Accidental Vagrant

Found this great critique of The Design Way as well as some thoughtful comments on a presentation I made at Stanford University. Nice to see what someone else thinks I said. This blog also has some thoughtful comments on C. West Churchman and other systems ideas. Worth a look.

Humans did not discover fire—they designed it. The wheel was not something our ancestors merely stumbled over in a stroke of good luck; it, too, was designed. The habit of labeling significant human achievements as ‘discoveries’, rather than ‘designs’, dis­closes a critical bias in our Western tradition where observation dominates imagination. The Design Way, Nelson & Stolterman, pg. 11 There is still a wide chasm between what people believe about the genesis of the ‘real’ world and people who make ‘real’ things—i.e. designers.   It is still generally accepted and promoted that traditional design fields delimit the reach and grasp of human making. It is also true that 'invention' is commonly used to describe the means by which things are created while 'discover' is still used to define human agency in the real world more often than not. But there seems to be movement, maybe even progress, towards grasping a fuller appreciation...