IS DESIGN TODAY JUST ENGINEERING OR SIMPLY A NEW CODE WORD IN POLITICS? FALSE DILEMMAS.





“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.” -- Taleb

Before, design (in common view) was associated with graphic design (and industrial design of consumer products). Then, the concept enlarged -- but never settled.

The rationalist disease has been raging for quite some time, with academia claiming design as just another subject to be "broken down into parts." The authors here, for example, expound a very expected (for academia) approach, taking especial care to present themselves as "practitioners and teachers," with their intellectual opponent presented merely as a "theorist and teacher." Is this a new form of design?

Some of the points made:
"Novelty is not the primary goal of design."
Politics, apparently is: "To share goals is to agree on (re)framing a situation in order to act together."
"The goal and the effect of the design conversation to make its subject explicit"
"A knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, if not a prerequisite, seems at least a more fertile ground for the emergence of poetry, and her sister, delight."

One has to agree that poetry brings delight. Unfortunately, the conversations proposed never happen among people who do not *already* agree (and even less so with passing time). They just don't, in practice. And there things which cannot be addressed by conversation, in principle. And poetry does not arise as proposed. And neither is design simply engineering, nor is it politics, but rather it is closest to art. And it is this that Glanville meant by his second-order cybernetics. As stated, one needs to understand anything already (by 80%?) in order to "understand."

Without being verbose, let's finish with Nietzsche, the most profound of the philosophers: "Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious." "In everything one thing is impossible: rationality."

It seems that it is these do that distinguish design from engineering.

If one finds the Nietzschenian reversal of "logic" odd, one can try discussing, for example, the dollar value of particular human lives (or the generalized "human life") and the accompanying trade-offs of the political realm of the coronavirus (novel, by the way --- it seems that Mother Nature does aim at novelty in her designs), and see how well it will work.

Comments