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| Title | reply to Ranulph re "the No Man's Land" | ||||
| Author | Wolfgang Jonas | ||||
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"If Design is in Wiener's No Man's Land, then No Man's Land would seem to be a larger area than those it is between! " Yes, I think this is so. There are islands of rationality, and designers are (Design is) desperately struggling with constructing stable connections between these islands in order to build their own discipline similar to the other well-established ones. This is the old way of knowledge building. Exploring the terrain and drawing maps / building models (metaphors are mixing here, sorry). We seem to know when we are able to rely on knowledge. Which may be true in science and thus in technology. But designers' core activity is to "connect this to people", which means to deal with decisions, values, accident, ... which means not-knowing. So my approach is to build knowledge about not-knowing, about the limits of knowing in design. We are (Design is) the other side of knowing. This does not mean that the traditional approach is not worth being followed. But it supports the illusion that - if we only struggle hard enough - the whole of the No Man's Land will be known one day. I argue: There are considerable regions that resist being understood by us. And, complementary to the mainstream approach, I want to explore the terrain from the opposite side of the border of knowing: I want to know what cannot be known. In order to be able to act in a situation of not-knowing... An idea which still has to be worked out more thoroughly, of course. Jonas 15/12/02 © 2010 Wolfgang Jonas |
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