- Email: [email protected]
Is There a Designer?
Review 69, no. 3 (1991): 6–15, available at https://hbr.org/1991/05/ teaching-smart-people-how-to-learn. 7 Gisela E. Speidel and Kristina Inn, “The Ocean Is My Classroom,” Kamehamea Journal of Education (Fall 1994): 11–23, available at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ504214. 8 The “moving target” is a reference to the origins of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener, “father” of cybernetics, invented anti-aircraft guns during World War II to successfully destroy moving aircraft. See Thomas Fischer, “Wiener’s Prefiguring of a Cybernetic Design Theory,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 34, no. 3 (2015): 52–59, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/NORBERT.2014.6893913. 9 Lucy A. Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situation Actions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 283. 10 David Hands, Design Management:The Essential Handbook (London: Kogan Page, 2018), 23. 11 Lissack, “Understanding Is a Design Problem. Part 2,” 331. 12 Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer-Verlag Inc., 2003), 227.
Is There a Designer? Hugo Letiche, Institut Mines: TBS, Evry/Paris, France; ULSB, University of Leicester, UK [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.11.006
Abstract This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Michael Lissack and I co-authored Coherence in the Midst of Complexity. In this article, readers will see how our thought has since diverged. While Lissack has increasingly focused on a cognitive interpretation of basic concepts or categories of the mind, I have pursued object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) and rejected the mind-based thesis. Lissack has chosen for human cognition and the brain as his baseline, while I claim that objects inherently withdraw from perception, and that knowing is ontologically partial and incomplete. The “realness” of objects, whether the objects are mental, cultural, physical, imaginary or whatever, is limitedly accessible. I criticize “corrolationism,” or the assertion that all there is, is mind (or cognition and awareness). I insist that objects, in their enormous variety and complexity, require to be acknowledged and not reduced to epiphenomena dominated by thought; i.e. it is not mind all the way down. Keywords Object-oriented-ontology; critique of corrolationism; Graham Harman
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Introduction In the version of “Understanding is a Design Problem,”1 which I was given to comment on, Michael Lissack introduces the “Reflexive Designerly Thinking Self-Aware Cognizer” (or “RDTSAC”)—obviously, quite a mouthful. In later versions, he revised this to the less unwieldly “designer aware cognizer.” In both the original “RDTSAC” as well as the later “designer aware cognizer,” mind dominates. The crucial issue seems to be this: “Is the truth of consciousness a pragmatically driven design problem?” Several of Lissack’s terms in RDTSAC are also crucial to my thought; though I must admit that I would not be inclined to string them all along in a single conceptualization. In this essay, I will try to pick apart several, but not all of the terms. Michael Lissack, I will argue, is a radical “corrolationist”—he assumes that we can never be sure about whatever is “true in the real world,” we only have access to mind, thought, cognition, and perception. Just why he seems to think that we do have some sort of privileged access to the “brain” or to “cognition,” I do not know; are they not just as much objects of the real world as any others? Let me state at the outset that I reject corrolationism as a basic philosophical position. I do not think that it is mind all the way down, with a sharp dualistic divide assumed between mind and world, consciousness and the real. As will be discussed, I acknowledge some of the basic dualisms of Lissack‘s argument; indeed, there is blind labelling versus openness, cognitive reductionism versus doing justice to, prejudice versus resonance; and I will argue that the concept of “designer” cannot get us out of these dilemmas.
It’s Phenomenology, All the Way Down Lissack’s point of departure seems to be Edmund Husserl’s fundierung (foundational) relation,2 which he links to John Dewey’s pragmatism,3 all of which he positions in a cognitivist context. Husserl is a rather Janus-faced philosopher—on the one hand there is his very Cartesian embrace of “ideas,” and on the other, his phenomenological call to “return to the things themselves.”4 These two aspects to Husserl’s thought gave birth to his two methods: phenomenological reduction and transcendental reduction. Many years ago, as a graduate student, I had to do an oral exam on Husserl. After three quarters of an hour discussing phenomenological reduction with the professor, it was time for me to face transcendental reduction. The professor brushed aside my efforts, saying, “Transcendental reduction was a mistake; no need to go further.” I was stunned; I had spent many hours
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trying to prepare a sensible account of transcendental reduction for the exam, only to discover that it wasn’t needed. But ultimately, I think the professor was right. Phenomenological reduction, especially as linked to Husserl’s more situated and political positioning in Krisis (1970), I retain as a powerful and important insight. Husserl—a Jewish intellectual, who in the nineteen-thirties lost his position, security, and place in German society, in part dislodged and betrayed by his star student Martin Heidegger—knew all too powerfully how prejudice, opinion, and blind intolerance can destroy awareness. Lissack is also fascinated by the dilemma of unfounded dogma, or what Sartre called “false consciousness.”5 How do we understand the willful denial of events, circumstances and the Other? Nazi Germany demonstrated how a denial of awareness makes it possible to (literally) kill a thing. How do we understand the murderous ability of humans to refuse to see, acknowledge, or know? Husserl was convinced that common everyday awareness amounted to a refusal to see. He called for the bracketing of assumptions, the leaving aside of what we think we know, and the radical perceptual investigation of circumstance. As Lissack asserts, we see with our assumptions—and what we think we know makes us blind. At my first job, I taught philosophy to labor relations students. In a seminar in their fourth year I asked the students, “What exactly is there between the bus stop and the campus?” The university was in a rural setting near Utrecht, and nearly all the students lived in Utrecht and were bussed daily to and from campus. There was, in fact, a double row of magnificent plane trees between the bus stop and the campus, but no student ever knew what was there. I asked, hinted, probed—all to no avail. They passed the trees all those years blindly, focused on their day’s work, never taking any notice of their surroundings. This is Husserl’s point:6 our lack of seeing concrete circumstances. By bracketing or setting aside what we think we know, we gain the ability to look, see, and gain in awareness. This is the key to phenomenological reduction. It is the willingness to let circumstances speak to us; the choice to listen to the world, rather than shut down our context with unfounded thoughts and preconceptions. Husserl’s radical claim was that what we think we know makes openness to circumstances impossible; an intellectual fault with potentially profound sociopolitical consequences. Denying the Other his or her identity, based on our own prejudices, makes political violence possible, and invites social repression. Thus, perception is not
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neutral. Openness of perception—the willingness to see circumstances, difference, and the unexpected—is crucial to a politics of justice or respect. Lissack speaks of “representation” versus “compression,” where representation is identified with closed assumptions and more or less automatic responses, and compression with exploring, questioning and looking anew. His choice of terms seems somewhat undesirable to me. All languaging of objects or situations entails re-presenting, or showing again (in the sense of “to bring before the mind”) while the political use of the word represent, as in “My congresswoman represents my district,” is not (at least to me) a mindlessly reductive idea. To compress is to “press together” and compressors (machines) increase gas pressure by decreasing volume. Metaphorically there is a violence to compression, which does not match the openness that is the hallmark of thoughtful awareness. The willingness to see is thus not merely a cognitive theme, it is a fundamentally existential one as well. Heidegger, of course, pursued this theme of the existential significance of phenomenological openness in his philosophy. But before I turn to Heidegger, let me finally contend with Husserl’s “transcendental reduction.” Husserl, at all costs, was out to avoid relativism. The embrace of the phenomenal endangers any absolute concept of Truth. If the key issue is having a willingness to support phenomenological openness, then whatever is seen is “true.” What is in the way of our embracing magic, in that case? By “embracing magic,” I mean believing that humans have the ability to will natural events, or perceiving natural events as willed by others. For instance, if someone gets sick, it is due to the hostile or hateful will of another person. If someone’s crops fail or their well goes dry, or their house burns down; it is because some evil form of agency has been set upon them. Husserl did not want to fall into some sort of “anything goes”—he was determined to defend a restrictive concept of Truth. To do so, he asserted transcendental reduction—deeper than phenomena, there are concepts of basic Truths, or “Ideas.” A random act of cognition will not do: only acts of awareness that are consistent with basic categories of Truth are foundationally sound and deserving of respect. This fundierung (foundational) relationship is Lissack’s point of departure. And I remain chastised and in agreement with my professor. Husserl’s turn to basic Truths or Ideas as foundational makes Truth metaphysical in the literal sense of the word—meta-physical meaning apart from, behind the physical—in other words, fundamentally beyond the phenomenal. Thus, Husserl
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gave and took with the same hand: he gave us a powerful defense of phenomenological awareness in competition with prejudice, but he debunked the phenomenological by championing ideas or first principles or categories. Truth must not only be perception or psychology for Husserl. Thought had to be more than the process of consciousness; it had to have its grounds in something more fundamental or permanent than the phenomenal vagaries of awareness. In Lissack, the “complex” is more true than the “complicated.”7 The one idea is superior to the other. But what is the justification for his hierarchy? Lissack argues that the complex is more open to awareness and is less blocked by assumptions and pre-judgments than the complicated, but he offers no phenomenal evidence for the claim. In fact, the complex appears to be a tautology—if one is more open to complexity, one sees and questions more; if one is more phenomenally attuned and inquisitive, one enjoins the complex. Once, during a PhD research methodology workshop, I met an African graduate student who had been told by his supervising professor to go to Tunisia and study how conflict between French managers and engineers and Tunisian managers and engineers threatened the success of a new pickup truck factory. For me, the student was being blinded to the possibilities of the context. Perhaps there were no such conflicts; perhaps there were very different fault lines. Telling someone to interview people to discover French-Tunisian conflict prejudiced the research process. As always in interviews, the interviewee tries to feel what the interviewer wants, and then attempts to key the answering to that. Asking: “What have you learned; what awareness is needed to let this project succeed; what have been your biggest surprises working here?” will produce a very different interview than if one is fishing for conflict and impediments to success. One could call the French-Tunisian conflict model “complicated,” and the learning, awareness and opening-up-to-other model, “complex.” But I am unsure what one really gains from using the labels. The phenomenological question of “What is there to see here?” always has potentially multiple levels and requires openness to situation, to really fulfill its potential. For me, phenomenological openness is crucial to informed research. Heidegger famously extended Husserl’s existentialism by focusing on the tension between the “ready-at-hand” and “present-at-hand.” The ready-athand is metaphorically similar to a utensil—the world as something to be used, exploited, and handled. Heidegger’s famous example was the hammer, which
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is a tool to bang nails into the wall until its handle breaks off … and then, suddenly, the hammer is a problematic object, presenting itself to us as an issue. Heidegger’s assertion was that, most of the time, we are utterly submerged in our daily activities in a world of “usage” and are barely conscious either of ourselves or of our tools. Exceptionally, Being—existence or aliveness as such—comes to fore, and we are confronted with our Being and not just with the being of our everyday activities. The quotidian world of objects, as ruled by commonplaces and the lack of awareness, is where Husserl’s universe of commonsense prejudice reigns. What in Husserl was thought of as faulty perception becomes in Heidegger the “ready-at-hand,” and Husserl’s “transcendental reduction” becomes “presence-at-hand,” or an awareness of the fundamental quality of Being exceeding the pragmatic or everyday. Being lost in the quotidian was clearly an issue for Husserl. It is recast as Dasein, or being thrown into circumstance in Heidegger. It is not through Ideas or fundamental concepts, but via the very existential quality of life itself, that Heidegger proposes to transcend “throwness”8 and to discover the ability to be radically open to the existence of Being. Lissack, addresses the question of the “ready-tohand” or the “natural attitude” of Husserlian prejudice. Awareness, or consciousness in Lissack’s essay, is a problem of perception and cognition. While he implies that openness to circumstance, world, or existence is an issue, Lissack never really problematizes the tension between what Heidegger calls the ready-at-hand and presence-at-hand, and what Husserl named the phenomenal realm versus that of Ideas. Lissack’s dualities—complicated versus complex, blind versus reflexive, representation versus compression—reproduce the pattern of duality in Husserl and Heidegger, but they never leave the level of the ready-at-hand or that of the phenomenal, whereby his conceptualization remains conceptually rather flat or one-dimensional.
The Solution is Object Oriented Object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) is grounded in the critique of “corrolationism.” Corrolationism assumes that everything we can know is really only in our minds or consciousness. There is no escape from mind and cognition; we never really know the world. All knowledge is a mental construct and we are never actually in the world. In effect, this is so much neo-Kantianism. Basic parameters or assumptions, especially in Kant those of time and space, are the grounds for all human cognition. These basic concepts are qualities of human
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knowing, not of the world. The phenomenal object is an object of human perception—the real object, or the object in-and-of-itself, is unknowable.9 Knowledge is a human cognitive construct, which can never escape its mind-based foundations. O-O-O, at least as portrayed by Graham Harman10 asserts that reality is not some sort of undifferentiated soup or indistinguishable flow. There really are differences — the earth is not an ant, relativity theory is not a thunderstorm, unicorns are not the Rijksmuseum. Myths, fantasies, concepts, buildings, forests and continents are all objects. Objects come in all sorts of forms, shapes and (non-)substances. However complex collections of objects may be, differences remain between one and another. Basically, there is ontological difference, and thus the “real” is not mind all the way down. Harman has framed his conceptualization of O-O-O in reference to Heidegger’s hammer example. To repeat: the hammer as ready-to-hand is taken for granted; it is not noticed or really an object of awareness. Tool-being is goal directed and fairly blind. But when the hammer breaks—the handle shatters and splinters fly about—it suddenly appears to us and demands awareness. For Heidegger, that is the moment where mindfulness can begin: the person becomes aware of the object, of circumstance, and of self. The possibility to pass from ready-at-hand to presenceat-hand, or to self-awareness and to consciousness of one’s Being, presents itself. Harman reverses a key part to the metaphor. He argues that indeed awareness of the hammer is normally partial, but that is not, as Heidegger asserted, a failure of human (self-) consciousness, it is an ontological quality of objects. Objects withdraw from awareness; it is inherent to object-being to be partial, incomplete, and at least somewhat hidden. Phenomenological cognition is always partial—it can only be of one side of an object. Take the hammer: one can only see one side of it; some of it will always be hidden from our vision. Perception is always incomplete; perhaps one smells an object, but does not feel its weight; or sees an object up close, but loses an overview of all its elements. Husserl’s phenomenology was already aware of this partiality. What Harman adds is that the problem is not one of the limits of perception. The limits in awareness, ultimately, are not a perceptual or epistemological problem—they are an ontological problem. Objects are always partial and limited in what they reveal. We can never completely know the “Real-Object.” Empirical experience is limited to the Phenomenal-Qualities. Nonetheless, the Real-Object can and does assert its influence on awareness, circumstances, and world. Phenomenal or
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perceptual limits do not determine ontology. Perceptual or empirical data are always limited and incomplete. And this is why the “Real-Objects,” for instance of physics, are conceptual constructs defined via experiments and in terms of theories. As Karen Barad11 makes so clear, experimentation allows the experimenter to claim that some effect of the Real-Object justifies a proposed assertion. The physicist sees the results of the experiment, but the physicist never sees the Real-Object. Researchers probe the world with their experimental apparatus and interpret the results of their probes on the basis of their ideas. We do have some indirect access to the Real-Object; but that access is never direct or simple. Corrolationism is just too simple. What is in the mind is not totally devoid of the Real; nor is the Real ever entirely in the mind. When Harman turns to social history, he is confronted by the quasi-indeterminacy of his ontology. In Immaterialism,12 Harman examines the Dutch VOC (United East India Company), which colonized Indonesia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Was the VOC (or is the VOC) an object? Harman concludes that it is (was). But how does one circumscribe or characterize it? The phenomenal VOC includes the spice trade, the enrichment of Holland making the “Dutch Golden Age” possible, and colonial violence and cruel repression. How does one typify a social or historical object? Does one do that in terms of its principle players, in this case the governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen? Coen was a ruthless adventurer, a hard and malicious colonialist, a man who disobeyed orders and defied hierarchy. And he was lionized in Holland during the twentieth century as a representative of the “VOCspirit”—in fact, a principal motorway tunnel (Coentunnel) in Amsterdam is named after him. Today, he has fallen into disrepute for his racist and exploitive practices. When the object is human, is its “Real” knowable? In fact, is there a Real to the human? I do not think Harman is entirely sure of the answer. If human history, or human histories, do not entail a single Real attachable to them, does that mean the human is inherently limited to being phenomenal? As stated, Harman has reversed Heidegger’s ready-to-hand/ presence-to-hand analysis. In Heidegger, the ready-tohand is qualified as being, while the presence-to-hand entails Being.13 Does Harman believe that phenomenal being is inherently accompanied by Real Being? He hints as much when he evokes “occasionalism.” Occasionalism is a medieval Islamic philosophical principle asserting that whatever made change or events happen between objects was metaphysical. The phenomenal or physical world is populated by
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innumerable objects; change or event requires a principle of action transcending the objects, and making (or allowing) interaction, relationship, and change to occur. The principle of agency or relatedness as change or transformation transcends the objects themselves. Agency requires a metaphysical first principle that guarantees the possibility of transcending object-being via event, occurrence, and change.14 I do not want to attack or defend Harman’s occasionalism, but I do want to point to Lissack’s problems with the same issue. Lissack seems to opt instead for some sort of pragmatism. Things happen; there are causes or agency that make the things happen. From that, Lissack concludes some sort of principle of purpose, directionality, or “intentionality”15 is operant. With intentionality we are right back in Husserl’s phenomenology. Intentionality posits that human thought and action always intend something. Lissack voices this in terms of affordances. A chair affords sitting; a cake in the shop window affords an opportunity to treat our sweet tooth. The hammer affords the possibility of hanging a painting or repairing the roof. Objects are defined in terms of their use; an object is something for use that has purpose, and that affords some sort of human action. If it does not afford anything, it does not exist for us and it is not perceived or named. Harman’s ontology is flat. All sorts of things exist or are Real. “Real-ness” is not defined in O-O-O in terms of human usage. Lissack’s world seems to be entirely human-centered. Things exist insofar as they have intentional human, social, economic and political value. Here, Lissack and environmental ethics, and post-humanism (or the Anthropocene) part company. Lissack’s radical corrolationism sees Truth entirely in human cognitive or mentalist terms. His epistemology thus is radically humanist; if something does not have purpose for humans, it just does not exist. Harman’s ontology asserts that the relationships between the Real-Object and the Phenomenological- Object are complex, often uncertain, and dynamic. We are moved and affected by such relationships, and principally not able to determine their outcomes. We are of and in the object-world; it is not outside of us, juxtaposed to us, or ever simply an object of our cognition. For O-O-O, phenomenal cognition is partial, limited, and only part of the story.16
Afterword While Lissack champions complex openness and iterative interactive thinking, his corrolationist cognitivism seems very problematic to me. For me, there
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is no and there can be no “designer.” Ultimately, “the designer” is a metaphysical first principle, which Harman acknowledges, but leaves in a sort of hypothetical mist. Whatever makes the actions of historical reality between multiple objects in varied circumstances and via events happen, also transcends the object-being of the Real. After David Hume,17 we know that causality is metaphysical; we see correlations, activities, and occurrences; but we can only hypothesize causality. We (have the option to) believe in its being. One can only claim that awareness is a design problem if one is willing to assume that objects, relationships, and causality are all mental constructs. If one admits or assumes corrolationism or radical (social) constructivism, wherein the only knowable reality is one that is “minded,” then reality (or in O-O-O terms, “objects”) are mere mental or cognitive constructs. “World” is merely a brain effect. Such radical cognitivism seems deeply inadequate to me. How could one justify the assumption that phenomenal cognition supported by brain structure is the full extent of what can be known, I do not know. How, if phenomenal perception and mental processing are all there is, would it be possible to ever know as much? Radical corrolationism, I believe, leads to tautology, wherein its ability to know itself seems inexplicable. There would, here, seem to be no possible solution to the problem of access to the Real. Corrolationism blocks out many problems by simply refusing to get out of the mind and into the world. It’s totally mind-centered perspective is consistent, but is it adequate? Are we really willing to sacrifice the Real to an all-encompassing principle of mentalist cognition? If, as is my case, one is neither a radical cognitivist, nor admits a metaphysical absolute into one’s ontology, one can only acknowledge the Real, and admit one’s very limited ability to know that Real. This is, in effect, the same as saying “Objects withdraw.” There are no grounds, I believe, for positing a “designer.” Objects are what they are beyond, outside and irrespective of consciousness or cognition. As Harman (admittedly in the tradition of Kant) claims, the “phenomenal object” which we can cognize, is not the “real” object.18 The limits on cognition do not mean that the “real” does not exist, but it does mean that human cognition is partial, limited and incomplete. Harman’s claim thus is that cognition is ontologically limited—the nature of the very being of objects limits what we can know. My assertion is that existential truthfulness demands that we acknowledge and accept the nature of the limits to human cognition and knowing. There is not just a world of
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constructivism or one of our own invention—there is more than that. The Real or the objects really exist, but that Real or object-being is only partially, fleetingly, and incompletely knowable. Thus, while I applaud Lissack’s effort to champion open and relational thought, I do not find much agreement between our ontological positions.
Design Is Construction, Construction Is Design Christiane M. Herr, Department of Architecture, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China [email protected]
1 Michael Lissack, “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective. Part 1,” She Ji:The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 5, no. 3 (2019): 231–46, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.07.002; Michael Lissack, “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective. Part 2,” She Ji:The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 5, no. 4 (2019): 327–42, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. sheji.2019.11.019. 2 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), First published in 1900. 3 John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, reprinted ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 4 See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: An Historical Introduction (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 124–39; 152–65. 5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism (London: Citadel Press, 1993). 6 Husserl, Logical Investigations. 7 Hugo Letiche, Michael Lissack, and Ron Schultz, Coherence in the Midst of Complexity: Advances in Social Complexity Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 223. 9 Graham Harman, “A New Sense of Mimesis,” in Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy, ed. Mark Foster Gage (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 49–64. 10 Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005); Graham Harman, Object-Oriented-Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Polity, 2018); Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (London: Polity, 2018). 11 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 12 Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (London: Polity, 2016); Norah Campbell, Stephen Dunne, and Paul Ennis, “Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 3 (2019): 121–37, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276418824638. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time. 14 Referring to David Hume: Enquiry Considering Human Understanding, and His Critique of Causality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 15 See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 107–11. 16 Hugo Letiche, Geoff Lightfoot, and Simon Lilley, “The Matter of Objects,” Ephemera 18, no. 3 (2018): 681–93, available at https:// search.proquest.com/docview/2161271516?accountid=28839. 17 David Hume, The Essential Philosophical Works. 18 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (London: Zero Books, 2011).
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.11.007
Abstract This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Lissack’s claim that cognition and meaning making can be understood as design processes is a reiteration of arguments already put forward by constructivist thinkers. By relying on a cognitive science vocabulary and science-based epistemology, Lissack omits a significant and relevant body of work that has argued and explained these points more elegantly, already decades ago. This commentary discusses Lissack’s claim with reference to radical constructivism and design cybernetics and argues for a design-oriented rather than a cognitive science-oriented approach to the subject of design. Keywords Radical constructivism; design process; design cybernetics; complexity
The concluding sentence of Michael Lissack’s winding article summarizes the newly introduced perspective succinctly: “Once we approach understanding as a design process, our ways of thought will never be the same.”1 At the same time, it also offers a starting point for a critical commentary. Assuming that this is the answer, what was the question? In the earlier parts of the article, Lissack remains vague about the aims of his argument—is the intention to inform the design community, or is this an argument from the perspective of design addressed to cognitive scientists? Arguing broadly that understanding should be thought of as a design process, Lissack draws on a wide range of theories to support this argument— almost all examples and theories quoted in the paper, however, relate to the rational and reductionist approach of science-based disciplines and seem an uneasy fit with design. Why does a design-focused argument have to be made with authoritative support from science? If design is the key focus here, why is it
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Is There a Designer? Hugo Letiche, Institut Mines: TBS, Evry/Paris, France; ULSB, University of Leicester, UK [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.11.006
Abstract This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Michael Lissack and I co-authored Coherence in the Midst of Complexity. In this article, readers will see how our thought has since diverged. While Lissack has increasingly focused on a cognitive interpretation of basic concepts or categories of the mind, I have pursued object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) and rejected the mind-based thesis. Lissack has chosen for human cognition and the brain as his baseline, while I claim that objects inherently withdraw from perception, and that knowing is ontologically partial and incomplete. The “realness” of objects, whether the objects are mental, cultural, physical, imaginary or whatever, is limitedly accessible. I criticize “corrolationism,” or the assertion that all there is, is mind (or cognition and awareness). I insist that objects, in their enormous variety and complexity, require to be acknowledged and not reduced to epiphenomena dominated by thought; i.e. it is not mind all the way down. Keywords Object-oriented-ontology; critique of corrolationism; Graham Harman
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Introduction In the version of “Understanding is a Design Problem,”1 which I was given to comment on, Michael Lissack introduces the “Reflexive Designerly Thinking Self-Aware Cognizer” (or “RDTSAC”)—obviously, quite a mouthful. In later versions, he revised this to the less unwieldly “designer aware cognizer.” In both the original “RDTSAC” as well as the later “designer aware cognizer,” mind dominates. The crucial issue seems to be this: “Is the truth of consciousness a pragmatically driven design problem?” Several of Lissack’s terms in RDTSAC are also crucial to my thought; though I must admit that I would not be inclined to string them all along in a single conceptualization. In this essay, I will try to pick apart several, but not all of the terms. Michael Lissack, I will argue, is a radical “corrolationist”—he assumes that we can never be sure about whatever is “true in the real world,” we only have access to mind, thought, cognition, and perception. Just why he seems to think that we do have some sort of privileged access to the “brain” or to “cognition,” I do not know; are they not just as much objects of the real world as any others? Let me state at the outset that I reject corrolationism as a basic philosophical position. I do not think that it is mind all the way down, with a sharp dualistic divide assumed between mind and world, consciousness and the real. As will be discussed, I acknowledge some of the basic dualisms of Lissack‘s argument; indeed, there is blind labelling versus openness, cognitive reductionism versus doing justice to, prejudice versus resonance; and I will argue that the concept of “designer” cannot get us out of these dilemmas.
It’s Phenomenology, All the Way Down Lissack’s point of departure seems to be Edmund Husserl’s fundierung (foundational) relation,2 which he links to John Dewey’s pragmatism,3 all of which he positions in a cognitivist context. Husserl is a rather Janus-faced philosopher—on the one hand there is his very Cartesian embrace of “ideas,” and on the other, his phenomenological call to “return to the things themselves.”4 These two aspects to Husserl’s thought gave birth to his two methods: phenomenological reduction and transcendental reduction. Many years ago, as a graduate student, I had to do an oral exam on Husserl. After three quarters of an hour discussing phenomenological reduction with the professor, it was time for me to face transcendental reduction. The professor brushed aside my efforts, saying, “Transcendental reduction was a mistake; no need to go further.” I was stunned; I had spent many hours
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trying to prepare a sensible account of transcendental reduction for the exam, only to discover that it wasn’t needed. But ultimately, I think the professor was right. Phenomenological reduction, especially as linked to Husserl’s more situated and political positioning in Krisis (1970), I retain as a powerful and important insight. Husserl—a Jewish intellectual, who in the nineteen-thirties lost his position, security, and place in German society, in part dislodged and betrayed by his star student Martin Heidegger—knew all too powerfully how prejudice, opinion, and blind intolerance can destroy awareness. Lissack is also fascinated by the dilemma of unfounded dogma, or what Sartre called “false consciousness.”5 How do we understand the willful denial of events, circumstances and the Other? Nazi Germany demonstrated how a denial of awareness makes it possible to (literally) kill a thing. How do we understand the murderous ability of humans to refuse to see, acknowledge, or know? Husserl was convinced that common everyday awareness amounted to a refusal to see. He called for the bracketing of assumptions, the leaving aside of what we think we know, and the radical perceptual investigation of circumstance. As Lissack asserts, we see with our assumptions—and what we think we know makes us blind. At my first job, I taught philosophy to labor relations students. In a seminar in their fourth year I asked the students, “What exactly is there between the bus stop and the campus?” The university was in a rural setting near Utrecht, and nearly all the students lived in Utrecht and were bussed daily to and from campus. There was, in fact, a double row of magnificent plane trees between the bus stop and the campus, but no student ever knew what was there. I asked, hinted, probed—all to no avail. They passed the trees all those years blindly, focused on their day’s work, never taking any notice of their surroundings. This is Husserl’s point:6 our lack of seeing concrete circumstances. By bracketing or setting aside what we think we know, we gain the ability to look, see, and gain in awareness. This is the key to phenomenological reduction. It is the willingness to let circumstances speak to us; the choice to listen to the world, rather than shut down our context with unfounded thoughts and preconceptions. Husserl’s radical claim was that what we think we know makes openness to circumstances impossible; an intellectual fault with potentially profound sociopolitical consequences. Denying the Other his or her identity, based on our own prejudices, makes political violence possible, and invites social repression. Thus, perception is not
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neutral. Openness of perception—the willingness to see circumstances, difference, and the unexpected—is crucial to a politics of justice or respect. Lissack speaks of “representation” versus “compression,” where representation is identified with closed assumptions and more or less automatic responses, and compression with exploring, questioning and looking anew. His choice of terms seems somewhat undesirable to me. All languaging of objects or situations entails re-presenting, or showing again (in the sense of “to bring before the mind”) while the political use of the word represent, as in “My congresswoman represents my district,” is not (at least to me) a mindlessly reductive idea. To compress is to “press together” and compressors (machines) increase gas pressure by decreasing volume. Metaphorically there is a violence to compression, which does not match the openness that is the hallmark of thoughtful awareness. The willingness to see is thus not merely a cognitive theme, it is a fundamentally existential one as well. Heidegger, of course, pursued this theme of the existential significance of phenomenological openness in his philosophy. But before I turn to Heidegger, let me finally contend with Husserl’s “transcendental reduction.” Husserl, at all costs, was out to avoid relativism. The embrace of the phenomenal endangers any absolute concept of Truth. If the key issue is having a willingness to support phenomenological openness, then whatever is seen is “true.” What is in the way of our embracing magic, in that case? By “embracing magic,” I mean believing that humans have the ability to will natural events, or perceiving natural events as willed by others. For instance, if someone gets sick, it is due to the hostile or hateful will of another person. If someone’s crops fail or their well goes dry, or their house burns down; it is because some evil form of agency has been set upon them. Husserl did not want to fall into some sort of “anything goes”—he was determined to defend a restrictive concept of Truth. To do so, he asserted transcendental reduction—deeper than phenomena, there are concepts of basic Truths, or “Ideas.” A random act of cognition will not do: only acts of awareness that are consistent with basic categories of Truth are foundationally sound and deserving of respect. This fundierung (foundational) relationship is Lissack’s point of departure. And I remain chastised and in agreement with my professor. Husserl’s turn to basic Truths or Ideas as foundational makes Truth metaphysical in the literal sense of the word—meta-physical meaning apart from, behind the physical—in other words, fundamentally beyond the phenomenal. Thus, Husserl
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gave and took with the same hand: he gave us a powerful defense of phenomenological awareness in competition with prejudice, but he debunked the phenomenological by championing ideas or first principles or categories. Truth must not only be perception or psychology for Husserl. Thought had to be more than the process of consciousness; it had to have its grounds in something more fundamental or permanent than the phenomenal vagaries of awareness. In Lissack, the “complex” is more true than the “complicated.”7 The one idea is superior to the other. But what is the justification for his hierarchy? Lissack argues that the complex is more open to awareness and is less blocked by assumptions and pre-judgments than the complicated, but he offers no phenomenal evidence for the claim. In fact, the complex appears to be a tautology—if one is more open to complexity, one sees and questions more; if one is more phenomenally attuned and inquisitive, one enjoins the complex. Once, during a PhD research methodology workshop, I met an African graduate student who had been told by his supervising professor to go to Tunisia and study how conflict between French managers and engineers and Tunisian managers and engineers threatened the success of a new pickup truck factory. For me, the student was being blinded to the possibilities of the context. Perhaps there were no such conflicts; perhaps there were very different fault lines. Telling someone to interview people to discover French-Tunisian conflict prejudiced the research process. As always in interviews, the interviewee tries to feel what the interviewer wants, and then attempts to key the answering to that. Asking: “What have you learned; what awareness is needed to let this project succeed; what have been your biggest surprises working here?” will produce a very different interview than if one is fishing for conflict and impediments to success. One could call the French-Tunisian conflict model “complicated,” and the learning, awareness and opening-up-to-other model, “complex.” But I am unsure what one really gains from using the labels. The phenomenological question of “What is there to see here?” always has potentially multiple levels and requires openness to situation, to really fulfill its potential. For me, phenomenological openness is crucial to informed research. Heidegger famously extended Husserl’s existentialism by focusing on the tension between the “ready-at-hand” and “present-at-hand.” The ready-athand is metaphorically similar to a utensil—the world as something to be used, exploited, and handled. Heidegger’s famous example was the hammer, which
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is a tool to bang nails into the wall until its handle breaks off … and then, suddenly, the hammer is a problematic object, presenting itself to us as an issue. Heidegger’s assertion was that, most of the time, we are utterly submerged in our daily activities in a world of “usage” and are barely conscious either of ourselves or of our tools. Exceptionally, Being—existence or aliveness as such—comes to fore, and we are confronted with our Being and not just with the being of our everyday activities. The quotidian world of objects, as ruled by commonplaces and the lack of awareness, is where Husserl’s universe of commonsense prejudice reigns. What in Husserl was thought of as faulty perception becomes in Heidegger the “ready-at-hand,” and Husserl’s “transcendental reduction” becomes “presence-at-hand,” or an awareness of the fundamental quality of Being exceeding the pragmatic or everyday. Being lost in the quotidian was clearly an issue for Husserl. It is recast as Dasein, or being thrown into circumstance in Heidegger. It is not through Ideas or fundamental concepts, but via the very existential quality of life itself, that Heidegger proposes to transcend “throwness”8 and to discover the ability to be radically open to the existence of Being. Lissack, addresses the question of the “ready-tohand” or the “natural attitude” of Husserlian prejudice. Awareness, or consciousness in Lissack’s essay, is a problem of perception and cognition. While he implies that openness to circumstance, world, or existence is an issue, Lissack never really problematizes the tension between what Heidegger calls the ready-at-hand and presence-at-hand, and what Husserl named the phenomenal realm versus that of Ideas. Lissack’s dualities—complicated versus complex, blind versus reflexive, representation versus compression—reproduce the pattern of duality in Husserl and Heidegger, but they never leave the level of the ready-at-hand or that of the phenomenal, whereby his conceptualization remains conceptually rather flat or one-dimensional.
The Solution is Object Oriented Object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) is grounded in the critique of “corrolationism.” Corrolationism assumes that everything we can know is really only in our minds or consciousness. There is no escape from mind and cognition; we never really know the world. All knowledge is a mental construct and we are never actually in the world. In effect, this is so much neo-Kantianism. Basic parameters or assumptions, especially in Kant those of time and space, are the grounds for all human cognition. These basic concepts are qualities of human
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knowing, not of the world. The phenomenal object is an object of human perception—the real object, or the object in-and-of-itself, is unknowable.9 Knowledge is a human cognitive construct, which can never escape its mind-based foundations. O-O-O, at least as portrayed by Graham Harman10 asserts that reality is not some sort of undifferentiated soup or indistinguishable flow. There really are differences — the earth is not an ant, relativity theory is not a thunderstorm, unicorns are not the Rijksmuseum. Myths, fantasies, concepts, buildings, forests and continents are all objects. Objects come in all sorts of forms, shapes and (non-)substances. However complex collections of objects may be, differences remain between one and another. Basically, there is ontological difference, and thus the “real” is not mind all the way down. Harman has framed his conceptualization of O-O-O in reference to Heidegger’s hammer example. To repeat: the hammer as ready-to-hand is taken for granted; it is not noticed or really an object of awareness. Tool-being is goal directed and fairly blind. But when the hammer breaks—the handle shatters and splinters fly about—it suddenly appears to us and demands awareness. For Heidegger, that is the moment where mindfulness can begin: the person becomes aware of the object, of circumstance, and of self. The possibility to pass from ready-at-hand to presenceat-hand, or to self-awareness and to consciousness of one’s Being, presents itself. Harman reverses a key part to the metaphor. He argues that indeed awareness of the hammer is normally partial, but that is not, as Heidegger asserted, a failure of human (self-) consciousness, it is an ontological quality of objects. Objects withdraw from awareness; it is inherent to object-being to be partial, incomplete, and at least somewhat hidden. Phenomenological cognition is always partial—it can only be of one side of an object. Take the hammer: one can only see one side of it; some of it will always be hidden from our vision. Perception is always incomplete; perhaps one smells an object, but does not feel its weight; or sees an object up close, but loses an overview of all its elements. Husserl’s phenomenology was already aware of this partiality. What Harman adds is that the problem is not one of the limits of perception. The limits in awareness, ultimately, are not a perceptual or epistemological problem—they are an ontological problem. Objects are always partial and limited in what they reveal. We can never completely know the “Real-Object.” Empirical experience is limited to the Phenomenal-Qualities. Nonetheless, the Real-Object can and does assert its influence on awareness, circumstances, and world. Phenomenal or
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perceptual limits do not determine ontology. Perceptual or empirical data are always limited and incomplete. And this is why the “Real-Objects,” for instance of physics, are conceptual constructs defined via experiments and in terms of theories. As Karen Barad11 makes so clear, experimentation allows the experimenter to claim that some effect of the Real-Object justifies a proposed assertion. The physicist sees the results of the experiment, but the physicist never sees the Real-Object. Researchers probe the world with their experimental apparatus and interpret the results of their probes on the basis of their ideas. We do have some indirect access to the Real-Object; but that access is never direct or simple. Corrolationism is just too simple. What is in the mind is not totally devoid of the Real; nor is the Real ever entirely in the mind. When Harman turns to social history, he is confronted by the quasi-indeterminacy of his ontology. In Immaterialism,12 Harman examines the Dutch VOC (United East India Company), which colonized Indonesia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Was the VOC (or is the VOC) an object? Harman concludes that it is (was). But how does one circumscribe or characterize it? The phenomenal VOC includes the spice trade, the enrichment of Holland making the “Dutch Golden Age” possible, and colonial violence and cruel repression. How does one typify a social or historical object? Does one do that in terms of its principle players, in this case the governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen? Coen was a ruthless adventurer, a hard and malicious colonialist, a man who disobeyed orders and defied hierarchy. And he was lionized in Holland during the twentieth century as a representative of the “VOCspirit”—in fact, a principal motorway tunnel (Coentunnel) in Amsterdam is named after him. Today, he has fallen into disrepute for his racist and exploitive practices. When the object is human, is its “Real” knowable? In fact, is there a Real to the human? I do not think Harman is entirely sure of the answer. If human history, or human histories, do not entail a single Real attachable to them, does that mean the human is inherently limited to being phenomenal? As stated, Harman has reversed Heidegger’s ready-to-hand/ presence-to-hand analysis. In Heidegger, the ready-tohand is qualified as being, while the presence-to-hand entails Being.13 Does Harman believe that phenomenal being is inherently accompanied by Real Being? He hints as much when he evokes “occasionalism.” Occasionalism is a medieval Islamic philosophical principle asserting that whatever made change or events happen between objects was metaphysical. The phenomenal or physical world is populated by
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innumerable objects; change or event requires a principle of action transcending the objects, and making (or allowing) interaction, relationship, and change to occur. The principle of agency or relatedness as change or transformation transcends the objects themselves. Agency requires a metaphysical first principle that guarantees the possibility of transcending object-being via event, occurrence, and change.14 I do not want to attack or defend Harman’s occasionalism, but I do want to point to Lissack’s problems with the same issue. Lissack seems to opt instead for some sort of pragmatism. Things happen; there are causes or agency that make the things happen. From that, Lissack concludes some sort of principle of purpose, directionality, or “intentionality”15 is operant. With intentionality we are right back in Husserl’s phenomenology. Intentionality posits that human thought and action always intend something. Lissack voices this in terms of affordances. A chair affords sitting; a cake in the shop window affords an opportunity to treat our sweet tooth. The hammer affords the possibility of hanging a painting or repairing the roof. Objects are defined in terms of their use; an object is something for use that has purpose, and that affords some sort of human action. If it does not afford anything, it does not exist for us and it is not perceived or named. Harman’s ontology is flat. All sorts of things exist or are Real. “Real-ness” is not defined in O-O-O in terms of human usage. Lissack’s world seems to be entirely human-centered. Things exist insofar as they have intentional human, social, economic and political value. Here, Lissack and environmental ethics, and post-humanism (or the Anthropocene) part company. Lissack’s radical corrolationism sees Truth entirely in human cognitive or mentalist terms. His epistemology thus is radically humanist; if something does not have purpose for humans, it just does not exist. Harman’s ontology asserts that the relationships between the Real-Object and the Phenomenological- Object are complex, often uncertain, and dynamic. We are moved and affected by such relationships, and principally not able to determine their outcomes. We are of and in the object-world; it is not outside of us, juxtaposed to us, or ever simply an object of our cognition. For O-O-O, phenomenal cognition is partial, limited, and only part of the story.16
Afterword While Lissack champions complex openness and iterative interactive thinking, his corrolationist cognitivism seems very problematic to me. For me, there
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is no and there can be no “designer.” Ultimately, “the designer” is a metaphysical first principle, which Harman acknowledges, but leaves in a sort of hypothetical mist. Whatever makes the actions of historical reality between multiple objects in varied circumstances and via events happen, also transcends the object-being of the Real. After David Hume,17 we know that causality is metaphysical; we see correlations, activities, and occurrences; but we can only hypothesize causality. We (have the option to) believe in its being. One can only claim that awareness is a design problem if one is willing to assume that objects, relationships, and causality are all mental constructs. If one admits or assumes corrolationism or radical (social) constructivism, wherein the only knowable reality is one that is “minded,” then reality (or in O-O-O terms, “objects”) are mere mental or cognitive constructs. “World” is merely a brain effect. Such radical cognitivism seems deeply inadequate to me. How could one justify the assumption that phenomenal cognition supported by brain structure is the full extent of what can be known, I do not know. How, if phenomenal perception and mental processing are all there is, would it be possible to ever know as much? Radical corrolationism, I believe, leads to tautology, wherein its ability to know itself seems inexplicable. There would, here, seem to be no possible solution to the problem of access to the Real. Corrolationism blocks out many problems by simply refusing to get out of the mind and into the world. It’s totally mind-centered perspective is consistent, but is it adequate? Are we really willing to sacrifice the Real to an all-encompassing principle of mentalist cognition? If, as is my case, one is neither a radical cognitivist, nor admits a metaphysical absolute into one’s ontology, one can only acknowledge the Real, and admit one’s very limited ability to know that Real. This is, in effect, the same as saying “Objects withdraw.” There are no grounds, I believe, for positing a “designer.” Objects are what they are beyond, outside and irrespective of consciousness or cognition. As Harman (admittedly in the tradition of Kant) claims, the “phenomenal object” which we can cognize, is not the “real” object.18 The limits on cognition do not mean that the “real” does not exist, but it does mean that human cognition is partial, limited and incomplete. Harman’s claim thus is that cognition is ontologically limited—the nature of the very being of objects limits what we can know. My assertion is that existential truthfulness demands that we acknowledge and accept the nature of the limits to human cognition and knowing. There is not just a world of
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constructivism or one of our own invention—there is more than that. The Real or the objects really exist, but that Real or object-being is only partially, fleetingly, and incompletely knowable. Thus, while I applaud Lissack’s effort to champion open and relational thought, I do not find much agreement between our ontological positions.
Design Is Construction, Construction Is Design Christiane M. Herr, Department of Architecture, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China [email protected]
1 Michael Lissack, “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective. Part 1,” She Ji:The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 5, no. 3 (2019): 231–46, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.07.002; Michael Lissack, “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective. Part 2,” She Ji:The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 5, no. 4 (2019): 327–42, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. sheji.2019.11.019. 2 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), First published in 1900. 3 John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, reprinted ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 4 See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: An Historical Introduction (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 124–39; 152–65. 5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism (London: Citadel Press, 1993). 6 Husserl, Logical Investigations. 7 Hugo Letiche, Michael Lissack, and Ron Schultz, Coherence in the Midst of Complexity: Advances in Social Complexity Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 223. 9 Graham Harman, “A New Sense of Mimesis,” in Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy, ed. Mark Foster Gage (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 49–64. 10 Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005); Graham Harman, Object-Oriented-Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Polity, 2018); Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (London: Polity, 2018). 11 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 12 Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (London: Polity, 2016); Norah Campbell, Stephen Dunne, and Paul Ennis, “Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 3 (2019): 121–37, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276418824638. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time. 14 Referring to David Hume: Enquiry Considering Human Understanding, and His Critique of Causality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 15 See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 107–11. 16 Hugo Letiche, Geoff Lightfoot, and Simon Lilley, “The Matter of Objects,” Ephemera 18, no. 3 (2018): 681–93, available at https:// search.proquest.com/docview/2161271516?accountid=28839. 17 David Hume, The Essential Philosophical Works. 18 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (London: Zero Books, 2011).
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.11.007
Abstract This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Lissack’s claim that cognition and meaning making can be understood as design processes is a reiteration of arguments already put forward by constructivist thinkers. By relying on a cognitive science vocabulary and science-based epistemology, Lissack omits a significant and relevant body of work that has argued and explained these points more elegantly, already decades ago. This commentary discusses Lissack’s claim with reference to radical constructivism and design cybernetics and argues for a design-oriented rather than a cognitive science-oriented approach to the subject of design. Keywords Radical constructivism; design process; design cybernetics; complexity
The concluding sentence of Michael Lissack’s winding article summarizes the newly introduced perspective succinctly: “Once we approach understanding as a design process, our ways of thought will never be the same.”1 At the same time, it also offers a starting point for a critical commentary. Assuming that this is the answer, what was the question? In the earlier parts of the article, Lissack remains vague about the aims of his argument—is the intention to inform the design community, or is this an argument from the perspective of design addressed to cognitive scientists? Arguing broadly that understanding should be thought of as a design process, Lissack draws on a wide range of theories to support this argument— almost all examples and theories quoted in the paper, however, relate to the rational and reductionist approach of science-based disciplines and seem an uneasy fit with design. Why does a design-focused argument have to be made with authoritative support from science? If design is the key focus here, why is it
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