Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Cities for People

Last year's Rede Lecture at Cambridge by C. P. Snow is now available in a slim, thoughtful, and disturbing volume entitled The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution . It runs a mere 58 pages of direct, insistent, pellucid prose and can be read in one hour. Since it takes so little time to courageously tackle two problems vital to scientists, and since it is modestly priced, this unimposing book may well be the greatest literary bargain of an inflated publishing age. The "two cultures" in the title are the modern culture of the scientific intellectual and the traditional culture of the literary intellectual. With a foot in each cultural camp, C. P. Snow comes uniquely armed to the fray. He states his own qualifications: "by training I was a scientist; by vocation I was a writer." More specifically, Charles Percy Snow, the scientist, won his M. A. in physics in

The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution

Research in art and design - an un-discipline

Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit. For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of change in an unselfconscious culture's designs. It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction. In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships - and this picture is almost always wrong. To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous. The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can proceed component by component, each component relatively independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right way to build the form up from these components, is the greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form. By Christopher Alexander. Pp. 191. 54s. 1964. (Harvard University Press.)

Context: The relationship between design and science has shifted over recent decades. One bridge between the two is cybernetics, which offers perspectives on both in terms of their practice. From around 1980 onwards, drawing on ideas from cybernetics, Glanville has suggested that rather than apply science to design, it makes more sense to understand science as a form of design activity, reversing the more usual hierarchy between the two. I return to review this argument here, in the context of recent discussions in this journal regarding second-order science (SOS. Problem: Despite numerous connections to practice, second-order cybernetics (SOC) has tended to be associated with theory. As a result, SOC is perceived as separate to the more tangible aspects of earlier cybernetics in a way that obscures both the continuity between the two and also current opportunities for developing the field. Method: I review Glanville’s understanding of design, and particularly his account of scientific research as a design-like activity, placing this within the context of the shifting relation between science and design during the development of SOC, with reference to the work of Rittel and Feyerabend. Through this, I summarise significant parallels and overlaps between SOC and the contemporary concerns of design research. Results: I suggest that we can see design research not just as a field influenced by cybernetics but as a form of SOC practice even where cybernetics is not explicitly referenced. Implications: Given this, design research offers much to cybernetics as an important example of SOC that is both outward looking and practice based. As such, it bridges the gap between SOC and the more tangible legacy of earlier cybernetics, while also suggesting connections to contemporary concerns in this journal with SOS in terms of researching research. Constructivist content: By suggesting that we see design research as an example of SOC, I develop connections between constructivism and practice. The article is published with open peer commentaries by Tom Scholte (University of British Columbia, Canada), David Griffiths (University of Bolton, UK), Christiane M. Herr (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China), Michael Hohl (Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Germany), Mateus de Sousa van Stralen (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil), Jose dos Santos Cabral Filho (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Andrea Jelic (Independent researcher, Serbia), and a response by the author.

/pdf/design-research-as-a-variety-of-second-order-cybernetic-xpf57mdwih.pdf

Design research as a variety of second-order cybernetic practice

While the relationship between ethics and design is usually thought of in terms of the application of the former to the latter, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can authoritatively guide design practice. Depending on which theories or ideas we refer to, we receive different guidance as to what to do. Indeed, design may have as much to contribute to ethical theory as vice versa. This essay builds connections between design and ethics, looking to the similarities of structure between wicked problems in design and those dilemmas that are of central concern in normative ethical theory. Understanding design and ethics in mutual terms, ethical questions in design need not be understood in terms of external limitations or trade-offs between competing priorities. Moreover, the way designers cope with the ethical challenges presented by wicked problems may inform how we approach complex ethical challenges in other contexts, including some of those that arise within ethical discourse itself.

Wicked Problems in Design and Ethics

Context: The design of academic conferences, in which settings ideas are shared and created, is, we suggest, of more than passing interest in constructivism, where epistemology is considered in terms of knowing rather than knowledge. Problem: The passivity and predominantly one-way structure of the typical paper presentation format of academic conferences has a number of serious limitations from a constructivist perspective. These limits are both practical and epistemological. While alternative formats abound, there is nevertheless increasing pressure reinforcing this format due to delegates’ funding typically being linked to reading a paper. Method: In this special issue, authors reflect on conferences that they have organised and participated in that have used alternative formats, such as conversational structures or other constructivist inspired approaches, in whole or in part. We review and contextualize their contributions, understanding them in terms of their connections to constructivism and to each other. Results: While this issue is of relevance across disciplinary boundaries, contributions focus on two fields: that of cybernetics/systems, and that of design. We identify the way that conference organization is of particular importance to these fields, being in self-reflexive relationship to them: the environment of a design conference is something that we design; while a conference regarding systems or cybernetics is itself an instance of the sorts of process with which these fields are concerned. Implications: Building on this self-reflexivity and, also, the close connection of design and cybernetics/systems to constructivism, we suggest that conference organization is an area in which constructivism may itself be understood in terms of practice (and so knowing) rather than theory (and so knowledge. This in turn helps connect ideas in constructivism with pragmatic fields, such as knowledge management, and recent discussions in this journal regarding second-order science. Constructivist content: As a setting for the creation of new ideas, the design of conferences is of importance where we understand epistemology in constructivist terms as a process of knowing. Moreover, the particular fields drawn on - design and cybernetics/systems - have close connections to constructivism, as can be seen, for instance, in the work of Ranulph Glanville, on which we draw here.

/pdf/exploring-alternatives-to-the-traditional-conference-format-5aiygjytip.pdf

Exploring Alternatives to the Traditional Conference Format: Introduction to the Special Issue on Composing Conferences

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the various movements from abstraction to actuality in the context of design, with particular reference to architecture, first in terms of the design process and second in terms of the interpretation of architecture by observers.Design/methodology/approach – The paper focuses on the designers' use of forms of representation, such as drawings, with reference to the cybernetic understanding of conversation. This account is then used to discuss the representational properties of architecture itself and to relate this back to the design process.Findings – It is argued that the forms of representation used by designers, such as drawings and physical models, have both abstract and actual properties and that this combination is important for their representational function. The ambiguity in the interpretation of drawings and models is not only useful in generating ideas but also appropriate given the ambiguity in the interpretation of the architecture they repre...

Conversing with drawings and buildings: from abstract to actual in architecture

Purpose



– The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which cybernetics leads to distinctiveways of acting. 




Design/methodology/approach



– Paralleling von Foerster’s argument that it makes more sense to speak of the cybernetics of epistemology than the epistemology of cybernetics, the author argues that cybernetics is not one form of practice amongst others but an account of what it is to practice, understood as where we relate how we act to how we understand so that each informs the other. The author explores the potential difference that adopting this understanding of practice makes in practice and shows its significance by establishing connections between the eponymous cybernetic example of steering and questions regarding teleology in ethics. 




Findings



– While all practice is cybernetic in the sense of involving a relationship between understanding and acting, the relationship between cybernetics and practice is not a neutral one. Understanding practice in cybernetic terms enables us to pursue goods internal to the practice, which, in turn, makes a difference to how we act. 




Practical implications



– The author argues that how we understand the relation between our understanding and our acting (our theories of theory and practice) leads to significant differences of action in practice. 




Originality/value



– The author argues that cybernetics has non-neutral, and ethically significant, consequences in practice that are beyond the application of cybernetics to practice or the advantages of adopting explicitly conversational ways of acting.

/pdf/cybernetics-of-practice-4nsfhygdmu.pdf

Cybernetics of practice

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