- Email: [email protected]
Second Order Cybernetics: Why and Where to Steer To
to iteration—and they have to be, working in an environment with too many unknowns, where progress is created through learning your way to a solution. Yet this tends to be an ability that is built up over years of attaining design expertise; design literature has very little to offer in terms of methods and tools to achieve a good, and valid, iteration. Priming is a key design skill, but this too tends to be an intuitive ability, built up over years of design of experience. Design doesn’t have a systematic way of collecting, accessing, and critically dealing with precedents, which would be needed to deliberately prime attention. And finally, designers are not particularly good at questioning—on the contrary, all but the most expert designers are quite vulnerable to jumping to conclusions. These five qualities of design do not aid in the systematic and critical questioning of assumptions, and they do not make up a safe designerly process to avoid conspiracy theories.
1 Kees Dorst, Notes on Design: How Creative Practice Works (Amsterdam: BIS publishers, 2007), 90. 2 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. 3 Pieter Stappers and Elisa Giaccardi, “Research through Design,” in The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd ed. (Interaction Design Foundation, 2017), article 43, available at https:// www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/research-through-design. 4 Ilpo K. Koskinen and Kees Dorst, “Academic Design,” in DS 80-11 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 15) Vol 11: Human Behaviour in Design, Design Education (Milan, Italy, July 27–30, 2015), 227–34, available at https:// www.designsociety.org/publication/38015/ACADEMIC+DESIGN. 5 Richard Buchanan, “Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001):183–206, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/40238091.
Conclusion We find ourselves in a tangled web of voices, opinions, and disingenuous half-truths, and urgently need to find new ways of creating a critical understanding of the world. Lissack is absolutely right in highlighting that inductive understanding and design are closely related, perhaps closer than designers realize. But I hope I have demonstrated that this is problematic, as design thinking is one of the modes of reasoning that actually leads to conspiracy theories. As design and design literature exist today, the field doesn’t have the practices, methods, and tools to safely support the creation of understanding— although this could be shifting: the learning that has always driven design projects is now being formalized, extended, and systematized in Research through Design,3 Academic Design,4 and other methodologies. The growing literature on Design as Rhetoric is starting to ameliorate this situation,5 but as of yet this has led to few methods and tools in the design repertoire. The real solution to the challenge that Lissack has posed lies in the work that he has set out to do in this paper: by thoughtfully taking the key concepts from design and abstracting them, designerly ways of thinking can be linked to critical practices, methods, and tools from other fields. These can then be used to strengthen and enrich the design repertoire. Iterative design processes can play host to the types of critical thinking practices that are needed to safely build up understanding in a complex world. We need bridgebuilders (such as cyberneticists) to create links into other fields and enhance what design can do.
Comments on Understanding Is a Design Problem
Second Order Cybernetics: Why and Where to Steer To Michael Hohl, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, School of Design, Dessau, Germany [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.11.005
Abstract This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” In response to the two-part article this short commentary argues, among others, that there is no possible ‘whole’ perspective upon the world but only different perspectives held by different observers. It then discusses some aspects of the relationship between the design process and second-order cybernetics, applying an example of designerly practice to discuss the “double-diamond model” of the design process, and to demonstrate where first-order cybernetics thinking and where second-order cybernetics’ thinking might come into play. This is followed by the argument that designers design not purely in their minds and observe changes in the reacting world – but that instead
359
designers also think and design – outside of their minds – with their hands, tools and the materials. The transition between the designing mind and the environment is a fluent one. Keywords Second order cybernetics; double diamond model; process; reflecting
In this commentary to the article “Understanding Is a Design Problem” by Michael Lissack,1 I do not intend to thoroughly critique the arguments of the original two parts of the text. I only wish to add some personal views, thoughts, and reflections from a designer’s perspective to some of the ideas being presented. Grossly simplified, the article argues that designerly thinking, storytelling, and cybernetics may together form a theoretical framework of tools conducive to telling better and more convincing stories and as a result encouraging more critical thinking. The subtext to the article is that we need better tools to tell stories that convince an audience who have resisted factual, rational arguments, and do not wish to think critically and ask questions, but instead hold on to opinions and beliefs despite contradictory evidence. Despite this being a most important and laudable aim, I do not believe that this is a convincing approach. In my view this is merely another story. All storytellers have their vocabulary, techniques, an agenda, and a particular worldview shaping their mindset and the essence of their story. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff,2 for example, analyzed how political parties use language, and provided concrete instructions regarding how to appeal to particular audiences by actively making use of their previously formed opinions and beliefs. Many believe they are in possession of the truth and want to convince their audience of the veracity of their claims. What about a story not telling us what to think? Does a new way of telling stories that not only invites critical thinking but requires active and critical engagement to create a meaningful narrative exist? To me it seems that the Western perspective of striving for clarity, as opposed to permitting uncertainty and ambiguity, reinforces thinking in polar opposites and extreme views. The shades of grey are missing. Simplistic thinking could be viewed as mono- causal thinking—rejecting the nuanced complexity of the world. In my view, traditional storytelling is part of this world.
360
“We have no access to the total or to the whole. Instead we only have access to aspects—aspects restricted to what the lenses provide.”3 I am interpreting this to mean that with more senses, better lenses, and better brains we could gain access to, comprehend, and perhaps fully understand the whole. This insinuates that one reality exists out there, independent of an observer. I think that, viewed through a cybernetic and constructivist lens, there is no independent reality out there—neither total, nor whole. The only thing that exists are many different perspectives, never any single or complete one. Each one of this multitude of different perspectives is constructed by an individual observer. Sometimes we ourselves are those different observers. When I start my car in the morning and the radio turns on, the volume of the music that seemed very appropriate yesterday might now appear too loud and distracting. Our perception changes and our lenses change. As such, I don’t think it is a problem of being “incapable of dealing with reality as a whole.”4 As long as we are aware that our reality is not the reality but a reality that is different from those other perspectives held by other actors.
Second Order Cybernetics as “Learning How to Learn to Steer”? I can only agree partially with the definition of cybernetics being “the art of learning how we learn to steer.”5 I would see learning how to learn as part of the framework of first order cybernetics. “How” concerns usability, safety, and control. Second order cybernetics, from a designerly perspective, I would say, is about why and where we steer to. We can see this also in the second loop of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s double loop learning cycle,6 in which we question our goals, values, and beliefs. One has to know why one is steering in order to succeed in making landfall.7 This is less about the cybernetics of learning how to predict to successfully hit a moving target,8 than about acquiring the knowledge that forms part of a way of being in the world that is part of a culture. Knowing “how to build a boat” implies a different set of skills and motivations than those involved when “knowing how to navigate,” or even “knowing why” one wishes to build the boat in the first place. All require different ways of thinking and knowing. First order cybernetics is concerned with constructing appropriate boats that can be navigated
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safely and efficiently, and then navigating those boats in changing conditions. Second order cybernetics is concerned with the purpose, why we are building boats, what types of boats we (can) build, what kind of loads our boats are carrying, and where we are navigating them to. Are we safely and efficiently cruising tourists, food supplies or troops ? Lucy Suchman writes in this context “Behavior is not simply ‘reactive and contingent on the external world,’ but rather is reflexively constitutive of the world’s significance, which in turn gives behavior its sense.”9 This sort of distinction between first and second order cybernetics becomes visible in the expanded double-diamond model of the design process, originally developed in 2005 by the UK Design Council.10 Here, the first diamond is labelled “designing the right thing,” and the second “designing the thing right.” The process is thus that one first examines the problem, purpose and goals within a wider context (second- order cybernetics), and then the focus becomes an appropriate designerly solution (cybernetics of the first order). Designers often begin from a perceived need or problem. First, the designer spends time and effort questioning, probing, and accepting said problem—for example, work related back pain—then spends more time discerning the right thing to address it. In finding a solution to that pain, the designer might consider back exercises, a desk with adjustable height, a radically new work environment, a treadmill, or perhaps a supportive office chair. Designers do not build chairs; they solve problems. The chair is the tangible result of a circular process of research and understanding the problem better, and that process includes questions, investigations, uncertainty, and ambiguity followed by iterations of making and prototyping. With the second diamond of the model, the designer accepts that a supportive chair will provide an acceptable solution. She uses her skills to design that chair, now knowing why and what kind of chair she will be designing. And yet, if we give this brief to ten different designers we will likely receive twelve different chairs which all solve our problem one way or another. Within the perceived constraints inherent in the target group and concerns related to budget, timeframe, materiality, or ecological sustainability, there are still a multitude of different solutions. This process of perceiving a problem, experiencing internal simulation followed by an external intervention, and perceiving the consequences is also depicted in Figure 1: The Modeling Relation in Practice11 by Pille Bunnell and Michael Lissack, in Part 2 of the main text. In the next paragraph I will discuss that figure in more detail.
Comments on Understanding Is a Design Problem
Figure 1: Modeling Relation in Practice In this figure, designing as modeling appears to take place initially and primarily in the mind, after which follows an intervention in a presumed complex world. The consequences are perceived and the cycle is repeated. In this model, the complex world appears passive, and the designerly modeling interventions top-down, contrived, and purely premeditated. In the figure there is a clear distinction being made between the world and the designer’s mind. The designer has a plan and then acts. He is modeling, then acting and observing, and the world is reacting. I think that, in practice, this is a more bottom-up process and relationship. More like a dance. The designer uses aids, tools, and methods in order to think, ideate, and reflect. Sometimes the designer does not have a clear plan. The modeling elements are not abstract, simulated, and confined to the mind, but they are a concrete and actual part of the complex world. They aid in modeling and developing a plan. In this relationship, thinking also takes place out there, by sketching, drawing, pushing elements around with our hands, and inspiring modeling changes. Designers also think and model outside of their minds in the world, using their hands. The changing world changes the mind, and the changing mind changes the world. We cannot only model through thinking and perceiving consequences (observing) alone, it requires acting. Acting affords modeling, an externalized way of thinking. The boundary between the complex world perceived and the designer’s model is more fluent and permeable. In designing, I think, there is an additional, in-between zone that connects the complex world and the embodied mind. As such, designing may also be viewed as a way of thinking, with one’s hands, outside of one’s mind. While Heinz von Foerster wrote, “If you want to see, learn how to act,”12 here we might say, “If you wish to design, learn how to act.”
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 George Lakeoff, The Political Mind: A Cognitibe Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (London: Penguin Books, 2008). 3 Lissack, “Understanding Is a Design Problem. Part 1,” 237. 4 Ibid., 238. 5 Ibid., 235. 6 Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1974); Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business
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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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1 Kees Dorst, Notes on Design: How Creative Practice Works (Amsterdam: BIS publishers, 2007), 90. 2 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. 3 Pieter Stappers and Elisa Giaccardi, “Research through Design,” in The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd ed. (Interaction Design Foundation, 2017), article 43, available at https:// www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/research-through-design. 4 Ilpo K. Koskinen and Kees Dorst, “Academic Design,” in DS 80-11 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 15) Vol 11: Human Behaviour in Design, Design Education (Milan, Italy, July 27–30, 2015), 227–34, available at https:// www.designsociety.org/publication/38015/ACADEMIC+DESIGN. 5 Richard Buchanan, “Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001):183–206, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/40238091.
Conclusion We find ourselves in a tangled web of voices, opinions, and disingenuous half-truths, and urgently need to find new ways of creating a critical understanding of the world. Lissack is absolutely right in highlighting that inductive understanding and design are closely related, perhaps closer than designers realize. But I hope I have demonstrated that this is problematic, as design thinking is one of the modes of reasoning that actually leads to conspiracy theories. As design and design literature exist today, the field doesn’t have the practices, methods, and tools to safely support the creation of understanding— although this could be shifting: the learning that has always driven design projects is now being formalized, extended, and systematized in Research through Design,3 Academic Design,4 and other methodologies. The growing literature on Design as Rhetoric is starting to ameliorate this situation,5 but as of yet this has led to few methods and tools in the design repertoire. The real solution to the challenge that Lissack has posed lies in the work that he has set out to do in this paper: by thoughtfully taking the key concepts from design and abstracting them, designerly ways of thinking can be linked to critical practices, methods, and tools from other fields. These can then be used to strengthen and enrich the design repertoire. Iterative design processes can play host to the types of critical thinking practices that are needed to safely build up understanding in a complex world. We need bridgebuilders (such as cyberneticists) to create links into other fields and enhance what design can do.
Comments on Understanding Is a Design Problem
Second Order Cybernetics: Why and Where to Steer To Michael Hohl, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, School of Design, Dessau, Germany [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.11.005
Abstract This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” In response to the two-part article this short commentary argues, among others, that there is no possible ‘whole’ perspective upon the world but only different perspectives held by different observers. It then discusses some aspects of the relationship between the design process and second-order cybernetics, applying an example of designerly practice to discuss the “double-diamond model” of the design process, and to demonstrate where first-order cybernetics thinking and where second-order cybernetics’ thinking might come into play. This is followed by the argument that designers design not purely in their minds and observe changes in the reacting world – but that instead
359
designers also think and design – outside of their minds – with their hands, tools and the materials. The transition between the designing mind and the environment is a fluent one. Keywords Second order cybernetics; double diamond model; process; reflecting
In this commentary to the article “Understanding Is a Design Problem” by Michael Lissack,1 I do not intend to thoroughly critique the arguments of the original two parts of the text. I only wish to add some personal views, thoughts, and reflections from a designer’s perspective to some of the ideas being presented. Grossly simplified, the article argues that designerly thinking, storytelling, and cybernetics may together form a theoretical framework of tools conducive to telling better and more convincing stories and as a result encouraging more critical thinking. The subtext to the article is that we need better tools to tell stories that convince an audience who have resisted factual, rational arguments, and do not wish to think critically and ask questions, but instead hold on to opinions and beliefs despite contradictory evidence. Despite this being a most important and laudable aim, I do not believe that this is a convincing approach. In my view this is merely another story. All storytellers have their vocabulary, techniques, an agenda, and a particular worldview shaping their mindset and the essence of their story. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff,2 for example, analyzed how political parties use language, and provided concrete instructions regarding how to appeal to particular audiences by actively making use of their previously formed opinions and beliefs. Many believe they are in possession of the truth and want to convince their audience of the veracity of their claims. What about a story not telling us what to think? Does a new way of telling stories that not only invites critical thinking but requires active and critical engagement to create a meaningful narrative exist? To me it seems that the Western perspective of striving for clarity, as opposed to permitting uncertainty and ambiguity, reinforces thinking in polar opposites and extreme views. The shades of grey are missing. Simplistic thinking could be viewed as mono- causal thinking—rejecting the nuanced complexity of the world. In my view, traditional storytelling is part of this world.
360
“We have no access to the total or to the whole. Instead we only have access to aspects—aspects restricted to what the lenses provide.”3 I am interpreting this to mean that with more senses, better lenses, and better brains we could gain access to, comprehend, and perhaps fully understand the whole. This insinuates that one reality exists out there, independent of an observer. I think that, viewed through a cybernetic and constructivist lens, there is no independent reality out there—neither total, nor whole. The only thing that exists are many different perspectives, never any single or complete one. Each one of this multitude of different perspectives is constructed by an individual observer. Sometimes we ourselves are those different observers. When I start my car in the morning and the radio turns on, the volume of the music that seemed very appropriate yesterday might now appear too loud and distracting. Our perception changes and our lenses change. As such, I don’t think it is a problem of being “incapable of dealing with reality as a whole.”4 As long as we are aware that our reality is not the reality but a reality that is different from those other perspectives held by other actors.
Second Order Cybernetics as “Learning How to Learn to Steer”? I can only agree partially with the definition of cybernetics being “the art of learning how we learn to steer.”5 I would see learning how to learn as part of the framework of first order cybernetics. “How” concerns usability, safety, and control. Second order cybernetics, from a designerly perspective, I would say, is about why and where we steer to. We can see this also in the second loop of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s double loop learning cycle,6 in which we question our goals, values, and beliefs. One has to know why one is steering in order to succeed in making landfall.7 This is less about the cybernetics of learning how to predict to successfully hit a moving target,8 than about acquiring the knowledge that forms part of a way of being in the world that is part of a culture. Knowing “how to build a boat” implies a different set of skills and motivations than those involved when “knowing how to navigate,” or even “knowing why” one wishes to build the boat in the first place. All require different ways of thinking and knowing. First order cybernetics is concerned with constructing appropriate boats that can be navigated
she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 2019
safely and efficiently, and then navigating those boats in changing conditions. Second order cybernetics is concerned with the purpose, why we are building boats, what types of boats we (can) build, what kind of loads our boats are carrying, and where we are navigating them to. Are we safely and efficiently cruising tourists, food supplies or troops ? Lucy Suchman writes in this context “Behavior is not simply ‘reactive and contingent on the external world,’ but rather is reflexively constitutive of the world’s significance, which in turn gives behavior its sense.”9 This sort of distinction between first and second order cybernetics becomes visible in the expanded double-diamond model of the design process, originally developed in 2005 by the UK Design Council.10 Here, the first diamond is labelled “designing the right thing,” and the second “designing the thing right.” The process is thus that one first examines the problem, purpose and goals within a wider context (second- order cybernetics), and then the focus becomes an appropriate designerly solution (cybernetics of the first order). Designers often begin from a perceived need or problem. First, the designer spends time and effort questioning, probing, and accepting said problem—for example, work related back pain—then spends more time discerning the right thing to address it. In finding a solution to that pain, the designer might consider back exercises, a desk with adjustable height, a radically new work environment, a treadmill, or perhaps a supportive office chair. Designers do not build chairs; they solve problems. The chair is the tangible result of a circular process of research and understanding the problem better, and that process includes questions, investigations, uncertainty, and ambiguity followed by iterations of making and prototyping. With the second diamond of the model, the designer accepts that a supportive chair will provide an acceptable solution. She uses her skills to design that chair, now knowing why and what kind of chair she will be designing. And yet, if we give this brief to ten different designers we will likely receive twelve different chairs which all solve our problem one way or another. Within the perceived constraints inherent in the target group and concerns related to budget, timeframe, materiality, or ecological sustainability, there are still a multitude of different solutions. This process of perceiving a problem, experiencing internal simulation followed by an external intervention, and perceiving the consequences is also depicted in Figure 1: The Modeling Relation in Practice11 by Pille Bunnell and Michael Lissack, in Part 2 of the main text. In the next paragraph I will discuss that figure in more detail.
Comments on Understanding Is a Design Problem
Figure 1: Modeling Relation in Practice In this figure, designing as modeling appears to take place initially and primarily in the mind, after which follows an intervention in a presumed complex world. The consequences are perceived and the cycle is repeated. In this model, the complex world appears passive, and the designerly modeling interventions top-down, contrived, and purely premeditated. In the figure there is a clear distinction being made between the world and the designer’s mind. The designer has a plan and then acts. He is modeling, then acting and observing, and the world is reacting. I think that, in practice, this is a more bottom-up process and relationship. More like a dance. The designer uses aids, tools, and methods in order to think, ideate, and reflect. Sometimes the designer does not have a clear plan. The modeling elements are not abstract, simulated, and confined to the mind, but they are a concrete and actual part of the complex world. They aid in modeling and developing a plan. In this relationship, thinking also takes place out there, by sketching, drawing, pushing elements around with our hands, and inspiring modeling changes. Designers also think and model outside of their minds in the world, using their hands. The changing world changes the mind, and the changing mind changes the world. We cannot only model through thinking and perceiving consequences (observing) alone, it requires acting. Acting affords modeling, an externalized way of thinking. The boundary between the complex world perceived and the designer’s model is more fluent and permeable. In designing, I think, there is an additional, in-between zone that connects the complex world and the embodied mind. As such, designing may also be viewed as a way of thinking, with one’s hands, outside of one’s mind. While Heinz von Foerster wrote, “If you want to see, learn how to act,”12 here we might say, “If you wish to design, learn how to act.”
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 George Lakeoff, The Political Mind: A Cognitibe Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (London: Penguin Books, 2008). 3 Lissack, “Understanding Is a Design Problem. Part 1,” 237. 4 Ibid., 238. 5 Ibid., 235. 6 Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1974); Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business
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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
she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 2019