Accidental Vagrant

This is an excellent article concerning the crisis with The Humanities that is so prevalent in public discourse nowadays. The author makes the assertion that the crisis is not academic ie with universities. Hopefully this article will begin a longer conversation on the relationships among The Arts and Humanities, Science and Technology and  serious Design—a Systemic conversation. https://open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia/p/the-real-crisis-in-humanities-isnt?r=asq7d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email   

As a scholar practitioner advising people in businesses, governmental agencies and even universities, it is too often the case that the refrain: “this is too abstract”, “this is too academic”, “this is too complicated”, “this is too hard”…is heard when the reality of what is required to actually change complex systems by design begins to sink in. The implied judgment is that 'thinking' gets in the way of practical 'doing' and doing should be simple and easy—i.e. ‘keep it simple stupid’. People want to claim the competencies of change agents but they hope to gain that competence through ‘edutainment’ or by learning the ‘tricks of the trade” or some other minimally demanding means. The famous pragmatic nature of Americans has led to the rise and nurture of prideful anti-intellectualism, which has reinforced the historic split between thinking and doing inherited from centuries of Western tradition. However the best designers have learned how to reintegrat...