Tag John Dewey

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Like a Cezanne Painting

Sep 12, ’08 2:24 PM

From a trusted marketing report:

Vacation travel is about purchasing an experience. A leisure traveler’s evaluation of a destination or a resort hinges on intangibles that amount to much more than just a list of amenities or attributes.

Basically, when we think of having “an experience,” it is greater than the sum of its parts.

Cezanne's Basket of Apples

Basket of Apples, Paul Cézanne

This is like a Cezanne painting. His still life seems odd at first. For example, the table’s horizontal edge is off and not consistent in the painting. However, if you look at the painting, from part-to-part-to-part, suddenly, the painting makes sense. Not in its parts, but the way it’s connected throughout its composition. It makes the viewer go from part-to-part-to-part, thus, creating an experience.

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Environment v. Surrounding

Jul 18, ’08 11:52 AM

There are many different ways to consider the difference between environment and surrounding. Dick emphasizing this in his lectures, especially when discussing the third mode of design (person-environment).

He tells a story of when he was young. How he had this telescope and would look at the stars at night. He was fascinated by the constellations. In the morning, he would tell his mom about it and she couldn’t care about Orion or the Big Dipper. For Dick, the stars were part of his environment. For his mother, they were part of her surrounding.

This is the way I like to think of it:

Surrounding

  • one does not have to be affected by one’s surrounding
  • one should probably at least be aware of it
  • ex: many people are aware that there is a war going on in Iraq, but in many ways, it doesn’t feel like we’re directly affected by it

Environment

  • very similar to what architects refer to as milieu
  • ex: when Ariel from the Little Mermaid sings, “Part of Your World,” she is talking about wanting to be part of Prince Eric’s environment not surrounding

On a more serious note, another example of environment is John Donne’s Meditation XVII. He writes,

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Through an awareness of the “other,” we can choose to bring something that is in the realm of surrounding to environment. Can this be freedom, the constant expansion of our own environment? This topic must be saved for another entry.

Edit on 7/28/08.
Thanks, Imran, for finding this excerpt from Dewey’s Democracy and Education. This is Dewey’s definition of environment:

In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living thing. Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the fish’s activities – to its life. The north pole is a significant element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive existence (suppose there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into his activity as a sustaining or frustrating condition.

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Problem of Theory & Practice in Gramsci & Dewey

Mar 21, ’08 12:04 PM

I’ve been reading a bit more Antonio Gramsci (Marxist Theorist) and John Dewey’s Art as Experience. Although the two have two very different notions of reality, they seem to have the same macro-problem.

PROBLEM: Separation of Thought and Action.

FOR GRAMSCI:
Thought is the theory of contradictions in a society and action is the people’s actual consciousness. Because of a separation between the two, he was interested in how to align the people’s consciousness with the theoretical. For him, there is a crucial issue of freedom at stake. When thought and action are one, this is freedom (he calls this the philosophy of praxis, a.k.a. Marxism).

Ok, this is interesting but what does it mean? Well, Gramsci lived in a time when the Italian populace was more in tune with foreign culture than a national Italian culture. That’s because, according to Gramsci, the intellectuals/elite in Italy weren’t concerned with the lower classes; they were still tied to the caste tradition. He writes,

All this means that the entire “educated class,” with its intellectual activity, is detached from the people-nation, not because the latter has not shown and does not show itself to be interested in this activity at all levels … but because in relation to the people-nation the indigenous intellectual element is more foreign than the foreigners.
(An Antonio Gramsci Reader, p. 369)

He asks, “What is the meaning of the fact that the Italian people prefer to read foreign writers?” For him, with the exception of opera, there was no organic relationship between high culture and low culture. Then what is needed to bridge the gap between thought and action? Well, for Gramsci, he says that organic intellectuals are needed (to help create a counter-hegemony). Organic intellectuals are intellectuals from among the people. This makes sense. These individuals from the people feel tied to them, know their needs, aspirations, and feelings (Isn’t this what we do as interaction designers?).

This particular theme of Gramsci deals with his concern for the lack of a vernacular Italian novel that consists of both the national and popular. Simply put, he was envious of the French who had an Alexandre Dumas. He wanted an Italian Alexandre Dumas.

Gramsci and Design:
Is it possible to create products (whether they be novels, artifacts, services, organizations) that reflect the people’s popular psyche? By “people,” I don’t just mean the majority; people can come to mean subaltern people, especially in the context of a great chunk of Gramsci’s works. For example, can we have a Korean American Alexandre Dumas? (This is the theme of my thesis) Or design for the vision-impaired?

FOR DEWEY:
Unlike Gramsci’s entitative/materialist reality, Dewey has an essentialist reality. He is concerned with man, the “live creature,” and his environment (note: different from “surrounding”). In Art as Experience, he, too, is concerned with the separation of thought and action.

Dewey begins his book by stating that a philosophy/theory of art is an effort to understand the actual experiences. He writes,

For theory is concerned with understanding, insight, not without exclamations of admiration, and stimulation of that emotional outburst often called appreciation. It is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants, he is committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air, water and sunlight that condition the growth of plants. (p. 2)

Hence, the situation or environment is key to understanding. It is in the action, the actual doing that one experiences life at the fullest and it’s these fulfilling experiences that man is incessantly after.

When he talks about this experience, it consists of both thought (esthetic undergoing, perception) and action (artistic doing, making) – his artistic-esthetic experience. He says that there cannot be a distinction between esthetic and artistic; they must be united for an experience to be an experience. An artist must have both doing and undergoing while creating a product, and a beholder/audience must also do both in order to create his/her own experience.

So how does he relate to Gramsci? Well, he, too, is uncomfortable with how we’ve come to distinguish between high art (placing them in museums) and low art. This wasn’t so in past cultures. His goal is to recover the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living. He says, we need to go back to “experience of the common or mill run of things” (p. 9).

Activities, such as dancing, making music, painting, making drama, were just parts of group life – the significant life of an organized community. In fact, the Greeks formed the idea that art is an act of reproduction/imitation. Art used to have such a close connection with daily life. Now, we must go out of our way to go to a museum, a theatre, etc. Art has lost its indigenous status and great paintings, for example, are secluded in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. Gramsci would not be happy.

Dewey and Design:
Dewey’s pragmatism and works have enormous implications for design. He’s all about interaction. In fact, Moholy-Nagy, when he came to Chicago to start the New Bauhaus (didn’t last long although from what I know, it’s had influence in the creation of IIT’s design school), met Dewey through a mutual friend in NY. Dewey’s treatise on art became a textbook for the New Bauhaus. His chapter, “Having an Experience,” as Richard Buchanan says, is THE text, the foundational piece, for CMU’s interaction design program.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
What does all this mean for the nature of products or even the purpose of the things we create? For example, I think it’s great that the i-pod is in the MOMA as an iconic artifact of everyday life along with Eames’ chair. Taking parts from Gramsci and Dewey, can we start talking more about the products we can make and how they support/shape sub-cultures, groups of cultures, and Culture?

(btw, I’m in no-wise a marxist. I’m taking the parts that are interesting to me in these theories and looking for practical applications for Design)

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