Subject: Conversation on 'design' Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999
At 03:16 PM 2/12/99 you wrote:
> I'd like to engage you in a one-on-one Socratic dialogue. Would you be ok with that?
SURE... (I am open to ALL forms of sharing ;-)
> So let me start by asking you a question,
> "Once a design culture accomplishes its goal(s), what do the people who come afterwards do?"
OK, let me share with you what first comes to my mind, ok? I think that your question makes an 'inappropriate' assumption... that 'cultures' (understood as an 'externality') have goals, and that people should do what their culture 'decide'? Goals are not external to people, and they should be flexible, and changeable, according to people's judgements. I would understand DESIGN as a OPENING a life-long learning process (which starts in the people's perception of themselves and/in the world), and CULTURE as "the pattern of emotioning and sensing, the way of being in the world" (please read Pille Bunnel's "Conserving a culture"). A culture has to do with values, shared stories, traditions etcetera.
So it's not that a 'design culture' has to do with 'doing somebody's plan', but I am talking about a design STYLE, a way of doing things, rather than the things themselves. Somewhere I read that designers engage in a 'DIALOGUE with the situation,' rather than problem- solving ... this is what I mean by a 'design culture.' And when I say designers I am including EVERYBODY.
Got it???
Looking forward to more... questions :-)
Silvia
No, of course, there is no externality ... Culture. I meant, when a current gathering of minds senses the flow and pace and stylings of life they want to have with one another, and they move to bring those qualitites to fruition ... so nicely formed that it becomes the values and shared stories and civilities and routine of life ... once they form the life-space, then what is there for the children who
follow to do? ... assuming that their forebears did well?
The talk and heart of design culture is growth and maliating. Community and communication may never be "formed" in any final sense. It seems to hold the promise that every new person will re-shape the community...in some absolute and beneficial way.Does that mean social organizations will or should not be, the same from one day to the next? What is proper, value-laden, engraved in ritual one day, is to be put aside the next?
I want to learn the threaded path that wends between captured plateaus of accomplishment and the openness of benevolent anarchy. Can you place it all into perspective for me? Something that I can see being - good for minds that have achieved an accomplishment, and, for the new generations which receive that baton, and have to either accept what came before or step forward in a changed direction.
Art explores design possibilities. Social governance options are there but have to be more viscous. Like Pille searching through blinding water to find the hand holds. If Manu mislead her, if the rock beneath the water rush offered no safe secure grip place, if there were no 'priori' which in its constancy existed as safe life-space haven - the way consistent laws and agreements of social behavior are the hand grips on which we divine our behaviors with one another, and new generations can follow.
Manu may have been the "design culture" who created those hand holds in the living face of the rock wall. Pille could be taught the design culture ability to make such handholds, but these are already there and do not have to be replaced.
Going elsewhere is one answer, but what to do if "here" is all there is?
Is "design culture" appropriate for certain stages of social evolving only? And if so, what does the
totality of that evolution look like? What are the alternative behaviors, needs, skills, etc of all the
stages and forms of 'community'?
What is the scaffolding and what is ornamentation?Jamie
