Wurman is re-thinking the idea of a conference. Moving away from a presentation format to a conversation format.
Article on Fastcodesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664704/the-creator-of-ted-aims-to-reinvent-conferences-once-again
The new conference site: http://www.thewwwconference.com/
Logic is from rhetoric to poetics – from what Buchanan calls the forethought (which is captured in Western culture as an “architectonic” or “master” art, p. 31), “the particular conception of design that stands behind the product” (p. 27), to making. He captures the humanistic narrative of design’s history and demonstrates how the relationship between design as rhetoric and making (poetics) changes – and really gets separated following the Renaissance when people arbitrarily separated thinking/thought and doing. The 20th century has seen an emergence of rhetoric, or design as a new liberal art. For example, the original Bauhaus was a struggle between rhetoric and poetics … they had a vision of making but not a systematic vision of forethought … the intellectual, thinking aspect was only captured in the personality of the leadership. Therefore, it did not last. We are at that point in history where rhetoric is coming on the scene again and design, as an architectonic art, has the ability to close the gap between thinking and making (Basically, a summary of Buchanan’s Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design).
If the subject matter of design is indeterminate – potentially universal in scope, because design may be applied to new and changing situations, limited only by the inventiveness of the designer – then the subject matter of design studies is not products, as such, but the art of conceiving and planning products. In other words, the poetics of products – the study of products as they are – is different from the rhetoric of products – the study of how people come to be as vehicles of argument and persuasion about the desirable qualities of private and public life. The interplay between rhetoric and poetics of products is a significant issue in design studies, but the orientation in logical sequence is from rhetoric to poetics.
It is not difficult to relate Dewey’s own works, in terms of their dominant interests, to those of Aristotle. Thus Dewey’s Logic corresponds to the Organon, Experience and Nature to the Metaphysics, Human Nature and Conduct to the Ethics, The Public and Its Problems to the Politics, and Art as Experience to the Poetics (Walter Watson, 36).