nature while also mentioning (real) machines, cybernetics is not about the detail, the metal or the flesh, but about the organization of all the elements that make up the system, and a successful (future) fighter plane needs to be an autopoietic system, with intrinsic control 50 , similar to a successful human biological system. Seen on this basic level, and from this single viewpoint of true cybernetic control, there is only one meta-form of cybernetics51, with contextual variations. If we look beyond the (human) question of the absence or inclusion of the observer to the essence of cybernetics, as theory, the machined system and the biological system should both exhibit an integral and intrinsic control, with the machine acting as if it were its own observer, since that is what we expect from an autopoietic system. Beer (2004:857-858) almost jabs his finger at the significance of Wiener‘s descriptive definition of cybernetics: control and communication … and if we are to be logical, you cannot have both if levers are to be pulled. Leveraged ‗communication‘ is mere information without interpretation; communication cannot be controlled except by fascists, and it‘s as if Beer is highlighting the conversational interaction between the two terms52 … in the animal and the machine … reflection on these strange associates seems to call for a refocus of what the two terms have to say to each other, otherwise why use them in the same sentence? What they have in common is intrinsic control, control that communicates because the optimal function of the system is on the edge of chaos, that inbetween space of possibility that balances disequilibrium and equilibrium53. This type of control is a transaction, which makes it simply another interactive conversation between the system and itself (on the understanding that this system is both operationally closed and structurally / informationally open). … but of conservation In my experience intrinsic control is normatively important in the context of constructivist teaching, where this notion of control becomes an integral part of the learning environment, an evolving and selfregulating educational conversation-in-the-classroom that uses Stafford Beer‘s ‗muddy box54 regulatory system‘ (1979:57-73) as a deceptively simple base model with inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. It is what happens inside that matters. In this interactive situation where two or more systems are communicating, Beer‘s muddy box becomes a learning device as much as a regulatory system, i.e., it cybernetically controls. Who controls what? The key word is interaction, and therefore the magic ingredient becomes the control of variety, by all participants to the conversation. Now imagine that we can do without the notion of inputs and outputs55, that feedback loops are still there, but we have to rethink how they function. If we can imagine all participants (human, mechanical, all actors and actants in the system) being represented by their force fields (i.e., their habitus and practice combined, this autopoietic structuring mechanism), we can get a clearer picture of how two or more autopoietic systems trying to communicate might function in this interactive environment. Inside the box, inputs are merely the ‗accidental‘ outputs or effects of a single system as it goes about its lawful business. What we normally term inputs and outputs are artificial constructs that can only be named and positioned afterwards, not before the conversation 50 I believe that Stafford Beer (2004:858) answered the question, what is cybernetics?, and supplied a solution to the problem of ―a lingua franca in which to talk cybernetics‖ with his concept of intrinsic control. 51 It‘s rather ironic, then, that meta- also denotes ―something of a higher or second-order kind‖ – COED. 52 If I/you control you/me too much you/I will cease to communicate, and if you/I do not allow me/you to communicate, I/you will lose control. 53 ―The most successful kind of control is one built into the very process of going out of control‖ (Beer, 2004:858). 54 Neither a black (opaque to observation) nor a white (transparent) box. 55 The alternative to the (behaviourist / strict cognitivist) ―input/output type of observation … is a transaction, an interaction … which we choose to call a conversation between participants‖ (Pask, 1992). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 257 starts. So dispense with them, in the conversational moment; there are only systems in conversation, there are only cybernetics and control. Dealing with variety is dealing with life, and life demands the conservationist power of control. Ashby‘s Law of Requisite Variety (Beer, 1979:84-86) states that only variety absorbs variety, not in the sense of numbering states but in developing matching states. In this sense feedback loops are also, essentially, a biological necessity: the system allows information from outside to enter the system, and as a result it changes. These changes are detected by another system, and the process of feedforward / feedback is continued, if not perpetuated. This highlights the presence of both conversations and interactions of actors, and Gordon Pask (1992) differentiated between the beginnings and endings of the conversation, and unlimited interactions that ―do not generally have a start and finish‖. Design as product is a conversation with a beginning and an end, while design as process is an interaction of actors, with no discernible start and finish. Then design as process cannot be (or contain) a cybernetic conversation? No, that was not the intention. Multiple conversations take place within a network of interactions of actors. To return to Ashby‘s influence on conversations as learning mechanisms, in the classroom interactive space variety has to be operationally reduced, since the system (single or multiple) naturally produces variety, but to what end? Left unchecked, the (larger) system will dissipate, so the autopoietic system‘s operational organization needs to close, in order to operate. But the system‘s boundary is open to information, and so the classroom conversation induces variety (adjusting the viability of Beer‘s muddy box to progress from structured solvable problems to dealing with ill-structured wicked problems). This is necessary because, like the cybernetically controlled fighter aircraft, students need to match the variety of (new) information with their own variety (possibility) of response. It is for this reason that I cannot agree with Glanville (2007:1195) that Ashby‘s Law is not applicable in the world of design, where we are not in control, especially not of the design conversation. Agreed, designers defer to the social context of the design situation, but a design-style adaptation makes full use of the cybernetic principle of control: ―every regulator must contain a model of that which is regulated‖56 (Beer, 1979:234), and the regulatory process of intrinsic control ―sees to it that Ashby‘s Law is automatically obeyed; therefore there is no loss possible in balancing the variety equations‖ (Beer, 1979:91). I do, however, agree with Glanville‘s viewpoint (2007:1189) that we (design teachers) should not even try to (negatively) control the situation, because a constructivist classroom run on cybernetic conversational principles ―can easily set up situations in which the variety to be controlled is vastly greater than any variety you might ever have access to‖. But we don‘t have to, and Ashby‘s Law still works in the classroom, and in the design context. Intrinsic control is situated within all participants, and as a principle, it opens up the inbetween space of innovation called learning, because when one observer (playing a part in the conversation) manages to make happen the model-of-knowing of that which is regulated, and all the other observers follow 56 Beer‘s description of Conant and Ashby‘s (1970) theorem of regulation, and my interpretation of Beer, differs from their use of the term ―the regulator as an object‖ (i.e. the control tower of an airport), and definitely differs from the original mention of a ‗good regulator‘ as one that relates to the system within which it operates to the extent of producing an optimal (maximally successful) outcome. However, the corollary drawn by Conant and Ashby to the living brain is equivalent to transforming a theorem from a firstorder application to a second-order interpretation: for the human brain to function autopoietically it ―must proceed, in learning, by the formation of a model (or models) of its environment‖. We, as thinking human beings, must become our own regulators-forsurvival. Ashby‘s first-order Law is not applicable to design as here described, but his second-order corollary does point the way to intrinsic control. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 258 suit, 57 all the systems‘ intrinsic control structures flow one into the other, and negative (nonparticipatory) ‗control‘ is not even an issue: first-order cybernetics learns from second-order cybernetics, and both (all) conversational partners become simply kubernetes-systems-in-symbiosis, networked into knowing. Personal and professional identities emerge during these recursive interactions with the medium that contains the system(s) at the time. System design (read cybernetics) becomes a user-customization of complex working environments in real time, which means that cybernetics, as meta-design, deals with the quasi-real world that allows an object-thought dance to play out in the fourth dimension, while investigating the not-yet-real existence of pure, ontological possibility. Ah, but what does all this have to do with society at large? How can mere conversations help social systems design? What is a cybernetic design conversation for, really? In his review of The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen (awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, 1998), Tasioulas (2010:9) focuses on one particularly interesting aspect, namely the way Sen opposes the principle of the ideal theory of justice (in its transcendental institutionalist form derived mainly from John Rawls) by suggesting an approach that reads very much like a social systems design conversation 58. Rawls wants to set up a social contract along the lines of Hobbes, Locke and Kant, which would institutionalise a set of rules embodying the ideal theory of justice, while Sen wants to compare the very need for justice to situations in the real world. Sen‘s idea of justice, the theory of what it should be and what it could accomplish, is based on ―what emerges in the society, including the kind of lives that people can actually lead‖ (Sen, in Tasioulas, 2010:9). Sen‘s comparative/social realization (CSR) approach wants to achieve an open form of dialogue based on reasonableness – the opposite of partiality (almost instinctively protecting individual / social group interests) and parochialism (not being able to see beyond the bounds or parameters of the group), i.e., ―democratic modes of public deliberation, dialogue and interaction‖ (Tasioulas, 2010:10) very much in line with the Habermasian 59 view of working within the real world (and its Rittelish scenarios of wicked problems) to achieve any form of justice. Basing this on reasonableness in the public sphere means this open form of dialogue-driven justice is an ongoing social systems design that needs to be protected, not the particular form of justice, or the design, or the system, but the very fact of the conversation itself, as if it were a living thing, which in part it is. If we wish to take the idea of a cybernetically designed conversation seriously, and offer a reasonable approach to the process of setting up such a conversation, the very foundation on which this process rests must be derived from the logic of, not ideal theories of social conduct, but a living logic to be found not in the pseudo-logic of clear ideas, not in the logic of knowledge and demonstration, but in the working logic of every day [social reality], eternally mysterious and disturbing [in its complexity], the logic of the structure of the living thing. (Maritain 1939:52) Nelson (2004:262-263; 265), speaking in connection with a cybernetic design conversation and the nature of inquiry itself, states that the logic used by description and explanation (―what can become real‖) is quite different to the logic and reason of ―what should become real‖ in the sense of seeing this scenario as a design question based on interested groups (cf. the public sphere, above) that form intentional social systems. Given that we may accept, for the sake of argument, that a social systems design conversation must (at least, among other principles) be based on the principle of reasonableness, 57 A principle of autopoiesis is that you only participate to the extent that you participate (Maturana and Varela, 1980:xxv), which means that each conversational partner acquires the ‗relations proper‘ to the design conversational context. 58 59 Both Jenlink and Banathy (2004) argue for the design conversation to be seen as a social systems design. Habermas‘s recognised the relativity of an everyday multigroup approach as having the most legitimacy, and argued that ―the logic of social explanation is pluralistic and eludes the ‗apparatus of general theories‘‖ (Bohman, 2007). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 259 or even just the logic and reason of what should become real, while at the same time placing this conversational process in the public sphere, so to speak, we may also ask whether allowing so many disparate voices to participate in the developing design would allow the process itself any chance of success. On a politically nationalist basis (cf. the current European situation) the underlying partiality and parochialism is self-evident and seemingly inevitable, and it seems that for the sake of political expediency the answer is, by and large, in the negative, since consensus must be reached as to ‗the way forward‘, and too wide a public participation curtailed for the sake of governance. What, then, of Sen‘s idea of justice, based as it should be on the lives of real people (everyone in the group concerned, irrespective of their worldviews) as opposed to the ideal of justice based on what Maritain would call the pseudo-logic of set rules, linear, clear, unvarying, fostering ―the ever degrading and hostile political discourse‖ (Banathy, 2008:25) that is anything but reasonable. Any activity that effects the working structure of the public sphere carries within itself, in fact can be interpreted as, a discourse of some kind, becomes a social system design conversation, and should therefore strive for an approach that Banathy (2008:25) says represents a ―yearning for civility, mutual respect, and dignity in our social discourse‖; in short, the idea of justice. ―Evidently, he [Sen] does not intend justice to equate with what Aristotle called ‗universal justice‘, namely interpersonal morality as a whole‖ (Tasioulas, 2010:10); indeed not, since Sen argues for the idea as opposed to the ideal, for the living concept as opposed to the book of rules that allows no evolutionary and systemic adaptation. Aristotle was a very practical philosopher, one who practiced the logic of the structure of the living thing (above), the idea of anything as an evolving ‗thing‘ emerging from the needs of the people concerned, and to him universal or general justice (the ideal) was not to be confused with particular or (shall we say) practical justice (the idea). A working and democratic viewpoint is not to be found in the ideal of universal justice, but in Aristotle‘s practical or ethical justice, since, as with the ethics that should underpin the idea of sustainability in design thinking and practice, the concept of ethics cannot be written down, or defined as a set of rules, because it will not let itself be articulated, directly, but must be allowed to show itself, and, like Nelson‘s (2004:265) description of what happens ―when words are not enough – when dialogue falls quite‖, we have to allow a ‗thing‘ (cf. ‗an evolving thing‘ above) to show itself, to become clear through its image in another‘s representation. Ethics, in von Foerster‘s (1991) translation of Wittgenstein‘s words, will not let itself be expressed. Just as Heidegger‘s Being will not let itself be expressed directly (although Dasein – everyday existence – can be only too clearly expressed), so what we are pleased to call ethics cannot really be brought to light in direct everyday expression, except through human actions, and therefore through the consequences of the choices each individual makes; ethics are only expressible when ‗dialogue falls quite‘ and we see the image of ethics in the representation of each other‘s actions and its consequences, and we see where all of us are heading in the developing social systems design conversation, itself a ‗thing‘ that cannot be expressed or perceived directly, but must be allowed, in a reasonable way and in the public sphere, to develop as a living systems idea, and therefore protected as an ongoing and necessary conversation. Making waves This is Aristotle‘s practical justice, the very idea of an ethical life lived as if ―no set of rules, no matter how long and detailed, obviates the need for deliberative and ethical virtue‖ because the intellectual virtue (which I believe both Maritain and Bourdieu would term habits of thought) needed for decision making depends on ―a detailed understanding of the particulars of each situation‖ (Kraut, 2010). What we have to remember is that, as guidelines for a constructing a civil society go, this approach is as close to perfect as we can get: in making decisions based on an idea of the real we design our own habits of thought, a mindset that acts as ―a disposition [that] operates with only one set of conditions and not their opposites as well‖, a social systems design conversation that ―is perfect in a special way, because the man who possesses justice is capable of practicing it towards a secondary party and not merely in Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 260 his own case‖ (Aristotle, 1971:139-141). Acting in this dispositional way towards the self as you would towards the other is constitutive of both systems thinking and the very idea of a cybernetic design conversation, the latter compared by Winograd and Flores (1988:159) to ―a dance, giving some initiative to each partner in a specific sequence‖, while the former is characterised by von Foerster as an invitation to a dance, and in equating an invitation to dialogue with an invitation to dance he is speaking about a type of willing or consensual togetherness: ―when we are talking with each other, we … invent what we both wish the other would invent with me‖ (Waters, 1999). This dance of consensual togetherness is termed patterns of interference by Nelson (2004:263-264); having explained the types of designs of inquiry that include truth-seeking inquiring systems and idealseeking ones, he reminds the reader that both forms of inquiry, although different, are pervasive in our history and lead to what can become real instead of what should become real, that illusive something that Heidegger (in Dreyfus, 1991:270) called the truth-in-hiddenness, the ‗truth‘ of the logic of the living thing that cannot be written down as a set of rules, but that has to be found in a cybernetic design conversation, in the design dialogue, that is a desire-based inquiry system (Nelson, 2004:263264). Corresponding to Aristotle‘s and Habermas‘s approach regarding social participation, a desirebased approach, as an inquiry system that creates patterns of interference, shifts the focus of what should be, what is desired, from the participants themselves to the newly developing context, something that can only happen if the participants in the cybernetic design conversation are willing to act in this dispositional way (towards the self as towards the other). What should be decided is what the new context ‗desires‘, an amalgam of what the individuals in the design conversation desire, and yet much more, since Gestalt theory (long recognised in graphic design) tells us that the (new) whole is more than simply the sum of the parts. The new ‗desire‘ – what should be decided in social justice – can only come into being through these patterns of interference, amounting to the dispositions-towards of each participant that act like the (overlapping) ripples created by several pebbles dropped in a pool of water, and in design terms can be called the hybrid effect of different wavefunctions interacting. Although a wavefunction is a mathematical object, it can also represent all-that-there-is-to-know, i.e., all the information content of any one entity (person, group, organization). In opposition to MitletonKelly‘s (2005) belief that ―Complexity, however, does not argue for ever-increasing interconnectivity‖, I argue for an increase. Mitleton-Kelly emphasises the dependency resulting from this connectivity, and ―that the greater the interdependence between related systems or entities the wider the ‗ripples‘ of perturbation or disturbance of a move or action by any one entity on all the other related entities‖. This is a new (group) wavefunction that is being formed, and in contrast to what Mitleton-Kelly believes are non-beneficial effects on everyone concerned, it allows the new to emerge, and allows each participant to extract from this phase transition (a transition between chaos and order) whatever is autopoietically necessary for each system to not only survive but to evolve and prosper. Each survives because the other survives and prospers. An autopoietic ‗dependency‘ is not a negative thing, being the very fabric making up the conditions for emergence and possibility (Author, 2007:97). In that sense human knowing is two or more wavefunctions that collide to form patterns of interference (information restructuring) that in turn form a new entity via the effects of a dispositional and cybernetic design conversation. Let the conversation decide, finally Design as a process is an inbetween activity, just as the cybernetic design conversation, according to the argument above, relies on the ‗quantum physics‘ equivalent of a dispositional phase transition, in real time, that emerges from the human interactive inputs: the new emerges from a hybrid mix of the old, so to speak. In his argument for justice, I believe Aristotle makes the point not just for incompleteness, but for the inbetweenness of things. When we take any topic seriously we have to ask ―what degree of accuracy is to be expected in any of them, in order that we may not unnecessarily complicate the facts by introducing side issues‖ (Aristotle, 1971:40). In a true systems fashion Maturana Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 261 (in Winograd and Flores, 1988:48) reminds us that the organism and its environment must not be seen as two separate things but are, in fact, defined by what is a new unity that ―specifies the space in which it exists, and in observing it we must use distinctions within that space‖. The participant and the cybernetic design conversation form such a new unity (made more complex through attracting multiple participants), and no Aristotelian ‗degree of accuracy‘ can be expected that does not emerge from within the conversation, a process that correlates to the autopoiesis of any living cell system that allows no changes to take place except as an internal restructuring (neatly capturing the inner workings of the learning process itself). Seeing that we can only expect ‗enlightenment‘ from within, and only make decisions based on ‗internal distinctions‘ it becomes clear why a cybernetic design conversational environment has to be inbetween and ‗factually‘ (objectively) incomplete, with the only constant being the flow of information. In this regard Boland and Collopy (2004:4) make out a case similar to Aristotle‘s, in that they argue against the prevailing management practice and education that relies too heavily on a ‗decision attitude‘ that ―portrays the manager as facing a set of alternative courses of action from which a choice must be made‖, as if from a manual of ideal forms that emphasises the difficulty of the choice, but underplays the making of distinctions, or the design of alternatives. On the other hand, ―The design attitude toward problem solving … assumes that it is difficult to design a good alternative … [and] is concerned with finding the best answer possible, given the skills, time, and resources of the team‖ (Boland and Collopy, 2004:6). The idea of creating new alternatives is more important than the ideal of choosing among given ‗alternatives‘. As Conway (1968) also found, ―Any organization that designs a system [defined more broadly here than just information systems] will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization‘s communication structure‖, or, any group that makes decisions based on ideal or pre-set and complete conditions, and that do not allow internal cognitive changes to take place (making decisions based on the power of emergence) can only produce a design solution that mirror‘s the group‘s disposition towards controlled determinism. This is first-order systems in action, and for many designers, still, much the safest way. It is, however, not design in the modern sense, and is not conducive towards a cybernetic design conversation. Any intellectual activity, especially if self-referential, can be regarded as design, and allowing the medium in which distinctions can be made (i.e., between old and new positions) to be called design can make of a conversation as much a designed object as any concrete production line artefact (Conway, 1968; Lyytinen, 2004:221; Schiltz, 2009:173), but with this difference: a social systems design conversation will facilitate the design of systems whose structure is a copy of the participants‘ communication structure (above), in the sense of ―expanding the domain‘s horizons beyond their own capability of observing that expansion‖ (Schiltz, 2009:173), and ‗the conversation‘ can do so, can become the deciding factor, because it fulfils the role of the structure of the living thing. From first to last This argument has been about the rediscovery of systemic thinking in the design process, and particularly about the capacity of the cybernetic design conversation, as a living systems design in its own right, to offer its participants a new way of seeing the world around us, and how we interact with it. The argument for a social systems design conversation, cybernetically-driven, includes the important aspect of gaining intrinsic control over the self, before ‗the other‘ can be dealt with in any reasonable manner, since, while gaining control over events in the real world have merit (as first-order systems and product management), to transfer this same mindset to social systems leads to an unjust and uncivil society. I wish to conclude this argument with an addition to the decision / design attitude debate (above), a dispositional way of thinking that slots in with the difference between working from the ideal and working towards the idea (cf. Sen‘s argument, above). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 262 Aristotle (1971:29) posed this question: in arguing your case, is it better to argue from or to first principles? Two things Aristotle wrote are important to interpret his views on this issue; (1) ―when the sketch is well done, anyone can finish the picture‖ (:39), strengthens his viewpoint on the essential incompleteness (inbetweenness) of our acts of being, and (2) ―We shall find that this applies to ‗beginnings‘, which is our name for first principles; in them the fact is the beginning‖ (:41). What does this establish? That we will do well to accept the premise of incompleteness for the essence of anything, including our own developing beings as acts of creation, and that this approach to seeing and understanding the world begins to encompass also the idea of beginnings: all acts are incomplete, beginnings are incomplete, and as such all first principles also, leading to the incompleteness of all things to be called facts. Now Aristotle says something that appears quite radical and at odds with my own teaching, which is that students should always ask the why question of everything. Aristotle states that ―we begin with the fact, and if there is sufficient reason for accepting it as such, there will be no need to ascertain also the why of the fact‖ (:30). But, read in the light of his view on incompleteness, and like the writings of Heidegger that at first appears to contradict our cherished views, under investigation, using the mechanism of a cybernetic design conversation that asks all pre-judged beliefs and views to be suspended ‗for the duration‘, Aristotle‘s text begins to ‗unhide‘ (Heidegger‘s reveal from a space of hiddenness) their meaning. Aristotle‘s fact is incomplete, the idea instead of the ideal. As such it corresponds to our own beginnings, as first principles: Aristotle‘s fact is a mutable instance of being, neither textually nor historically captured, in the sense that it is human experience and consciousness that is taken as the beginnings of everything that comes after, i.e., experience built on an action that can only be described as the present-compelling-itself-into-the-future. This is the very idea of what an experience is, can be, and can afford us, as human actors, in our knowing interaction with designed objects, situations, and with groups of people, which contact leads to an intelligible relationship,60 a space of understanding of our new selves as knowing beings, and because of this, a knowledge of our (new) relationship with the world and everything in it: our total world space. This is an Aristotelian the-factof-being-human beginning that does not begin at any defined, historical point since it always already begins at all points, and therefore, like true design (as an idea), never ends. Aristotle‘s first principles, then, as incomplete beginnings, is a stance towards an ontological understanding of the self and its place in the world that asks a different question: the why turns into what next, an inbetween, unspecified, ‗incomplete‘ question that makes use of whatever is there, at, and in, the moment, in and with the dynamics of the cybernetic design conversation. New beginnings that have to be worked61 for, which is why one argues to these first principles and not from someone else‘s: first principles in Aristotelian philosophy and in design proper are rigorously (ontologically) individual and social. I submit that this systemic approach to design, to life in general, is the way to justice for civil society, for we invite each other to experience, to invent and so discover what we both wish the other would … this approach is an open invitation to dialogue that has no beginning and does not end. 60 The essentials of The Nicomachean Ethics is rendered in Aquinas‘s social theory as two-dimensional order: co-ordination and an intelligible relationship (Finnis, 1998:35-37). 61 This is order you don‘t get for free; cf. Kauffman (1996:71), ―We have seen that the origin of collective autocatalysis, the origin of life itself, comes because of what I call ‗order for free‘ – self-organization that arises naturally‖. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 263 Reinjection An argument for abduction makes use of an educational process, indeed, a lifelong learning process that uses us as explained by this figure that is now redesigning itself to become what I will later call Jakobson‘s Ladder. We might feel as if we live in an inner world of subjective thought (creative and complex), and regard the outer world of objective expression (specified and analytical) as alien to who we think we are, but in fact who we are is to be found in the rapid switching between implicit and explicit knowing, between in here and out there, both as virtual and as ephemeral as the eventual identity we can claim for ourselves, which is to be found in the inbetween of movement, between worlds, of our construction. An argument for abduction is thus an argument sive conversation with your outside-self that (the collective) ‗you‘ control, and when we have this cybernetic conversation, with ourselves essentially, we are not as pure ‗self‘ as we would like to think, and so we really need to reach the point where it is possible to ‗see‘ that the self must become its own functional explanation, and it can do so by imagining the real 62 on and in the spacetime landscape of existence, or Heidegger‘s clearing in the forest, if that explains what is happening to you better. I find it, personally, impossible to imagine that any thinking being can hide in its own implicitness and pretend that the explicitness of the outside world cannot influence its identity in any way, although I have to accept that many do exactly this, but then they also have conversations with themselves that are totally blind and self-authoritarian, the antithesis of self-generation, and under such circumstances the question, who am I becomes totally irrelevant. To experience (as opposed to simply analysing) a cybernetic conversation is to look for the self ‗out there‘ in the worldedness of explicit expression, to allow a cybernetic dance partner, as it were, to help in this search for a pattern of being. When I was 9 years old, the same year that I was ‗taught‘ to swim by being unceremoniously dumped into the municipal swimming baths (cf. Chapter 3:90), I was also taught by a boy my own age to talk to the animals. 63 I have forgotten the exact circumstances, but not the essence of the story; as boys will we were wandering all over the place looking for adventure, and at times you find ants crawling all over you, having disturbed them in the grasses growing in the veld. What set him off I don‘t know, but it was probably watching me swatting at the ants and gleefully annihilating them in a boyish play-acting role of the earthling getting rid of the alien invaders. 64 What he told me was that his daddy had told him that … well, to cut a long story short, if you injure an insect in going about your normal business, don‘t just leave it in its damaged state, but be compassionate and caring enough to kill it outright, even something as small as an ant. Be aware that you have a responsibility towards the effects you might have on the world outside-the-self, and today I understand that as having a conversation with an ant as the other-entity that can help me in this search for a pattern of being. That point of revelation was, to me, an example of a phase transition that is impossible to erase, since it forms part of our developing ways of knowing, or Nelson‘s patterns of interference that induce the restructuring of information, which, in turn, means the formation of a new 62 Strictly speaking there is no difference between what we imagine and what we take as real. 63Cf. Chapter 4:194; this boy, through his father, was teaching me to become a radical constructivist: “Rather than speaking with an authorial voice, the text [of the Zhuangzi, written by the Daoist philosopher Zhuang] is filled with fantasy conversations between perspectives, including those of millipedes, convicts, musicians and the wind” (quoted in Hansen, 2007). 64 You were never that imaginative as a child? At age 8 just about the whole population of under-tens in the town of Montague used to rush out of the cinema after seeing yet another cowboys-and-indians film, to play at being Gene Autry or Roy Rodgers. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 264 wavefunction composed of the interaction of at least two preceding ones. The fact that one of these wavefunctions can ‗belong‘ to an ant is neither here nor there, since the focus is entirely on the (re)design of the knower, but, crucially, also on the entailments of this knowing process, for what else is a conversation if not this interchange between inner and outer, represented by the creative and the complex trying to express itself as the specified and the analytical, trying to express itself as the other? The functional explanation that is at the heart of cybernetics begins with , and the process of knowing, or rather, its entailments that we would sweep under the carpet of denial if we could, provide the keys to the true form of the next combined wavefunction. I stated at the beginning of this article that I do not wish to argue for the type of systemic thinking that merely integrates the systems approach into design thinking as if simply adding another string to the bow would speak to an existing problem, since ‗the problem‘ lies not so much within design as it does in the complexity of contemporary social interactions; the ‗problem‘ is thus a truly systemic problem, and one that requires evolutionary adaptation. Who is to do this adaptation and how to deal with this process of change is the real problem. A systemic approach to any problem situation will highlight the cybernetic truth of the situation: the system you are looking at is looking right back at you, and can become a dance or a sparring partner, depending on the context, or it can become a propagandistic enemy that will not play by the rules of the game, i.e., its goal will be to assimilate your system without the niceties of reciprocity. Appreciation of the outside world as having its own rules and expectations (even the non-human ones) should be the first conscious responsiveness to this meeting of minds when you confront any knowing and observing system, as I indicated in Chapter 4 (:108-109), in the sense that in a cybernetic conversation you create a meeting-of-minds space, and according to gramma/topology, you would then presume that objects have ‗minds‘consciousness, and in this space of alethic uncovering human consciousness and non-human consciousness intermingle, reach out to each other, interrogate each other … asking questions, sometimes, simply for the sake of asking questions and a sense of curiosity, a wanting to know what the proxy-people-other is really like; ―the fact of living … is to know in the realm of existence‖ (Maturana and Varela, 1997:194). Stepping over the threshold of believing in humans as the only ones with civil liberties opens you up to new entailments in the form of alienation, some thing that will happen if you ―open up the scope of inquiry … and push back the boundaries of our system in order to include other important aspects of the world in which design is practiced‖ (Findeli, 2001:11), but once having opened up the scope of inquiry we find the alien other hardly antagonistic but a form of the self in possibility (cf. Chapter 3:91). The entailments of a cybernetic conversation thus means that students have to, deliberately, use the form of the other to dissociate themselves from themselves (cf. Chapter 4:128; 152), as Geyer (1994) believes is inevitable in a complex society, as long as we focus on the resulting relationship between alienation, the leaving of the old self, and participation, the co-ontogenic coupling of your system with another system; as Geyer reminds us, this is not a matter of simple opposites, and we can recognise Richard Jung‘s differánce lens of sive at work. 65 Everything is 65 ... ―differance thus points out the irreducibility of temporalizing ... it rather indicates the middle voice, it precedes and sets up the opposition between passivity and activity. [It is] the play of differences‖ (Derrida, 2003:225-226). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 265 available in the other, depending on which side of the sive line you find yourself, and divergence depends on convergence depends on divergence depends on … this ongoing and reciprocal conversation. Design is indeed an inbetween social act of mutual recognition that only comes into being when ‗switched on‘ by human action, and I cannot conceive of any human action devoid of all forms of ‗conversation‘ or communication, i.e., all forms of consciousness, even when one is being ‗unconsciously aware‘ of an interaction, as in the example of using tacit knowing to hammer in a nail, or the after-effect awareness that comes with the realisation that, oops, I‘ve just stepped on (or worse, in) something. These are all forms of conversation, and are all forms of being ‗literate‘ in the widest sense. Whatever we are doing we do so by languaging our way through the world, and (cf. Chapter 2:78-80 & Chapter 4:152) students have to be taught – correction, they have to teach themselves, with the help of gramma/topology as a theory of knowing, that all interactions with the world is at the same time teaching yourself to be literate, to ‗read‘ the texts of the world, i.e., to be able to ‗read‘ the texts of the other, as Eco says we can. An argument for abduction thus includes Jakobson‘s Ladder as a base platform to make us aware of the active and constructive nature of language, and knowing about the power of metaphor is a greater help than hindrance, even to those design students who still regard themselves more as doers than thinkers. To be truly literate we must be able to deal with the mediated world, and, as if dealing with a world from within a submarine isn‘t enough, now the signals are being coded and decoded and simply scrambled. Maturana and Varela (1997:136-137) uses the analogy of the navigator inside a submarine who is unaware of the outside world of reefs and sandbanks, and yet they do not mean to suggest that this polarity between in here and out there should hold. Their solution to the problem of cognition can, in fact, be compared to Prigogine‘s (1980:xiii-xiv; 83) notion of living systems as ―far-from-equilibrium objects separated by instabilities from the world of equilibrium‖, i.e., on the brink between chaos and order; Maturana and Varela has it that we have to avoid the traps of both representationism and solipsism by ―walking on the razor‘s edge‖ (Maturana and Varela, 1997:133) between complete analysis and total entropy (cf. Figure 20, above), to avoid the distractions of so-called objectivity and maddening subjectivity, and opt instead for what Protagoras called the fitness of a conceptual system (cf. Chapter 3:104). The submariner in his ―absolute cognitive solitude‖ does not exist as if the nervous system can operate in a vacuum, and neither does the nervous system operate through exact representations received in toto from the outside world (:133), as if the steersman of our cognitive system is on land and we in a boat tossed about by forces beyond our control. The truth is somewhere inbetween, as we have discussed, and we have to deal with mediated signals travelling between the system and its environment. Only communication speaks to communication, thus, since only communication can communicate, and we might ask, are we in the picture at all? What is this that happens in the inbetween? Who communicates and with what is this communication enabled, made possible? Not mere language, which is just the carrier of words, which are sounds and wavelengths, or printed / written marks on paper, in themselves nothing at all. If a conversation is an interaction that takes place between a system and its environment, a structural coupling, again, in terms of communication, this would be nothing in itself. When does communication occur, and why? According to Maturana and Varela (1987:196) a conversation might be described as this ‗meeting of minds‘ in the structural coupling of systems, but it is not necessarily communication, being only communicative behaviour, and communication occurs only when the behaviours of both systems are coordinated in some way (:195). Coordinated in a mediated field of knowing, not the easiest task to master, and yet we appear to function quite adequately in this field of apparent undecidability. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 266 Is that how communication communicates? By facilitating the emergence, from a field of undecidability, of a decision-making process that can be called reasonable? I would suggest that we look again at what von Foerster (1991) called metaphysics, that deliberation which results in decisions being made even though the original question carries within its structure an undecidability, in principle. If we take metaphysics as the search for first principles, for the nature of being, and for good measure, the nature of knowing, then a cybernetic circularity brings us to the point where we started from, with our own form. Gramma/topology, as a theory of knowing, can facilitate this process of the self becoming its own ―Functional explanation [that] is the basis of cybernetics‖ (Jung, 2007:21), a cybernetics steeped in a field of undecidability, and on the razor‘s edge between cognitive isolation and what Maritain (1939:52) called the pseudo-logic of clear ideas (i.e., positivism). True communication, then, becomes an argument for abduction which is an argument sive conversation with your outside-self that (the collective) ‗you’ control, a reasonable process of fair exchange taking place between us, which allows the switching between rationality and reasonableness to arrive at a position where the distinctions have been made and the answers available in this new space are acceptable to both the I and the Thou, a most reasonable position, since ―I require a You to become [me], becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter‖ (Buber, in Bloch and Nordstrom, 2007:17). There is no ‗who‘ that communicates, although there is a ‗who‘ that carries out communicative actions, and therefore we can agree with Luhmann in saying that only communication communicates, although it is still up to the individual system to interpret what is being communicated, which scenario can only be said to contain ‗communication‘ which has been ‗interpreted‘ if the result is a change in the internal structure of the system, i.e., if a coordinated behaviour pattern can be detected, even if what is observed is largely a one-sided effect, as can happen in teaching when the student gives nothing back and nothing away, despite having learned something. Normally, though, there is a response and feedback, and a teach-it-back situation is created, meaning that the behavioural patterns of both parties are indeed coordinated; how else do you know if your teaching has been successful or not? Design education, design theory, and on simply a personal note, design students need the affordances of good communication, i.e., a certain minimum understanding of how language operates is necessary, and although this might be taken for granted, it is anything but the case with our students, and just because you can speak it does not mean you can communicate, no more than because you can hear means you can listen. Language is unfortunately something that is taken for granted, and its real affordances either downplayed or completely missed. In the article I stressed the fact that in design education an interactive conversation between multiple participants is not only essential, but has eclectic ontological implications. I also mentioned the (human) susceptibility to the power of negative (restrictive) control, and one of the effects of taking language use for granted is to surrender your thoughts to the control of language (in effect someone else‘s use of language) as a system-environment we find ourselves in, instead of using language as an expressive tool, and so being able to deal with the many levels of mediation that communication can filter through. A cybernetic conversation is better understood as fuelled by an intrinsic control that, vide ontological implications, leads to a designing of the knowing self. Seen in this light, as a free invention, we cannot design our identities within the restrictions of traditional inputs and outputs. If we can agree that communication occurs only when the behaviours of both systems are coordinated in some way in a mediated field of knowing, and that this field of knowing is also a field of Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 267 undecidability,66 then an argument for abduction needs no traditional inputs and outputs, but it has to be aware of the networking of fields of force, and that networking is, in fact, the reassembly and reassociation of our ways of knowing while being what we know, expressed as a wavefunction (discussed, below). What we ‗produce‘ in terms of communication cannot be expressed as directly as we would like to believe, because meaning cannot be transferred, and on its way from you to me that ‗meaning‘ is mediated, time and again. What type of input and output can we speak of if this is the case? We are not (trivial) machines to passively accept pre-determined inputs and outputs, and therefore the consequences of your ‗outputs‘ as a designer must be tested in the (social) space of reassembly, the agora Thing where everyone should have the right to their own, reasoned, ‗input‘ as an outcome of their participation. Replace assembly and association with first-order cybernetic control (as far as I am concerned, and as I have argued, the wrong kind of first-order application) and inputs are predetermined, and the outputs from the system calibrated back to the input stage to correct any deviation from the original goal. So, we need a new ‗language‘ to speak complexity (cf. below), and the phenomenon of us can only, really, be described by using the term fields of force, with the conjunctive / disjunctive device that is represented by sive as the new metaphoric fuse (Figure 28).67 Figure 28. Jakobson’s Ladder. Cf. Addendum C. We do not need reasoning as induction, since we do not need to draw general conclusions from the limited (to our minds) examples we have, and neither would we be comfortable with anyone else drawing conclusions (deductive reasoning) from a general law that could influence our lives, when that person does not know us and has never spoken to us. When we make decisions on our own behalf, and when we make decisions on behalf of others68 we should be aware that there should not, for our own sake, be any difference in making ‗self‘ or ‗other‘ decisions, or a difference in the process of reasoning, since the only reasoning that makes any sense is the fitness of a conceptual system to survive in the medium it finds itself in … and that medium is never ‗empty‘ and always mediated. When I argue for 66 We cannot have it both ways; either design as a thinking process is an inbetween activity that thrives on the new and the unexpected, and therefore on the in principle undecidable, or it is an activity that corresponds to truth and reality, as if written in law. 67 We are, indeed, ‗switching‘ al the time, between region (1) and region (2), between tacit knowing and focal knowing, between induction and deduction to call into being abduction. There is an exchange relation between being and knowing (Günther‘s First Law, in Scot, 1996). 68 Cf. Chapter 4:132: I know when I am making the ‗right‘ decision for ‗myself‘ if the form of that new ‗myself‘ also depends on the well-being of the others that helped design this new self. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 268 design as an abductive process of reasoning, then that process of becoming includes, of necessity, both inductive and deductive reasoning, but deduction that is subordinate to both experience and speculation, and induction that may well be described as reasoning on the basis of the evidence (particular instances), except that the ‗evidence‘ is encapsulated within social narratives and more akin to Bourdieu‘s concept of field than to hard facts (above). We are knowing all the time, and we are switching between our inner storehouse of implicit knowledge that tends to enfold everything (convergence) into patterns of memory, 69 and our visual output (explicit production) that tends to unfold what we need to communicate (divergence). Remember that Arthur (1994) noted that deductive rationality breaks down under the weight of complexity, that really exasperating space in real life that often requires us to change our minds even before we have quite made them up, i.e., we often have to re-construct our plan of action mid-way to completion due to changes in the environment, due to feedback, due to us being design thinkers and attentive to nuances in the system(s) we are working with. We need to switch between tacit and explicit knowing, we need to change our minds in mid-flight, as it were, if we are to deal with shifting ‗facts‘ and unexpected and emerging meanings in this creative process of keeping the idea alive and changing, while we allow abductive reasoning to lead us away from the point of letting go the forming / reforming idea too soon. Creative thinking has always been abductive thinking, working with the unbounded rationality to be found in the logic of the living situation, in context, always, which means even the wildest flights of the imagination is somehow constrained by the affordances of both our habitus and practice, and bounded only to the non-linear development of the rhizomatic networked unity (cf. Chapter 4:171) that is the final idea come down to earth. After having dispatched the notion of inputs and outputs (at least the traditional version) in favour of a radical constructivist version, I suggested in the article that there is no such thing as second-order cybernetics, something I would typically do to my students just when they have become used to this strange notion of the dance of cybernetic thought, and think they understand the difference between first and second-order … control. Take the word control (specifically the way we normally use this term) out of the equation and there is no appreciable difference except direction, since the (autopoietic) control we need to get to know how to design is the intrinsic control we need to enable transactions and in the making of distinctions. All systems, whether systems of knowing or systems to be known, whether human or non-human, are represented by or as fields of force (i.e., their habitus and practice combined, this autopoietic structuring mechanism), and it is the interaction between these fields of force that spark communication exchanges, the reason I stated that there are only systems in conversation, there are only cybernetics and control. To the beginner student of cybernetics the word control means absolute control that is guaranteed, a process which needs switching on and it works without further attention being paid to the system. Even in a prison (or -state) this does not happen, and even with machines this is impossible, and we have to rethink this notion of control, an element in a complex and nested systems network that has to have the capacity to hold information-seeking conversations with other elements of the same system, but also allied systems. Within an all-mechanical system the elements have to know how to converse with one another, for the sake of control, yes, but autopoietic and intrinsic control, even if speaking of the altruistic aspects of mechanical parts seems totally off the wall. A well-designed machine (-ed system) is very much like a biological system that needs to preserve its own structure in order to survive, and for that reason it will not (can not) make 69 Convergence or abstraction does not lose information, even though our memories of, e.g., an object are not stored in the brain intact, that is, in one piece as a whole image, but spread across the brain in parts. I wrote (above) that abstraction or implicate order is not fragmentation, because convergence does not lose connections but may gain others, holding as it does the possibility of augmentation on recall, and the negative connotation of the word fragmentation should not be attached to this process. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 269 decisions that impact negatively on its environment, the medium on which it depends; only humans intent on absolute control do this to their and our cost. It is then not as contrary as it might sound if, for an anti-authoritarian, I insist that we only have cybernetics70 and we need control, for this is an aspect of being human that emerges from Maritain‘s structure of the living thing, based on ―what emerges in the society, including the kind of lives that people can actually lead‖ (Sen, in Tasioulas, 2010:9), which should remind us of what both Margolin and Findeli called for. This is humanising the scope of design inquiry to, with Slamat‘s compassionate rationality, observe the importance of contemporary social discourses. Intrinsic control becomes an instrument of and in dialogue, the form of us cybernetically, if we can ‗dwell‘ (behave as if, comport oneself toward) inside our conversations with the other as a ―holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization‖ (Heidegger, 1962:89). Cybernetic intrinsic control is then Aristotle‘s practical justice, the very idea of an ethical life lived as if ―no set of rules, no matter how long and detailed, obviates the need for deliberative and ethical virtue‖ because the intellectual virtue (which I believe both Maritain and Bourdieu would term habits of thought, and can now also term as our fields of force) needed for decision making depends on ―a detailed understanding of the particulars of each situation‖ (Kraut, 2010), including our own, continuously being re-assembled situation. Nelson‘s patterns of interference becomes a contextual and dispositional what-is-desired, a mutual desiring-towards, the essence of which and the direction this new thinking-entity will take depending on the structural changes brought about by two or more wavefunctions colliding, over which we should not even try to exercise absolute control. Inside this razor‘s edge mix we will find the first principles of our own new form, towards which we have to argue, continuously, as that which is always farthest off, so that we remain incomplete as factuality but not as facticity. This is Aristotle‘s the-fact-of-being-humanbeginning, the identity both we and design as a discipline looks for. But, having dealt with the difficulty of an easy and linear notion of inputs and outputs, and the argument moving on to the question of whether it would be better to regard communication as based on fields of force, we need to look at the complexity of a cybernetic design conversation, which is far more than simply a means to a design product end, but involves all the nested systems that make up what we call the socio-technical world, and as such this conversation must naturally touch on ethics, that which will not let itself be expressed, another aspect of the entirely not there nature of much of communication. We have to find a new language of expression, and, based on the work of Davies (2000:43; 243) and Prigogine (1980:89-90), my argument will be that the complexity of quantum physics makes this possible, and even though a wavefunction is known as a mathematical object, it does represent the information content of any existing state, and most importantly, it is non-local, i.e. ubiquitous, and ideally suited to a model of social structuration. We can become our own internal information for own consumption, but we also ‗identify with the object itself‘, becoming part of the environmental information, sharing with the group and sharing in the group. In that sense human knowing is (at least) two wavefunctions that collide, two information structures that form a new entity via a phase transition. Individually, as the collective, we are this new single spacetime landscape, and that is discussed next. 70 We are observers, and we need to invite observation. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 270 Acknowledgement of text The following paper was printed in Pre-proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy, February 22-23, 2007, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (van der Merwe, 2007a). The complexity of design as a wavefunction Before tackling the philosophical and ethical issue of suicide, let‘s begin with another contradiction to everyday common sense. In design terms what is a beginning often stems from another ending, and vice versa. Design, as a human activity – of thought – does not have a beginning or an ending, proper, but it does deal with a continuous becoming, and this paper is written from a design perspective. Norretranders (1999: 70) reminds us that normal is boring, that order and chaos are both devoid of much interest. The territory that lies between these two extremes, however, is the stuff of dreams, of evolution, of the becoming of true reality, however fleeting that may prove to be. This term, territory, also refers to a concept that has occupied man for as long as he has been evolving, since it represents the ―inward compulsion in animate beings to posses and defend such a space‖ (Ardrey, 1970: 13). Is that compulsion merely a material phenomenological attribute, or can it also be seen as a metaphysical phenomenon? Why would we defend this territory, any territory? We may also say that in all territorial species, without exception, possession of a territory lends enhanced energy to the proprietor. Students of animal behavior cannot agree as to why this should be, but the challenger is almost invariably defeated … there seems some mysterious flow of energy and resolve which invests a proprietor on his home grounds. (Ardrey, 1970: 13) Why should this be? How can anyone explain why a sports team would win consistently on their home ground but lose to the rival team away from home? If true reality is that which we can observe, touch, measure and calculate, then why should a mere change in venue make all the difference in the world? Because there is more than one world to contend with, and more than one reality to effectively change the course of history itself, let alone influence the choices made by any one individual. This territory, the space of belonging that we all would give our lives for, is not really a physical space, but a mental construct that is our metaphysical selves, the only ‗home‘ we will ever inhabit, and that space must, at all costs, be defended. In a postmodern age that does not seem to offer a steady state environment where an ideal of home is safe and dependable, it is all the more important that we have a better idea of how to conceive of ourselves as a functioning species that will not be fatally damaged when their physical territory is either changed or destroyed. We need a new way of speaking about and looking at the world, and so looking at our selves, understanding the way we think now but, crucially, the way we can think into the future by looking at the new us. Shotter (1994) speaks of knowledge of the third kind, a ‗practical‘ way of knowing that can ‗call out‘, not simply responses and reactions, but also a ―stance toward our own construction of our own abilities‖. Norretranders‘ third possibility (a territory between complete chaos and total control) is complexity. To him this space contains everything that we can wish for, because here we really live our lives and here we communicate how we feel about whatever touches us, ―changes in the weather, wonderful landscapes, friendly conversation, delicious salads, and fun and games‖ (Norretranders, 1999: 70-71). What do these approaches have in common? They are looking for a new way of understanding the world, but that understanding comes via an enhanced understanding of the individual, and why this individual still needs to cling to a territorial, albeit a metaphysical, space. Now we may return to that ultimate of endings, suicide. To cease to defend your territory, this space that you inhabit, that you are, is to decide that you cannot agree with Norretranders‘ view of the complexity of the wonder of life, and that Shotter‘s knowledge of a third kind does not help you construct the new person you feel you simply Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 271 must become, to make it all worthwhile, and to persuade you to defend what you have. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus had written ―There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide‖ (Green, 2005: 3). We may easily take this remark from Camus as a starting point, because, it seems to me, we can talk about the origins of life and thought, and wonder about the ontology and meaning of design, as I do, but if we cannot ask ourselves if all this is worthwhile, then we are wasting our time, or worse, recklessly spending thought-time much like contemporary culture has us consuming products. We are, I am convinced, looking at our life worlds as if nothing ever changes, when, in fact, everything changes all the time. Poor Sisyphus was condemned to push that rock up that hill for ever, and I have no doubt many people feel the same frustration that he must have experienced when it promptly rolled back down, and w/he had to start all over again. Attention to detail too often means that we miss the phase transition that takes place in any case, and we think that it is the same hill and the same rock. It most certainly is not. It is not the landscape of our material existence that has to change, but the complexity fitness landscapes of our own ontological and metaphysical landscape that we have to recognise as changing. By seeing the rock and the hill as unrelenting sameness, we are blind to different ways of seeing the real world of probabilities that can be ours. You are able to ‗see‘ - in the complex possibilities that are visible through the features of everyday survival71 - what you can become, by making choices, by conserving what works in the now (Maturana, 1997) to enable you to design your new self in the future. The reader will have spotted the omission in that last sentence, namely, having ‗conserved‘ what works for you now, but still needing new, additional, constructive elements, where on earth do you get those from? This is a philosophical design problem called the missing elements of innovation. If this world and this mind is all we have, how do we innovate and come up with new design ideas? There is nothing whatsoever in the ‗real‘ future, it not having happened yet, and we have already looked in the past and plundered historical detail for new ideas. Now what? Where do we go to from here? Where does ‗the new‘ come from?72 Design thinking does offer a solution of sorts, and it is a complex solution in that detail does not matter, because we already have those at our disposal, and still nothing much happens. Information does not seem to be the answer, because we are swamped with the stuff, everyday, and it has become Too Much, the title of Hewison‘s analysis of the ‗swinging sixties‘. ―Verbal culture was being supplanted by a visual one, and ideas were now being discussed in terms of ‗image‘‖ (Hewison, 1988: 38). Why, then, do my students suffer from a lack of ideas, living as they do in an image-conscious time? What did verbal culture have that we seem to lack today? Involvement, and that means individual participation in generating (verbalizing and visualizing) the stories of a verbal culture, and this same verbal culture depended not on the exact detail of the story told, but on the networking end-result. That is the design solution to a human (social) problem. In a postmodern age that does not seem to offer a steady state environment (above), it is the networking results of making the right connections and associations that offer new solutions to old problems, in the sense that the design process and, I suggest, individuation, should be seen to operate within a groundless field of non-specific properties (Jonas, 2004). Probability in a non-equilibrium setting forms this ‗groundless‘ and complex field of interactions, and the more I learn about complexity theory the more I see the autopoietic functions of design being portrayed, but more than this, the more I am convinced that the design of a personal ontology has to precede any understanding of autopoietic design and social systems. The new comes from us, but not as we are now – it comes from what we need to become, based on the contradictory nowness plus the new, additional, constructive elements we need to acquire. 71 72 The trick is to see the wood and not just the trees. This is when we begin thinking that nothing will come from nothing, as some unimaginative students still do, not being able to harness the power inherent in the facticity self designing the factuality self. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 272 The problem of us How do we ‗speak‘ complexity? We have to rid ourselves of the notion that language is a neat system that functions as an almost infallible tool, and that in describing disorder or complexity or neat theories of everything we can cope better with our own internal chaos of not-knowingness (below). Language is not a system (Luhmann, 1997), therefore we do not ‗have‘ it, cannot posses it in that way, and neither is there any disorder in the universe, if, as Bohm (1998) states, we mean to imply a complete absence of order. In the same vein there is no such thing as complexity, if what we really mean to say is that things are not as neatly knowable as we would like, and that therefore what we do not understand should labelled as chaotic or too complex to understand or deal with. Wheeler made this provocative statement at a Santa Fe Institute meeting in 1990, ―There is no out there out there‖ (quoted in Norretranders, 1999:10; 201); if we can accept that there is no objective and accessible reality out there, as Rorty (1992) also believed, where does that leave the idea of ‗complexity‘? Where, exactly, is complexity to be found? Like the idea of design itself, it is elusively always and already elsewhere. Is complexity, then, to be found in here? It is in that sense that, when Stuart Kauffman (1996:9) says that ―we need to paint a new picture‖ when discussing the relationship between self-organization and selection, I would interpret that as an injunction to re-design the relationship between self-organization (autopoiesis/inside) and selection (non-equilibrium/outside). If we need to learn how to speak complexity (as if we were learning a new form of Esperanto) we need to find it first. We need to discover that there is no outside, and neither is there, really, an observable inside. The complex answer to the problem of us is to redesign, to rethink how we become, and that happens nowhere, and it happens here-and-now, but not as we are used to. Not only is consciousness a wonderfully complex phenomenon, normal human beings manage to perform the most complex tasks without thinking. What we are looking for we do anyway, but we cannot see it: we seem to think it is something else altogether, something very practical and not philosophical enough to make us think further than the surface meaning of the words. We need to rethink the notion of conversation. The problem between us How do we speak the complexities that make up our beings? Ordinary conversation just happens, and it does not usually lead anywhere spectacular - why should it? The problem is, it can lead to another world, to a quite different realization that makes you look at yourself in a different light, because, beyond that point, you are a different person. The problem is, we usually associate this phenomenon with bad news, with upheaval, with uncertainty and chaos. News of a death, or a betrayal, news of a negative kind. Very seldom does conversation carry the magic markers that designate a positive point of no return, a phase transition from this reality to a better one, and very seldom do we, in the here-andnow, suddenly envisage our new and better life beyond this moment in time. This phase transition happens nowhere and it happens right here. This is a description of a cybernetic conversation, that phenomenon that is nothing and everything, a conceptual instrument that can only happen and only has existence between us. To imagine our new possibilities, our new selves, it is not implausible to think ―that life emerged as a phase transition to collective autocatalysis once a chemical minestrone, held in a localized region able to sustain adequately high concentrations, became thick enough with molecular diversity‖ (Kauffman, 1996:274). So the question is, when are the circumstances just right for a phase transition, this autoreproduction, to take place – i.e. when do you reach the point when external triggers have done enough ‗triggering‘ to begin the autoproduction process, and is it this simple? When our ideas soup becomes thick enough with ideas diversity, we do not stop all external influences, on the contrary, just about then we really start to pull in more of the stuff! What we have to ask is what happens just before, during, and immediately after this phase transition? What did you think you were capable of before this Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 273 phase transitional conversation (psychology speak for therapy), what did you begin to perceive during the conversation, and who are you now? This type of conversation is a journey of discovery that concentrates mainly on crossing a gap between the now and the yet-to-be, allowing us to ―gain a foothold at another shore of reality‖ (Polanyi, 1962:123). The floating pattern of behavioural action we use as support base is the 'meeting-place' where teacher and student may co-produce meaning from the environment (Van der Merwe, 2000). If we intelligently use this environment the 'hidden aspects of the unknown' can be seen as simply the known data turned pattern, clues and pointers to the so-called unknown solution (Polanyi, 1962:120–128). Based on the here-and-now, triggered by the not-yet, this meeting-place is Luhmann‘s nowhere conversational speech bubble, the communication that speaks to communication, the problem between us. A crazy quilt spacetime ―’Where do you come from?’ said the Red Queen. ‘And where are you going?‘‖ (Carroll, 1978:243). The problem between us, at least in my design world, looks somewhat like a wavefunction, although Kauffman uses a patchwork quilt to illustrate this point. What he calls a patch procedure (Kauffman, 1996:252) is visually quite simple: imagine the space, all the space, that can constitute your life-world. Imagine it as a patchwork quilt, with each patch representing the parts of a non-serial, difficult-to-solve problem (much like life, really). He is talking about spacetime, in equilibrium, a space that contains nothing, a flat quilt with no colour and no pattern but nevertheless, there, a something that we use as yardstick. The minute we add things, like gravity, movement (time), attractors, then the quilt starts to react, or rather, the quilt is drawn upon, warped, becomes a landscape that is trying to change (transform) itself into a fitness landscape, but the trouble between us, is that all the patches, the squares that make up the quilt, are trying to do the same thing. ―Each patch climbs toward fitness peaks on its own landscape, but in doing so deforms the fitness landscape of its partners‖ (Kauffman, 1996:253), and this happens because finding a solution in one patch will change the nature of the problem for another patch, through the act of networking or interconnection; we are all part of this crazy quilt spacetime landscape we call social reality. This process can become chaotic, as you might imagine, and this ‗Red Queen chaotic behavior‘ can only be avoided by a system of co-evolution (codesign or participatory design), and this system of cooperation lies between chaos and order, or in design‘s case, between totalitarian analysis and too much creative freedom. According to Mitleton-Kelly (2005) ―Complexity arises from the inter-relationship, inter-action and interconnectivity of elements within a system and between a system and its environment‖. This means that autopoiesis, as applied to social systems by Luhmann, equates with this definition of the term complexity. In design terms, autopoiesis is neither one thing nor another, but is the interrelationship that is catalysed by the communicative conversation between Kauffman‘s patches, to get rid of the Red Queen‘s tendency towards chaos. However, Carroll‘s Red Queen did ask that very important question, and we each have to think what this means. Where do you come from? I come from now. Where are you going? Where can you help me to get to? What have you got to work with? I have you. I have the rest of the quilt to help me find a solution, since the problem description, the probability descriptions, the parts and wholes are all part of the same fabric: there is nothing else, and it literally depends on how the elements are put together whether you have a problem or a solution, a poison or a food. In opposition to Mitleton-Kelly‘s (2005) belief that ―Complexity, however, does not argue for everincreasing interconnectivity‖, I argue for an increase. Mitleton-Kelly emphasises the dependency resulting from this connectivity, and ―that the greater the interdependence between related systems or entities the wider the ‗ripples‘ of perturbation or disturbance of a move or action by any one entity on all the other related entities‖. This is a wavefunction that, in contrast to what Mitleton-Kelly believes are non-beneficial effects on everyone concerned, allows the new to emerge, and allows each Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 274 participant to extract from this phase transition whatever is autopoietically necessary for each system to not only survive but to evolve and prosper. Each survives because the other survives and prospers. If such a phrase makes any sense, an autopoietic ‗dependency‘ is not a negative thing, being the very fabric making up the conditions for emergence and possibility. Each fitness landscape adjusts itself to the adjacent one in the patchwork quilt of spacetime. As Kauffman (1996:253) states, ―Patches, in short, may be a fundamental process we have evolved in our social system‖, and if the analogy holds, then adjacent fitness landscapes, trying to accommodate individual fitness peaks that are not all precisely the same, collectively seen as the spacetime landscape, means that the fabric of this landscape stretches / deforms – unlike a real quilt with its individual patches, this spacetime quilt does not ruck up, taking away from one patch if another patch reaches a high fitness peak and pulls towards itself more of the spacetime fabric. The social process of fitness landscaping / spacetiming manufactures more fabric, as it were, because it stretches and leaves the surrounding areas untouched but at the same time enriched. This is working with probability existence, not material existence, and if scientific spacetime creates the conditions for gravity, then any body large enough to deform spacetime is an attractor – any person or idea that is deemed important enough acts as an attractor in the social spacetime and gravitates towards itself other ideas and influences, quite probably proving Dawkins (2006:158) correct, only he reminds us that mere ideas can be these attractors, since they act as patterns of information, the new replicators he calls memes, further suggesting that they mutate through propagating. Price (2004) calls this a process of selforganized emergence that is fed by a discourse that contains the cultural replicators called memes, and that these carry the schemata for a complex social order in the making. Before returning to an explanation of how this wavefunction works, we may examine the complex quilt of social spacetime from another vantage point, since our brains have no problem with the quality called non-locality (below), a truly complex and somewhat bizarre idea. But what is this social complexity, and why would a scientific theory hold any importance for human development, let alone help in deciding philosophical questions? Complicated ethics Edmonds (1999) rightly refers to the idea that complexity theory should be made useful to systems. The question what is complexity in design? is a philosophical question, and designers have to ask what is the philosophy of design?, which in turn leads to a situation wherein Willis (1999) can ask, what is the ontology of design?, and answer with ―designing is fundamental to being human – we design, that is to say, we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings – in turn we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed‖. So what exactly is complexity? Edmonds (1999) deals with several concepts that he relates to complexity, one of which is particularly useful when correlating complexity and design ontology. This is ignorance, or to be fair, we may call it a not-knowingness that characterises the way many people deal with the world, whether from true ignorance or as an automatic response to the perceived complexities of modern life. This leaves the impression that complexity is just a grey mass of tangled webs, too intricate for individuals to deal with, and obscuring what should have been obvious and transparent. Either that, or the term is used wrongly to refer to simple disorder, a situation of chaotic information overload with no discernible patterns. Both definitions are equally bad, but describe what many people experience as normal life, hence the often-preferred ignorance. I prefer the approach that Kauffman (1996) uses, namely that complexity is one of the terms we may use when describing a natural process of connection, and extrapolating from the biological to the social, this can refer to the connections that are made between people, whether by design or chance, and Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 275 gradually establishing links, then groupings, then larger and larger social components, and in the process gaining some benefit from these connections and groupings. If left to our own devises these are normally obvious and transparent, although it may take some time to unpack the threads that link all the members of an extended family, a social group, or a whole community, placing each in relation to the other. This is human evolutionary complexity, understandable as parts that make up the whole, but not used in toto as a conversational element in isolation. This simply means that life as it has evolved, including social life, is both complex and simplified at the same time. In order to manage life we abstract and simplify, but the crucial point is, complexity does not disappear in the process, it is the bedrock upon which we build the simplified structures of everyday organizational management. Seen this way, social complexity, as does the design process, goes as far as is needed for the (local) system to work properly, and no further, yet, until change is necessary, or until existing (but not used) connections need to be activated between local and global systems. Correlation with biology is again possible, because evolution through complex adaptive and autocatalytic systems means that, following Kauffman (1996:114), we can admit that complexity and creativity not only are linked, but that they are naturally ubiquitous, that they form the crazy quilt fabric of social spacetime, the vital ingredients for an ontology of design. On the other hand, Churchman (1977) speaks of complexity as nothing new, in the sense of every historical period having grappled with the larger-than-life mysteries through its philosophers, who love asking questions but who dislike easy answers. Churchman has three key terms that he deals with: the first, ontological question that asks what the philosophy of reality might be. Secondly, epistemology, and here we have to question how we can know anything to be real (or not) in a complex world. In terms of design ontology that is a thorny issue, since we have to deal with the created and purposefully designed artificial while remaining, epistemologically, on track, while Latour (1992) goes even further and speaks of non-human actors (designed artefacts) that play defined, and sometimes controlling, roles in our lives. How will we be able to deal with this contemporary and quite complex world? Quite possibly through Churchman‘s third key term, namely ethics, which encompasses the previous two. ―The ethical question is: Is complexity a valuable thing in our society, or an evil thing, or neither?‖ To the question, can complexity be judged on an ethical basis? we can respond with complexity is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral73. Complexity, following Castells‘ (2000:76) definition of technology, is a force that is ubiquitous in modern life (cf. Kauffman, above), and as such needs investigation much like Castells‘ inquiry into the technology / society influence / counter-influence scenario, because the complexity we need to investigate is of our own making, our creation. But still, complexity as an ethical issue? According to Churchman (1977) the philosopher Spinoza was of the opinion that ―the ethical mode of life is understanding‖, and Russell (1987:555) agrees that Spinoza thought the preservation (cf. what we conserve, above) of man‘s own being results from a wise act, which in turn is made possible through personal and contextual understanding. For me, the valuable connection to complexity is Wittgenstein‘s belief (Edmonds and Eidinow, 2001:55) that ethics can only be revealed through the way we choose to act, because as a subject it resists articulation: it is there, but we cannot talk about it. Von Foerster (1991) renders Wittgenstein‘s ―Es ist Klar, dass sich Ethik nicht aussprechen laesst‖ as ―It is clear that ethics cannot be articulated‖, but perhaps a slight shift in perspectival translation that yields ―It is clear that ethics will not let itself be expressed‖ might offer another link to understanding human behaviour. Just as Heidegger‘s Being will not let itself be expressed directly, so what we are pleased to call ethics cannot really be brought to light in direct everyday expression, except through human actions, and therefore through the consequences of the choices each individual makes. ―Fortunately, ethics has two sisters who allow her to remain unseen. One is Metaphysics, the other Dialogics‖. 73 “Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral” (Melvin Kranzberg, in Castells, 2000:76). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 276 To von Foerster, metaphysics is what happens when we find ourselves making decisions about what he calls in principle undecidable questions. This is something I can understand, and it correlates with Jacques Maritain‘s belief that we should live according to the ―logic of the structure of the living thing‖, not the logic of decidability, or what Maritain (1939:52) called the pseudo-logic of clear ideas (i.e., positivism). In that sense epistemology is opposed to metaphysics, or can be seen to be, until we are confronted by the non-logical and undecidability of really complex natural systems, namely quantum physics. Epistemology, then, and because of what in a quantum sense has always been, takes on another hue, bringing it much closer to undecidable metaphysics than many people would be comfortable with. When speaking of physics in the not too distant past we could be forgiven for assuming it an immutable subject, reassuring and safe. That has changed, and the meta of quantum physics still astound with its magic tricks and in principle undecidable answers to what should have been logical questions. Von Foerster is correct, and not alone, in pointing to the ethical character of metaphysical undecidable questions that we attempt to answer by making the ultimate philosophical choice, when we decide to be what we can become and take full responsibility for that decision. Dialogics to von Foerster is language – the dance of language. We cannot forget that ―Whatever else we are doing, we are all doing language‖ (O‘Rourke, 2003), and furthermore, that language is not a system but operates as a linking device during the structural coupling of system boundaries (Luhmann, 1997). Two people, two system boundaries, engaged in conversation are both ‗doing language‘ and using it as a linking device to engender meaning and understanding, something that has to happen then and there, every time, but cannot happen if language were (only) a decidable system with pre-programmed meanings built in. Languaging, as dialogics, is not the traditional meaning of each individual word, nor is it predictable, unless, as von Foerster (1991) says, ―language is on the track of appearance‖ monological and decidedly denotative. Dialogics concerns itself with connotative function, the undecidability, beforehand, of choice of final meaning. This is very important and very ethical – von Foerster believes that appearance in language is the root of consciousness, but that function in language is the root of conscience, because it dances with another74. You now not only take responsibility for your own choices, but also must take joint responsibility for co-creating an environment wherein another human must make choices, as close to a wavefunction as make no difference. The enabling wavefunction of design thinking One definition of complexity is that it should be seen as a way of understanding diversity, including working with rules that ―are created, and changed, in a relentless process of deliberate actions and unique interactions‖ (Castells, 2000:74), and if we could find generic characteristics that these complex systems have in common, we might be able to create the enabling infrastructures (Mitleton-Kelly, 2005) necessary to make complexity theory useful to social systems. Of course, the idea behind autopoiesis is that we have to find these generic characteristics, part of which method is to change the way we ask questions and therefore ‗see‘ differently. We cannot refer to the external world as if objectively, therefore we can only reference the self, as system. Keeping in mind the patchwork quilt of spacetime that we call our environment, ―the question ‗How does the organism obtain information about its environment?‘ becomes ‗How does it happen that the organism has the structure that permits it to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists?‘‖ (Maturana and Varela, 1980:2). Semantics change to structure, and if we, as I propose, think of the concept of structural spacetime as the rough equivalent of the human central nervous system, then a theory-in-praxis of complexity can evolve along with our understanding of what it is to be human. From my particular worldview, both subjectively personal and as a design thinker (my ‗design thinking‘ has become my ‗persona thinking‘), I find it 74 When Von Foerster (Waters, 1999) equates an invitation to dialogue with an invitation to dance he is speaking about the type of willing or consensual togetherness: “when we are talking with each other, we … invent what we both wish the other would invent with me”. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 277 difficult to separate the image of the central nervous system from the image of ubiquitous spacetime: an individual, as an autopoietic system reliant on the internal grid of the central nervous system, is a copy of the grid (fitness landscape) of spacetime, on and in which system it finds itself, by finding the other(s). How is this possible? Apart from the manifold prime functions of the human brain, we can also ―imagine, that is to say, represent and simulate, external events and programs of action for the animal itself‖ (Monod, 1997:149). We are capable of these projective functions, and when we realise that what we project stems ―from the experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species over the course of its evolution‖, and that this simulative, projective function has enabled the central nervous system to design itself for a particular function (Monod, 1997:154), we have to ask what that function is. That is like asking, why (how) are we alive? The closest thing to an answer comes from Stafford Beer (1980:66), who wrote, regarding Maturana‘s notion of freedom from the ego, that this forms a natural contradiction of autopoiesis. It survives, as it must, but what is this it? Self-preservation is the ultimate goal of any being, but this then means that the ego/id cannot be formed in complete isolation from that which it depends on – the other. Freedom from it / the ego would mean freedom from a self-centred interpretation that does not allow dialogue or that does not take others into account. We are symbol manipulators, we have to be, and our language structures attest to that, as do our dreams. These are often filled with Freudian ‗archaic remnants‘ that do not stem from individual experience, ―and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind‖ (Jung, 1978:56). We consciously, but also unconsciously, produce symbols (abstracted complexity production), because we want to make sense of the world we think we perceive. We also know that ―man … never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses‖ (Jung, 1978:4). My argument is that the central nervous system, as a sensing organ, and on a metaphysical level (‗activated‘ by the memory knowledge of physical phenomenology), uses the projective functions in a deeply biological way that follows the structural understanding of Maturana‘s question, How does it happen that the organism has the structure that permits it to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists? Monod (1997:156) speaks of a non-verbal mental reflection that, as a projection, imagines or simulates an experience (of the ‗outside-self‘) based on forms, forces and interactions. That means the ‗structures‘ encountered in this ‗outside‘ space become the structures of the organism, initially, and on further development, both sets of structures ‗recognise‘ each other. ―Let the attention so concentrate upon the imagined experience as to be oblivious to all else, and I know … that one may suddenly find oneself identifying with the object itself, with, say, a molecule of protein‖ (Monod, 1997:156). Based on the work of Davies (2000:43; 243) and Prigogine (1980:89-90), my argument is that the complexity of quantum physics makes this possible, and even though a wavefunction is known as a mathematical object, it does represent the information content of any existing state, and most importantly, it is non-local, i.e. ubiquitous, and ideally suited to a model of social spacetime. Furthermore, to complete the correlation between complexity and human knowing, atoms have both particle and wave-like properties: socially, they can be the system and the environment at the same time. We can be our own autopoietic system, self-organizing and ‗closed off‘ from external forces, but we are also the environment that sustains us through ‗natural‘ interaction. We are our own internal information for own consumption, but we also ‗identify with the object itself‘, becoming part of the environmental information. In that sense human knowing is two wavefunctions that collide, two information structures that form a new entity via the phase transition mentioned earlier. Having reached this point, I can revise the projective function of the central nervous system interacting with its Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 278 environment: the grid of the fitness landscape of social spacetime, on and in which each individual human system finds itself, is a copy of the internal grid of the central nervous system. We are the universe. To borrow Monod‘s (1997:87) words and refocus them so that we can see ourselves, the following: ―No preformed and complete structure pre-existed anywhere; but the architectural plan for it was present in its very constituents. It can therefore come into being spontaneously and autonomously, without outside help and without the injection of additional information. The necessary information was present, but unexpressed, in the constituents. The epigenetic building of a structure is not a creation; it is a revelation‖. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 279 Reinjection In the article on cybernetic conversation (above) I state that systemic thinking, which implies the inclusion of the person or the group that commissions the design in the first place, used to be a takenfor-granted and integral part of the ‗design‘ process when design was still looked upon as a craft, and the term design had much more value as a process than it did as a product. As such, as I do in the paper above, we could speak of design without beginning and without end, or, more practically speaking, the next good beginning came from the previous ending; each copy, say, of a chair or a cabinet was its own original, each its own beginning that stemmed from the lessons learned during the process of making the previous one. The aura of the original idea was migrated to each new ‗copy‘ as the craftsman developed his art. Very unfortunately, with the development of disciplines came the differentiation between complex beginnings and endings, and they seemed to turn into simplified black and white things, each its own original with no links to any other, and rationality and reason came to symbolise the facticity of empirical detail. ―From the mid-seventeenth century on … an imbalance began to develop‖ between reason and reasonableness, between human adaptability and argumentation and the rigours and proofs of formal argumentation (Toulmin, 2001:14-15), just as an imbalance gradually came to be established between mass production (begun with the Industrial Revolution, c. 1750) and a craft sensibility. We find ourselves today in a position of compromise, in that the clock cannot be turned back (the Arts and Crafts Movement succeeded only for a short while), and yet so many movements and schools of thought at variance with globalism have come to the fore that the status quo needs to be re-examined. In Chapter 1 mention is made of, e.g., the Lancaster and Northumbria Universities joint Design PhD Conference (2009) based on the interrelationships between sustainability, innovation and design, specifically to challenge design activities and to urge the professions to reflect ―changes in society, technology, the environment and business [changes that demand] the development of new creative directions … and new kinds of designers and creative professionals‖. The same type of call was made by the Cumulus Kyoto 2008 Conference (Resetting Design – A New Beginning) and the Brighton 05-06-07 (Boddington et al., 2008) declaration, while an AIGA research report highlighted trends for future designers that link to the Design for Future Needs (ICSID, 2001) project as well as the ICSID/Danish Designers (2008) research project that concentrated on design‘s vital role in society and the impact this should have on education, i.e., ―We have to kill the myth about the solitary designer, who can see through the complexity of this world alone … [reporting that Danish design students] possess a large degree of humanistic understanding‖. Design is recognised as a social constructivist enterprise, a collaborative conversation by any means, and a making profession that is open to the complexities of our various socio-technical worlds. It is therefore important that we see ourselves as a functioning species and more than that, as a functional explanation that is the basis for a cybernetic design conversation, so that we can become more than one and less than many. We do need a new way to speak about and to the world, and that language is the language of complexity, not to describe the world but to describe our new frameworks of understanding, e.g., Shotter‘s knowledge of a third kind that can call out responses from us because we project our ontology-of-equipment [not-A] onto the knowing objects we converse with, fully aware that these ‗object‘/others will touch us because they talk back. It is now time to admit that this cybernetic design conversation can only take place in that territory between complete chaos and total control (Norretranders‘s third possibility), or as was shown above, on a probability curve between complete analysis and total creativity; neither of these poles are in themselves sufficient for human needs, and thus a balance needs to be struck between rationality and reasonableness, between first and secondorder cybernetics. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 280 The fact that we must ensure that this phase transition between old and new ground-of-understanding takes place also means we need to place ourselves at the centre of this event, since the new comes from us (the mutual ‗us‘ and not from the individual) and not from some external source, nor even from the interaction of our old knowledge and the new knowledge that can be sourced (some would say, learned), and yet, the most difficult aspect to bring into education is that you are, but you are not, responsible. When you place ‗yourself‘ at the centre of this phase transition, it is the process that is put into effect, and ‗it‘ must survive as it will, making sure that education and design uses us. It is not the exact detail of the story told, but the networking end-result that matters, bearing in mind that end means place, and that this place is merely the topos in which everything is being reassembled through renegotiation of meaning (cf. Chapter 3:91; topoi as meeting places). This is the problem of us and the problem between us, since that collective us is applicable to and appropriated by all actors, human and non-human, and only on the other side of this conversational space can we ask the question, who are you, now? Strangely enough, it is only then that you can truly answer the Red Queen: where do you come from and where are you going?75 The problem between us is this thing called a wavefunction, but for students it is not that strange, since they have already been introduced to the concept, simply in other terms. Once knowing that a wavefunction is a term for all that can be known at this moment (the fact that this moment also implicitly denotes and connotes Norretranders‘s absent-but-present exformation 76 and the already existing new probabilities is a matter for further and complex unpacking of Figure 25 Splitting the Infinitive), the students recognise George Kelly‘s notion of personal constructs, which is, as a visual model, the forerunner of two autopoietic systems structurally coupling in the specific medium they find themselves in; each system contains a wavefunction that is constantly fluctuating and adapting, coontogenically, and yet for its own sake. Complexity increases with every new structural coupling process, and in this space between chaos and order we do need to keep control, each of our own process, and that simply has to be the intrinsic control of reasonableness. This wavefunction is our autopoietic boundary, and it is who we are at any one moment; ‗we‘ are neither inside nor fully outside, but inbetween, in wakeful consciousness. The fitness landscape of spacetime isn‘t some imaginary concept (yes, it is!) … isn‘t some imaginary concept in the sense of being something trivial and non-consequential, because as a model of who we are and can be it is, to all intents and purposes, our habitus and practice, i.e., it is our field(s) of force77 that contain all the constantly-in-flux wavefunctions of not simply our own ‗productions‘ but also those of the neighbouring patches, each trying to tell its own story and each trying to reach a fitness peak, each trying to survive as it must. Bourdieu (1998:138) defines fields as peculiar social universes, peculiar in the same sense of Latour‘s (2005b) description of the social as ―a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling‖, and in these fields of activity we are offered ―conditions propitious to the development of a form of social exchange, of competition, even of struggle, which are indispensable for the development [of our] potentialities‖. Tellingly, Bourdieu (:138) adds that, ―in order to make the most of yourself in them, you must make the most of reason‖, which means that reason itself is 75 ‗Only on the other side‘ is the convenient way to express this notion, which is in fact something that happens inside the conversational space (cf. Richard Jung‘s lacunae, below). ―In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion o f how we have become, and of where we are going‖ (Giddens, 1991:54). 76 Exformation can be compared to ex libris, ‗from my library,‘ while information has the prefix in, meaning into; towards; within, which, metaphorically, places information in the category of 77 instead of the more inclusive category of everything . Cf. Chapter 3:80: Gramma/topology draws on the free invention of interacting circular theories as fields of force, and the human observer provides one of the strongest force fields in the equation. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 281 generated in these social universes, these fluctuating fields of force, and ―you must make arguments, demonstrations, refutations triumph in them‖ (Bourdieu, 1998:138); this can only be done if, in good faith, we enter ―the mode of dwelling autonomously alongside entities within-the-world. In this kind of ‗dwelling‘ as a holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the presentat-hand is consummated‖ (Heidegger, 1962:88-89). The construction (in this space rather the uncovering) of reason-as-reasonableness is, in actor-network parlance, the negotiation of meaning of the role that one actor can play in the ensemble, and reason sive rationality (as an ontology-ofequipment entity) is one such actor that the other actors need to function, collaboratively. All actors are consummated in each other through an autopoietic co-ontogenic drift, this structural coupling that is individual and collective, selfish and selfless at the same time, in such a biologically truthful way that neither pole (as dichotomy) makes any sense on its own, another reason that Richard Jung‘s notion of the sive descriptive conjunction-disjunction makes sense in observing human sive non-human affairs. Conjunction is taken to mean two or more ‗things‘ occupying the same space at the same time, with the express notion that they might have some connective commonality, and disjunction to mean the breaking of any associative link. Interpreted as such the notion of sive is parallel to Bohm and Peat‘s convergence (enfoldment) and divergence (unfoldment) approach to making sense of this universe (cf. above), since there can be no reasonable separation made between implicate and explicate order, and each is available and implicit sive explicit in the other (natural order or socio-technical reality, whichever you prefer), just as metonymy 78 is available and implicit in metaphor, i.e., we think metaphor and express metonymy; each is dependent on the other, and neither comes first. At this point I can truthfully (as factuality and not facticity) report that this document is feeding off itself, and that I have no more idea of what will happen next, specifically and in detail, than one can see into the future that isn‘t, yet. What I am writing cannot be foreseen but then neither is it a complete surprise (à la Donald Schön), and all that has gone before is becoming visible in all that can be seen, on this page, which is as designed an artefact as any other. Who designs? Not I, says the author, having died a natural death (cf. Chapter 3) and morphed into a hybrid observer sive designer that records what he observes as it develops, in this spacetime landscape of multiple patches. ―Patches, in short, may be a fundamental process we have evolved in our social system‖ (Kauffman, 1996:253), as well as in our autopoietically knowing systems-of-being, which means that each spacetime patch is, in fact, two patches, on the one hand, and two halfpatches on the other. To paraphrase Schön‘s (1987:4) statement (cf. Chapter 3:96), our collective and collaborative, complementary acts work within a ―problem setting [that] is an ontological process – in Nelson Goodman‘s … memorable word, a form of worldmaking‖. A theory of [design] gramma/topology (and in this case, at this point, a theory of us) thus comes closer to what Genosko (1998:79) called the undisciplined inbetween [sive], going so far as to state that ―instability is the character of undisciplined theory in and of the between‖, thereby linking Deleuze and Guattari‘s concept of the rhizome (‗natural‘ 78 ―Experience with physical objects provides the basis for metonymy‖ (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003:59); cf. ftn. 28 and the notion of non-human entities (objects or ideas) as proxy people, as well as the idea of switching constantly between figure (metonymy) and ground (metaphor); in making sense of the world we normally use the conjunction-disjunction mechanism, in that we use metaphor (conjunction) to bring two entities together (expecially when dealing with ethics, which will not let itself be expressed directly), and in putting it out there in the world through communication, i.e., expressing it in verbal terms or some visual means (including designed objects), the conjunction switches to disjunction, as it has to, cleaving a space between itself and the meaning that is the real destination of the message), or, virtually separating the meaning from the vehicle. One interesting example that Lakoff and Johnson (2003:35) use is ―The ham sandwich is waiting for his check‖, meaning that the waitress uses metaphor to conjoin the customer with what he ate, and then expresses this thought in a context that allows and indeed requires disjunction, a virtual removing of the meaning (that customer) from the vehicle for thought (ham sandwich). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 282 network) to Luhmann‘s concept of contradiction as a destabilizing force. It is, indeed, too destabilizing to ‗travel‘ between convergence and divergence and yet emerge unchanged, in form and in mind. In regarding ourselves, for the sake of convenience and clarity, as simply two adjacent patches, we resemble the classroom situation between teacher and student. There are inputs and outputs, there are feedback loops because the two of you are neighbours and you are having a common or garden fence conversation (cf. discussion, below). The influence that each can have on the other can be regarded as negligible or very minimal, but influence there will be. Any co-ontogenic drift changes something, but the thing to remember is, you may have gained something from over the hedge, from the other patch, but that did not diminish your neighbour in any sense; in fact, the joy of gossiping usually adds to the framework-of-knowing of that neighbour‘s structure. However, there will always be at least two adjacent neighbours in the one-dimensional plane, one in front and one behind, but in design and spacetime terms you have eight two-dimensional neighbours (including the ones across the street), while in three-dimensions you have fourteen neighbouring patches to interact with, and that‘s just the minimum number. In real life a student has to deal with multiple inputs and design multiple outputs, which is a daunting task, if you think that the outputs have to differ substantially for each of the contact patches that your system structurally couples with. In pure design terms that is exactly what you have to do, seeing that design is a social constructivist activity that relies on user-input, and your task is to give the users what they want. Well, it is but then, it isn‘t. I have made out an argument for the migration of the aura from an original to a copy that takes the place of the real, and paradoxically that is what I believe people as designers have to do as well. Nevertheless, ‗you‘ don‘t move to the neighbouring patches, and ‗they‘ do not come to you: the fabric of this landscape stretches / deforms – unlike a real quilt with its individual patches, this spacetime quilt does not ruck up, taking away from one patch if another patch reaches a high fitness peak and pulls towards itself more of the spacetime fabric. The social process of fitness landscaping / spacetiming manufactures more fabric, as it were, because it stretches and leaves the surrounding areas untouched but at the same time enriched. In an autopoietic coupling the systems do not even know of each other, since that is not the point, but their passing and their constant interactive presencing within the medium leaves the medium enriched, leaves the spacetime fabric enriched for those in the neighbourhood. A designer need only ‗dwell‘ in the medium of the cybernetic design conversation with the users of design, and do so as a holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization, to become the form of the argument being put forward, to embody the implicate & convergent order sive explicate & divergent order of an argument striving for reasonableness, by example. The designer gives nothing to the user except by example, through a gramma/topological framework of reasoning that treats itself as an object sive subject entity, i.e., a meta-design, that allows the user to perceive and arrive at the same point as the designer did, the same point as any system does for its own sake. Only in this way can all forms of manipulation and coercion be avoided. I stated in the paper that this is working with probability existence, not material existence, and if scientific spacetime creates the conditions for gravity, then any body large enough to deform spacetime is an attractor – any person or idea that is deemed important enough acts as an attractor in the social spacetime, and this Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 283 alone will create the conditions for gravitating towards itself79 other ideas and influences. Remembering the idea of replicators that Dawkins calls memes, which propagate and mutate in the process, and also remembering that the formation of a focal actor that attracts authority to itself is not a good idea, even though it is the easiest thing to achieve, allows us to picture the human and the non-human entity, playing at being ontology-of-equipment, moving through the medium in which they exist as attractors sive replicators while being propagated and mutated in the process of living-for-the-self, but such a life that all in the vicinity may benefit from the richness left behind. 80 Price (2004) calls this a process of self-organized emergence that is fed by a discourse, and that these replicators (new frameworks for thought) carry the schemata for a complex social order in the making; we are these replicators and new frameworks for thought, and others can see enough of the memes we portray to arrive at their own version of Jakobson‘s Ladder (Figure 28). In the argument for the migration of the aura I stated that a theory of and for design, gramma/topology, according to my argument, must conform to the ontological sive epistemological make-up of the designer-researcher, a creature (i.e., a creation) somewhere inbetween Dasein and Being that enters the mode of dwelling autonomously alongside entities within-the-world, and this ontological sive epistemological make-up, i.e., its structure or form, designs itself as an extension of our central nervous system. In using a memeenabling mechanism such as gramma/topology we can allow the action of our self sive gramma/topology projection to design the new combination, a cyber-human blend that makes no distinction between the human and non-human entities of its make-up, and ‗it‘ survives, as Stafford Beer indicated (above). We are at that point where we can ask that important question, who are you? The answer is, freedom from the ego, which leads to, ―How does it happen that the organism has the structure that permits it to operate adequately in the medium in which it exists?‖ (Maturana and Varela, 1980:2). This is a contradiction, if not another paradox, in that we expect both the construction of a survival mechanism and we want freedom from the self, at the same time. And yet ‗it‘ survives, but what is the form of this that survives, if not our own ontological sive epistemological form? Once having stumbled upon the idea of the central nervous system as an extension of our searching and projecting abilities, as ontology-of-equipment, I found it too difficult to separate that image from the image of ubiquitous spacetime, and found myself thinking that, as I am an autopoietic system that bumps up against other systems in the virtual ‗out there,‘ I must be taking something of my self with me in this … whatever it is I am doing. If it is true that I rely on the internal grid of my central nervous system, then what am I doing ‗out there‘ if I am, really, still ‗in here‘? I have argued that the self finds itself in that inbetween landscape that does not acknowledge any in here or out there that would make any sense to the system concerned, so we may ask, can the ‗in here‘ structure of the nervous system be extended outwards, like filaments or tendrils of far-knowing? Can it be that I am a copy of the spacetime fitness landscape, on and in which system I find myself, by finding the other(s)? Through our powers of imagination we can represent or simulate the world external to our own system, because this is one of the prime functions of the human brain, and what we project (this simulative function) stems ―from the experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species over the course of its evolution‖ (Monod, 1997:154); what we project, this grid of the fitness landscape of social spacetime, on and in which each individual human system finds itself, is a copy of the internal grid of the central nervous system, and we find that we are the universe, our ownmost more than one and less than many form of flexible inbetweenness, incomplete by design. ‗We‘ project, not I. 79 The body is not just a physical entity which we ‗possess‘, it is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity‖ (Giddens, 1991:99). 80 I am a constant gardener, and I recognise this description as applicable to an earthworm; from the viewpoint of this earth-eating machine, the whole point is a living-for-the -self, but in doing so every other actor in the garden benefits greatly. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 284 The complexity of design as a wavefunction thus means, in effect, that the essence (as far as we may speak of an essence) of design is not to be found the product, and not even in the process of design towards that product, unless we manage to perceive our ever-developing self as the product; the essence of design is every system coupling that takes place in communication, as Figure 29 shows. In this poster presentation for the Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy I tried to encapsulate what complexity means to design, seeing that we are the (main) wavefunctions design has to rely on. Figure 29. The Complexity of Design as a Wavefunction. Cf. Addendum D. [1] Design needs an identity and so do we, as long as we realise that identity stems form a continuous becoming, which means that any end, indeed all ‗ends‘ are mere beginnings for another phase of becoming, which allows us to move from place to place, from agora to agora, and experience a multitude of spaces of reassembly and renegotiation, and also, to experience what was always and already but differently there, except that we were not ready to perceive what was previously hidden from us, hidden not by the space or the object or the event, but hidden by our own unknowing form, at that point. [2] The form of design and the form of identity is a relationship of purpose, a cybernetic bildung that is a framing action inclusive of where we have been sive where we wish to go, the former playing a part in the latter through choices we make in the now, since what we have to work with, despite the deceptive structure presented by the past, is in fact, for the purposes of an own future, still a groundless field(s) of force, separate and discontinuous until we, through our purposeful action, make distinctions and conciliate, i.e., draw towards us (or rather, let that which needs to be seen come towards us) those elements that, when they start the process of converging sive diverging (cf. Fig. 24, the Unified Field Theory of Design) allows a model of us to emerge. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 285 [3] Both design and Dasein, thus, are chasing the elusive Being that is ever farthest away, simply because the process has never had a worldly beginning and will never reach an end, and this journey of discovery sive research (surprise and intent, the one feeding off the other) happens on the mutually ubiquitous spacetime landscape where the fitness of both forms will be tested through both being each other‘s distinction sive difference between an own system and the medium in which both find themselves, a medium that acts as environment to that developing system(s). [4] The choices we make for a model of us also connects, in the process of being on the edge of order and chaos, to that which is ever farthest away and as close as choice, a designerly projection of that particular and peculiar mix of input spaces, already its own end and conclusion were it not that every end is at once another beginning via the agora of and in the spacetime landscape, but we have to be continuously aware of the responsibility of the mutual choices we make, since our new forms are being connected to what should concern Dasein towards Being, i.e., the nature of the self through our animal and phenomenological structures of understanding, much like our immediate ancestors did when still in the trees, but also the nature of the self through that potential nest of vipers we thought had been caged and, being out of view we thought were out of reach. We might be the universe, to ourselves, but we are not in full control and therefore do not create so much as reveal what is there. The complexity of design as a wavefunction is our own developing form which we can observe through the lens of gramma/topology, which does not mean that there are no other lenses to use, other combinations of ways of knowing to experiment with. In this poster presentation I presented, for instance, a variation of gramma/topology (its forerunner, actually) called the Luhmann-Beer-Bohm-Tree model of otherness, a model of us that can help us observe how the journey from [1] – [4] is at all possible. From Luhmann I took the idea of a social autopoiesis that cleaves a space between what we think we are and everything external to us, but in the cleaving produces a new space of reassembly, new system sive environment distinctions to help us decide what we want to be, since autopoiesis explains how a copy can produce a new original, how the self needs the self to produce the self, i.e., how we can be more than one and less than many. From Beer I took the concept of the muddy box that is yet not a black box we cannot influence, otherwise we would not achieve any lasting learning environment system which, as a process of learning itself, continuously produce system sive environment distinctions because of carrying within its structure a model of that towards which it is developing, as long as we keep in mind that Bohm shows clearly that what becomes implicit when we enfold our decisions through convergence is not hidden from others, since our mutual mechanisms of knowing can ferret out what is implicit because it is available to us through languaging, and what was backgrounded can be made to explicitly foreground itself, reveal itself to others from a space of hiddenness we thought was just our own; there is no great difference between convergence and divergence, being part of a natural process of interaction with the world, and therefore there is no great difference between your model of knowing and mine since the I also uses the model of knowing of the Thou. This is another aspect of life as we know it, generously exploited by graphic designers, artists and writers, and the reason why language can work at all. This is the open secret of human communication, that our similarities are greater than our differences, based on Norretranders‘s Tree of Talking model of communication that describes the transfer of information, but a model that is implicitly based on the production of exformation. The tree itself is relatively simple, ―called a binary tree, because it branches by doubling‖ (Norretranders, 1999:106). I have no ‗correct‘ background that will allow me, in a strict disciplinary way, to disagree with Norretranders, but his assertion (made in 1999, and a decade in the computing business is at least seven x ten dog years away from its beginning) was made in the absence of parallel computing power, and that assertion is, ―Backward and forward are equidistant: In principle, communication Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 286 can always be reversed. Computations cannot. Nor can the production of exformation. Because when one discards exformation, one cannot go backward. One forgets which microstates led to the known macrostate. Forgetting is irrevocable. Communicating is revocable and reversible‖ (Norretranders, 1999:105-106). The last column on the poster refers to design (and our own form) becoming a wavefunction that merges with other wavefunctions, a state of being in which Prigogine‘s notion of the irreversible processes start, at that razor‘s edge between order and chaos. It is true that at that moment (which I have referred to as a moment of recognition) another process starts where the previous one ends, except that there is no ending but only a moving from place to place, a phase transition from the old to the new. At that moment (too brief to ‗see‘ or comprehend if you don‘t know that this is possible) all wavefunctions cease to be observable, and we may speak of an inbetween state of being called a Petrovksy lacuna (discussed below), a condition under which a wavefront‘s ‗wake‘ disappears and we can observe nothing, until the moment passes, and we find that we are not the same. Design and designers that transcend their own boundaries, their wavefunctions, become metadesigns, become the functional form of cybernetics, but they first have to transverse (turn and cross) this space of nothingness in the wake of former ways of knowing. We become who we ‗are‘ and have always potentially been. There is, however, a problem with Norretranders‘s Tree of Talking model, which is that Norretranders (1999:110-111) envisages communication as two trees of talking communicating via a tube, with all the initial information that can possibly be created making its way down the tree, ‗discarding‘ (compacting, convergence) some information and leaving the traces as exformation, until only one branch is left containing all the words that need to be said. ―They are transferred via the tube. No discarding takes place there. At the other end of the tube, the words are received and are unfurled to reveal their meaning‖ (:110). Not only can no direct communication take place between two systems, since everything is mediated, but according to Maturana and Varela (1987:196) … there is no ‗transmitted information‘ in communication. Communication takes place each time there is behavioural coordination in a realm of structural coupling. This conclusion is surprising only if we insist on not questioning the latest metaphor for communication which has become popular with the so-called communication media. According to this metaphor of the tube, communication is something generated at a certain point. It is carried by a conduit (or tube) and is delivered to the receiver at the other end. Hence, there is a something that is communicated, and what is communicated is an integral part of that which travels in the tube. Thus, we usually speak of the ‗information‘ contained in a picture, an object, or, more evidently, the printed word. The metaphor of the tube is therefore false, since it posits a type of unity between the two systems, sender and receiver, that does not emerge from the interaction itself, as if ―an interaction is determined by the perturbing agent and not by its structural dynamics‖, a situation one does not find in real life communication since each individual will not necessarily receive what the other is sending; ―each person says what he says or hears what he hears according to his own structural determination; saying does not ensure listening‖ (Maturana and Varela, 1987:196). Each individual extracts, from memory, data bits that are seemingly randomly stored, and the path that is taken to the point where anything can be said also appears to be random – and what is Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 287 said is then mediated by all manner of interventions – the ‗information‘ that the second system needs to make sense of is again mediated by that system‘s disposition and frameworks of belief, with the result that the two ‗patterns of thought‘ (how memory is stored in the brain) could look totally different. ―From the perspective of an observer, there is always ambiguity in a communicative interaction. The phenomenon of communication depends on not what is transmitted, but on what happens to the person who receives it. And this is a very different matter from ‗transmitting information‘‖ (Maturana and Varela, 1987:195). Our similarities are greater than our differences, and this is due in large part to the production of exformation, that which can remain unsaid for being implicit in what is being said, the reason that designers needs to know if their field of knowledge overlaps with that of the user, crucial in graphic design expression. We accept that communication is not direct but mediated, and that anything communicated is partly ‗produced‘ by the receiver. Not only is the path that any memory takes from brain storage space to explicit expression a somewhat devious route, but from the start, the very urge to communicate anything, the construction of any memory is not as linear as a computational model of communication. If as Norretranders (above) claims, backward and forward are, indeed, equidistant, and the tree branches by doubling, then in social communicative terms, as opposed to computational terms, we can be in two or more places at the same time, we can be more than one and less than many, since we do acquire a structure that lets us deal with the complex world of everyday concerns, but also with the complex world of everyday conceptual (re)mapping; in fact, we can see the self and the not-self at the same time, which is not simply the doubling of the tree branches, but a Derridean doubling of commentary that helps us in the critical production of meaning, which not only makes use of adjacent branches, but jumps to ‗branches‘ (i.e., storage spaces) removed in space and in time that can form a relationship with other branches of memory paths already laid down. This radical constructivist dance is not a mechanical recipe that we follow, but a search, backwards and forwards, sideways and up-and-down, looking for the fitness patterns that will, collectively, allow us to make sense of what we are dealing with. This is, in fact, the quantum science of consciousness, according to Stuart Hameroff (in Broderick, 1999:143), who believes that mind cannot be simply understood in computational terms; each cell contains ―neural cytoskeletal microtubules, tiny hollow nano-scale tubes inside cells built from columns of tubuline dimers (protein polymers) able to switch between two conformations‖. This means, in effect, that the binary tree of talking is just a very basic form, and the real tree is a much more complex, rhizomatic form of the tree of talking, i.e., communication, since ―The quantum-mind theory speculates that their signaltransmitting properties might permit parts of the brain to act as cellular automata, or even non-locally (that is, contrary to the ordinary limits of space, time and causality) and thereby surpass their crass physical limitations‖ (:143). The parts of a memory are not simply fetched from their storage spaces and put back together like a jigsaw puzzle, because what we get back is an augmented memory (:236, above), because of the path of retrieval, but, apparently, even more so because of the ubiquitousness of non-locality, which, as stated above, not only makes use of adjacent branches of the tree, but jumps to ‗branches‘ (i.e., storage spaces) removed in space and in time that can form a different relationship with other branches of memory paths already laid down. We ‗remember‘ more than we remember, since this is a production that seems to make as much use of exformation as normal communication does, and perhaps the phenomenon of exformation works exactly because of the brain‘s capacity for this quantum entanglement, as Hameroff believes. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 288 This is a very crude illustration of what two colliding wavefunctions look like, and as Prigogine stated, irreversible processes start from this moment of collision, and a phase transition takes place. In human terms, we are seeing two autopoietic systems co-ontogenically re-structuring their respective structures of knowing, by both taking part in this newly forming hybrid of probability turned possibility. If we keep in mind that human consciousness can be classed as (also) being non-local (exhibiting a form of quantum entanglement), then a human phase transition during wavefunction collision may engender and produce much more information that anyone has imagined before. Hameroff and Penrose‘s (1996) ―quantum inseparability, or non-locality, which implies that all quantum objects that have once interacted are in some sense still connected‖, is corroborated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and their experiments for space communication. Non-locality, or quantum entanglement, ―has reached a crucial stage where useful commercial and technological applications can be developed‖ even though classical physics cannot explain how this works (Perdigues-Armengol et al., 2009:33). Besides developing what they call quantum communications, this seems to represent the ultimate in safe communication design, since the message destroys itself in the process of being observed, i.e., when it is read, this quantum phenomenon of entanglement can be used for long-distance and instant messaging, and as far as I can make out, for free, once the first ‗message has been sent. Two particles (photons) are ‗entangled‘ by being allowed to interact with each other, and ―These two entangle photons can then be separated but as soon as one of them interacts with a third particle, the other photon of the pair modifies its quantum state‖ (Armengol et al., 2009:35). Despite Einstein‘s doubt whether this ―spooky action at a distance‖ would really work, since nothing is supposed to travel faster than the speed of light, the change in one particle will effect a similar change in the other particle, instantaneously (Rudolph, 2008:831). This was proven by both ESA and Salart et al. (2008) in two experiments that established the speed and the integrity of the ‗signal‘ sent from one location to another. Salart et al. (2008:862) reports that a pair of photons was sent to two villages in Switzerland, Satigny and Jussy, which are 18 km apart. Essentially, the experiment proved that two villages could be connected by quantum entanglement, for all practical purposes, instantly. This was followed by ESA‘s experiment that sent photons between two observatories, on two different Canary Islands, 144 km apart, with the signal arriving intact, i.e., ―it was obvious that the photons had remained entangled … that means that an entangled signal will survive the journey from the surface of the earth into space, and vice versa‖ (Perdigues-Armengol et al., 2009:35-36). These developments are perhaps the best evidence of Prigogine‘s wavefunction collisions being applicable to human knowing systems, based on Hameroff and Penrose‘s (1996) work but also on the work of others, such as the cardiologist Pim van Pommel (2004) who reports on the work of Berkovitch (computer science) and Romijn (neurobiology), both having found that ―the brain has an absolutely inadequate capacity to produce and store all the informational processes of all our memories with associative thoughts‖ and that we have no other explanation for an impossible situation other than that it is made possible because of the existence of the quantum behaviour of particles, a cybernetic system on the microlevel, being a system of observations of observers, since the particles seem to know when they are being observed (detected by a photon of light, enabling us to ‗see‘ them) and they then accordingly change their behaviour because of that observation, which is another way to describe Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 289 memory storage and retrieval. We know that, i.e., light photons can behave as both particles and as waves, and that these are complementary aspects of the same state of probability, which operates in state or phase space (inputs, outputs and state variables) and not real space, and we now know that non-locality is something that simply exists even if we cannot quite explain why with classical physics. Because of the presence of microtubules in all cells including neurons, which enables non-locality, ―Romijn argues that the continuously changing electromagnetic fields of the neuronal networks, which can be considered as a biological quantum coherence phenomenon, possibly could be the elementary carrier of consciousness‖ (van Lommel, 2004). In understanding the probability fields in quantum physics we can also better understand the transition between phase space and real space fields of consciousness, these being two complementary aspects of the same thing, much like being a particle and a wave at the same time. Van Lommel (2004) also reports that According to Erwin Schrödinger … DNA is an a-statistic molecule, and a-statistic processes are quantum mechanical processes which originate from phase-space. In his theory DNA should function as a quantum antenna with non-local communication [which led Stuart Hameroff to consider] DNA as a chain of quantum bits (qubits) with helical twists, and according to [Hameroff] DNA should function in a way analogous to superconductive quantum interference devices. In his quantum computer model the 3 billion base pairs should function as qubits with quantum superposition of simultaneously zero and one. Whether this proposition is true or not, that the whole of the body can in fact act as a detecting device to ‗observe‘ our hybrid memory storage spaces, has yet to be proven conclusively, but it would help explain why more information seems to be retrieved than was stored in the first place,81 and also help explain why so much information can be ‗stored‘ when the brain does not have that capacity. This information must then be ‗stored‘ elsewhere. What seems to be not in contention anymore, as Walker (2000:216) confirms, is that the nature of consciousness (the way we perceive the world, form concepts, store and retrieve memories) ―must be understood in terms of the nonlocal properties of quantum mechanics‖, and even though he insists on calling this phenomenon quantum tunnelling, it conforms to the experiments carried out by ESA and Salart et al. If particles can behave in this nonlocal way through quantum entanglement, in real space, and so much so that this phenomenon is taken seriously as the future of space communication, we might think seriously about quantum entanglement as the driving force behind inner space communication, when we are in this inbetween state called a Petrovsky lacuna (cf. below). The evocation of form. Richard Jung (2007:18) wrote a short Ode to Indefiniteness, which is something not to be found in either time or space, it has neither outer boundaries nor an inner centre, and there is as a result no in here and no out there, which is exactly where ‗we‘ are, in terms of answering the question what is consciousness? (after asking my students, who are you? I ask them, where are you?). We are indeed in this inbetween space of probability where Jung says we can evoke form. Form does not emerge from indefiniteness as Venus rose out of the sea. Indefiniteness has to be perturbed and disturbed; form has to be provoked, evoked, stimulated, seduced, seeded, 81 Cf. :236, above: the information quanta obtained through sight is 'mysteriously' increased in the image-schema areas of the brain; what we 'have in mind' (store in the mind) is an improved version that is an augmented production (an interpretation or mindful artifice) created by knowledge 'already there' combining with the visual data obtained from information in the world, and this version has as much relevance to us as the 'real out there'. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 290 composed, constructed, and maintained. Form dissolves into indefiniteness as a raindrop into the sea. (Jung, 2007:18) Form does not emerge from the field of nothingness that is basho 82 as if it can be found as a ready-made instead of uncovered, revealed, as the sketch83 it really is. As an artist begins to tease an image from the blank page, so an observer must evoke, i.e., suggest to himself what could be, and he uses the traces of all the auras that he ‗finds‘ in this space of indefiniteness, where all possibilities are present as presence-at-hand. Form emerges from indefiniteness as easily as it dissolves into it, being the means and the outcome, and form dwells within this indefiniteness as a holding-back from manipulation, so that the perception of the otherness of not-form can make itself known. Form observes itself on and in the spacetime landscape that form itself has to ‗populate‘ with all manner of provocations, including the differential lenses that make up gramma/topology. This field of abduction has to be perturbed84 if any learning is to take place, and it is significant that Jung stresses the many different ways that this process can be initiated, which is one of the strong points of a weak theory such as gramma/topology. To provoke and to evoke might have the same intention but requires a different action, while stimulation and seduction even requires different directions, with seduction very close to abduction. To seed a field of expectation can be as dishonest as seeding a defunct gold mine with a real gold nugget brought in from outside, while to seed the field of nothingness honestly is to use the self as the ‗seed‘ that is cultivated into a new composition. The individual who wished to become form on this plane of indefiniteness can benefit from studying Jakobson‘s Ladder and the power of metaphor to cross boundaries of perception, because ―An interpretation of living under the metaphor mind can yield a system of intentions in a semiotic space‖ (Jung, 2007:17). As we have seen, metaphor acts like a fuse to force the crossing of boundaries from an existing state to another, often unexpected state (cf. Figure 24, The unified field theory of design, above), and, depending on the context, it can radically combine the intension of inductive probability with the extension of deductive necessity to yield a system of abductive expectability (Peirce, 1998:233) in the semiotic space85 where both human and non-human actors can participate as the entities that Jung (:18) describes as syncopes. Syncopes (condensations, contractions, collapses) in indefiniteness take the form of entities. Diascopes (expansions, explosions, tears) in indefiniteness take the form of spacetimes. Syncopes and diascopes are complementary grounds of being (on) of forms. (Jung, 2007:18) At the start of this chapter I repeated the two questions that gramma/topology is concerned with (who are you? and, what is a theory?), which are so intertwined that any answer you arrive at still leaves you undecided as to whether you answered the first or the second question. These two questions are 82 Cf. Chapter 4:156. An impermanent and fluid condition, rather, is the business of design due to its ‗everywhere groundlessness‘ (cf. Chapter 3:119), a situation that I described in A Natural Death is Announced using the term basho, expressed as emptiness and nothingness, which in turn denotes, not a negative position, but the space within which we can reassemble our relations with the other, and where Bateson‘s metapattern forms an everywhere groundlessness, from which new ideas (new assemblies from old parts) are born. 83 Form will always remain a sketch in the sense of being restrained by what it has yet to find, much like Dasein striving to attain Being, because form argues to first principles. 84 Cf. Chapter 4:173. Learning how to learn includes helping students to observe their own thought processes, how to make their sense impressions ‗ring true‘ when compared to those of their classmates (authentication), and how to feed back their experiences into their (initial) line of reasoning so that the cognitive dissonances / perturbations (new information) encountered in the world outside the knowing-self can be accommodated. 85 Cf. Chapter 4:109. Do objects have real consciousness? No, but they do talk back to us, and if we consider that (written) texts talk back (Hülsmans, 2003:76) and that Eco (1976:57) essentially stated that all human artefacts can be read as texts, and we admit that all designed objects can be carriers of semiotic significance (cf. Chapter 3:112), then we do imbue objects with consciousness, as if. It is not that ‗things‘ ―have the unity the modernists believed they had, nor do they have the multiplicity postmodernists would like them to retain. They are lying there, in the new assemblies where they are waiting for the due process that will give them their unity, at the end, not at the beginning‖ (Latour, 2000:120). Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 291 complementary grounds for each other, and more, since the self can become object in order to deal with other objects on their level, so to speak, a metaphor for contracting our being into a form that can act as an instance of syncope, also aptly described as a momentarily loss of consciousness, a phase of immersion during which I believe the transference from self to other-form can be experienced, aheadof-time, as it were. I would also like to suggest that syncope morphs into diascope, as happens naturally in the field of abduction, when the vertical and synchronic switches with the horizontal and diachronic so fast that the two become almost indistinguishable. An example is the view of Gärdenfors (2004:216), who states that symbolic equations, the way we express ourselves when sign turns to symbol, are not ―elements of the internal cognitive process‖, but rather function as external manipulative devices. To Gärdenfors this is an example of situated cognition, when an interplay is provoked, evoked, stimulated, seduced, seeded, composed, constructed, and maintained between our internal conceptual form and these symbolic forms of representation that, perhaps because it happens on the spacetime landscape, brings the conceptual us, as form, into the world of experience. If we can accept that diascopes represents the form of spacetimes, plural, we have confirmation that every level of gramma/topological creativity in situated cognition is identical for being different, since the only invariants are the eigen values sive behaviours: communication as a necessity, and the cybernetics of cybernetics, i.e., the invariable structure of the observation of observations, recursively reciprocal, leaving us as operating systems that are doubly closed upon ourselves (above). Syncopes and diascopes are complementary grounds for each other, which means entities and spacetimes are each other‘s complementary grounds: ―We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern ‗equipment‘ … [and] reserve the term ‗ontology‘ for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities‖ (Heidegger, 1962:97; 31). Entities, whether people, designed objects or theories of knowing, are all to be encountered in concern through this theoretical (in the sense of the play between inductive probability, deductive necessity and abductive expectability) inquiry in the expanded spacetime landscape, an approach that shares Gärdenfor‘s (2004:31) belief that ―conceptual spaces [are] theoretical entities that can be used to explain and predict various empirical phenomena concerning concept formation‖. Part of that concept formation is the formation of the self as functional form, but this formation also takes place in a field of indefiniteness. Entities and space-times are lacunae in indefiniteness. They are complementary forms. They are bound to each other as Siamese twins. They do not ek-sist (stand out) in and out of each other, but ek-sist together yet apart, joint yet separate from each other. We do not discover them in indefiniteness, but construct them outside of it. We do not receive them as data, but by operations tease them out as capra. (Jung, 2007:18) As form, we are both entity and spacetime landscape, but we are also, to begin with, the proto-form in lacunae. These are, medically speaking, indentations of hollows in bone matter, i.e., something that is not there, and only present in its absence. A Petrovsky lacuna is created (a closer description would be, comes into ek-sistence) when a wavefront, which normally creates a wake after it passes, fails to do so; think of the turbulent wake that is created by an aircraft‘s wing, which can represent the leading edge of a wavefront; it is unthinkable to imagine that turbulence will not be created in the wake of the wing‘s passing. The general consensus seems to be that the following is the case: [1] a Petrovsky lacuna is a region of space ―where the fundamental solution of a linear hyperbolic partial differential equation vanishes‖ (TutorVista, n.d.), while these ‗solutions‘ of hyperbolic equations are described as ‗wavelike,‘ which means that a Petrovsky lacuna is formed in the collision of two wavefronts, or wavefunctions, when Prigogine said a phase transition (an irreversible process) starts and the original wavefunctions cease to be observable. The turbulence that normally follow in the wake of a passing wavefront can be likened to the information-into-knowledge conditions of an entity, an augmented information packet that the wavefront, as exformation, can afford the observer, but this only happens if Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 292 that observer is not part of the observation process, which designers are. In our case, we must observe at least two wavefronts and two lacunae, and because communication is mediated, we observe two sets of combined entities sive space-times as lacunae, in indefiniteness. I would suggest that not only are the entities and space-times, as lacunae in indefiniteness, complementary forms, but the combined sets of entity sive space-time sive lacuna are complementary forms as well. Both these sets do not emerge the one from the other, but both emerge as themselves, but having gone through a phase transition, both new selves contain to a large extent the probability of the other, and the I becomes the Thou, the self can become more than one and less than many. Entities and space-times ―ek-sist together yet apart, joint yet separate from each other‖, a form of existence that Heidegger (1962:286) called ―a not-yet which it will be – that which is constantly still outstanding‖. Entities and space-times, our newly formed, cybernetic functional forms-in-the-making, are no longer our old selves as entities (‗old‘ as in previous, now just one of the new parts), and neither can we be found in and on the spacetime landscape – those are areas of indefiniteness now (lacunae) where our formation begins, and ends. The process ‗ends‘ only because our observation has to leave the contributing entities and space-times (and the original colliding wavefunctions) behind and follow the rising-out-of-nothingness new wavefunction, which has already created a new self I and on a new spacetime landscape. Jung states that entities and space-times ek-sist together yet apart, joint yet separate from each other, and I would like to add, the original and separate wavefunctions enter the landscape of spacetime, collide (communicate, and become entangled), and these two sets of entangled entities (including their original and separate space-times, also now entangled) ek-sist together yet apart, in and on the spacetime landscape where they first met, but then move on to a new spacetime landscape (they create one, really, without ‗moving‘), still ek-sisting together yet apart, but because of quantum entanglement all the different states of entities and space-times are still connected, joint yet separate from each other. The final proof is that we do not observe these phenomena as appearance (we do not receive them as data) but ‗observe‘ them as lived experience (we receive them as capra), or, ―as the experience of consciousness: evidence, i.e., the ‗observer in the system‘‖ (Lanigan, 1994:110). The shape of space-time Von Foerster (2003:225) has a suggestion for what this space-time may look like, in that we have to Note that the double closure of the system which now recursively operates not only on what it ‗sees‘ but on its operators as well. In order to make this twofold closure even more apparent I propose to wrap the diagram … around its two axes of circular symmetry until the artificial boundaries disappear and the torus … is obtained. Figure 30. The organism as a functioning whole: Diagramme of twofold closure and Torus. (Von Foerster, 2003:321). N = bundles of neurons, SS = sensory surface, MS = motor surface, and NP = neuropituitary. Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 293 Reading the diagramme, the nerve impulses (arrows, left to right) act on the motor surface that interacts (communicates) with the sensory surface. On the other hand nerve impulses also travel top to bottom, which activity acts on the neuropituitary, resulting in steroids being released into the gaps between the synapses, and this cross-connectivity influences the whole system (von Foerster, 2003:225). Instead of a flat and linear space, it is much closer, in appearance at least, to a three-dimensional space-time, hence the torus. If we speculate, on the basis of Stuart Kauffman‘s description of the crazy-quilt spacetime landscape, the evidence from Hameroff et al. concerning the nonlocal ability of particles to become entangled and communicate instantly, and we include von Foerster‘s diagramme-into-torus recursive operation, then I would suggest that the spacetime landscape we imagine in observing our functional forms developing, is quite closely explained by the model of hyperbolic space. Margaret Wertheim (2004/5) interviewed both David Henderson and Daina Taimina, and asked them to explain a hyperbolic plane, to which Henderson replied that it is the opposite of a sphere, being a flat surface that curves away from itself at every point and is therefore open and infinite, while a sphere is finite and closed. I prefer this visualisation of space because it seems to correspond to Kauffman‘s spacetime landscape in the sense that each patch on that landscape that stretches towards a fitness peak does not take away any ‗space‘ from its neighbouring patches, but seems to create more space. Wertheim: ―So as you move away from any point on a hyperbolic surface you get exponentially more space, so to speak‖ Yes, and you can get an idea of that with the hyperbolic soccer ball model … A normal soccer ball has spherical geometry and is made up of hexagons and pentagons. Each pentagon, which has five sides, is surrounded by hexagons, which have six. If you just stuck together a lot of hexagons you'd get a plane, but in the soccer ball the presence of the pentagons pulls the hexagons away from flatness and the surface closes up on itself to form a sphere. To make a hyperbolic surface you replace the pentagons with heptagons, which have seven sides. Now you have to put in seven hexagons for every five you had before, so instead of closing up, the surface opens out and curves away from itself. (Henderson) Figure 31. Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane (Wertheim, Henderson and Taimina, 2005). http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/16/crocheting.php These mathematicians wanted to have a better and more tactile understanding of hyperbolic geometry, and Taimina realised that although models had been made before (as far back as 1868, and recently in the 1970s) they were constructed of paper and too fragile to handle. She came to the conclusion that a Evolutionary form follows cybernetic function 294 model could be constructed by using crochet techniques, by simply exponentially increasing the stitches with every new row. We use these models a lot in our classes at Cornell. Most of our students don't make the models themselves but they get a concrete sense of the properties of the hyperbolic plane from studying them. One thing is that you can physically experience straight lines. You can fold the crochet models and see how straight lines behave and how they intersect. It really helps the students to understand very quickly the intrinsic properties of hyperbolic geometry. (Taimina) Von Foerster‘s ‗straight lines‘ from left to right and top to bottom work better in a torus shape, but our ‗straight lines‘ will work better in a hyperbolic shape, since that explains why a point A and a point Z can be removed in time and space by the whole of the hyperbolic plane that, because it curves in on itself, potentially can bring A and Z together as immediate neighbours with the concomitant ‗instant‘ connection between them. A most peculiar matrix Clive Dilnot (2010) speaks of a fundamental break with our ―condition of instinctual or purely biological being … Loss of reliance on instinct … is compensated for by development of that on which survival now depends, the inter-twining of artifice and (self-) consciousness‖. We have been discussing exactly this condition, but with the addition of a design cybernetics conversation (a thinly disguised entity sive spacetime landscape scenario in the making): we are living in a self-made world of artificial constructs, and within this admitted politics of the artificial we need to pay attention to the ―larger issues of how contemporary social discourse is conducted‖ (Margolin, 2002:17), and design education is a very important part of that social discourse, because the only ‗natural‘ part we have left is our humanness and how that is construed and constructed, designed, as it were (cf. Chapter 1:2). We are neither animal nor quite human, it seems, being a peculiar mix of biological instinct and worldly artifice, and ―What we call the human emerges awkwardly and incompletely from this peculiar matrix‖ (Dilnot, 2010). My argument is that incomplete is good, being a continuous development towards the new. If I adopt it [the principle of Relativity], neither I nor the other can be the centre of the universe. As in the heliocentric system, there must be a third that is the central reference. It is the relation between Thou and I, and this relation is identity: reality = community. What are the consequences of all this in ethics and aesthetics? The Ethical Imperative: Act always so as to increase the number of choices. The Aesthetical Imperative: If you desire to see, learn how to act. (von Foerster, 2003:227) This is, in effect, (almost) the end of my argument: gramma/topology as a theory for knowing can help a student who desires to see, not because it offers a framework that guarantees an outcome, but because its framework is simply a proto-form that can entice and provoke, stimulate and seduce, and above all help to construct and maintain the new form of the entity that is a human sive non-human identity. We are indeed a most peculiar and ongoing matrix, and yet, through thinking our designed forms as wavefunctions we can begin to see our self coming towards us, as Heidegger said would happen. In Chapter 6, then, I offer a few last demonstrations of how a gramma/topological mindset can help to continue the ongoing argument to the self. The continuing argument to the self 6 295 The continuing argument to the self Work in progress Gramma/topology will always be a work in progress, because it is not a theory of knowledge but simply the ground to the student‟s figure, and in the process of dealing with our contemporary and complex world of changing problem spaces it is hoped that a gestalt switch can take place between what the design student knows at any one point in time and what it can become possible to know the next, instead of the learning process being a mere stacking up of one fact after another in rote learning. Students have to learn how to learn, and they have to construct their own realities from those various models of and for reality that they are surrounded by and offered, especially the ones conveniently offered by the many electronic mediators that they deal with on a daily basis. Gramma/topology is such that it should become as the ice canoe (discussed below) that returns to that from which it came, taking the canoeist with it, to be re-assembled each time the combined cybernetic form returns. This process of immersion in the fields of indefiniteness, the nothingness of basho, is above all a search for identity by both the individual and the discipline. What follows are a few last ways of looking at this process (there are, of course, others), and I believe that using a theory of knowing somewhat like gramma/topology, as a kind of intrinsic hindsight (i.e., reflection), will allow us to assimilate to ourselves what there is to uncover in any „text‟ in the world of either ideas or experience. Learning how to renew a thinking identity The problem with identity is that idem, „the same,‟ or rather this stability of the same, seems to be most peoples‟ idea of an identity structure. Verfallen in the everyday sameness of stability and safety. As Boland and Lyytinen (2004:53) state, the quest for an identity is misdirected when focusing on the facts as opposed to the process itself, and by facts they mean the „things‟ that identity can be associated with, clearly an argument from first principles that aligns identity with preconceived structures. They are, of course, speaking of the quest of a discipline for an identifying structure, and we can ask, are these identifying structures eigen values or not? Should they be, and what are eigen values? “Von Foerster sees a cognitive world constructed of „eigen values‟ of the nervous system‟s cognitive processes. Eigen values are stable systems of recursive processing that stabilize in the mind and enable us to (re)cognize things” (Brier, 2003). Can identity be associated with the „things‟ of eigen values if Boland and Lyytinen state that this is misdirected? Can eigen values be described as „things‟? Can design as a discipline have eigen values? Emphatically not. 1 But design as a process can, in the sense that design then has no beginning and does not end, but changes in the process of observing itself. As such design can have eigen values, but not the kind that von Foerster (2003:321) seems to describe as “invariants, these „Eigen behaviors‟ [that] arise through the recursively reciprocal effect of the participants in such an established social domain”. Design as a discipline cannot strive to attain a domain-independent approach to design theory (cf. Chapter 3:97) and therefore to a design identity, so it would seem as if eigen values and eigen behaviours cannot be attributed to design, but that would be a false position to take, since eigen values are not the „things‟ that Boland and Lyytinen warn against. 1 This has a lot to do with the language I speak, since when I see the term eigen values I immediately translate it as eiegoed, or that which a person possesses as his own, usually pointing to cultural possessions which identify and distinguish a group as an own domain. The continuing argument to the self 296 An argument from first principles would seem to correspond to what von Foerster calls invariant properties, or general laws that guide action and results, and this view could be made applicable to first-order cybernetics and trivial machines, but it cannot serve to explain the invariant variability of social systems as second-order cybernetic observation systems. In that case, how can von Foerster see a cognitive world constructed of „eigen values‟ of the nervous system‟s cognitive processes, if these eigen values are stable systems of recursive processing that stabilize in the mind and enable us to (re)cognize things? Is this one of the examples of paradox that I stated (cf. Chapter 5:219, above) can be part of gramma/topology? A paradox is simply a situation or a statement that seems so contradictory that we usually dismiss it out of hand, and yet in real life the so-called paradox might be the solution we are looking for and reject, being the not-us. A paradox is a distinction, and we can learn to make (design) distinctions and then use them to cross the border between the now and the not-yet; a paradox is , hence a design paradox is an eigen value. A design paradox is not the action stemming from a design decision, but the communication capability of the system, and we are that system; we are our own eigen value, and carry this aspect with us when we engage in a design activity. The recursively reciprocal effect of/on the participants in an established domain that von Foerster speaks of can be compared to Brier‟s view that eigen values are stable systems of recursive processing; recursive, yes, because we can be described as structurally closed systems that thrive on recursivity for the sake of our internal organization, but reciprocal? We are stable systems as structurally closed systems, but then we open up to instability, and we do so in reciprocity as informationally open systems, co-ontogenically drifting in our environment and exchanging information, with the word reciprocal highlighting the relationship aspect of this exchange. Granted, there can be no direct stream of information from environment to organism that serves as an objective frame (Brier, 2003) that is not questioned, since everything is mediated, but there is a reciprocal exchange nevertheless. Von Foerster‟s recursively reciprocal, then, means a double closure (von Foerster, 2003:322): “Communication is the Eigen behavior of a recursively operating system that is doubly closed onto itself”. Eigen values and behaviours can only be ascribed to invariants that arise in a recursively reciprocal coupling between system and environment, but these „invariants‟ cannot be stable „secondorder‟ aspects of human knowing systems, otherwise we would be left with one half of the equation of living systems, and as Luhmann (2002:104; 157) states, there are two „invariants‟ that do not prohibit the interaction between operational closure and informational openness, and these are “the distinction between self-reference and external reference as an invariable structure of their own observations … [and the fact that] communication [and not action] is an unavoidably social operation”. Strip everything else down to the bone, and we are left with these two „invariants‟ as eigen values sive behaviours: communication as a necessity, and the cybernetics of cybernetics, i.e., the invariable structure of the observation of observations, recursively reciprocal, leaving us as operating systems that are doubly closed upon ourselves. A paradox? No, merely . The term invariant can point to absolute control in a hierarchical organization, or it can be made to denote aspects of being human that never change, even when we in practice and in theory change all the time (hetarchical organization), i.e., the changeless nature of change that is encapsulated by the eigen values of social communication (in its broadest sense) and its corollary, observation of observations. I submit these as the invariants of von Foerster‟s double closure, and believe that this approach is part of how we speak complexity. Atoms can be particles and wavefunctions at the same time, and we can be autopoietically closed systems and (be/in) the environment at the same time; we are both inside and outside for being neither, since we are, instead, a sive function of ourselves. We are more than one and less than many, since (cf. Chapter 4:204-205) we can design and construct our own internal information for own consumption, at the same time that we can „identify with the object itself‟, thereby becoming part of the environmental information, sharing with the group and sharing in The continuing argument to the self 297 the group. Human knowing, facilitated by a hybrid lens such as gramma/topology, can then be compared to two wavefunctions that collide and merge, and we can observe the two information structures (only communications can communicate!) in the process of forming a new entity via the phase transition that is . We are doubly closed upon ourselves because we have the ability to be the operator and the operand at the same time “through the interchangeability of functors standing in reciprocal relationships to one another”, and this process of probability provides us with the freedom to act, which in itself becomes a responsibility (von Foerster, 2003:322), as Slamat and Sen would, I believe, endorse as an ethical responsibility. We have the capability to be the operator and that which is operated on (operand), which makes us our own functional object (functor). Design as Gestaltung is Bonsiepe‟s preferred term (cf. Chapter 5:220), and he also highlighted the difference between design as a thrown idea / sketch / framework and design as a finished object; as gestaltung, design refers to a process of coming-into-being as a functional object and not as the finished product (the same applies when we link design and our own self through identity). And yet there are two ways that we can appear as „objects‟ according to Heidegger; one is, if all that you can say about yourself is based on facts and figures, then you cannot answer the question, who are you? However, if you want to find out if there is more to life than the everyday concerns of facticity, then, paradoxically, you still have treat yourself as an object, but this time as factuality. “Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein‟s „facticity‟. This is a definite way of Being” (Heidegger, 1962:82). In this, second, way of treating Dasein as an object, fact changes to Fact, and we get closer to what I believe Aristotle meant with arguing to first principles, instead of arguing from the fact of existing laws and procedures. When we become our own functional object we design ourselves as we design the world, but we design with and through the world by making use of the narratives already in the world (including the narratives of designed objects and the living narratives of other people). This knowing system as gestaltung needs an observer to complete the double closure, and the argument for abduction is important to this movement of reciprocity. “Peirce‟s term „abduction‟ has to be taken literally here” (Baecker, 1996:200), just as we have to take Baecker‟s words literally but also figuratively, since his use of the words system and observer should be interpreted as interchangeable (the system being capable of being its own observer as well). Abduction means „to kidnap‟ the insight an observer can gain into how a system works, which I prefer to term as „a leading away‟ of an original insight to a new understanding, “and that would make the system dependent on the observer refraining from destroying what he gained”, since to sever the coupling means, to the system, losing the observation of its own structure. This means, logically, that we cannot know ourselves, except through the feedback from other people, i.e., as I have stated before, we can be our own observers, but not in isolation from the other, since we need [not-A] to determine [A]. To lose the observation of our own structure by the [not-A] observer severing the coupling is to lose any feedback from the environment, and we would be informationally closed as well as structurally closed, an impossible situation called being put in solitary confinement, or sent to Coventry. 2 As Baecker says, abduction is a Catch 22 situation where a system can only be liberated by being constrained, taken away or more properly, led away from itself, which is where the double closure comes into play. Gramma/topology, as a theory of knowing, can facilitate this process of the self becoming its own “Functional explanation [that] is the basis of cybernetics” (Jung, 2007:21); we can be the functional explanation and the functional object at the same time, by being closed to ourselves as [A], but when we cross the boundary to [not-A], we have to become closed to „ourselves‟ again, to avoid changing to 2 The only other „cause‟ of becoming informationally as well as structurally closed is being solipsistic . The continuing argument to the self 298 [not-A] and to only use that boundary crossing to recursively re-enter what was [A], but which now attains a different “computability, which is tantamount to decidability” (Baecker, 1996:200). And yet, communication occurs only when the behaviours of both systems are coordinated in some way in a mediated field of knowing, and when this field of knowing is also a field of undecidability. How do we extract „decidability‟ from a field of the opposite? Re-entering the making of a thinking identity If functional explanation is the basis of cybernetics, as Richard Jung states, then we might take notice of Bateson‟s (2000:405) notion that cybernetic explanation is peculiarly negative, as opposed to the positive explanation of causality. In that sense we can understand Baecker‟s (:200) reference to the cybernetic explanation of constraints, the „negative‟ that forms a relation between system and observer. I much prefer Bateson‟s (:405) own term, restraints, those factors that “can in all cases be regarded as [determining the] inequality of probability”, the very factors that liberate us by restraining us, if, that is, we work within the environment and not despite the environment. Design can, similar to any human action following on a decision-making process sans any other system external to the self, avoid this reciprocal relationship and have the absolute freedom to act, in isolation. That has been done since the Industrial Revolution, and that approach worked very well, and made a lot of people very rich. We simply cannot afford this type of minority-luxury today, and our freedom to act must be restrained by the environment we must admit we are a part of, and we must do so as an extension of our (newly) developing self by dwelling within-the-world alongside that which is being observed, with both self and theory-self (as extension) holding-oneself-back (restraining-oneself voluntary), not utilizing either theory or knowledge as methods for manipulation sans the input and joint control of the other, not imposing the self on other entities in the world, but looking for a present-at-hand consummation, itself a hybrid mix of all the elements that participated in the perception of and in the problem space (and allowing us to see the fact of present-at-hand turn itself into the Fact of presence-at-hand). This is another description of the process of probability that Baecker says provides us with the freedom to act, von Foerster‟s process of interchangeability of functors standing in reciprocal relationships to one another. It is against this background that one should read the text on Identity, Process and Narrative, in which Boland and Lyytinen (2004:57) state that identity is a process that comes into being through the narratives of the language-games we all play a part in. Accordingly, we (they use the term to refer to researchers, but also to refer to technologies and actors in organizations as specific identity originators / creators) use the existing and meaningful narratives available in the world to build new metanarratives, which then enter that same world as newly meaningful texts. This competitive situation means new texts compete with older meaningful texts thus affecting the emergence of yet further new meanings and understanding in the world. What we have to realize is that this scenario represents a three-fold involvement of meaning, and here we can refer to Turner and Fauconnier‟s notion of conceptual integration or blending. The way we deal with the world and its proliferation of information / variety, is to tell stories, to conceptualize. We do so by using language (playing language games), and by creating our own versions of what we imagine we are dealing with. "Since nobody can carry the physical world within himself, the process of conceptualization is indispensable to the process of structuring and ordering called communication" (Roelofse, 1987:12). Part of this conceptualization process is what Turner and Fauconnier (1995) call conceptual integration / blending, using mental spaces as natural constructions of normal cognition. During this process the input from two or more mental spaces (image schemas, abstractions, and stories) are projected to a separate blended space, one that has elements of all the original inputs but that, crucially, now contains emergent structures not perceptible before. “Blending is at work in many areas of cognition and action, including metaphors, The continuing argument to the self 299 counterfactuals, and conceptual change” (Turner and Fauconnier, 1995), and blending is at work in Boland and Lyytinen‟s three-fold scenario. Boland and Lyytinen‟s text, I feel, could have made this point (the ontology or the coming-into-being of identity) a little clearer, and they could have done so by, perhaps, not referring to meta-narratives, but rather using the literary notion of metafiction, since this idea comes closer to what Turner and Fauconnier means with blended story-telling. Seen in this light, the double-hermeneutics of the sociotechnical world takes on a more practical identity, if you will. Meta-narratives normally refer to one dominating narrative, and as the term suggests, it is a story of reality that, while containing vestiges of the original stories it displaces, yet strives to control all forms of creativity and ontological processes. In contrast, metafiction refers to a virtual story that structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own identity, as a questioning artefact, in order to highlight and interrogate the relationship between fiction and reality (Waugh, 1990:2). Thus when we use the existing, meaningful narratives in the world to help create our own narratives, the narrative structure that Boland and Lyytinen refer to in itself becomes a problem, although one can understand that type of narrative (and simultaneously, interpretative) structure as referring to an existing interpretation (of reality) being used to build new interpretations, which, in turn, affect other, and newer still, interpretations. Yet, and returning to the concept of a double-hermeneutics of the socio-technical world, the narrative structure needs to be seen as not a linear structure but as a more three-dimensional interdependent system that helps create a new story neither social nor technical, but a blend of both – an „artefactual narrative‟ that draws attention to itself not as a device or system, but as a conceptual tool to question the relationship between the user and the interface (whatever form the latter may need to assume). Strictly speaking, following Boland and Lyytinen‟s (:61) linear narrative structure, we would use existing narratives (meaning 1) to build our own identity-creating narratives (meaning 2), which in turn, as meta-narratives, affect the emergence of further meaning (3) and understanding. Here we have the researcher, but where does the user and the artefact / interface fit in? One would assume that Boland and Lyytinen has the same three-fold involvement of meaning scenario in mind that Turner and Fauconnier‟s concept of integration points to, and yet the latter‟s explanation feels three-dimensional while the former‟s explanation still feels too much like linear cause and effect. Meaning (1) gives rise to meaning (2), which, as a meta-narrative, then gives rise to meaning (3). The very idea of identity construction should be seen as, not a meta-process, but a blended process, which makes quite a difference in the sense of not leaving behind the elements of origin, which is an impossible thing to conceptualize. Nothing is left behind, and in imagining (constructing the not-as-yet identity, if you will) the new we must not forget that, even when making use of the idea of going beyond (meta) original inputs, those origins are not superseded nor destroyed (or repressed, denied, banned, censored, etc.) but creatively transformed and augmented – hence the conceptual integration / blending process of identity or narrative creation. Boland and Lyytinen does mention the problem of our received vocabulary that must be resisted, and that we must understand the Wittgensteinian limits and traps of language, but are they not themselves caught in the snare of language convolution by insisting on going beyond (meta) what is there, instead of going into what is there, because what is there, at any moment, is all there is, until someone changes the situation, by means of a different way of „seeing‟ not beyond the existing situation, but seeing, differently, through-and-with the existing situation. The new, whether an identity or a new design, cannot be achieved by going simply beyond what is there. This concept of meta is not the same as transcending what is there if, by using the language term meta/beyond we really mean leave behind meaning (1) to create meaning (2), which in turn then leaves behind both (1) & (2) in order to let (3) emerge: a very linear and loss-inducing process. Perhaps Boland and Lyytinen did not mean to imply any of these interpretations of their text, but then, Wittgenstein (quoted in Arnheim,1967:146) did say "... die Wörte sind wie die Haut auf einem tiefen The continuing argument to the self 300 Wasser" (words are like the skin on a deep pool); interpretation in depth means delving deep underneath the skin of what is there. As Wittgenstein (1968:43) put it, the essence of language lies not in the words themselves, or the visible `rearrangement' of these black marks called writing, "but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out". The essence of the narrative lies not in going beyond, but lies in going into. The „words‟ of the „design text‟ that must be woven into the structure of the design narrative (whether this narrative needs to serve as an industrially designed object for everyday use or as an interface system) must be both the designer‟s and the user‟s „words‟ or narrative, while at the same time this (new) narrative belongs to neither. Meaning (1) plus meaning (2) is present, to be sure, but meaning (3) is the „working narrative‟ the designer strives for yet cannot know fully, the not-yetexisting and future narrative that is not the result of cause-and-effect linear thinking, but Turner and Fauconnier‟s complex blended projection of possible meaning, finally activated by the user. The process of „identity‟ formation based on a narrative structure is quite a complex one, and perhaps we need to take another look at Boland and Lyytinen‟s (:61) identity process using the narratives of our language-games: “… we build meta-narratives [meaning 2] … of the narratives that are available in the world [meaning 1] … and already full of meaning. But our meta-narratives [meaning 2] also enter that world as texts … and thereby affect the way in which meaning and understanding [meaning 3] emerges in that world”. My original objection to the use of the term meta-narrative still stands, but let us assume that this term may be interpreted to denote the newly constructed design narrative that the object or system has to be capable of communicating to the reader / user, and furthermore, that this narrative, while being „communicated‟ – or, rather, revealed as an interpretative possibility, i.e., the user-activated „solution‟ – can adapt or transform itself through interacting with signals from the (working) environment. The coming-into-being of this design narrative depends neither on the designer nor on the user as the final „author‟ of its structure. An information systems solution using the notion of identity as narrative depends on a scenario of co-authorship, a scenario of co-designing, re-writing the design solution in real time. Any other solution is a closed system based on hard systems thinking, even when designed to be used in different work environments: a closed system embodies the thought processes of the designer but not those of the user, perhaps because the latter becomes irrelevant to the way the system operates? Designing information systems cannot be done by constructing your own (research / design) identity first and then assuming that your (design) existential choices bring the socio-technical world into being. Boland and Lyytinen‟s text possibly means the following: “we build meta-narratives [designer/researcher: meaning 2] of the narratives that are available in the world [users: meaning 1] and already full of meaning. But our meta-narratives [designer/researcher: meaning 2] also enter that world as texts, and thereby affect the way in which meaning and understanding [meaning 3] emerges in that world”. Meaning (2) as a text is given far too much prominence, and researcher/designers are described as bringing the socio-technical world into being: what exactly does meaning (3) then consists of? The fundamental mistake being made by using hard systems thinking (control cybernetics) as opposed to soft systems thinking (observer cybernetics), is that meaning (2), when it appears the second time, should be seen as something else altogether: the „designerly meaning‟ (new meaning 3) which is an amalgam of designer and user understanding of the specific problem space. We can re-write Boland and Lyytinen‟s text to read as follows: “designers, in a process of professional identity construction, build narratives [meaning 2] using the narratives that are available in the world [meaning 1] and already full of meaning. But our design narratives [meaning 2] must combine with the existing narratives of the users [meaning 1], and this newly created and combined understanding of the contextual problem space also enter that world as texts [meaning 3] and thereby affect the way in which meaning and understanding [meaning 4] emerges in the socio-technical world”. The continuing argument to the self 301 We are, as the work of Niklas Luhmann makes clear, working with communications (narratives) based on what is entirely not there. Luhmann‟s interpretation of an autopoietic or self-generating system is one that “constructs itself upon a foundation that is entirely not there” (Metcalf 1999), and the elements comprising the design narrative, the designer (meaning 1) and the user (meaning 2), construct not only their own „environments‟ but mutually construct their social environment based entirely on what is in fact not there. Social reality and meaning is constructed inside the system, inside the narrative. So when Boland and Lyytinen (:55) “seek to characterize the recursive, dialectical process of our identity construction as it takes place within a social field as a set of knowledge production and dissemination practices … that define what information system researchers are”, they seem to envisage the designer, again, as a social agent that needs an identity separate from that of the user, when, in fact, that should not, cannot be the case at all; “We argue … that we should approach the issue of identity through the eyes of designers who project their stories into the world” (Boland and Lyytinen, 2004:56). A researcher has no identity in that sense. There is no such thing as a designer. Social communication means voluntarily giving up your individual rights to absolute certainty, and declaring your willingness to accommodate the other. In that sense there can be no such thing as an individual personality sans any formative social background, or a designer divorced from that which is being designed for: the contextual social world. A designer must work with the personality, the identity, the essence of the user‟s landscape or narrative of reality, and not with his own „identity‟. All this happens inside the narrative, inside something that is entirely not there, therefore it can be done: anything that can be imagined with empathy can be constructed in a social reality landscape. I agree with the general tone of Boland and Lyytinen‟s article, but their interpretation of the subjunctive power of interpretation leads me to think that they might be conflating two mindsets and trying to control what cannot be controlled, or, what should not be controlled by the „wrong‟ social agent. The only „control‟ that is applicable in constructing a design narrative is the notion of the regulatory process of intrinsic control, and the way we deal with the world and its proliferation of information / variety, is to tell stories, to conceptualize and project, in short, to mentally structure this regulatory process of intrinsic control. We do so by using language (playing language games), and by creating our own versions of what we imagine we are dealing with. Designers of information systems, however, do not choose the narratives, nor do the users, because the narratives we should be concentrating on are the yet-to-be ones that are entirely not there, yet. No one can control these, nor should they set goals and objectives by trying to avoid appropriation or the alignment with not-my-own narratives. I would far rather (re)turn to the notion of metafiction, the form of which structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own identity, but in doing so it becomes a questioning artefact, it becomes a functor in the sense of offering itself as a functional object. This, according to Waugh (1990:2), serves to highlight and interrogate the relationship between fiction and reality, and if we translate this idea, it becomes what Gerhard Fischer (2003) calls meta-design. Waugh‟s description of the role that metafiction can play is very adaptable to design thinking: meta-design refers to a design narrative that structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own identity, as a functional object, in order to highlight and interrogate the relationship between user narratives and so-called reality. Fischer writes that “a fundamental objective of meta-design is to create socio-technical environments that empower users to engage in informed participation rather than being restricted to the use of existing systems”. The use of narratives in design must, I believe, follow this fundamental reasoning: to create a sociotechnical world, one that does not yet exist and only begins to „exist‟, initially, as an entirely-not-there narrative, we must focus on the interactive spaces-for-use that can be co-created and understood by the user, and, crucially, can offer itself (as „artefactual space‟) up as an interpretative tool for further „design‟ / development. Meta-design would then refer to early human and non-human systems design, initially as a framing narrative, that does not exist in and for itself, having no intrinsic identity. It The continuing argument to the self 302 structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own proto-identity in the form of a functional object, as a questioning system, in order to highlight, interrogate, and re-design (co-create) the relationship that is being constituted and conserved between emerging user narratives and evolving working realities. Personal and professional identities emerge during these recursive interactions with the medium that contains the system(s) at the time. Systems design becomes a user-customization of complex working environments in real time. A cybernetic design conversation is such a meta-design functional object, which is why we can find our own identity and that of our discipline inside this interactive space of becoming. The indeterminacy and fundamental undecidability of becoming In a previous publication (van der Merwe, 1998:34-36) I argued that Eco (1976:57) says of paintings, that function as sign-vehicles, that they convey “many intertwined contents [cf. the reference by Norretranders to exformation] and therefore what is commonly called a „message‟ is in fact a text whose content is a multileveled discourse”. We live in a world of non-stationary, i.e., deferred meaning that moves from one level of signification to another. When we try to analyse the content of a message (painting, text, designed artefact) as a discourse, we have to keep in mind that signifier and signified (sign), signification, ambiguity, and denotation coupled to connotation all play important roles, because their respective roles are constitutive of the text, or message, of the work of art or design. This approach is confirmed by Hawkes (1986:141); signification does move from one level of meaning to another by transforming denoted meaning into connoted meaning, a process of migration of meaning that has Eco‟s system substantially agreeing with Barthes‟s system for interpreting the myths of our social reality narratives. I read the two systems as two texts that collectively become Barthesian Eco‟s, a hybrid form that not only helps to illuminate the constituent forms of the parts, but, as a collective, sheds new light on any subject sive object it investigates. The following is taken (almost) verbatim from my previous (1998:34-36) text. Barthes‟s system includes two planes of signification, that of language and myth. On the plane of language is signifier, signified, and sign; on the plane of myth are form, concept and signification. However, in myth the signifier (form) is created by the signs of the language plane, thus the last term of the language system becomes the first term of the mythical system. Meaning moves on from the level of the language system to the level of the mythical system; the combination of signifier and signified (sign) gives rise to form, and form, through concept, gives rise to signification (Barthes, 1972:117), a three-step process. Eco seemingly also has a three-step process that can fruitfully be compared to Barthes‟s system. In the multileveled discourse content of a visual text, “there are at least three codes, a denotative one and two connotative ones”; what is important is that the (first) denotative code is not correlated with the (second) connoted system, but with the (third) connoted system, this being the destination of the message; the (third) connoted system does not yet exist (Eco, 1976:56-57). Figure 32. The three-step process: Barthesian Eco/s. Cf. Addendum E. The continuing argument to the self 303 In this respect Barthes appears to have a similar correlation: “The third term is the correlation of the first two”; since his system works on two planes, this statement means that the sign is the correlation of the signifier and the signified on the language plane, but on the mythical plane this would mean that signification in myth is the correlation of form and concept (Barthes, 1972:117). The three –step process can be assigned the following Barthesian sequence: Language plane A: 1. signifier indicates 2. signified, which becomes 3. sign, and Mythical plane B: 1. form indicates 2. concept, which becomes 3. signification. In Eco‟s system the following sequence C applies: 1. (first code) denotation indicates 2. (second code) connotation, which becomes 3. (third code) connotation. In each system (1) is correlated with (3), while in Barthes‟ case the whole of sequence A forms the platform for the start of sequence B, thus (3) mythical signification is correlated with (1) form, but also with the sum of (1)-(3) of sequence A. Barthes‟s sequence A becomes Eco‟s (first) denotative code, from becomes the (second) connoted system, and mythical signification becomes the (third) connoted system. What makes such a comparison possible, when in fact they should not quite function in exactly this way, is the use of ambiguity, or distortion (cf. the use of the uncertainty principle, and the acceptance of the inbetweenness of factuality versus facticity). “Semiotically speaking ambiguity must be defined as a mode of violating the rules of the code … the text becomes self-focusing: it directs the attention of the addressee primarily to its own shape (Eco, 1976:263-264). [I am aware of the apparent contradiction that this passage can create, but … read on]. “The relation which unites the concept of the myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of deformation … myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear” (Barthes, 1972:121-122). Depending on the work being critiqued / read as a text, either or both of these systems may be employed. When the Barthesian Eco/s system (C) of reading a visual text is put into practice the destination of the discourse, or the conversational implicature, 3 becomes apparent. This destination or implication in the design conversation is a deformed own shape: it represents an own shape because it (mentally) replaces the shape / significance of what one is factually looking at (the vehicle for the message), and deformed because it distorts the (supposed) meaning, the significance that would normally flow from the signified / concept / (second code) connotation, i.e., on all three levels (A, B, and C), number (2) is the mediator (A: signified; B: concept; C: second code/connotation or form). There is always a correlation between (1) and (3) which is mediated by (2). The signified mediates between the signifier and the sign, thus the correlation between the signifier and the sign depends on the mediation of the signified, e.g., the signum, or signifier of the Roman standards carried by its legions, a "visual identification" (Ong 1982:76) – which could be both a sign and a symbol. The signifier (the Roman standard) is carried 3 This refers to a situation in which that which is implicit rather than explicit must be interpeted by the viewer / user (Danto, 1993:63). The continuing argument to the self 304 through a landscape that is supportive of the Roman Empire, and therefore the narrative to be found in the world correspond to the narrative of the signifier (here comes the Roman Legion of the Light Foot), and the sign is merely information that is not challenged, meaning that the correlation between (1) and (3) is not in dispute, since what is signified (2) hardly needs to mediate. The Roman „designer‟ builds a narrative (signifier) based on the narratives that are available in the world and already full of meaning (we know who the Romans are). But the design narratives (signifier / meaning 1) must combine with the existing narratives of the users (signified / meaning 2), and this newly created and combined understanding of the contextual problem space also enter that world as texts (sign / meaning 3) … we are the Roman Legion of the Light Foot, and we are here for your protection. This is as close as one can get to information transference, with not a great deal of mediation necessary, since the correlation between (1) and (3) is expected and understood. However, when the initial narrative is in dispute, resisted or cannot be expected to be readily understood, as would be the case when a designer uses existing narratives in the world to build an own narrative, that then has to re-enter that same world, then circumspection is called for. In the case of the Roman designer of the signum the mediation of what was being signified when marching through enemy territory changed the sign to symbol, saying, in effect, here comes the Roman Legion that will subdue and punish you; the mediation (interpreting text to make meaning) comes from both the signifier (narrative 2) and the narratives (1) of the natives living in the landscape the Romans are interacting with. The new, collective, narrative (3) has to be interpreted (understood) as a hybrid message half-way between narratives (1) and (2), and in this second example, cannot be taken as the „truth‟ because its form was distorted by the myth that is narrative (3: we are here for your protection), and we have to look for the real narrative (4: we will subdue and punish you). Narrative (1) and narrative (3) are correlated, to be sure, except that the mediation process on the mythical plane is such that (3) is a distorted version of (4), which is how and why propaganda works so well. When designers, in a process of professional identity construction, build narratives [meaning 2] using the narratives that are available in the world [meaning 1] and already full of meaning, that means our design narratives [meaning 2] must combine with the existing narratives of the users [meaning 1] which could be friendly or hostile, and this newly created and combined understanding of the contextual problem space also enters that world as texts [meaning 3] which thereby affect the way in which meaning and understanding [meaning 4] emerges in the socio-technical world. There are only three texts because this is a three-step process, but we see four narratives, so one of them has to be replaced by another, and in Boland and Lyytinen‟s example of Identity, Process and Narrative, only the form, the functional object, has the capability of making that decision. The form is the mediation in all cases, and in the process of identity construction we have to use the insights of a cybernetic conversation to observe „ourselves‟ becoming that form, the functional object that is the basis for and of cybernetics; only (the combined) we can create this capacity for making decisions such as whether narrative (3) or narrative (4) is the correct one, based on a compassionate rationality, an argument for abduction. Taking existing narratives in the world [1] as the signifier, and our combined designer / user new narratives [1+2] as the signified, the re-entry means that this narrative enters the world as a text [3] that acts as the sign, the combination of [1] + [2]. However, this is a false reading of a complex situation, and narrative (3), i.e., the combination [1]+[2], is not a text yet, and therefore cannot act as the sign for [1]+[2], which still have to be proven in the new [1], which is in fact, now, [not-1]. When you put the new combined narratives back into the world as texts it is a new world because of the observations and interactions that have taken place, and [A] is trying to find itself in [not-A]. Only when [not-A], or [not-1] has had time to assimilate the new narrative (the new input) can [3] appear as a text, but you can‟t have two [3]‟s (well, you can, really, but one is (3) narrative and the other is [3] text). We would still need a fourth step to allow for the emergence of text [4], but there is no „fourth step‟. Our developing form, as functional object, ensures that “The relation which unites the concept of The continuing argument to the self 305 myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of deformation … myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear” (Barthes, 1972:121-122). Everything is still there, both (3) and (4) as narratives, but (3) is transformed into (4), mostly without our being aware of this phase transition, but as designers and observers we have to teach ourselves to become aware of (3) being transformed into (4), by us, by our form as functional object, because our function is to distort abduct and transform, not to make disappear. We allow (3)into(4) to turn into [3] as both the new narrative and our form re-enters the system to become a combined new text. This re-entry movement directs the attention of the addressee primarily to its own shape (Eco, 1976:263-264), but not as itself and for itself, because the language-games we play with Jakobson‟s Ladder and our combined fields of force, this functional object that we become, is a meta-design own shape that begins, initially, as a framing device (a framing narrative), that does not exist in and for itself, having no intrinsic identity. It structurally, deliberately and methodically offers its own proto-identity in the form of a functional object, as a questioning system within the observing system, in order to highlight, interrogate, and re-design (co-create) the relationship that is being constituted and conserved between emerging user narratives and evolving working realities, between induction and deduction, between habitus and practice, and between our implicate order in convergence and our explicate order in divergence, i.e., between our inner and outer worlds. We are the border that we have to cross from [A] to [not-A], and then we become the new border we have to re-cross upon re-entry into the system. As Luhmann (2002:190) says, Observation is the use of a distinction to designate one and not the other side. To draw a distinction is to mark a border, with the consequence that one can reach one side from the other only by crossing the border. Spencer Brown calls this „form‟. We are this new form between [A] and [not-A], and we are this new functional object since we cannot be a functional subject at that point of re-entry, because as an observer we are “the excluded middle of his observation; [the observer] is not the „subject‟ but rather the „parasite‟ (Serres) of his observation” (Luhmann, 2002:190). We are our own product for own consumption; “the real subjects [of the free trade among the many fields of force] are our own thought processes” (Simon, 2001:137). Communication is very important to design, but we have to remember that true communication is mediated, and what is most important are the associations being entered into in the very flow of the back-and-forth movement of the cybernetic conversation, across the sive border between inner and outer. New associations mean new ways of augmenting existing knowledge, in fact, it means that learning takes place, and that means the new individual is at the heart of this association (cf. Chapter 4:194). The Spencer Brown form that is being created is this new individual in the flow, or as Thackara (2006:1) puts it, in the bubble, when the collective we are in control of a complex and fourth dimensional activity space that illustrates the relationship that must exist between human beings as thinking machines and everything they need to think with, especially when that knowledge is „invisible‟ for being only accessible through technological mediation, in this abductive space where observation, interpretation and consequent decision-making is inbetween and „factually‟ (objectively) incomplete, with reference to the outside, since only „distinctions within that space‟ will place you in the bubble, where only the flow of information is constant, and everything else is mutable (cf. Chapter 4:161-162). I compared this flow to these words from Susani (2002): “trying to map places that are intangible and invisible; the flows of communication and the places where they happen”, a recognisable network of communications that resembles the space of flows – Felix Stalder (2002) compared this structure to the Dutch East-Indian spice trade: there has to be a medium through which The continuing argument to the self 306 things flow (the oceans), the stuff that flows (spices then, information now), and the nodes between which flows happen (the harbours that served as starting and end points for the ships) (cf. Chapter 4:196). Being a Spencer Brown form and a Richard Jung functional object, we are the nodes at the same time that we are the flows themselves; when we are in the bubble we create the flow itself. The flow of an ice canoe My interpretation of flow differs slightly from that of Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2002:90), i.e., to be in the flow is to experience an absorbing focus on the task at hand in which actions are merged with an enhanced awareness-of-self-and-other, a process that in many cases can seem to either speed up or slow down time, and in which one feels oneself on the border between equilibrium and disequilibrium, a dynamic sense of the interaction between control and an imminent loss of control. I cannot agree that flow entails a loss of one‟s own awareness of being a social actor (which would nullify most of ANT), or a “loss of reflective self-consciousness”, which would in turn invalidate Donald Schön‟s claim to reflection-in-action. What a designer can agree with and fully understand, is the comment apparently common to all or most of the interviewees with which the flow researchers were in contact, whether they were chess players, basketball players, musicians, surgeons or artists, i.e., that to experience flow is to be aware of a constant feedback from the developing situation, and that decisions-in-flow are based on adjustments to these feedbacks, something that cannot be done if the individual is unaware of self-in-action. What I find some difficulty with is the emphasis on flow being an autotelic activity, a process in which the practitioner immerses him or herself for the sake of the activity; art for art‟s sake, climbing mountains because they‟re there, playing basketball because that‟s what you like doing, playing chess because you like thinking ahead in a challenging situation, playing the flute (or letting the flute play you) because the music is somehow who you are. All of this I understand and support, but I cannot endorse an autotelic activity that is too self-centred and all-absorbing, and the descriptions of optimal experience are too close to “the subjectively perceived opportunities and capacities for action that determine experience” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2002:91), which, if taken at face value, would seem to encourage a preference for a structurally closed autopoietic system without the counterbalancing aspects of the informational openness of a human (knowing) system. An activity that is its own reward, as a notion within gramma/topology, is something I can make use of, but not if individual actants become their own main focal actors and everything else has to be channelled through the flow as a closed loop obligatory passage point. Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2002:99) give two examples that make this clear; “Flow principles have informed product design at Nissan USA, with the goal of making the use of the product more enjoyable”, and “In the Flow Activities Centre, students have regular opportunities to actively choose and engage in activities related to their own interests and then pursue these activities without imposed demands or pacing”. The statements Related to their own interests and making the use of the product more enjoyable are not in dispute, per se, but for the fact that they point to a focus on the individual in exclusion of an other, as if those actors (human and nonhuman) do not and cannot feature as prominently as the individual experiencing the flow. Flow, in this sense, is a non-cybernetic activity that is dismissive of social constructivism, where the observer is but one of the elements in the system being observed, even when the observation is about the observer‟s participation in a systemic activity. Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2002:91) persist in focusing on “the subjective challenges and subjective skills … that influence the quality of a person’s experience”, an approach to design education that can misjudge the complex interrelationships between students (peer-influence), between teacher and student, and between all the role players and the non-human actors in this The continuing argument to the self 307 performance-of-learning that can be called a cybernetic flow within a design conversation. It is for this reason that Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi‟s (2002:89-92) description of flow as both autotelic and teleonomic is somewhat contradictory, unless one accepts their version of flow as being focused on subjective experience alone. Teleonomy may be described as the science of adaptation but it is also an evolutionary process that “accrues information about what has worked, exploiting feedback from the environment via the selection and survival of fitter coalitions of such insight” (Foote and Hill, 2000). Making a distinction such as the recognition of subjectivity as guideline, is establishing a form of teleology, a process that is guided by purposeful action, but not the cybernetic purposeful action that Rosenblueth et al. (1943:22) had in mind (cf. Chapter 4:135). It is, instead, a teleology that contains a directive principle, a masters narrative, the goal and the purpose in this case not being external to people‟s awareness of voluntary activity and therefore deterministic of their behaviour, but a goal and purpose nonetheless that, despite being internal to people‟s awareness of voluntary activity, becomes subjectively deterministic as a role-playing master narrative, taking individuality to the extreme. The teleonomy of the self that Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2002:91) speak about is an artificial construct that cannot act as its own boundary object, as it must, if it is to be a viable system, since any adaptation that takes place flows in one direction as consumption, and subjectivity is all that remains. Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi‟s teleonomy of the self has to be examined through another lens, that of Gerard de Zeeuw‟s quality of life. “What constitutes a good life? Viewed through the experiential lens of flow, the statement a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2002:89) must be tested by “A claim has the desired quality if in the construction process attention has been devoted to the construction progressing in such a way that using the claim serves to improve the quality” (de Zeeuw, in Kooistra, 2002:123); a teleonomic hybrid would produce the following, A claim good life has the desired quality if in the construction process attention has been devoted to the construction progressing in such a way that using the claim serves to improve the quality a complete absorption in any activity constitutes a good life. This conceptual blend would seem to „prove‟ Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi‟s claim and reject de Zeeuw‟s, but Kooistra (2002:123) asks a very pertinent cybernetic question based on the work of de Zeeuw, namely “How to judge the quality of reasoning in the social sciences when you are part of the same system?” Systems theory seems to present the observer with this dilemma while at the same time affording that same observer a way out of the dilemma, an escape from between the horns of the dilemma, the twin (dichotomous) forces of their reasoning and my reasoning. Apparently, de Zeeuw‟s approach to systems thinking has a narrative structure of flow and survival, which means that the structure is simultaneously means and outcome. If a good life depends on my reasoning and on my (self‟s) survival, the construction and survival of my experiences, then I am not a part of any system except one that resembles a monocoque, a single shell construction akin to a structurally closed system, and mind is removed from body yet again, except this time my mind is removed from other bodies and hence other minds, in a split between my subjective experiences and the experiences of others. Reasoning has the desired quality if in the construction process attention has been devoted to the construction progressing in such a way that the consequences of reasoning is acceptable to the rest of the system, but a teleonomy of the self reasons in such a way that the good life becomes one for home consumption, and this subjective reasoning must either be „bought into‟ by persuasion or by force, or it is acknowledged as the product of separatist thinking, not the type of integral thinking and reasoning that takes into account the rest of the system, of which the self is only one part. You can only judge the quality of reasoning because you are part of the same system, and because the judging is facilitated not by a single self but by multiple selves in a cybernetic conversation, i.e., meaning is negotiated and constructed. The continuing argument to the self 308 De Zeeuw‟s (in Kooistra, 2002:125) approach to systems thinking is a narrative structure of flow and survival that seems to negotiate its own destruction in the moment of survival; this is not as strange as it sounds, because when you cross the border into another country, even with a valid passport, you are not „yourself‟ on the other side if you compare this self (+1) with the self (+0) at home, and when you return (re-enter) you carry with you enough new experiences for the self (+0) at home to have to adjust to the returning self (+1). “As soon as understanding emerges, the relation disappears that the elements have with each other within the bounds of understanding”, and the new self absorbs the old self, i.e., “Understanding swallows up whatever is understood. As soon as I understand who I am, I have swallowed myself up” (De Zeeuw, in Kooistra, 2002:125). When crossing the sive border between inner and outer landscape we constantly renegotiate who we are and what we know, and we do so through the (Spencer Brown/Jung) form we have designed ourselves as. Seeing that de Zeeuw‟s approach to systems thinking has a narrative structure of flow and survival, i.e., that the structure is simultaneously means and outcome, we can paraphrase Kooistra‟s (2002:127) account of the ice canoe. This means/outcome mechanism is what I refer to as an ice canoe. The [true] story of the ice canoe is as elementary as it is illustrative: an artist once built a canoe out of the material ice, launched it on a pond and paddled it around till his canoe melted / vanished back to its original state: water. One can think of knowledge our developing self as an ice canoe. It is made of the very material we are trying to sail on.4 Knowledge A fixed and finite knowledge of our real self is frozen ignorance. Only with a lot of energy (social constructions, education and technology) can we succeed in keeping our knowledge ontological self frozen. We are our own means and outcome, in collaboration, and the flow of survival really has a narrative structure based on the story that tells itself. The story that tells itself In the discussion on eigen values and the question of invariants (:294, above), it was established that “Von Foerster sees a cognitive world constructed of „eigen values‟ of the nervous system‟s cognitive processes. Eigen values are stable systems of recursive processing that stabilize in the mind and enable us to (re)cognize things” (Brier, 2003). And yet, eigen values and behaviours can only be ascribed to invariants that arise in a recursively reciprocal coupling between system and environment, but these „invariants‟ cannot be stable „second-order‟ aspects of human knowing systems, and likewise the story that tells itself cannot be such a stable aspect of our educational knowing system, i.e., one that acts in the same way as a fully described, and a domain-independent, discipline that makes use of well-defined theories that act more like methods for practice than tools for thought, and more often than not adheres to Mode 1 knowledge production, in which the researcher has full control. (cf. Chapter 3:80, fnt 10). Something that is invariant remains unchanged even under processes of transformation, and design (as process) eigen values can only be described as invariant in the sense of design being a cybernetic process of the observation of observations, which means that the only invariant aspect of design is the variability of change, as clichéd as this might normally sound. The only eigen values „we‟ (and here I remind the reader that the individual and the discipline of „design‟ are both, in exactly the same way, looking for an identity) can afford and must strive for are not the eigen values or eiegoed (that which is one‟s own) of a closed culture, but the eigen values that are only to be uncovered (as if waiting for us, but in fact „designed‟ by our own interventions and interactions) when we immerse ourselves in a process of probability when looking for a present-at-hand consummation (cf. :296, above), i.e., when 4 Cf. Chapter 1:24; Mitchell (1994:283) asked, what if that which obstructs our view also constitutes that view? The very things that 'obstruct' our view of design (plus) research are those things that we cannot seem to look past, that 'get in our way' - we cannot see the conceptual model of the wood for our close (everyday) involvement with the trees. The continuing argument to the self 309 von Foerster‟s process of interchangeability of functors standing in reciprocal relationships to one another pertains. The story that tells itself can thus not be an invariant (i.e., stable) aspect of human knowing, because the story that tells itself is the divergent (Bohm) aspect of the natural unfoldment of the cybernetic process of the observation of observations, i.e., that invariable structure that is always present due to its variability, a true and exciting paradox of design discovery. For this very reason I cannot believe in and work with a set curriculum that pre-designs the learning outcomes of design education. I do not believe in curriculum content as such, and thus cannot believe in any theory (way of knowing) that claims to explain or even to facilitate that content, afterwards. 5 The content of any course of instruction being mere data and information, but not knowledge, means that a curriculum in the 21st century needs to be about the on-the-spot creation of knowledge (cf. Chapter 2:61) „as it happens‟ (is designed by co-ontogenesis), how to acquire it and what to do with this new and „I‟ve never seen this before‟ knowledge (of the self), and not about a defined and boundary-creating „content‟ that allows no explosive question to be asked. I would rather follow the insights of Levi-Strauss and Papanek and see what happens when the story is allowed to tell itself. The telling feature of these two stories of human knowing is the paradoxical invariant aspect they share, i.e., that of side-stepping (due to never assimilating into their culture of knowing) the Western insistence on the dichotomy between the permanent and the ephemeral, an aspect of „knowing‟ that non-First World nations exhibit. Claude Levi-Strauss recorded the tale of an ethnographer in a South American country that was surprised by the unpredictable quality (according to him) of native peoples‟ responses toward the telling of a story, revealed by the reactions of the community; the same story was told time and again, in different parts of the region, by different people, but told differently with „enormous‟ variation in detail. It was not that the inhabitants of the region did not know of these „discrepancies‟, but more a case that these did not matter to them at all (Levi-Strauss, 1969:12); the telling of the story was what mattered, i.e., the possibility of a fresh (audience) interpretation with each telling (story-teller interpretation), and not the ever-lasting, mythical „factual truths‟ contained in the story, faithfully re-told, word-for-word. Victor Papanek (1995:142-143), on the other hand, would question this dichotomy, which he calls an apparent contradiction, between what we regard as permanent and what ephemeral. His example comes from Bali, from a people for “whom permanence and the momentary were inextricably intermingled”; In my village I would see the little girls practicing the Legong, the Balinese dance, with the Gamelan orchestra. Only after a time did I realise that all the interest of performers and spectators was closely focused on these practice sessions and rehearsals. Relatives, friends and other onlookers would crowd around every day, watching, smiling, shouting criticism and offering suggestions. But after the dress rehearsal all interest vanished – the actual performance took place largely under the uncritical eyes of tourists. „Why watch it now?‟ my friend Surati asked, obviously puzzled, „It is too late to change anything now. The dance and the sounds are frozen!‟ (Papanek, 1995:143) These are examples of active participation in the flow of an ice canoe, and only at the expense of a lot of (wasted) energy can we succeed in keeping our knowledge and our ontological self frozen. Why then, do we tolerate the permanence of a fixed design curriculum, when our answer to de Zeeuw‟s question, 5 Gramma/topology, as a theory of knowing-in-action, facilitates an interpretation of the so-called „contents‟ of any given situation in real time, as it happens sive unfolds. The continuing argument to the self 310 “How to judge the quality of reason …” (above), is that you can only judge the quality of reasoning (you can only judge the quality of design education) because you are part of the same living system of education, and because the judging is facilitated not by a single self (whether teacher or student) but by multiple selves in a cybernetic conversation, i.e., the meaning of design education is negotiated and constructed in the moment, when permanence and the momentary are inextricably intermingled, and we allow the story to tell itself. A likely story concealed in a portmanteau Life itself is both simplified and complex, as Jakobson‟s Ladder shows, and it is quite feasible that the outcome we seek should resemble an ongoing story more than it does an established fact, especially when that outcome is the identity of our enduring self 6 and the identity of our discipline. The only reality is in the telling of the story, in the experience we have of being alive, in the flow, in the bubble. Not the photograph, not the designed object, not the painting, but the experience of these objects and events, this is where we can find ourselves, and if we are lucky we experience the migration of the aura of whatever we are interacting with from out there to in here, which only, really, happens when the other crosses the border between out there and in here, and seeing that we are the border, our changed consciousness reacts to the flowing story that tells itself. As human beings that thrive on communication, we are not simple conduits for information flows, because “We ourselves are portmanteau Signs of a complex order. We are packing cases of multiple meaning large enough to make a human being a Sign of itself” (Kauffman, 2001:109). When [A] implies [B], meaning when [A] implies [not-A], that becomes a “convenient sign for implication”, and it is “significant to see the sign of implication as a complex sign composed of other logical signs”, according to Louis Kauffman (2001:84), and since this complex sign has an underpinning of simplicity, we arrive at inference as a portmanteau sign that “glues” the disparate “meanings into a coherent whole” (:84). The self + implication + inference, these are portmanteau signs, therefore it seems reasonable to compare this view to von Foerster‟s (1972) idea that the information that can be extracted from a description depends on our “ability to draw inferences from this description”, and I would add, to make inferences to the best explanation, also known as abductive reasoning. There are deductive and inductive inferences, both complex signs respectively, derived and these from necessity concepts and cannot be chance, made applicable to the world except as our efforts to describe that world (von Foerster, 1972), while Peirce (1998:233) spoke of deductive necessity, of inductive probability, of abductive expectability, and wondered where these came from? How does inference work, and what is its form? I interpret that to ask, how does abduction work, and what is its form? Well, according to Kaufman (above), abduction has a portmanteau form, and this portmanteau sign is used to glue all other meanings into a coherent whole; inference travels across borders between inner probability and outer necessity, and it does so as abductive expectability. However, Peirce (:233) also states that inference cannot be conceived by us if by inference (and here the term includes inductive, deductive and abductive inference) we mean something that has already been settled, and so can be adopted as part of the system of knowing. When asking, where does inference come from?, we must remember that we are the portmanteau sign of complexity, but we also 6 Needless to say, enduring posits survival and not law. The continuing argument to the self 311 have the character of self-control, “which distinguishes reasoning from the processes by which perceptual judgments are formed, and self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory”. Our portmanteau form, in order to work as it should, is also a holding-oneself-back form (above), i.e., inhibitory, and as such originates nothing, and yet holding-oneself-back is but part of the portmanteau, which can only be a portmanteau if it straddles both sides of the sive border and functions within the fields of force, within a full abductive argument. “What can our first acquaintance with an inference, when it is not yet adopted, be but a perception – a perception of the world of ideas?” (:233), i.e., the fluctuating fields of force we take as social universes, and where reason is generated, and also where “you must make arguments, demonstrations, refutations triumph in them” (Bourdieu, 1998:138). “Therefore it cannot be in the act of adoption of an inference, in the pronouncing of it to be reasonable, that the formal conceptions in question can first emerge … It must be in the first perceiving that so one might conceivably reason” (Peirce, 1998:233). Inference does not emerge in reasoning, but in perception, in participation, in an immersion,7 i.e., when we are delivered over to entities which we need so that we can be what we can be, which is our potentiality-for-Being (cf. Chapter 5:224). During this process of giving-over, this total immersion, we are no longer holding-back but become part of the process itself, and we are in the flow of experience. Yes, it is true that self-control, or rather, inhibition, cannot introduce inference, but “when an inference is thought of as an inference, the conception of inference becomes a part of the matter of thought” (Peirce, 1998:233). When we become a portmanteau of the complex sign, we are the ice canoe that is made of the very material we are trying to sail on. Only if we spend a lot of energy can we succeed in keeping our ontological self frozen, and keep ourselves from becoming our own means and outcome, in collaboration. The very flow of survival has a narrative structure based on the story that tells itself, which story becomes the story of us, while, in the process, turning education into an ice canoe sive the pond. Even though I stated (above) that one can think of knowledge our developing self as an ice canoe, in context we cannot and should not identify our learning selves as either the ice canoe or the pond, exclusively, but we can and should identify our continually learning and developing selves with the experience of the interaction, in the flow, between two topics, with our own form as the third topic. In Chapter 4:118 I wrote, Glanville‟s (1997a) description of the characteristics of Pask‟s Conversation Theory is applicable here, in that the process of learning is described as “a process of conversation about and with Topics”, and the fact that “any one Topic entails at least two others”, a triad that engenders meaning. I see the observer and the observed as acting the roles of two Topics in conversation, which, by their very interaction, engenders the becoming of the third, and virtual, Topic. Design students, it has to be said, find this a problem, since they are expected to find ways of dealing with their individual creative input contextualized by socially communal creative inputs, aka a social stock of knowledge. A conversation between the two topics of the ice canoe and the pond designs the third topic, namely our continuing virtual (and only „real‟) selves, which of course means that any one Topic (us) entails at least two others (ice canoe and pond), which further means that the new hybrid Topic One (the new us) again entails at least two others (new ice canoes and new ponds, new contexts with other actors contributing force fields to interact with). I used the term a defining moment of recognition, because everything hinges on that phase transition between the old and the new space of understanding, when the student suddenly finds herself wearing new lenses, and everything is different, when she is dancing with this invisible partner, this as if member of Pask‟s Topic trio in a dance of infinite entailments that 7 This is the user expereince in the planning of interaction design. The continuing argument to the self 312 immediately negate themselves in appearing, and it is as if each dance invents itself but also renews itself, and uses the humans to do so, in the same as if sense that Gadamer claimed that education uses us. (Chapter 4:131) Perhaps it is that defining moment when the artist sinks into the pond that has now swallowed up his ice canoe that understanding emerges, and when “the relation disappears that the elements have with each other within the bounds of understanding”, and the new self absorbs the old self, i.e., “Understanding swallows up whatever is understood. As soon as I understand who I am, I have swallowed myself up” (De Zeeuw, in Kooistra, 2002:125). Understanding then becomes a form of necessary negation or alienation from the old self, if we allow this dance of infinite entailments to use us. Education uses us In Chapter 4:128 I made use of Blacker‟s (1993) comment that the new trend in university education regards students as products that can be fashioned by an institution, and this is done on order to serve industry better. Blacker calls this a cult of efficiency that needs to be avoided, and instead, we should return to the „eigen values‟ of education, that which is intrinsic to an educational environment. This reasoning he bases on Gadamer‟s appropriation of the interpretive tradition of hermeneutical exegesis, which, in design educational terms, I would translate as the explanation that teaches, and that explanation is the story that tells itself in the flow of survival. Blacker supports Gadamer‟s claim that education uses us, and furthermore, that “education as Bildung eludes us when we obtrude too severely on its proper sphere”. If we wish to follow Heidegger into his landscape of Dasein‟s possibilities, we cannot but agree with Gadamer‟s positioning of education as this worldedness within which Dasein can find what it needs to find, but only if it surrenders – more properly, offers itself up like the ice canoe – to this potential world-in-waiting, thereby allowing „education to use us‟. Heidegger (1962:359) states “that the entity which in every case we are, is ontologically that which is farthest”, meaning, in effect, that we will never fully attain this (doubtful) goal of irretrievably becoming, should, indeed, not want to finally end this quest for Being. We are blocked on two fronts from envisaging Dasein‟s ultimate Being: firstly, in the quite natural process of Verfallen, or being-in-the-world, we ontologically cover up this greatest single achievement by being practical and logical and getting things done (cf. the „cult of efficiency‟, above). However, in thus covering up “Dasein‟s authentic Being, so that the ontology which is directed towards this entity is denied an appropriate basis” (Heidegger, 1962:359), we need to realise that, however necessary and everyday-real this worldedness might be to life lived in the present, our own true identity and that of education, its proper sphere, will not find an appropriate and adequate basis in Verfallen. Gadamer‟s claim that education uses us means the opposite of a cult of machine-tested efficiency, correlating, rather, with soft systems and second order cybernetic thinking (the design cybernetic conversation). Education, as the building up of those being educated, should mean inculcating the capacity of ontological interpretation in Heidegger‟s meaning of the term, and in seeing education as the process of inquiry, thus we should see ourselves as this same process of inquiry – we may choose to inquire about the world and how it works, or we may inquire about that which is not written down but is being written. We should let education „use us‟ in the sense of allowing the process of inquiry called „education‟ to show itself to itself, with us as the second itself, and education as our own ontologically interpretive inquiry system, because we are this world that is inquiring-into-itself. When Gadamer states that education uses us I therefore translate that as we use ourselves, and here we have the second front on which we are blocked from envisaging Dasein‟s ultimate Being. We simply cannot see what we cannot see, first by looking at „the wrong thing‟ because of practically being-in-theworld – the first closing off – and second, because when, and if, we „look up‟ (look away and are led The continuing argument to the self 313 away by abduction) from these worldly concerns we still see nothing; nothing, that is, until we learn the art of projection. In this second closing off we can try to see too much by trying to see into the future, trying to see (at once and complete) our „new selves‟ when, in fact, there is nothing whatsoever to see. Everything possible is closed off from comprehension, simply because that future is, rather, inherent in the nowness of our daily living, and it is only when we are able to make hermeneutical distinctions between what is real now and what can be real, between the possible states of ourselves as system and the possible states of our environment(s), that we realise what we choose to conserve or to keep of the now will begin to call-into-being the not-now. The purpose of myth is to distort, not to make disappear, and likewise the purpose of our learning processes is to transport and to transform our old selves, not to make that old self disappear when we enter the spacetime landscape where the „future‟ is being designed. Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur remind their readers that "the study of symbolic forms [all human action and production] is fundamentally and inescapably a matter of understanding and interpretation" (Thompson 1990:274), and in the process of inquiring into the not-now, the purpose of true education, we have the now to interpret, but we also have the coming-into-being (the potential not-now) to interpret. An appropriate basis for authentic Being can be established by conserving and projecting that which the system needs for survival (the purpose of authentic Being) – and it is here that Gadamer‟s statement, “education as Bildung eludes us when we obtrude too severely on its proper sphere” (cf. above), becomes clear. This second closing off, from ourselves, of our potential and authentic Being, comes about when we look for something other than what is already there. We can conserve (make wise choices of and for preservation, for the survival of ourselves as system), and we can make distinctions between us [A] and not-us [not-A], and we can be content with this process, but we will not survive in the sense of Gadamer‟s Bildung, nor of Heidegger‟s authentic Being if survival in the now of the present is enough for us, if we only look for what is simply already there. To achieve the authenticity of Dasein, the full potential of being human, we must also „survive‟ into the other-than-now. True education has to be this envisaging, a bildung or visage of what is not yet, and we must ensure this inquiry succeeds by looking for something other than what is already there, and in the process risking this second closing off („double closure‟). When we interpret the now we can so easily let our state of Verfallen detain us, but when we allow a potential coming-into-being a place in this hermeneutic interpretation process, we allow education as Bildung, education as self-visaging, a place in our becoming, because this life-art of projection will allow us to „see‟, not the literal future which is not there yet, but the present-aspossible-other, the cybernetic functional form. Education, as the envisaging of the other-us (Gadamer‟s Bildung), relies on this collaborative duality of now sive not-now (which can be called the hermeneutical circle of knowing), but steers away from the goal-setting agendas of the „end product‟ (risking the second closing-off through the avoidance8 of „understanding‟). The very word survival means projecting something of the now into the future, but the complete diagramme for that future Being does not exist in the now, therefore, “when we obtrude too severely on its proper sphere” education, like authentic Being, will always be “ontologically that which is farthest” (Heidegger, 1962:359), for education, like authentic Being, is not what you will be looking at (thereby missing it completely), but “with which, according to which, we see” (Lingis, in Merleau-Ponty, 1968:li). The glory of a nice knock-down argument. A continuing argument to the self is, of course, a reference to Aristotle‟s notion of arguing to first principles, an idea which I allow to migrate to design education, where it takes on the meaning of arguing to that space of knowing where we will find out what we are capable of, indeed, find out who 8 Avoidance in the sense of not looking at the what of the „proper sphere‟ of Bildung, and in the sense of Heidegger (1962:363) stating that “Common sense misunderstands understanding”. You begin to understand what is ahead by the circularity of understanding-ascare: what is ahead will only become clearer if and when we „care for‟ what we are now, ontologically. The continuing argument to the self 314 we are, but we will not be bale to do so from within a fully described and domain-independent discipline that tells us what and how to think; we need the freedom of Bateson‟s restraints and Jung‟s functional explanation, i.e., the freedom afforded us by cybernetics. I have offered gramma/topology as a theory of knowing, a way of seeing and therefore one way of understanding the world of the otherthan-us, a wayfinding structure that can help students to argue to their own first principles of thinking sive understanding, and combined with the ontological phenomenology of an education that is allowed to use us, we (staff and students alike) can only benefit from learning how to rethink both our own identities and that of our discipline. It is all about perspective, really, even though that might represent a view on a spacetime landscape that shows us to be a most peculiarly and ongoing matrix, as Clive Dilnot (2010) has it, and that leads to the knowledge that we are the third topic ever emerging from Pask‟s merging of two other topics. In the next chapter I deal with Jakimowicz and Verbeke‟s (2010:30) design / object relation, since there is an educational issue at stake between the conceptual and the representational levels in design, a difficult partnership which I migrate to the observer sive object relation in the process of forming a new entity, i.e., Pask‟s third topic and von Foerster‟s identity relation. That is the real task of design education, and a search for identity that gramma/topology can facilitate, for the I and the other cannot be the centre of what we know and what we are, “there must be a third that is the central reference. It is the relation between Thou and I, and this relation is identity” (von Foerster, 2003:227). How we get there has always been the problem, since the “most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking” (Heidegger, 1968:4), but if we are not to be told how to think by a fully described discipline, can this type of identity-provoking thinking be taught? I submit that, through this investigation into what has shown itself to me as gramma/topology, the answer to that question has proved itself, not least of which is due to Richard Jung‟s field of indefiniteness, from which our new forms may be provoked into showing themselves. If, then, this radical constructivist prospect is at all acceptable as a view on our future in the observer sive observed relation, then I can at least, in the last chapter, offer a suggestion for a practical outcome for a gramma/topological way of thinking in terms of a renewed design education, and it starts with an unusual kind of narrative structure of flow and survival. The knock-down argument starts with Lewis Carroll‟s un-usual idea of an un-birthday, the idea being that one can see something in a contrary light and in so doing extract much more from this topsy-turvy version than from the original, at a ratio of 364/1 in this case. When Alice remarks “What a beautiful belt you‟ve got on! … a beautiful cravat, I should have said – no, a belt, I mean – I beg your pardon!”, Humpty Dumpty tells her it was given him by the White King and Queen as an un-birthday present. Quite naturally Alice is confused by this statement, having never heard of such, and the Egg explains the advantages thus: “„… there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents --‟ „Certainly,‟ said Alice. „And only one for birthday presents, you know. There‟s glory for you!‟ „I don‟t know what you mean by “glory”,‟ Alice said.” Notice that Alice did not dispute the argument itself when it was explained to her, but expressed confusion regarding the new term „glory‟ in relation to the un-birthday versus birthday argument. The Egg proceeds to tell Alice that she will only understand when he tells her, although she did not seem to have any problem understanding the (new) logic in the seeming illogic of an un-birthday. “„I meant “there‟s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‟” Alice, like any self-respecting seven-year old takes him at his word, literally, and disputes the meaning of „glory‟ as signifying „a nice knock-down argument‟, something we can understand from her viewpoint. The continuing argument to the self 315 “„When I use a word,‟ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, „it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less‟” (Carroll, 1978:319-324). Humpty Dumpty is arguing from his own perspective and his own particular way of assigning meaning to groups of words, but more importantly, he argues from the knowledge of his stock of exformation 9 and the way it was formed, something that Alice does not and cannot share, not having been part of the process that constructed the specific meaning that is still present through the traces of its absence. Seen in the light of Norretranders‟s (1998:75; 92) exposition of „discarded‟ information, we can reevaluate not only the possible meanings in this knock-down argument as we find it in the „original‟ but also the meanings attached to this episode as a whole by critics who have commented on the text of both Alice books. One notable writer, J.B. Priestley (1974:313), interpreted Carroll‟s Humpty Dumpty sketch as satire, and particularly as social commentary on the (c. 1921) literary critics that “very quickly show contempt for their audience”, as do the Egg to Alice. What is important to our argument is that Priestley acknowledges “I do not say for one moment that such an explanation will exhaust the significance of Humpty Dumpty, for I should not be surprised if there are not other … interpretations of this character … but it is Humpty Dumpty as a literary character that interests me”, i.e., it is from within a very particular observational position (OP) that Priestley interprets the text, that being the OP he attributes first to Lewis Carroll, combined with the OP he attributes to these new critics he disapproves of, and then, he brings these viewpoints together in a new (combined ) OP that is peculiarly his own, i.e., his own perspective. How, then, does one judge the viewpoints and interpretations (perspectives) of others, especially in matters concerning (design) research and the demands of rigour? Do we simply compare Priestley‟s interpretation of Carroll‟s text to the commentaries of other 1920‟s critics of the Alice books, and so try to faithfully contextualise Priestley‟s approach and final interpretation (he did say that his view could not be the definitive one) while trying to remain an „objective‟ observer / commentator, or do we interpret Priestley‟s work in the light of modern commentary on both Priestley as a writer / critic and the way Carroll is read today? It seems to me quite clear that there are no definitive answers, since compelling arguments may be made for both (and more) points of view, and a metaphorical winner takes all argument is not acceptable in social constructivist terms. Priestley‟s argument remains valid because his „assumptions‟ (c. 1921, and still valid today) are based on something that transcends historical boundaries, namely the human resistance to being told what to believe; this latter point, of course, needs careful handling, because all societies have historically been nurtured into believing what they are told, by myth, theology, and politics. However, our social systems (I am speaking only of the West) are what they have become largely due to the increasing awareness of the right of individuals to choose their own destinies, for better or worse, within a democracy of likeminded people. Perhaps it is time that we ministered10 to design education in like manner, and democratically allow the users of design education, the students, to develop their own observational positions, their own perspectives, in terms of what they know and how they know this, i.e., they are to be allowed the freedom to design their own cybernetic paths to discovery, since the ontological structure of knowing they need to acquire (cf. Maturana and Varela) must be peculiarly their own observational position. Perhaps it is time that we allowed students of design to let education use their emerging forms of 9 Cf. Chapter 2:48. “To visually represent the known, Norretranders (1998:75) has shown that it is very difficult to represent anything, if we are trying to express the complex and not the surface narratives behind appearances, and for that we need to get rid of a lot of information, indeed, get rid of a lot of what we can label knowledge (:25), because what we need to express compl exity is exformation (:92), the information that we discard not because it is not used, on the contrary, as traces of the so-called real (that is so difficult to express in the first place) this „discarded‟ information is very much present-in-absence. 10 Heidegger (1962:83-84) said that what we should be striving for is a mode of Being that is made visible as care, an expression that “is to be taken as an ontological structural concept”. The continuing argument to the self 316 knowing, since education itself is “with which, according to which, we see” (Lingis, in Merleau-Ponty, 1968:li), i.e., the design educational space of probability sive possibility comes into being due to each and every student who participates in developing a constructivist argument to first principles, thereby sharing in each others‟ with which and according to which we see, and the solution to judging the viewpoints and interpretations of others is that your observational position (your judgment, your perspective) shares so many elements with (1) Jung‟s field of indefiniteness from which your form was provoked, and therefore (2) shares so many elements with the forms of others, that the term judging changes its nature and becomes a recognition of those like-minded ideas and viewpoints that can be of use to the observer of observations, the student. A design education of concern, in Heidegger‟s sense of care and Slamat‟s sense of compassionate rationality, is exactly what gramma/topology aims to achieve, drawing as it does on the free invention of interacting circular theories as fields of force, with the human observer (cf. the individual sive group) being one of the strongest „force fields‟ that education can make use of. I submit that what we believe in and believe with, are the structural sive ontological frameworks of knowing that has received too little attention, the focus having been on design „theory‟ (of knowledge) and design methods extrinsic to each individual learner. A theory of knowing such as gramma/topology takes on the nature of our ways of knowing in the fields of interaction between disciplines, when one body of what is known collides with or willingly merges with another body of what is known: we have been discussing, rather, an intrinsic observational position regarding the affordances of what „theory‟ means for design education, and I maintain that the structural sive ontological questions are at the heart of a theory of and for design meaning-making, i.e., this theory of design knowing is meant exclusively to facilitate the design of a student‟s observational position, and as such design education can help the student to become an observer of observations, thus making contextual sense of what is being observed, in the widest sense of that term. In Chapter 3 (:81-82) this sharp (re)focus on an individual‟s observational position was discussed, and it bears reiteration. The notion of an observational position should be linked to the idea of an observational stance, a dispositional prompting that runs through our minds like a musical theme repeated over and over again, since it is the rhythm of our „standing place‟ (i.e., both meanings of the Italian stanza), with standing place meaning our observational position, termed the co-ordinate system by Einstein and Infeld (1942:163). The problem with the terms co-ordinate and position is that it tends to detract from the human volitional element when using the term observation, especially when combined with traditional uses of disciplinary theories, as if this knowledge is „doing the observing‟, which, given the tendency to reify knowledge, it can seem to do, in the same way that we ascribe agency to that non-living thing called „the social‟, when it is we who are doing the observing, we, with our structural sive ontological, and therefore fallible and perpetually incomplete, frameworks of knowing. When we make ourselves aware, as reflective practitioners, of taking an observational position, and further, acknowledge that this position is a human choice, a stance that has consequences for our understanding of what we observe and also for our understanding of our developing ontologies (selves), the idea of a co-ordinate system takes on a different meaning from letters and numbers on a map. Einstein and Infeld‟s observational position is thus much more of a stance than the physical spot itself, even though they use the term co-ordinate system (CS). However, they had to admit that this approach to knowledge (when they were simply concentrating on the laws of physics) “thus far [has] lacked something. We took no notice of the fact that all observations must be made in a certain CS. Instead of describing the structure of this CS we just ignored its existence” (:164), and worse, ignored the fact that different CS‟s exist. All observations made by humans must be made from within the physical but also the metaphysical space of a particular CS, an observational position taken, i.e., a stance towards what is to be known, and that very fact colours everything we begin to understand; we might say that our chosen space, the ground from which we observe, interprets for us just as education The continuing argument to the self 317 uses us, while mediating between our developing ontologies and the world. It is thus of importance that the structure of this CS be investigated, i.e., that the structure of each student‟s developing design stance (way of knowing) be allowed to come into being without undue influence from strong theories of knowledge. A design education of concern, that includes Slamat‟s notion of compassionate rationality, steers clear of (cf. Chapter 3:105) a theoretical framework that strictly adheres to an argument from first principles, because “Such a version of critical theory makes use of quasi-causal and functional explanations and pretends to know what the „real interests‟ of people are” (Slamat, 2009:1148-1149). This strongly suggests that a theoretical ground can be offered as if it were the (researcher‟s) student‟s figure, meaning that the results of (research) learning can be pre-empted and therefore „pre-decided‟ by the (strong) theory, instead of the results being arrived at through the (researcher‟s) student‟s interaction with the problem space: the way we „see‟ anything is constitutive of what we think we understand. Design education, meaning, really, the Spenser Brown sive Richard Jung form of the design „curriculum‟, and therefore also including the developing ontological form of the knowing student, must be free (cf. Chapter 3:100) to construct and reconstruct its contingent foundations from a continuouslyemitting-information ground to its own, and our, figure. Design as a discipline, and therefore the student-designer-researcher-observer, must be the ever-becoming figure to the available informationin-the-world‟s ground, in what has been recognised by Gestalt Theory as the figure / ground relation. The observer sive object relation in the process of forming a new entity (above), as figure, does not arise from the strong theory‟s ground as if fully formed, but must be provoked, teased, invited to emerge from that ground, with which it has links, of course, but from which it also differentiates itself, in order to construct an argument to first principles. For this reason gramma/topology must be a „weak‟ theory of translation and interpretation that enhances the student‟s capability of „designerly knowing‟ (hopefully a multiple-vision way of „seeing‟) instead of a strong theory of prediction and prescription. Being part of what is being observed, a systems-oriented and social constructivist student cannot but feel the need to „look through the eyes of others‟, a state of being that Slamat (:1152) feels an educated person should be capable of, and the way to achieve this is to temper critical rationality with care, resulting in a compassionate rationality. A student of design, as a reflective practitioner that learns how to take an observational position, i.e., a design stance, in the process also learns how to judge the viewpoints and interpretations of others-asself (with compassionate rationality, with care), and as such my instinct is to answer the question (above), can this type of identity-provoking thinking be taught? with the response, no, it cannot be „taught‟ in the sense of the student being told (given a recipe / method) how to achieve this. However, my own position is that, being reflective practitioners, we (staff and students) can let education use us to the extent that we can manage to humanise the scope of design inquiry (cf. Chapter 5:267) to, with Slamat‟s compassionate rationality, observe the importance of contemporary social discourses. Intrinsic control becomes an instrument of and in dialogue, the form of us cybernetically, if we can „dwell‟ (behave as if, comport oneself toward) inside our conversations with the other as a “holding-oneselfback from any manipulation or utilization” (Heidegger, 1962:89). What gramma/topology can „teach‟ is this holding-oneself-back to let what is of concern show itself, to allow the new form of the self to emerge from one‟s own interactions with „the world‟, and therefore to avoid the use of what Slamat calls quasi-causal and functional explanations that pretend to know what the „real interests‟ of people are, because this version of „functional explanation‟ is contrary to Richard Jung‟s use of the same term (cf. Chapter 5:248). The key difference between the everyday use of the word functional and its cybernetic counterpart, is that “a variational principle governs action”, which makes a cybernetic functional explanation “different from „explanations‟ by reference to [set] goals and purposes” (Jung, 2007:21), and gramma/topology, as a theory of knowing, can add itself to an education that uses us to The continuing argument to the self 318 facilitate this process of the self becoming its own “Functional 11 explanation [that] is the basis of cybernetics” (Jung, 2007:21). In this thesis, this argument about no-thing, I asked the main research question, what is a gramma/topology of design knowledge? As a radical constructivist I am not permitted to state that a theory for design knowing called gramma/topology has been proven in objective terms. What I do believe, and therefore submit, is that I have found an argument to first principles that can also be acceptable to others, and that this thesis and especially this chapter is, substantially, the result of surrendering myself to the affordances of gramma/topology. When I put the question to my students, what is a gramma/topology of design knowledge?, this is meant to provoke them into finding their own functional explanation, and in the Prologue (:v) I stated that I am really asking a second and implied question that becomes primary, i.e., who are you, as a designer, and how do you know this? In this complex world of ubiquitous information-as-presence, the worst thing I can do is to help students achieve and maintain a stable picture of themselves as designers inhabiting a world in equilibrium, and, for my part, I believe that gramma/topology can help a student answer these questions. Inside that second question is implied another question, i.e., have you observed yourself thinking, and what do you think with? In asking who are you? we cannot expect a direct and isolated answer, but have to keep on asking more and wider-ranging questions, e.g.,  Are you a reflective practitioner?  How do you know what design really is?  Where does this information come from? All the answers to all these questions have to contain the facility of feedback loops, the first answer feeding back to the first question, generating the second question, leading to the second answer which feeds back to the … in an iterative cycle of give and take inside the cybernetic conversation that engenders the functional explanation, the new form of the reflective student practitioner. When students thus ask me, what is a design theory? I answer that question with, see if you can make sense of (and make ontological use of) this thing called gramma/topology. In this thesis I interrogated two further research questions; in a design context we have to ask, of ourselves first, who am I?, and then ask, what is a theory? These two questions are interrelated, in the sense that the first question cannot be attempted without forming some theory about the process of asking questions, searching for possible solutions and the problematic of finally selecting appropriate answers, and a really good answer will leave you undecided whether you in fact answered question one or question two, or both. That, I submit, is gramma/topology, and that is what this thesis has been all about. Is this a gramma/topology which I see before me, its theoretical-equipment ready-toward my hand? Why did I begin this research into a theory-of-knowing that is called gramma/topology? I‟m still not sure of the answer to that question, mainly because the question itself does not make any sense to me, and the fact that I did not consciously „choose‟ to „look‟ for gramma/topology; it found me. What I do feel (rather than „know‟ as „fact‟), is that I have been following a path of discovery that stretches back to my early childhood, when I first became aware of being interested in asking the question, why? I, of course, cannot remember this as a „fact‟ (a substantiated and therefore accepted part of „known 11 The key difference between the everyday use of the word functional and its cybernetic counterpart, is that “a variational pri nciple governs action”, which makes a cybernetic functional explanation “different from „explanations‟ by reference to goals and purposes” (Jung, 2007:21). Henceforth all references to a functional self or functional explanation will carry this connotation of being stochastic in nature. The continuing argument to the self 319 history‟), but I am told / informed / „put-in-the-picture‟ by my family (parents) that I was a very stubborn child as a toddler (aged 0-5 years, before my first, „real‟ moment of recognition of myself as a person, i.e., when my „memory‟ and my ability to make distinctions began), and that I would absolutely refuse to obey any command „on principle‟ and yet, when the command was changed to a request, and further, was explained to me (and that magic word, „please‟, was added), I would immediately, seemingly without „thinking‟, do what was requested of me, i.e., I would accede to the request for a codesign of the „situational context‟. Did I have any inkling of the importance of a constructivist environment for development? Of course not, and neither do I think, now, that were that knowledge made available to me, somehow, at that age, that it would have made much of a difference to my „natural‟ development. It is not so-called „knowledge‟ (simply „outside-information‟) that makes a difference, but the interactions between communicating systems, and the resulting knowledge that one of those systems (myself, in this case) then can have access to, autopoietically as an internal structural change. However, I do have to admit that the stories (narratives, models of conduct, patterns of behaviour) that my mother told us from the time we could listen did have an effect sive affect (my first demonstration of communications that communicate) on my developing patterns of knowing (but this again can be identified as autopoietic co-ontogenic drift), which scenario was added to by later events (themselves types of narrative) such as the lessons I received in swimming and „talking to the animals‟ (cf. Chapters 3 and 5), and the „lesson‟ I was taught by nature itself when I found my „basho‟ (that „empty‟ space of all possibilities) in Arniston (Chapter 3). These are all narratives that shaped my awareness of my outside-self in one way or another, and designed me as a reflective practitioner of my own life. If you ask me the question now, where did gramma/topology come from?, I would still have to answer, I don’t know, because it is the wrong, semantic question, but ask me, what happened to you?, and I can answer that structural question without thinking, i.e., gramma/topology happened to me. I do realise that one of the main reasons this works for me is that systemic thinking allowed me to ask of myself the Maturana / Varela structural question, how does a system acquire the necessary structure it needs in order to deal with the world? How could students of design acquire the necessary knowing structures they need in order to deal with the complex world of wicked problem spaces and situations? If I then look back at the work done for this thesis, that was one of the main research questions I had to answer, for myself, but in order to let my own answer make sense to anyone else, my students above all, I had to find a way to communicate to them something that will not let itself be expressed, directly, a seemingly harsh constructivist impossibility, if you believe in direct and easy communication and the transfer of knowledge. I believe that I have found that way, because the „I‟ proved to be not an isolated individual (structurally and informationally closed) but an ever (re)forming „we‟ that redesigns the way necessary for each and every journey of discovery, by respecting the Richard Jung field of indefiniteness. That way to knowledge is gramma/topology, and it does not matter that another „I‟ uses it differently, or uses it with the parts rearranged sive reconfigured, because, in a conversation with Jörn Messeter this week, I heard myself saying that gramma/topology is an open source theory, and as such, as much as for its constructivist and autopoietic character, gramma/topology deals with all sources it feeds itself with as de Zeeuw (in Kooistra, 2002:125) deals with understanding: “As soon as understanding emerges, the relation disappears that the elements have with each other within the bounds of understanding”, and an invigorated gramma/topology absorbs the theory-parts from externalto-itself sources, i.e., “Understanding gramma/topology swallows up whatever is understood. As soon as I understand who I am gramma/topology understands what it has become, I have swallowed myself up it swallows itself up, it (re)turns to the indefiniteness that feeds it and allows it to regenerate. Like actornetwork theory, as explained by John Law (2005”7-12), it has no fixed identity and can (should, must) therefore transform itself by offering its own meta-design as a framework for thought, allowing every person who uses it to succumb to the inbetweenness of its single sive plural nature, making it and its The continuing argument to the self 320 users more than one and less than many, to the extent that “this sensibility for complexity [makes it possible to] avoid naturalizing a single spatial form, a single topology”. I am glad that I persisted in reading Heidegger, for now I can explain to my students how it is possible for both designer-Dasein and design-Dasein to induce a coming-towards-itself, as potentiality-for-Being, and in the process find out what it is that “it” should concern itself with. Gramma/topology can now provide a conceptually theoretical platform, i.e., a theory-as-ontology framework (a theory-of-knowing) that can enrich the teaching and learning of design in all its diverse applications, because there is no (main, focal) „I‟ teacher but there are many „we‟ participants sive observers in and of this cybernetic design conversation that is, after all, design education. In asking the question, what is design knowledge, and how is this knowledge generated?, I argued that design, as a term denoting human organisation and activity, needs to be recognised as a social process that can only be evaluated, and subsequently awarded a place in our lives, if we can understand our own, constructed selves as inextricably linked to these „products‟ of our projected image-schemas of self-identity and our models of social reality. With hindsight, it now seems clear to me that all the main, really interesting questions stem from one source, as it were, and can therefore be „answered‟ as if only one question was asked in the first place (and the detail, the exact wording, of any one question does not matter in the least), because, comparable to the Papanek and Levi-Strauss examples of the story that tells itself (cf. Chapter 6:309), all questions and thus all answers stem from this design(ed) existence we call life, when the question seems to be directed at our personal Dasein-ness, or that we call design, when the question seems to directed at our professional Dasein. Gramma/topology, as the „inter-face‟ of various circular theories-of-knowing, is radically constructive enough to disallow any distinction to be made between the private and professional identities of any of the participants in this cybernetic conversation, and all knowing-of-the-world-and-self merges into one movement of coming-into-Being. There is only one, larger and richer, „big picture prospect‟ that we can have access to, and that is the emerging story that begins telling itself when we make that first distinction, that first act of design, in launching ourselves, as it were, onto sive into this spacetime landscape of complexity that ensues whenever-and-always we are conscious, i.e., when we structurally couple with any other system we come across in the medium we exist in. All questions are subsumed by this imperative, know yourself; everything else flows from that moving instance, and then returns to itself. A last Bridge to cross On that basis, and given that the following applies, we can ask, where to from here? The (groundless) foundations of design, and therefore of design education, are (cf. Chapter 3:104) not only to be formed by the interactions between the information-bearing elements that are to be sourced from any area of study that contains information pertaining to cyclical feedback systems; any discipline that concerns itself in any way with the conception and projection of human conditions of living; all areas of knowledge production that combines critical theory (read, critical thinking) with critical care, but these (groundless, as yet unconnected and disparate) „foundations‟ (more properly, „ground‟) are also to be formed and reformed on a continuous basis by the developing, living, context. If we can accept that argument for design as a discipline, then why can this same argument not apply to the education of design students? In the last chapter I make suggestion for a practical outcome for a gramma/topological way of thinking in terms of a renewed design education, and suggest that we allow the users of design education, the students, to take their rightful place as skilled practitioners of learning. A new beginning 7 321 A new beginning There can be no conclusion There can be no conclusion because there is no beginning and no ending to the design and thinking process, and when one enters an entailment mesh, the starting point is of little concern, since the path (of discovery) that is developed is of most concern, being a cybernetic conversation that “is, itself, an organisationally closed and informationally open [autopoietic] system … [that a design education of concern will employ by highlighting] inscriptions of the shared component of A‟s and B‟s [being conversational partners] concepts as a kernel of nodes, standing for topics … These inscriptions, together with relations between them, form an entailment mesh” (Pask, 1980). Ultimately, my suggestions for a renewal of design education centres on the co-construction of an open-source elearning platform that functions as a co-ontogenic entailment mesh (more below). Before I arrived at this point of revelation, I had to question my own path of discovery, and what I have done in this thesis, I realise, is subliminally question my own reflective practice, i.e., I have, in effect, looked at the difference between my espoused theories and my theories-in-use (in the sense of understand yourself before you can begin to understand others, and you can only really „understand‟ yourself by beginning the process of understanding others1), because what we really do in practice, and what we base that on, can differ from what we espouse or suppose (imagine) we base our practices on. Theoria and praxis can be so exclusive of one another that we are not really acting as observers of our own observations, and reflection on practice is then really reflection on the efficient way we obey a given theory of knowledge. “But there are … theories-in-action implicit in our patterns of behavior with others. Like other kinds of knowing-in-action, they are usually tacit” (Schön, 1987:255). This fact of human existence, that most of what we know and most of what we try to communicate remains stubbornly tacit, i.e., almost impossible to express, write about, present to others, draw, or design, because the difference between what is in here and what can be shown to others out there can be so great as to be insurmountable. This is the perennial student problem, and the enduring problem with any type of educational system, as I pointed out in Chapter 4:141-142. Even the best teachers can fail to reach their students, can fail to „teach‟ them, if by „teaching‟ we mean giving them the tools to provoke new ways of thinking, when such tools are rejected, as they may be, despite the fact that these tools might work for us. Michael Pearson experienced just such a situation, when the changed-bycircumstances student body demand to be taught, regarding it as their right not to be forced to think too deeply and too analytically (or, of course, to synthesise the results of thinking). Michael used to enjoy going to work and having the students reacting to and interrogating the material, but now it is a question of asking, why are they “choosing „the way of the problem solver‟ – they say problem solving theory takes the world as it is; we live in this world – this is the reality – live with it!” (Pearson, 2004). This scenario should be very familiar to many teachers of design, and they will know what Michael means when he states that I scream (inwardly) that my students shy away from the complementary concept of critical theory, which calls into question the world as it is – the „existing institutions and social power 1 ... and, like the entialment mesh, there is no chicken-or-egg scenario, no starting or ending point that would make a lasting difference to the process. A new beginning 322 relations … why are they not „enquiring into their origins and nature of change‟ … I struggle to get my students involved in this interrogation so that they can reap the rewards it offers: particularly as Bellamy informs us „critical theory is inherently reconstructive because reflecting upon these assumptions … is thus a necessary part of thinking anew‟. (Pearson, 2004) Perhaps critical theory, any theory, can only be effective if it can be taken on board as if a part of the intrinsic thinking mechanism of any observer, instead of taking on the strong-theory appearance of an extrinsic system of thought that has to be obeyed. The new Millennium Student (cf. Chapter 2) does not like this approach to education, one in which they have no real part but are expected to consume readymade structures preserved by the negative feedback mechanisms of academic control, and even when, as in Michael Pearson‟s case, they are offered reconstructive critical theory as thinking tools, they may still not recognise these for what they are, or can be. Any curriculum should allow for a „reconstructive‟ process through reflection, a process in which the students‟ learning, or pedagogical experience, becomes a voluntary restructuring, but how would the student recognise that the material can be made „personal‟ and become part of that student‟s embodied, i.e., tacit knowledge, when it starts out as the explicit knowledge of someone else. I am told this by my students, for they mention that, too often, they experience a sense of loss, produced by their conceptual non-involvement, when finally handing in their practical projects. In contrast, when questioned about the „theory‟ projects they have to complete for my class (and often the information is given spontaneously), the students report a sense of achievement, despite the fact that I ask the 3rd years to deal with issues that are conceptually on at least the 4th year level, and this happens because through systemic thinking and a cybernetic approach they turn the explicit knowledge of others into their own implicit knowledge. As an example, for their next group project I have set my students the task of completing the DTRS9: Design Thinking Research Symposium (April 2012, Northumbria University UK) challenge entitled Articulating Design Thinking, which includes the brief Modern Age: How can the design of products, spaces, and services make growing old seem more attractive and inviting? The announcement reads: Invited DTRS9 participants should consider concentrating their paper on topical and relevant design research issues including, but not limited to, the following: ■Understanding and articulating the design process; ■Design communication; ■Design context; ■Design expertise; ■Design thinking; ■Design behaviour; ■Disciplinarity issues in design; ■Design knowledge; ■Language in design; ■Cross cultural issues in design; ■Co-designing; ■Socio-cultural issues in design; I, however, require the student teams to deal with all of these aspects in their research reports (I have stopped calling them theory essays), in order to record their responses to each issue and to be able to reflect on each one as an issue, but also to reflect on the integration of all these issues in one project, and how the one design issue impacts on the other, and then to link this new awareness to any and all of the theories (that comprise gramma/topology). To prepare for this project they have to read the papers from DTRS8 & 7, and to use these as the benchmark for their own project. Learning, despite my insistence that the students always work and prepare in groups, is a personal experience, and the teacher can have no direct contact with that (internal) experience, which begs the question, when marking any project, exactly what is being „marked‟? In a traditional design school, how do you mark something that is the result of a student‟s theories-in-action that may be implicit in their A new beginning 323 behaviour but not necessarily in their expression (their designs), when the student‟s theory-in-action may differ markedly from the teacher‟s (the prescribed theory for that subject) espoused theory? The real challenge lies in that kind of pedagogic experience that happens to the students in their own reconstructed (anew) worlds, where I, as teacher, have no control, despite the fact that I am one of the co-designers of (contributors to)that new world. According to Whitney-Smith you cannot observe the (conceptual) structural changes a (student) system experiences during the learning process, because “there is no way for an external observer [teacher] to determine if a system has changed its structure” (Whitney-Smith, 1987/88). This is the constructivist pedagogic experience of the individual who freely chooses to „learn‟ – or as Michael Pearson would say, the individual who has the sheer bloody mindedness to want to know WHY. This is the individual who asks that question, in class, of myself, yet cannot, must not, listen to „my‟ answer, indeed learns to know that it is not my „answer‟ that matters, but a new way of listening to the information that is available at any moment, coupled to the information that can still be accessed, must still be accessed. Learner become auto-teacher, in a systems theory sense, but, conversely, this also means teacher become auto-student, and through the observation of observations during the cybernetic design conversation, I can (to some extent at least) observe the structural changes taking place, I can observe and share in the experiences the student as a knowing system is going through, because that student „teaches it back‟ to me via the feedback loops that keep on feeding the cybernetic conversation. When it comes to dealing with the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, and the switching between the two, do not try to understand this kind of pedagogic experience in others before you learn to understand it in yourself, first. That „truth‟ was what put me on to the path of discovery that led to gramma/topology, and it only happened because I was lucky enough to come across a systemic way of thinking. This, then, is the difficulty of „teaching‟, the fact nothing can be taught in the sense of easily and unproblematically transferring so-called knowledge from one mind to another. However, this type of pedagogical experience can be provoked because what can be observed “is not „learning,‟ an internal change of state, but the behaviors associated with learning” (Whitney-Smith, 1987/88), and these changes in behaviour are what deserves the „marks‟, although I would again tend to disagree with Whitney-Smith and call these changes in behaviour „learning‟, because that is what I recognise in myself under similar circumstances, and I can demonstrate to the students how I can turn the explicit knowledge of others into my own implicit knowledge using the systemic mechanism of gramma/topology. All of this leads to one conclusion: traditional design education needs redesigning. But there can be a new beginning There need not be any conclusion to the process of design, which is a constant coming-into-being modelling of one‟s own reaction to the human sive world interface, but there are constant new beginnings; some of these can take on surprising and ground-breaking directions that cannot be foreseen. When I ask the question of myself, where to from here?, I have to reflect on what both I and my students (as an academic unit searching for renewal) have achieved and experienced so far. Design education can and should follow the course being set by design researchers who act as reflective practitioners in terms of discussing what the nature of design should be for a sustainable society, in the long run. That much has been established. We also need to remember that the groundless „foundations‟ for design thinking and gramma/topology are not formal foundations that become rules, methods or formulae, or for that matter, formal theories of know-how, but are closer to the principles that nourish the theory of living systems. The underpinnings of a new direction for design as a discipline are (to name a few important ones) the use of cyclical feedback systems; a concern with ways that deal with A new beginning 324 the conception and projection of human conditions of living; and all areas of knowledge production that combines critical theory (read, critical thinking) with critical care, i.e., compassionate rationality. If we can accept that argument for design as a discipline, then why can this same argument not apply to the education of design students? If we accept the constructivist approach to design education, and are willing to respond to the cybernetic results of the emergent properties of living systems situations, then we need to treat the student as an equal partner in the search for knowledge-production. We need to treat the student as a skilled practitioner. As a possible approach to the reconceptualization of design education, and as a suggestion for the future use of a gramma/topological way of thinking, I offer a dialogue between a gramma/topological mindset and two case studies, the first being a brave manifesto from Lucy Kimbell, and the second dealing with several articles written for the journal Reflection, describing various approaches to design thinking at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture in Ghent, Belgium. The Manifesto for the M(B)A in Designing Better Futures Lucy Kimbell (c. 2011) has created what can only be called a manifesto for designing better futures,2 and although her proposal for this new M(B)A is aimed at design management and its application is focused on management education, the framework that emerges can productively be compared to design education, and specifically to the new area we 3 are exploring in which design theory and „professional practice‟ (so-called „business for design‟) begins to merge. This section is thus offered as a tentative recommendation for future research in design thinking hybridization. Kimbell states that she does not wish to merely improve management education by inserting or introducing new types of thinking, which correlates with my contention (cf. Chapter 5:249) that the simplistic introduction of systemic thinking in a design theory curriculum will not work; I do not wish to argue for the type of interdisciplinary thinking that integrates the systems approach into design thinking as if simply adding another string to the bow would solve an inherent problem, since „the problem‟ is not so much design thinking but one highlighted by the contemporary, external, world of complex social interactions; the „problem‟ is a truly systemic problem, namely one of evolutionary adaptation. In like vein Kimbell suggest the possibility of a new attitude to education itself, a thought spurred on by a world seemingly in conflict with itself, with only a truly interdisciplinary approach standing a chance of offering any way out of what is at present an unsustainable direction. This new attitude that she suggest is a cross between the undisciplined view of Rust and the messy, wicked problem world of Rittel and, for good measure, is also based on the notion of Jonas‟s groundless field of knowledge in the sense that the Manifesto argues the case for sourcing the programme‟s conceptual parts from any discipline that deals with situated knowledge and its resultant investigation of user experience and appreciation, hence the inclusion of all manner of social science and humanities areas of knowing. The Manifesto also makes no concession to an institutional or otherwise set pattern of thought, and therefore cannot offer a way of arguing that amounts to arguing from first principles, instead, arguing for the not-yet without being too concerned with the constraints of the now. On this same deliberate and radical constructivist basis of not-knowing Kimbell‟s proposed M(B)A will not adhere to the established management programmes for a traditional MBA, but then neither will it follow what has up till now been accepted practice in design schools. The proposal makes provision for 2 Cf. the call for design to respond to the pressing needs of contemporary society via “the conception and projection of human conditions of living” (Jonas, 2007:188). 3 New to our faculty, although I do believe this hybrid has been applied elsewhere. A new beginning 325 what one can only call a design cybernetic conversation between the two entities that previously called themselves an MBA and an MA (in design), and the hybrid that will emerge from this collaboration should exhibit all the characteristics of co-ontogenic drift, and a social autopoietic viewpoint helps the designer to recognise the new hybrid, even in its indefiniteness and unfinished form, instead of seeing the two original forms slightly enhanced by the interaction. What seems to be envisaged by this Manifesto for the M(B)A is a form of education that will be allowed to design itself, as Gadamer believed education can „design itself‟ by using us, with two provisos: [1] that we re-examine the nature of knowledge and its production, and [2] that we then also rethink what the function of a discipline is and should be. I can only agree with Kimbell that knowledge is comparatively ineffective when dealing with a contemporary world of complexity and situations of uncertainty, a modern scenario that, on its own merits, would warrant a complete re-design of the educational system, and specifically how we produce knowledge, and more, how we facilitate the students‟ own construction of their knowledge. I believe that I have shown the necessity of allowing the emergence of a type of student knowledge production that is contingency-based, and focused quite specifically by the (design) situation and context being dealt with. For this reason, as well as the strong underpinning of a theory for design knowing by the mechanism of reasoning that emerges from an attitude of arguing to first principles, we cannot rely on the guarantees previously supplied by disciplinary knowledge and theories, since the pace of change is too fast, and, lest we forget, being surrounded as we are the by ubiquitousness of design in general and embedded computational systems in particular, it is no longer a question that things cannot be done but that they can. That means “the problems of real-world compatibility and coordination are going to get worse” since, if we can think of a possible new hybrid, the (short) history of this new revolution called cyber-physical systems (CPS) is such that, sooner rather than later, it will become possible, because “hardware and software design has reached a tipping point, where computing and networking can indeed be integrated into the vast majority of artefacts made by humans” (cf. Chapter 1:32, and Lee, 2009:71). We therefore have to ask if our existing design approaches to „problem-solving‟ are sufficient, and if our design curricula are up to the task of educating these new critical thinkers? I think not, and neither does Kimbell (c.2011) and Norman (2010d), both of whom argue for a new type of design educational approach, with Kimbell focusing on the necessity of our conceptual tools being structured such that they will allow us to deal with complexity and uncertainty, with one of the most important pointers to being able to do so being the insight and the conviction that a dialogue (none other than the design cybernetic conversation discussed in this thesis) must follow and include all human and non-human actors that have any connection with the design context, and, being so allowed, must be also foreseen to change the whole context within which learning takes place, whether in an educational setting or professional. Echoing the call from Boland and Collopy (2004:4) that management practice and education relies too heavily on a „decision attitude‟ that “portrays the manager as facing a set of alternative courses of action from which a choice must be made” instead of having to design these alternatives, since the idea of creating new alternatives is more important than the ideal of choosing among given „alternatives‟ (cf. Chapter 5:295), Kimbell stresses the lack of knowledge as a positive spur to innovative thinking in an environment of uncertainty that needs the dynamics of a cybernetic and inclusive conversation. The nature of knowledge (as form, as product) and its contemporary production must be rethought and reconfigured, since we are the forms that „carry‟ the knowledge produced (tacit knowledge) while we are also the forms that disseminate this knowledge (explicit knowledge). We are our own form and product, but, then, so is everyone else as a knowing system, a system that serves as carrier or vehicle for the story that tells itself. Everything we acquire and everything we produce has been, is being, and will further be mediated by other systems of knowing, and under these circumstances to insist on the A new beginning 326 stability of knowledge, its production and acquisition, is to refuse the reality of Horst Rittel‟s wicked and complex world of social-political-economic design contexts, i.e., “evidence of the messy, contingent, worlds in which knowledge is constructed and action takes place” (Kimbell, c.2011). This leads on to Kimbell‟s second proviso, i.e., that we then also rethink what the function of a discipline is and should be, and hence the necessity of rethinking the whole approach to education. The notion that we have to seriously consider the limitations of a knowledge base for Kimbell‟s new M(B)A can be made applicable to any design discipline today, being in the same business as it were (no pun intended at all), with design having to rethink its place in the world, and to decide if that place is adjustable and adaptable enough to address the demands of the world and not just the demands of a curriculum that keeps on slipping further and further behind. The adjust to and adapt reference has a double meaning, with teaching and learning in design taking on the exact same meaning as we design the world and the world designs us. This mutual process of transformation cannot happen without recourse to some form of rigour, but here we have to differentiate between „severity‟ and „thoroughness‟, between an inflexible attitude towards a subject under study and one that allows for adaptability, yet remains a process of discovery that pays attention to what emerges, and pays that attention by means of a concern with the formation of both parties in the communicative process: the „I‟ and „the other‟. (Chapter 3:77) Only a curriculum that can, based on a questioning discipline, be made adjustable and adaptable will succeed in allowing the future design students to design the world as they in turn allow the Gadamerian education sive learning environment to use them, i.e., to design them in a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship of purpose. This is how I would interpret Kimbell‟s new approach to disciplines, and specifically her questioning of the boundaries that disciplines can draw around themselves when fully described, i.e., when disciplines make use of well-defined theories that act more like methods for practice than tools for thought, disciplines that more often than not adhere to Mode 1 knowledge production, in which the researcher has full control (cf. Chapter 3:80, ftn. 10). This is the difference between „severity‟ and „thoroughness‟ when speaking about research vigour, precisely this difference between Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge production, which becomes a flexible attitude regarding what is studied, just as an observer of observations must acquire a structure of knowing that is flexible in the sense of being calibrated by what is being observed, and what is being observed is the emergence of something that is discovered by being uncovered (disclosed); this is the difference between being told what role to play and the willing (if surprising) formation of the roles and identities of all parties in the cybernetic conversation. Kimbell quotes Barry et al. (2008) who “found that an idealised interdisciplinarity was more complicated than its advocates suggest … [raising] questions about what might happen at the boundaries of design fields and management disciplines”, thereby reiterating her belief that the proposed M(B)A cannot be a simple amalgamation of two existing courses of study, which is what many attempts at interdisciplinary research turn out to be, a process that inevitably retains the original mindsets instead of encouraging the emergence of new ones. When switching from Mode 1 to Mode 2 knowledge production, a curriculum for the 21st century must change the very fabric from which it is being reconstituted, and like the ice canoe return to its origins only to re-emerge refreshed. Simon‟s (2001:111) “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” will not be achieved with known and sedimented knowledge that need not be reconsidered, questioned, and in the process of Mode 2 knowledge production put itself, as an interface between product and user, in constant danger of dissolving and vanishing. The latter A new beginning 327 two terms belong to Simon‟s (2001:113) description of design as a boundary science, and agrees substantially with Luhmann‟s (1995:372-373) notion that contradiction does not make that much of a difference (therefore it can safely be considered) since events disappear as soon as they occur: design as a boundary event draws from the sedimented stock of knowledge, even in its imminent disappearance, since its very coming into being constitutes its function: to facilitate the transition from the old to the new. (Chapter 3:95) I have to agree but also disagree with Kimbell‟s (c.2011) statement that “The resulting uncomfortable fluidity and hybridity means this M(B)A may not ever be able to come into existence” because the right requirements are assumed to be knowable by administrators and degree awarding boards at the start of the educational process, in opposition to John Chris Jones‟s (1988: 224) injunction: “the „right‟ requirements are in principle unknowable by users, customers, or designers at the start”. A curriculum for the 21st century that these new Millennium Students will find accessible cannot, then, adhere to the strict rule of a fully described discipline, and on these same grounds I have to agree with Kimbell that this new approach to education will quite likely not find favour with administrators in the new managerialist style, and yet, as a thought-experiment about-face, one might venture to also disagree with Kimbell‟s view, in the sense that we may ask if it is the content structure of the curriculum and/or the discipline that should be highlighted, or simply the learning process itself. What is it that makes a curriculum work for those exposed to its enabling structure? It is not the wording of the curriculum, nor is it the surface structure that describes the qualification, at least not the unit standards employed by the South African Standards Authority (SAQA, 2010). For the degree of e.g., Industrial Design, there are two levels of outcomes to use as a framework for any particular curriculum, i.e., specified and critical cross-field (or criteria) outcomes. The wording of both levels are generalspecific enough to allow educators the leeway for any amount of adaptability and adjustment. At the end of a period of learning (if proposed changes are implemented), a student will emerge with either a diploma after three years or a degree after a four year course of study: if the new qualifications are approached in the spirit of an incremental learning process and not in a spirit of administrative efficiency, then the wording for either stream (3 or 4 years of study) need not differ in any degree, for it is the capacity building of the student that will prove the deciding factor, and not the external scaffolding of a rigidly decided curriculum with any number of „support‟ programmes. The specified outcomes call for, apart from Industrial Design practical skills and knowledge, an understanding of the profession and industry relationship, and a professional level language skill, the demonstration of the ability to provide comprehensive design development and specification skills, coupled to the creation of design solutions for the international arena. These last two criteria are worth 90 credits, while what could become the real inner core of such a programme is hidden in an 8 credit specification: Demonstrate awareness of academic and philosophical issues surrounding Industrial Design. This is what I mean by agreeing with Kimbell that a totally new approach will not find favour with those who write these outcome rules and specifications, since they are written in a controlled environment that cannot tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, despite the fact that the SAQA critical cross-field outcomes would seem to read as if the curriculum would support the direction her M(B)A manifesto is taking, when in fact they do not, being an example of the difference between espoused theory and theory-in-use. However, a totally new approach to design education need not be in conflict with any of these exit level outcomes with their asymmetrical credit distribution, since these are specified and mere labels for practical inputs, the packaging, as it were, while the criteria outcomes are worded in such a way that an undisciplined and hybrid approach to education will be able to find favour with students without disturbing the equilibrium of the exit level outcomes in any way. A new beginning 328 This manifesto for designing better futures asks that we rethink the nature of a discipline, and therefore re-examine the nature of knowledge and, crucially, the nature of knowledge production, which means that we need to reassess the role that students themselves can and must play in their own knowledge production. It is in the nature of a cybernetic conversational feedback loop that the question of student knowledge production should then impact on the (re)design of the curriculum itself, focusing more on Mode 2 knowledge production that assumes a flexible attitude regarding the detail of what is studied, as long as the end result is a competency on the part of the student to address all the exit level outcomes, which is made all the more possible given that the aim of education is then to encourage critical thinking and the ability to apply that in the real world, with care. This flexible attitude towards what is studied, which equates with an observer of observations that must acquire a structure of knowing that is „flexible‟ in the sense of being calibrated by what is being observed, already points to the inclusion in the overall curriculum of another mechanism that can scaffold the learning process, namely Pask‟s entailment mesh, an as yet protean idea that is beginning to take shape in my department, and one that I have high hopes for being realised, sooner rather than later. Reflections on designing better futures The second case study, or rather, collection of insightful viewpoints on design education, comes from people either teaching at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, or are associated with the School via workshop sessions. The first example focuses on the „uncanny‟, an aspect of the phenomenological approach of Heidegger that allows a repositioning of knowing during the process of reflection; the second discusses several „entry points‟ to reflection that also deal with the tacit / explicit dichotomy, as well as the design / object relation, which I transform into the observer / object relation, thus linking this example to the first. The third example deals with reflection as a learning strategy, and provides the entry point to my department‟s discussion of the use of an entailment mesh as a learning tool. The Uncanny Describing one of the training courses at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture (Ghent, Belgium), Karel Deckers (2010:15) basis his move away from conventional architectural representation on the phenomenological approach of Heidegger, that allows a “„return‟ to the phenomena as such,” and specifically the phenomenon of the uncanny or unheimliche. Macquarrie and Robinson (1962:233, ftn. H. 188), in translating Heidegger‟s use of unheimlich as uncanny, state that “it means more literally „unhomelike‟,” and this feeling (this position of not-being-at-home) stems from an anxiety that originates in peoples‟ relationships with the world. “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein” does not refer to fear as a modern existential emotion, since this angst does not manifest itself through any entity in the world, i.e., there is literally no „thing‟, object, situation, or person to be afraid of, since “when something threatening brings itself close, anxiety does not „see‟ any definite „here‟ or „yonder‟ from which it comes … that in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within the world” (Heidegger, 1962:233). In terms of design education and the question of reflection or being a reflective practitioner, this is an important point to make: nothing can be „seen‟ and therefore nothing can be known from within this position of angst, an anxiety induced by a feeling of not-being-at-home, an „uncanny‟ feeling of not-knowing, i.e., of not being certain of … of what? Since this feeling is induced by nothing, not an object, a situation or a person, but is, still, due to our relationships with the world, then where does this anxious feeling come from? Uncanny is described as something that is beyond our knowledge, or our capacity to know, i.e., beyond our capacity to make sense of what we think we „see‟ in the world, or in this case, what we do not „see‟ but simply feel or intuit. This last word is symptomatic of what people also mean by (a type of) reflection, since it refers to a contemplation, a „looking-inside‟ that is based on no entity within the world, as Heidegger rightly remarked, hence the A new beginning 329 feeling of anxiety. Synonyms for „uncanny‟ are cryptic, deep, impenetrable, inscrutable, mystic, occult, magical, miraculous, preternatural, transcendental, and unearthly, while related words are dark, obscure, shadowy, incomprehensible, unaccountable, disorienting, perplexing, and unknowable (Merriam-Webster, 2011). What can this possibly have to do with design education? The opposite of not-knowing is canny, a circumspect position of knowing-how-to (Chambers, 1999:207), related to the Scots term ken, both terms derived from the Anglo-Saxon cennan / cunnan, meaning to know or knowing (Chambers, 1999:743), but also described as the “Old English cennan „tell, make known‟; related to Dutch and German kennen „know, be acquainted with‟” (Oxford, 2011a). Thus we have „canny‟ as the ability of getting to know something (knowing-how-to), but also the ability to make this something known to us (be acquainted with), and to others in communication. All of this means that we are able to position ourselves in the world and also able to communicate this knowledge to others; we are able to explain our relationships with the world and all that may be in it, hence the feelings of anxiety when we are unable to do just that. How then can Deckers (2010:87) claim that “The „Uncanny‟ is the common and inclusive quest for growth in collective and individual competence, both in pedagogical and architectural [design] research”? The answer lies in the difference between knowing and not-knowing, and the fact that a constructivist education has to promote the reflectiveness of the not-knowing part of human inquiry, turning away from the knowing part, i.e., turning away from conventional design representation (Deckers, 2010:15) towards what I described in Chapter 1:15 as the quality changes in the way students view the world in the process of acquiring new ways of generating individual knowledge. Gramma/topology is described as such a theory of knowing, one that makes full use of the „uncanny‟ in the form of, e.g., Heidegger‟s ontological phenomenology and Richard Jung‟s field of indefiniteness; in the former case a theory of knowing (as opposed to a theory of knowledge that relies on the known) will aid the observer in uncovering what is „there‟ in possibility, but cannot be „seen‟ from the present position, while in the latter the new form (understanding) has to be provoked and constructed from this field of indefiniteness that our inquiries have to disturb. It has always been a case of constructing the unknown from the known, the new from the old, and changing uncanny into canny, that is, if we can overcome our fear of the unknown and suspend our „belief‟ in the unsubstantiated „fact‟ that unheimlich necessarily means cryptic, deep, impenetrable, inscrutable, or unearthly, and stop describing the feeling of uncanny as dark and obscure, shadowy and incomprehensible, and above all, as disorienting and unknowable. Design education needs to find ways to entrust to the student the right to explore every avenue of knowing outside the personal / individual, outside the safety zone of the familiar and the known, and one of the best and most persuasive ways to do so is to introduce the student to the potential inherent to being a reflective practitioner. Entry points to reflection In their “reflective exploration of themes and influences on research by designing” Jakimowicz and Verbeke (2010:7) deal with a number of entry points to reflection that can only enhance the depth of a cybernetic design conversation, ones that design educators may encourage students to gain experience of irrespective of the subject matter. Starting with an awareness of (1) „serendipity‟, Jakimowicz and Verbeke (J&V) make mention of Pasteur‟s comment that “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind”, a clear indication of the value of preparing oneself to become a reflective practitioner, “open and absorbing information and clues” (J&V:25). In Chapter 5:239 I wrote that the stochastic process, or process having an element of probability or chance (seemingly here equated with the associations and connections of implicate order), that underlies the making of an artefact has to be increased, surely, if creativity is to be ensured. Correspondingly, von Foerster (2003:275; 280) states that our constructivist positions of invention lead to the self-organizing injunction of “I shall”, in the sense that we, as observers (open and absorbing information) must take upon ourselves the A new beginning 330 responsibility of knowing that “Necessity and Chance reflect some of our abilities and inabilities”, and to know that what we perceive resides in us and not in the phenomena we find in our fields of observation. Serendipity, or chance, can be fruitfully linked to associations and connections, as far as design education is concerned. Everything that is available as probability in the implicate order of things (our stocks of tacit knowledge) is also available as possibility in the explicate order of our expressive capabilities (cf. Chapter 5:238), and one of the reasons I can appreciate the malleability (the flexible „bendiness‟) of Richard Jung‟s notion of the sive descriptive conjunction-disjunction; conjunction is taken to mean two or more „things‟ occupying the same space at the same time, with the express notion that they might have some connective commonality, and disjunction to mean the breaking of any associative link. The idea of serendipity is not to compare and copy, or associate and continue in like vein; serendipity is meant to provoke new thoughts and ideas in the sense of associating (connecting) the newly perceived with our tacit knowledge, and drawing the probable from the possible. According to J&V (2010:26), (2) „associative thinking‟ allows one to freely invent new relations between subjects and concepts, and this leads to the dynamic of group work that makes the possibility sive probability, generated by one member, available to others in the group through the evocation of more (related or unrelated) ideas. When we draw the probable from the possible 4 , we use the only „pattern‟ of recognition we have available to us, viz., our stock of personal (backed up by social) knowledge that is generated by our own experiences, and termed (mostly) tacit knowledge; seeing that this pattern of recognition is designed partly by our participation in group activities, the sparks that can be gained from (associative) group work means that we allow the possible (an idea, a chance remark, a suggestion for change, etc.) generated by someone else to cross over the gap between other-knowing and selfknowing, and thus someone else‟s possible becomes our probable, and it is to our advantage to remember that the term „probable‟ means „likely to be the case‟, derived from “late Middle English (in the sense of „worthy of belief‟): via Old French from Latin probabilis; from probare „to test, demonstrate‟” (Oxford, 2011b). Nothing is taken for granted, and the possible must be examined first, i.e., reflected upon and „put to the test‟ as it were, making of the reflection a form of probing (same root as probable) into what could be the case. However, for the possible to cross the gap between our not-knowing and our (new) knowing, associative thinking really means that someone else‟s „associations‟ (or paradigms, ways of seeing the world) is „received‟ by us, and mediated by our own „associations‟, first, before we syntagmatically try to express what we think we „received‟ / understood. We, the „being-designed‟ new form between [A] and [not-A], cross the border between the upper and lower levels of Jakobson‟s Ladder; we are this functional object sive meta-design own shape that begins, initially, as a framing device (a framing narrative in the making through participating in the group narrative); we become a questioning system within the observing system, in order to highlight, interrogate, and redesign (co-create) the relationship that is being constituted and conserved between emerging user narratives and our own evolving working realities, between induction and deduction, between habitus and practice, and between our implicate order in convergence and our explicate order in divergence, i.e., between our inner and outer worlds (cf. :303, above). When we allow the other person‟s possible (expressive and explicit knowledge) to enter into our consciousness, it does so on level 2 (the specified/analytical region), but this received possible cannot unmediatedly become our own possible, and it at once crosses our inner border between the specified/analytical region (2) of knowing back into the creative/complex region (1), where it has to act 4 If we could, somehow, depend only on ourselves sans outside influence (no external mediation), then this sequence of probable from possible would be wrong, but since everything is mediated, even by our own pre-understanding, someone else‟s possible (Jakobson‟s Ladder region 2)will turn itself back into our probable (region 1). A new beginning 331 as only an associative probable, before being allowed a second crossing of this inner border between our implicit / tacit knowing and our newly (re)formed possibility in explicit knowing. Reflection, if you like, is a reverse form of abductive knowing, first turning what is possible in the world (from which material we can make decisions) back into the free invention 5 of probability, before it becomes the source material from which we choose, no, that we use to design decisions with. In Chapter 5:259 I dealt with Boland and Collopy‟s (2004:4) argument against the prevailing management practice and education that relies too heavily on a „decision attitude‟ that “portrays the manager as facing a set of alternative courses of action from which a choice must be made”, as if from a manual of ideal forms that emphasises the difficulty of the choice, but underplays the making of distinctions, or the design of alternatives, i.e., as if the possibilities of others can be acquired for its off-the-shelf usability. On the other hand, “The design attitude toward problem solving … assumes that it is difficult to design a good alternative … [and] is concerned with finding the best answer possible, given the skills, time, and resources of the team” (Boland and Collopy, 2004:6). The idea of creating new alternatives is more important than the ideal of choosing among given „alternatives‟; the newly designed idea must come from our own probability and not from the ideal of someone else‟s ideal possibility. I would suggest that this is the reason J&V (2010:27) can speak of (3) „delight as knowing‟ as one of the entry points to (true) reflection: “The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing” (J&V quoting Isaac Asimov), since, when we cross this border between not-knowing and knowing, between [A] and [not-A], we are in fact journeying from [A1] to [not-A] and back to [A2], the new self, but „we‟ are in fact this „border‟ that we (seem to) cross, because the „knowing stuff‟ simply isn‟t „us‟ but only our memories of knowing and knowledge, until, that is, you interpret sive change the verb „knowing‟ as/into the noun „knowing‟, as in we are always knowing sive finding out, an ongoing process of delight in one‟s continually renewable „self‟. This is the refining moment of recognition that Heidegger stipulated lies in possibility rather than actuality. As such, we may experience a moment of recognition of our new selves, and we can do so precisely because we do not and cannot uncover the processes of coming-intobeing alone. It is these formative moments of recognition that take us forward, especially in design education (cf. Chapter 3:89), and, “once seen and understood, it stays in our minds for the rest of our lives” (J&V, 2010:27). Of course, Jakimowicz and Verbeke are referring to the fundamental understanding that emerges when reflecting on (being immersed in the „knowing-of‟) the beauty of the Chapel of Nôtre Dame du Haut (Le Corbusier), while I maintain that the real fundamental understanding that emerges from this cybernetically-induced (educational) situation is the new understanding of the self, hence the delight, and hence the admission of (4) „poetics‟ as another entry point to reflection. Roughly translated, „poetics‟ can mean all design research that dares to go beyond (positivistic) rational thought, i.e., ontological phenomenology, radical constructivism, and all forms of second-order cybernetic conversations that issue an open invitation to all manner of knowing and all manner of perception, whether „real‟ or imagined, since this poetics of knowing creates “the new „experiential‟ values6 and states [that become] the knowledge by (or through)” which we expand (our) borders of knowing to “include all other fields of human experience” (J&V, 2010:28), a call for an undisicplined, domaindependent and therefore a groundless field of knowledge. “In the domain of creating, this relation [between design and object] is challenging, because on the conceptual level there is a complete unity between design and object, but on the representational 5 Cf. Chapter 4:110: gramma/topology, as a designerly socio-technical discourse, follows the concept of free invention, itself formed and re-formed while transforming each of its originating theories, and, as theoretical ontology of equipment, gramma/topology migrates the aura of any original theory to those open spaces of free association and reassembly that design innovation calls for. 6 Compare this notion of „new experiential values‟ to eigen values: the communication capability of a system (we are that system) means that we are our own eigen value(s), and carry this aspect with us when we engage in a design activity (cf. :294, above). A new beginning 332 level, sometimes they seem to be very distant” (J&V, 2010:30). If on the one hand we can regard design as the „servant‟ of the object that is used to foreground expression, and on the other see design as the main actor and the object as the „executor‟ (object as the servant of design), as J&V state, then one may see the former as research-oriented design, in which the object is seen as the primary outcome and of more importance, while the latter is seen as design-oriented research, with the knowledge-creating process being the main contributor (Fallman, 2005). With (6) „the object as knowledge‟ Jakimowicz and Verbeke would like to take design beyond the making of statements (design as a verb?), and change the relation between design and object so that neither becomes the „servant‟ of the other, with neither of the actors (in a cybernetic relationship of purpose) being subservient to any other main actor (cf. ActorNetwork Theory). Fallman would seem to take the position that this is not possible, that researchoriented design cannot and should not be confused with design-oriented research (if we wish to speak of „research‟ at all), and in practice this is what seems to happen in the real world that has a tendency to rely on the guarantees of positivistic methods, opting more often than not for the certainties of research-oriented design and in the process foregrounding object expression, with design as both verb and noun being the servant in the design/object relation. Design education cannot afford this industrial revolution mindset any longer, and ways must be found to, as J&V (2010:31) put it, build a new design/object relation in which “one is not an illustration of the other [but, through a creation sive reflection process acquire a new relation] in which one reinforces the other”, i.e., a symbiotic relationship that calls for a domain-dependent and groundless field of knowing. However, for this approach to be fully realised the scope of J&V‟s (2010:30) concept of (5) „designing is a laboratory‟ must be widened from the view that designers‟ proper sphere of work is the laboratory of the studio, as indeed they do with the realisation (:31) that (6) „the object as knowledge‟ leads to an open and circular design/object relation (i.e., cybernetic relation), which in turn means “that this kind of doing goes far beyond a mere professional studio work, but becomes a deeper attitude towards reality”. The issue of the design/object relation is also an issue of the designer/object relation, in the widest sense of it being an observer/object relation, and for the scope of this to be realised the laboratory in which design finds its true meaning is the world itself. Design itself needs to change, which means, really, that designers need to find new ways of interacting with the world-at-large, and as such they need to begin to understand how societies evolve to deal with the undoubted world of complexity we face every day. Possibly the best reason for change is that the-world-out-there can be treated as a living laboratory that allows designers to explore the hybridizing effect of design on the world and all its living ecosystems. By going out to the world and, in addition, finding innovative ways to bring that same world-in-motion to an educational setting, we can extend our knowledge, not of design principles per se, but of the reasoning behind human interactions. Latour (2005:149) regards texts, in his “discipline”, as “the functional equivalent of a laboratory. It‟s a place for trials, experiments, and simulations”. This same laboratory7 situation that Latour has in mind is fundamental to the intellectual activity of Castells (2001), since his version of social theory is a form of grounded theory based on a combination of theory/research. “That is, I literally cannot think without observing and understanding what‟s going on in the world”, and that world is defined by “the interaction between the network society and the power of identity and social movements” (cf. Chapter 3:88-89). If design is to bring “knowledge to understand the object, and the object itself, through its influencing power, [is to inspire] development of designing” (J&V, 2010:31), then the design/object relation needs to be seen for what it is: an observer/object relation, first, so that we can understand how we can design the world and the world can, consequently, design us, and, more profoundly, how we can 7 This is not to say that, as George Steiner (2011:10) has it, the humanities should aspire to the distinction and prestige of the sciences, since „laboratory‟ in design terms refers to what is probable (cf. probare „to test‟, above) and to that which can emerge from the contextual, living situation. A new beginning 333 become more than one and less than many, the reason why we need a new way to speak about and to the world, through the language of complexity, not to describe the world but to describe our new frameworks of understanding (cf. Chapter 5:278) that, in turn, can begin to articulate the observer/object relation. We are indeed more than one and less than many, since (cf. Chapter 4:204205) we can design and construct our own internal information for own consumption, at the same time that we can „identify with the object itself‟, thereby becoming part of the environmental information, sharing with the group and sharing in the group. Human knowing, facilitated by a hybrid lens such as gramma/topology, can then be compared to two wavefunctions that collide and merge, and we can observe the two information structures (observer/object relation used as an observer sive object relation) in the process of forming a new entity via the phase transition that is . In that sense we are doubly closed upon ourselves because we have the ability to be the operator and the operand at the same time “through the interchangeability of functors standing in reciprocal relationships to one another”, and this process of probability provides us with the freedom to act, which in itself becomes a responsibility (von Foerster, 2003:322). We have the capability to be the operator and that which is operated on (operand), which makes us our own functional object (functor). Again, the root of a word can be of use in finding our way, and we can see that „operator‟ and „operand‟ stem from the same root, the Latin operari / „to be at work‟, while „functor‟ can denote both a function and an operator, its root word meaning „to perform‟. We are more than one and less than many, observer and object at the same time, for all conceptual purposes, but further, we can also understand and be the operant of the operand, i.e., the operant quality of the at-workness of the operand, that being worked on, or, the designerlyness of that being designed, e.g., the reflectiveness (in the sense of „thinking quality‟) of the design, which is also the quality of self-reflection in the working process of designing … whether designing an object or the self, and in most cases, I would argue that both are being designed at the same time. This approach was argued in Chapter 4:160, based on John Law‟s (2005:12) understanding of the afterANT scenario as one that recognises neither singularity nor multiplicity or plurality; “this is something that is indeed more than one and less than many”, refusing the easy single / plural opposition in favour of a relational emergence, much the same way that Giddens (1986: 3; 14; 24) refused the opposition between agency and structure. Understanding, as a gramma/topological framework-for-action, has to be constructed somewhere inbetween the single and the multiple, the individual and the affordances for structuration to be found in the „quality experience‟ of the group. Gramma/topology, as a theory of knowing, can facilitate this process of the self becoming its own “Functional explanation [that] is the basis of cybernetics” (Jung, 2007:21); we can be the functional explanation and the functional object at the same time (cf. 296, above). To put this view in perspective, in terms of our observer/world relation we are both inside and outside for being neither, since we are, instead, a sive function of ourselves (cf. :295, above), a view that agrees with the last entry point to reflection from Jakimowicz and Verbeke (2010:41) that I wish to bring into the discussion, i.e., (14) „being inside (experiencing) – outside (knowing)‟, or, a response to Tschumi‟s “We cannot both experience and think that we experience”. J&V ask, if design is seen as interpretation and experience, and research seen as understanding and knowing, whether it is possible for experience to be transformed into knowing, or, better still, combined? Do we leave this to the making designer or to the thinking researcher? Could the two positions be merged, i.e., “is it an issue for them of becoming a hybrid „creator – knower‟ to be able to deal with this problem”? I do believe we have already answered this question. Sounding as if they might be referring to Jakobson‟s Ladder, J&V (2010:41) propose the concept of “autonomous „clouds‟ of both experience and knowing, where tacit knowledge complements the explicit”; a theory of knowing such as gramma/topology allows one to assume the position of seeing past the „normal‟ worldedness of inputs and outputs, and to observe the A new beginning 334 fields of force that emanate from each system‟s construct, i.e., the very essence or reason for my system‟s existence, a „force field‟ that contains all that “I” am, e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant‟s (1992:18) description of habitus8 as “a structuring mechanism that operates from within agents” (cf. Chapter 5:253). This structuring mechanism inside the autonomous clouds of both experience and knowing spans the divide (the border) between self and other, between inside and outside, between experience (action, making) and thought (concept); these effervescent „clouds of becoming‟ can only be „activated‟ into coalescence (given form to) if we, the knowing agents, refuse the opposition between agency and structure (Giddens, 1986: 3; 14; 24), and allow the (more often than not) disparate „clouds‟ / nodes and flows of knowledge / groundless fields to „communicate‟ with each other (with reference to Luhman), since the old self and the new self is, at that moment, more than one and less than many, i.e., in more than one „place‟ at the same time. I am thus saying that we can be both inside (experiencing) and outside (knowing), as Jakimowicz and Verbeke (2010:41) seem to be suggesting, contrary to Tschumi‟s “We cannot both experience and think that we experience”, because we can teach ourselves (and our students) how to observe what happens in any case when we „allow‟ a Heideggerian attitude to becoming to give form to our newly alert knowing structure that derives its efficacy (its ability to accomplish something) from a combined I/Thou agentive symbiosis, and since the Thou can also be an object (of design), the new design/object relation shows that the one is not simply an illustration of the other. These spaces of invention that can be called clouds of becoming, or J&V‟s „autonomous clouds‟, are autonomous and yet connected, being autopoietic by nature, and so each system (of knowing), whether „system‟ represents a person or a designed object, a human or a non-human actor, „communicates‟ through the process of co-ontogenic drift (cf. Chapter 4:111), structurally closed but informationally open, autonomous and yet connected. However, according to Wong (1993), Tschumi did not mean designers (architects) to simply accept the incommensurability of concept and percept, the impossibility to both experience and to think about that experience. Instead, “Tschumi established a duality of space in architecture, that of conceived space and perceived space, and yet, because he recognised the presence of a paradox (cf. 294, above; a paradox is a distinction that we can use to cross the border between knowing and not-knowing), Tschumi defined space as existing in both the real world of praxis and in the intellectual world of theoria. 9 Here we have a clear link to Schön‟s notion of reflective practice (and through Tschumi‟s duality of space a link to Schön‟s espoused theory and theory in use, what we think we believe and what we actually do, which Wong links to the concepts of explicit borrowing and implicit borrowing10), and to bring us closer to the „truth‟ of what we are designing, of what it means when that design is in the world, we need to reflect on both our espoused and our in-use theories and practices, to see if they match: we need to come as close as possible to both the (real) experience and to thinking about that experience, at the same time, or as Wong (1993) states that Tschumi proposed, a space where “the subjectivity of experience and the objectivity of concept 8 In using Lucy Kimbell‟s Manifesto as an example of a futuring design education, I am also aware of other examples that are of like mind, i.e., Stanford‟s d.school (2010) that calls itself a „hub‟ for both staff and students from engineering and medicine, business and the humanities, in fact anyone who wishes to learn about design thinking. The Weatherhead MBA offered by the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, focuses on the difference between the design attitude and the decision attitude normally taught to managers (cf. Chapter 5:261), since „design thinking‟ means seeing the „design attitude‟ “as an opportunity to learn new things and sweep in the broadest possible array of influences” (Weatherhead, 2011). Not only do Richard Boland, Kalle Lyytinen and Fred Collopy teach at Weatherhead, but so too does Richard Buchanan, who moved there from Carnegie Mellon‟s School of Design, and who is also involved in the Centre for Design (CDCM), Culture and Management, Kolding School of Design (Denmark). The CDCM aims to provoke the convergence of design and management by establishing an agenda of cross-disciplinary research, spurred on by the “importance [of the] rapid transition of society and the contingency challenge faced by organisations” (Kolding, 2011). All of these approaches can be linked to a habitus or learning environment that acts more as a structuring mechanism that operates from within agents („education uses us‟) than it does as a traditional place of learning (where „knowledge is obtained‟). 9 Cf. Chapter 4:112: Cybernetics thus came into being as a practical way of dealing with the world using interdisciplinary communication as a medium of interaction, a clear call for theoria to be integrated with praxis ... it represents a re-turn to what was deemed important before „modern‟ disciplinary necessity placed cross-boundary communication out of bounds, for the sake of clarity and domain-independence ... Leonardo da Vinci would have shrugged off this type of differentiation between theoria and praxis, letting the one learn from the other. 10 Borrowing = deriving ideas from, i.e., theory. A new beginning 335 become reconcilable”. Especially in today‟s quest for effective and affective interaction design (for experience), this reconciliation is important to achieve, and to design into the object sive system; in terms of design education, how do you teach something that is this ephemeral and subjective? “Bridging conceived space and perceived space is an experienced space resulting from the immediate experience” (Wong, 1993), and much of today‟s design education has to focus on this immediate experience, which ultimately belongs to the observer (the user of that space, of that designed object sive system) and not to the designer, i.e., much of today‟s design education must focus on the communication capacity of a cybernetic design conversation, since only communication can communicate (Luhmann, 2002:156), and Wong (explaining Tschumi‟s reasoning) makes it clear that architecture must „break away‟ from itself.11 Herein lies the key to a design education that is oriented towards the ephemeral and the subjective: every human being is an autopoietic system that does not, in truth, make direct contact with any other human being in terms of communication, in terms of knowing, i.e., in terms of either ontology or epistemology, since all our contacts with the world (the other-thanus) are mediated by the instruments of the world (language, culture, beliefs, espoused and in-use theories), and as such we are in language as a medium in which we co-ontogenically drift, i.e., we eksist in language sive communication, as long as we accept that this ek-sistence is Richard Jung‟s (2007:18) term for something that stands out from its medium of existence (cf. Chapter 5:290); this something does not arise from the medium as a ready-made, but differentiates itself from the medium, while being in constant contact (still being fully a part of) with that medium, for it has to „re-turn‟ to its originating medium like the ice canoe (cf. :304, above), to be re-assembled each time the combined cybernetic form (re)turns. The key to a design education that is oriented towards the ephemeral and the subjective is this re-turn to form, our newly (re)designed form (ek-sistence) whose metabolism Jung (2007:27) described as “anabolic as well as catabolic”, which I interpret as the reflective thinking process of design inception, i.e., the lacunae-like effect of gramma/topology that is illustrated by Jakobson‟s Ladder. Anabolism is described as the synthesis of complex molecules from simpler ones, while catabolic processes are the opposite, since they break down these complex molecules to form simpler ones, again, and so the process repeats itself. The point is, Richard Jung equated ek-sistence with the self in his description, which means that this anabolic sive catabolic (stable 12 ) cycle describes our own consciousness, our „method‟ of thinking and reflecting on what we are thinking, an illustration, in fact, of Günther‟s First Law, “There is an exchange relation between knowing and being” (Scot, 1996; cf. Chapter 4:125), and extrapolating from that, an illustration of the exchange relation between the specified/analytical region (2: catabolic) of knowing and the creative/complex region (1: anabolic) of being. When Tschumi (according to Wong, 1993) speaks of immediate experience (and we have to translate that as the „experience‟ or awareness available to the designer, and the possible experience made available to the user of design) he is not referring to either the concept or the reality of space, since immediate experience does not emerge from these directly (as Jung said form does not arise entire from indefiniteness as Venus from the sea) “but rather [from] the abrasions the experience imposes on the mental and physical confines of a particular space. It is about re-forming forms – both conceptual ones and sensual ones”. 13 The exchange relation, the design/object relation that I translate as the observer sive object relation is about this re-formation of forms, and in design education we have to 11 Cf. :295, above. A system (or a discipline, or a person) can only be liberated by being paradoxically constrained, i.e., taken away, led away from itself via abduction. 12 „Stable‟ in the sense of something that always happens, but „unstable‟ in the sense of a co-ontogenic cycle of anabolic sive catabolic processes will allow emergent properties to surface. 13 In the text above (:297) I speak of an „artefactual narrative‟ that draws attention to itself not as a device or a system, but as a conceptual tool to question the relationship between the user and the interface (whatever form the latter may need to assume). A new beginning 336 provide the structural space of (for) indefiniteness, and then allow the students to acquire the (knowing) structures they need that will enable them to operate innovatively in a modern design environment (cf. Chapter 4:128). All we have to do is suggest exercises that allow this indefiniteness, this space of all possibilities, to be “perturbed and disturbed; form has to be provoked, evoked, stimulated, seduced, seeded, composed, constructed, and maintained” (Jung, 2007:18); the (ability/capability of) reflectiveness of design education (its iterative and conversational nature steeped in feedback loops) needs this abrasiveness of ephemeral and subjective experience (from which it emerges and to which it returns). The student is not learning about her knowledge of things, but learning how to argue to first principles, learning how to recognise herself in these new and emerging forms-of-knowing that is the self, learning to recognise her new form that emerges from the relationships between topics, and for that we need to enhance the classroom cybernetic design conversation with an entailment mesh. The entailment mesh of reflection To Ranulph Glanville (2010:93), reflection is cybernetic by nature, circular in action, and can be used as a strategy for learning; reflection-in-action is thus a way of being that grants access to what we thought we knew but can now reconsider, in light of what we find ourselves knowing now, at this new moment, and in company with the new associations that we come to us through the other participants in the cybernetic conversation. What I appreciate (vide Geoffrey Vickers) in this description of the workshops that Glanville and Jakimowicz led is the fact that they decided to not manage the process in terms of control, but to allow the dynamics of the group to structure the form and the direction of the workshop itself, with the minimum of planned input,14 besides an introduction and the provocative question, what is reflection? The thing is, how many institutions would allow the word improvisation to be used as a key term in the curriculum? And yet, that is what the scientific term stochasm means when applied to education, because a pattern of random probability can be analysed and yet not predicted, i.e., no one can foresee what exactly will emerge from the dynamics of this workshop, but what does emerge can be responded to sive reflected upon, by both the facilitators and the participants of the workshop. That is why, given the ice canoe scenario (who is in the canoe and who in the pond makes no difference to the movement sive exchange sive transformation of the process), Glanville maintains that “the taking part is at least as much a reflection as any techniques and understandings developed as a result of participating” (:93). We only participate to the extent that we allow ourselves to participate, as one of my students taught back to me after I had spoken of this autopoietic principle (you only participate to the extent that you participate, Maturana and Varela, 1980:xxv), and Glanville‟s reflective instance is an example of co-ontogenic drift. For this type of learning scenario, the key terms are responsiveness and transformation in the uncertainty and incompleteness of this evolving narrative structure of flow and survival, as Glanville and Jakimowizc (:94) realised, and by re-presenting (teaching back) what was learned everyone begins to re-organise the information at hand by re-positioning it (which to me means they re-position themselves, i.e., their observational position) and thereby re-placing it; with what, you may ask. This is the self [A] crossing the border that is the self to reach the not-self [not-A], and on re-turn, again crossing that same „self‟ border (that is now subtly different) to re-place the (old) self (cf. Chapter 6:304): this exchange relation with our various and developing selves constitutes the growth of our knowledge; we are re-placing both self and knowing in this process of reflection. 14 It is for situations such as these that I invented Schön‟s First Law, i.e., the principle of using the least amount of control. A new beginning 337 Further to this, writing words / terms / short phrases (i.e., key words that act as search terms?) on bits of paper and arranging them, visibly, on a wall (the first publishing / presentation act: ppa1), and then, converse sive reflect on ppa1 (not forgetting that converse / conversation means „to keep company with‟ and „to turn‟), which leads to a re-think and a re-organization of the patterns (categories, groupings) that result, which generates a second ppa2 that, in its turn, leads to a different re-organisation, repositioning, and re-placement of knowing, in a cyclical feedforward movement. This is an autopoietic system-in-action that, once started, becomes self-generating, an example of the education-uses-us scenario, a simple act that Glanville (:96) says “provokes, teases out and reveals, while questioning and consequently answering gains in intensity and profundity”. This new workshop approach, based on Richard Jung‟s field of indefiniteness and whose non-hierarchical structure came about due to “the nonplanned-ness (or openness and responsiveness) of the way we work”, makes use of the one provocation that I wish to focus on for the sake of our new plan to re-design our course, i.e., Gordon Pask‟s Entailment Mesh. Pask‟s Entailment Meshes are vast structures of topics that might be learned, which are taken to constitute some field of interest. Pask‟s design recognises that learners come to any field they wish to study with different prior knowledge, different ways of learning, and seeking different outcomes and knowledge. They also understand differently. This means that anyone can start anywhere they chose (at any topic or topics), and that they can go to (seek to learn) any other topic(s) they wish … The whole mesh is richly cyclic, and very full. It has no hierarchy: hierarchy comes as a result of how the student sets up his or her start and end points, and then “prunes” links in the mesh to provide a hierarchy that comes not from an order in the material to be learnt, but in the knowledge and wishes of the learner. (Glanville, 2010:96) This non-hierarchical approach is similar to Deckers‟ (2010:69) advice to steer clear of vertical hierarchy and premeditated order, since the work “balances continually in a sort of pendulum [horizontal] movement between the build-up of individual and of cooperative competence growth among students and the teacher/researcher”; the students are participants from whom information is mined, and at the same time they are the researchers sive observers that work (re-organise, re-position, and re-place) with that information. It seems to me that a cybernetic design conversation is a natural entailment mesh, and that, therefore, the classroom is simply an entailment mesh by another name; we may as well do the reflection-in-action research to discover where this might lead to. Glanville (:97) is quite clear that this type of reflection workshop (this strategy for learning, i.e., this reflective and autopoietic learning system sive environment) is not meant to build a complete entailment mesh in the exact sense that Pask built his own, but is to be used as a joint authoring tool in which all participants can learn with and from each other, in order to design (creatively uncover/discover) the rich and alternative paths between a set of topics that the participants have generated and which they compose together, working as a group to explore the different ways they each understand the ensemble of topics, and their generative relationships. But it is far more. It allows participants (and later others) to explore differences in how they each conceive the topics and their relationships. This transformation of the material into a collectively generated map, 15 full of layers and contradictory interpretations, massively “incomplete”, allows and encourages discussion and questioning, and, through them, new and richer learning. It gives 15 Cf. Jakimowicz and Verbeke‟s (2010:41) concept of “autonomous „clouds‟ of both experience and knowing, where tacit knowledge complements the explicit”. A new beginning 338 rise to a powerful form of reflection through the transformation and enrichment of the original material. (Glanville, 2010:97) This description is the Richard Jung provocation that will lead to the design of our open-source elearning platform that functions as a co-ontogenic entailment mesh. But, and this is an essentialist problem with traditional and managerialist-style education, the student is not the „client‟ for whose needs we have to cater, instead, the student is the user of the design education system (never „product‟), and as such they have to be treated, not as mere users (read „consumers‟) of design but as co-creators of their own „design‟, whether through the conceptual theory class and discussing gramma/topology, or through co-designing and manipulating the practical equivalent of a cybernetic design conversation, i.e., the History & Theory entailment mesh on our e-learning platform. The skilled practitioner Sounding as if she had attended one of Glanville and Jakimowizc‟s reflection workshops, Sherrie Reynolds (2009:97) affirms that learning is a complex issue, and, reminiscent of Stuart Kauffman,16 she states her belief that unplanned and revelatory activity can create spontaneous order. In what may as well have been called another manifesto for designing better futures, Reynolds presents a plan for an alternative university that re-focuses its energies to concentrate on relationships instead of on „things‟ in a complex adaptive system that reminds one of the early Bauhaus; this new system of education envisions people interacting “in an open and free form and catalyze each other. Scholars and students are free to come and go because there are no barriers to entry other than curiosity” (:97-98). Even though this plan is one that requires a real space, it is named as a „studio for the mind‟, and as such this plan is equally applicable to the design of an entailment mesh. This interaction and building of relationships will allow rich and alternative pathways to emerge („promising patterns‟), and at traditional universities the authoritative attitude is to ring-fence this successful innovation through funding, with the idea that whatever worked should be replicated, thereby trying to force a theory of knowing, a transformative idea, into a method that guarantees the ideal formula. But replication, instead of the notion of adjust and adapt, has an adverse effect on complex living systems, and Reynolds would agree with Callon that, if we think a main focal actor is necessary in order to recruit more members of the network through problematization and interessement and all those indispensable and obligatory passage points, i.e., when any entity “acts as if enamoured of power and aligning the world around himself” (Callon, 2005a:193), that this is a non-viable idea, that it simply won‟t work. What she actually says is that no one can give the same class twice (… step into the same river …) or expect to “recruit other faculty groups to create the same kind of experience so that more students can participate” (:97), because with the best will in the world this cannot be done, not, that is, if you are interested in real education instead of rote learning, because cybernetics, constructivism and living systems thinking invalidates this form of control by ceding it to the student. “When a promising pattern emerges, we respond to it” (Reynolds, 2009:97), but the pattern must be one we (users of the system and not mere consumers) created, designed, or provoked into being, because we „control‟ the pathways of discovery and innovation through our participation; any student will find it nigh impossible to respond with enthusiasm and willing participation to an order-to-obey the prescribed curriculum. This alternative university with its innovative strategy for learning, i.e., this reflective and autopoietic learning system sive environment, treats students as partners instead of clients, just as participatory 16 Cf. Chapter 5:284; Following Kauffman (1996:114), we can admit that complexity and creativity not only are linked, but that they are naturally ubiquitous. A new beginning 339 design would have us treat users as partners, because “the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules” (Reynolds, 2009:92), has, indeed, a way of forcing us to re-think the „right requirements‟ that are unknowable at the start (cf. John Chris Jones). And yet, here we detect a problem. Contemporary design practice, especially “the default practice of first-user-study-thendesign” can only work if the contexts are highly determinable or if design is seen as mere problem solving (Chow and Jonas, 2010:9-10). In the case of design education, similar to the design practice example used by Chow and Jonas, we may not have a „problem‟ as such but may yet wish for an innovative renewal; how do you utilise a user-study if no product or system exists? Chow and Jonas‟ advice is to focus on the design first and bring in user-study second … Wait a minute. Rosan Chow and Wolfgang Jonas (2010:11) in fact do not share the beliefs of either User Centred Design or Participatory Design, since in their view “design innovation is independent from and does not need to be guided by users study – participatory or otherwise”. Oh. Now where does that leave the idea of treating students as users of design education, and better yet, as partners in the design of their own education, if design innovation is independent from user study. And didn‟t Rosan Chow (2005) do a doctorate, For User Study, that set out to investigate the theory behind user study? I know that she did point out that the results from a design user study might not be that useful for practice, but still, how does one reconcile her seemingly new position, five years later? There is no reconciliation necessary, since she has always held to that position, viz., I suggest that if design-driven user study is thinkable, then design-driven research is as thinkable. It is often assumed that understanding necessarily comes before design, and research comes before design. But as argued, this assumption is misleading. Through the process of designing, a new condition emerges and offers new opportunities for new understanding of the problem at hand. We might not want to spend all our efforts in understanding or in giving a problem a theoretical grounding before we design. Instead I suggest that we follow the opportunistic nature of design. Design research might focus on generating possible specification-in-context. (Chow, 2005:119) It is never a bad thing to be confronted with a viewpoint that seems to set the practical cat among the mental pigeons, or in this case, makes one query the difference between one‟s own espoused theory and theory-in-use, eliciting a response similar to … but I thought that … That is one of the main reasons why an entailment mesh can bring these hidden (tacit, espoused) assumptions to visibility, and, in keeping company with like-minded people (open-minded and cybernetically conversational by preference) the designer / researcher / student can find an own way to a relationship with design (and world) knowledge, enough at any rate to base a decision and consequent action upon. So where does that leave us with our newly minted idea of treating students as users, partners in the design process, and ultimately, as skilled practitioners? Surely the Chow / Jonas hypothesis disqualifies that approach, if design innovation is truly independent of any user involvement? Ah, now you‟re going too far; they did not say that, exactly, and in any case, Donald Norman agrees with them. What? A new beginning 340 Calm down; neither Chow and Jonas, or Norman has ever declared that users may not be „involved‟ in the design process. You, with your love of the meaning of words, should have spotted that discrepancy. What they are pointing out is that for design innovation to take place, it is a question of “existing design artifacts are knowledge sources for projection” (Chow and Jonas, 2010:12) and “design research is … essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs … [which are] invariably driven by the development of new technologies” (Norman, 2009). OK, I get the point, but let‟s look at a few rebuttals of this position, i.e., Nussbaum (2009) on Norman; “[Norman states that] It is science and technology that drive truly disruptive innovation, not Design‟s focus on the needs and wants of people … Norman tells designers to get over themselves … To me, the key to innovation, big and small, is the socialization of invention”. I do not wish to argue with the sentiment that design is a social act, but: to argue that the socialization of design is the key to innovation is to place the focus of „design‟ in the wrong place. Design as a thinking process is undeniably social and constructivist in nature, agreed, but design as a making profession, although I did describe it (cf. Chapter 3:103) as a profession [that] makes knowledge (Mode 2), as Dunin-Woyseth and Nielsen (2001:27-28) suggest, still leads to the position of humans deriving an epistemological premise from design itself (i.e., the world and its population of designed objects, a landscape where even other living systems, such as a fierce dog, can represent a meaning-making „design‟ that my system of knowing derives information from), which means that I look around me at what is at hand, and to hand, and rethink my own making-meaning process on the grounds that this or that seems to be a good idea (steer clear of that dog showing its teeth). Ever since the „invention‟ of fire, there have always been precedents for designed artefacts, and design might well listen to peoples‟ wants and needs but looks to the already known for inspiration, for the future (innovative design) simply does not yet exist. Just as „the social‟ does not exist in ANT terms, because it is a social construct and not an entity, so too for design, which cannot be socialized in terms of the making but in terms of the (human, epistemological) thinking. The (practical) precedents for the objects of design are in the past, and the subject / object relation, in terms of design, should not be conflated with innovation being driven by socialization in the present, as if design innovation can come into being as a tabula rasa absence of any pre-knowing. Zakiwarfel‟s (2009) rebuttal proves this point: I couldn‟t disagree more with the content of the essay … It‟s the next claim [new conceptual breakthroughs are invariably driven by the development of new technologies] that I find just silly … Don cites a number of products … flush toilets, indoor plumbing, automobiles, airplanes … saying that design research didn‟t lead to these innovations is a widely inaccurate claim … You can thank Sir John Harrington and George Jennings for taking the plunge … They invented the technology needed to create something they saw as an opportunity, not the other way around. Harrington may have „invented‟, or should one say, re-invented, the first (private) flush toilet in Britain for Queen Elizabeth I, who hated the echoing-through-the-castle sound the water made when flushing so much that she refused to use the contraption, and the „innovative‟ design died an early death, until the 19th century, when Jennings re-designed the first (improved and public) toilet, but the first „flushing‟ and very public toilet (if one counts a continuous flow of water as „flushing‟) was invented by the ancient Greeks, who also invented the shower, which ideas the Romans „borrowed‟ to invent indoor plumbing, etc. I‟m afraid that Zakiwarfel‟s examples are second-hand, and as for the Wright Brothers who (supposedly first) researched, designed, and prototyped the idea of flight … precedents set by Leonardo, and the scout-carrying war kites of China? what about the A new beginning 341 In Chapter 5:223 I stated that the designed object can play the proxy role of the real person, and that the advertising industry thrives on this psychological fact. When unpacking Heidegger‟s terminology we need to keep this in mind, and we then read, we shall call those information-as-presence entities which we encounter in concern „equipment‟ or things-to-think-with (which situation, coming into being at that moment, denotes an opening-up space, a cleaving of difference)… [and] while using the working term „ontology‟ for that theoretical inquiry which is devoted to the meaning that all entities have for us, we yet reserve the descriptive term „ontology‟ for our theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the uncovering of an ongoing process of meaning-making of and for human systems. I have to follow my own writing and admit the Chow / Jonas hypothesis (and the Norman provocation) correct: we have to take a serious look at the role that already existing technology (designed objects & systems) plays in our lives, and even more so in the lives of the Millennium Student. Actor-Network Theory makes clear the relationship between subject and object, between human actor and non-human actor, and we know by now that we design the world as the world designs us; because things talk back, and because we listen and absorb what is being communicated, we are to that extent influenced by technology (by designed objects and systems) that their voices may seem to some as being too prominent, so much so that this fact drowns out the human voice of need. Not so. The real importance of the Chow and Jonas hypothesis and Norman‟s challenge is to underscore what Bruinsma (1995) declared, “we do not need new forms, we need a new mentality” (cf. Chapter 4:208), which is in itself the forerunner of “The great challenge is how we can be better served by what we already know” (Willinsky, 1999), and when thinking about design and education, we need to make of designed objects the means by which we gain “a better understanding of people, of society and of the ecosystem” (Frascara, 2001). It is far better to deal with provocative utterances than to listen to meanings we already agree with, and it then becomes a quite legitimate design probe to take the position that new design is designed by old design, i.e., the great challenge is how the world of design can be better served by re-organising, re-positioning, and re-placing what we have already designed. We do not need new forms of design as much as we need to re-conceptualize the old, and it might seem strange to advocate a technology first and human needs later attitude, but we cannot pretend that what has already been designed, and is being designed faster than we can keep up with, does influence our thinking, and when the idea of a tag cloud (cf. Chapter 2:43) first suggested itself to me as an additional educational tool, technology came first, but human needs did not take second place, indeed, it was the spur of student needs that made me notice the technology in the first place (that „coloured‟ my searching mindset). Vannevar Bush was one of the most important pioneers of what was to become the internet and the WWW, and especially of how users would navigate (use for their own purposes) the accessible information, and today new technologies are seemingly paying heed to his foresight (this is only a human interpretation, as if said of a proxy person), with individuals playing the roles of information architect and „content provider‟ in the sense that Web 2.0 and the phenomenon of tag clouding make this possible. The „split in the road‟, in terms of the user-producer as opposed to the user-consumer, was already forecast by Bush, as indeed it has been visualised by many educators in the past, and the choice is comparatively easy: to retain control of the mode of production (of the content of the web platform), or to share it, but how do you persuade teachers (and web „designers‟) that the „technical Webmaster‟ and the „evangelist roles‟ should be played by the users, and not the teacher / designer? This piece from Chapter 2 has been on my mind for a long time, and by now I am convinced that an eversion of the entailment mesh (a manifestation of the cloud computing phenomenon, but with information tags / topics playing the role of the many servers in the cloud) is viable, both in terms of a co-ontogenic system for design education, and as a computer programme / web site that my colleague Byron van Wyk (as part of his masters degree research) will be able to produce, with the help and active involvement of our students, as user-producers. A new beginning 342 That brings us, belatedly, to this question of the skilled practitioner. Hestad (2009:18) reports that what is seen as the emerging field of service design regards the user as of increasing importance, especially when adding rapid prototyping to the mix in terms of “flexible production systems and time to market … [which] allows for user involvement early in the product development process and opens up for customisation. Another way of seeing users would be to label them as „skilled practitioners‟”, a term that Kilbourne and Buur (2007) used to describe the changing role of, e.g., a patient that needs to use a dialysis machine on a regular basis. As a research team they challenged what they call the limited view forced onto interaction design (also Hestad‟s service design) by a capped use of the term usability, 17 much preferring to shift the focus of their interaction / service design efforts towards what they came to call a skilled practitioner, instead of merely a user. The problem with the medical field, when it comes to design intervention, is that Human Factors Engineering gets in the way, with the result that the focus is on efficiency and usability and not on skills. Kilbourne and Buur make the point that we are surrounded by designed objects from birth, that we become used to dealing with these in so many forms, and that, in fact, we can begin to see this process of learning as enskilment. Take the case of the patient who is prepared, over the course of a number of days and sessions in hospital, to take over the complete task of interacting with a dialysis machine. For practical reasons this patient has to undergo dialysis more frequently and the solution is to take the equipment home, and so the patient, as a user, is enskilled to become a practitioner, not in any medical sense, except to understand exactly how the machine works (“setting up the apparatus of concentrates, tubing and filter … and inserting the tow needles”, and if you were coupled to such a machine so often you would also become quite proficient in its operation), and, crucially, to become the expert in the cybernetic conversation that any dialysis patient must have with this hemodialysis equipment, a task that is usually interpreted (mediated) by the nurse in hospital, at second hand. The cybernetic conversation, in terms of inputs and feedback, that the patient now has control over, includes issues such as the important awareness of how weight fluctuations can impact on the treatment itself. “Accounting for this difference [in weight] is critical to resolving discrepancies between bodily sensations and external numbers gathered by sensors. The patient as a skilled self-care practitioner chooses treatment options in close connection between the body and technology” (Kilbourne and Buur, 2007). Accounting for this „difference‟, being aware of its importance, is also to be compared to the difference between Schon‟s espoused theory and theories-in-use, something that can be overlooked if the interaction is mediated by the nurse, however well-trained, because only the user, on whom the „input information‟ depends, can really tell the difference, at first hand. According to Kilbourne and Buur, when a person becomes skilful it means they are able “to attend to the task at hand, actively engaged with a social and natural environment” (quoting Pálsson), and this attentiveness to the task at hand is also demonstrated by meteorologists who are “skilled in selecting and interpreting a large set of information to produce weather forecasts. To have a feel of their practice, skilled practitioners are engaged in the process of sense-making as they go about the world” quoting Perby). These meteorologists are very much like the air traffic controllers who feel themselves “in the flow and in control” (Thackara, 2006:1). In control of a complex and fourth dimensional activity space that illustrates the relationship that must exist between human beings as thinking machines and everything they need to think with, including designed objects and systems. These practitioners become enskilled, and it is more than just a case of learning how to use (usability) the equipment, it is also a 17 We had a similar concern with this term, and as a consequence added a second term, usefulness, to temper the technical quality of usability with human care. A new beginning 343 case of deriving thought (for further decision-and-meaning-making, i.e., usefulness) from the interaction. This is a strategy for learning via an entailment mesh, for, in this contemporary world, we find ourselves in a complex and fourth dimensional activity space, and who better to recruit to a programme of enskilment (design education) than the students, who, through interacting with the enriched environment we can offer, can become their own skilled practitioners, in the real world (even when engaging with the virtual world of the e-learning platform) external to the body, and in the inner world of conceptualization where learning (restructuring) takes place. 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A Rebuttal to Technology First Needs Last. http://zakiwarfel.com/archives/a-rebuttal-to-technology-first-needs-last/ Zhao, S. (2007). Internet and the lifeworld: updating Schutz‟s theory of mutual knowledge. Information Technology and People 20(2):140-160. Addendum A FEEDBACK LOOP INPUT OUTPUT GROUNDED THEORY VIA REFLECTIVE PRACTICE 1. The constructivist classroom depends on feedback loops as a measure of calibration STUDENT PRESENT/ DESIGNER / MANAGER KNOWLEDGE STUDENT / /  PRESENT KNOWLEDGE DESIGNER / PRACTITIONER PRESENT TEACHER / MANAGER KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE 2. Design is, however, not so neatly linear, but quite grey and wicked PRESENT/ TEACHER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE PRESENT DESIGNER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE       PRESENT DESIGNER / PRACTITIONER STUDENT KNOWLEDGE/ / DESIGNER MANAGER PRESENT TEACHER / MANAGER PRESENT KNOWLEDGE STAFFORD BEER’S MUDDY BOX 3. To make sense of the active and re-occuring patterns, we artificially slow the process down to see what’s going on   PRESENT/ TEACHER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE DESIGNER PRESENT/ PRACTITIONER KNOWLEDGE PRESENT DESIGNER / PRACTITIONER KNOWLEDGE STUDENT / PRESENT DESIGNER MANAGER KNOWLEDGE / EXTERNAL 4. Simplistically, the classroom contains three units: student, teacher and external information. But each of the three units consists of prior & new knowledge; each deals with its own input/output feedback loop 5. Even this is too neat and controlled, because each of the three units also have to contend with many other external > internal inputs in real and retrospective time OUTPUT 1 INPUT 1 FEEDBACK LOOP 1 6. Besides the real/retro & internal/ external influences on each unit, the teacher as classroom manager has to foreground the interaction between teacher & student “THE WOMB” 7. This direct link also depends on managing the input/output feedback loop, which, on a macro level follows the design curriculum ... 8. ... but on a micro, classroom dynamics, level follows the active design learning situation, with the teacher/student interactive link, calibrated to the output, changing the input in real time OUTPUT 1 INPUT 1 9. How can the student learn to manage the input in real time, plus add to the original input in retrospect, when each of the many possible feedback loops are active, and effective, at the same time? “THE FLAMES” Figure 18. The wickedness of design education 10. In real time, this is what the picture looks like: this is Rittel’s Wicked Problem Situation, seen as multiple input/output + feedback loops, or Activity Theory in action. This seeks to understand the unity of consciousness and activity, since the input/output relation between the student and information is neither mechanical nor given. “A much richer depiction of the user’s situation is needed for design and evaluation” (Nardi, 1996) “THE SUNFLOWER” Addendum B Figure 27. Conversational echolocation Addendum C Figure 28. Jakobson’s Ladder Addendum D Figure 29. The Complexity of Design as a Wavefunction Addendum E Figure 32. The three-step process: Barthesian Eco/s