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.
There’s some interesting discussions on the subject of social action and the role of awareness as well as social media.
For two contrasting views, consider Malcolm Gladwell’s essay in suspect of certain social media and their relationship to genuine, “strong-tie” connections and Maria Popova’s article on why Gladwell’s perspective is wrong.
Popova has an part of her article which makes the argument that empathy is the process/mechanism we need to bridge us from awareness to action:
What does this have to do with activism? It’s simple. Online communities broaden our scope of empathy. They do so by introducing new issues to our collective consciousness and exposing us to the lives these issues affect. In cases where our “in-group” lacks direct experience of such concerns, empathy is the missing link between awareness and action — it’s what enables us to act for the well-being of others …
Empathy derived from instilling personal identification and meaning as necessitating change? What is empathy? How does it work? If one ponders hard enough, does it come about? To love my neighbor as myself … a discussion from a theological perspective is one area that sounds like an interesting possibility for a later entry …
My concern in this post is not about social activism nor is it about who is correct. I’m interested in method and process; in all the literature so far on positivism, empiricism, and design science, I have not yet run into a rich account of how change is made. Many theorists/researchers/designers/philosophers so far have been making it clear that the natural and particularly social sciences are concerned about the importance of fluidity and change. Yet no one really knows how to talk about the mechanism behind change.
Kuhn writes about history is comprised of shifting from one paradigm to another. Many times, this is triggered with the accumulation of anomolies in the midst of an emerging crisis environment. However, when describing the actual process of how this transition occurs, he doesn’t quite know how to articulate it. Chalmers writes,
On Kuhn’s view, the kinds of factors that do prove effective in causing scientists to change paradigms is a matter to be discovered by psychological and sociological investigation … A scientific revolution corresponds to the abandonment of one paradigm and the adoption of a new one, not by an individual scientist only but by the relevant scientific community as a whole. As more and more individual scientists, for a variety of reasons, are converted to the new paradigm, there is an “increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances” (Kuhn, 1970a, p. 158). If the revolution is to be successful, this shift will spread so as to include the majority of the relevant scientific community, leaving a few dissenters. (Chalmers,
What is This Thing Called Science?, 1999, pp. 116-117)
According to Chalmers, Kuhn attributes the agency of change to the scientific community, who in turn are responsible for the change. But just when the reader is curious as to how this happens, Kuhn says its a matter of psychological and sociological exploration.
Next to Kuhn, I’ve also read Kenneth Gergen‘s essay on Generative Theory in hopes of finding some of this sociological exploration in the field of social psychology. Perhaps he has some details in some other writings on how generative theory works, but it doesn’t say in the article I just read. He writes,
It may be useful, then, to consider competing theoretical accounts in terms of their generative capacity, that is the capacity to challenge the guiding assumptions of the culture, to raise fundamental questions regarding contemporary social life, to foster reconsideration of that which is “taken for granted,” and thereby to furnish new alternatives for social action. It is the generative theory that can provoke debate, transform social reality, and ultimately serve to reorder social conduct. (Gergen, “
Toward Generative Theory,” 1978, p. 1346)
How does change occur? What is the mechanism? It seems like people know how to talk about this in retrospect (Kuhn) and know that it has to occur (Gergen) but it’s really hard to articulate the conditions for change as it applies to the present. But isn’t this the very nature of design?
I’m familar with Antonio Gramsci’s process of hegemony. He articulates very well one mechanism for creating change. I’m hungry for another perspective with just as much richness that Gramsci provides.
Going back to Kuhn, he does say this about the community of scientists,
To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation (emphasis mine) effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists. (Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1996, p. 94)
Ah, yes. Rhetoric … finding the places of the arguments. This seems like the mechanism for change, but this is all he mentions along with an example of how Galileo used persuasive arguments to convince his colleagues (According to Chalmers, Feyeraband says Galileo used propaganda and trickery (Chalmers, p. 154)).
This theme of mechanism(s) for change deserves more attention …