Cybernetic Conversations:

Designing ourselves towards discovery

  • Johann van der Merwe
Keywords: cybernetics, design, control

Abstract

In this article I wish to argue for a mode of critical and expansive thinking that our profession can call designerly-knowing, design thinking, or a design conversation – if this mode of thought can be understood to be undisciplined, and understood to be critical thought that owes allegiance to no (one external) directive philosophy except the one that regulates the fluid conditions of living and being of everyday existence, as will be explained below. This is not to be taken as a contradiction, since the developing argument will be for an internal (intrinsic) directive that regulates life, but further, also that this intrinsic directive is a shared concept as opposed to an individual one, making this ‘directive’ a constantly reassembled one. It is in this sense that Merholz (2009) would rather rename ‘design thinking’ as ‘social science thinking’, since design needs the clarifying perspectives and viewpoints brought to its practice by the disparate disciplinary backgrounds of the non-designers on the team, while Patnaik (2009) calls these newly combined skill sets ‘hybrid thinking’. Roger Martin (in Merholz 2009) acknowledges the need for a different type of ‘thinking practice’ (inelegant as my phrase may be), since the mere wish for interdisciplinarity, and knowingly putting a design team together from different disciplinary backgrounds will not be enough. I stated above that I do not wish to argue for the type of interdisciplinary thinking that integrates the systems approach into design thinking as if simply adding another string to the bow would solve an inherent problem, since ‘the problem’ is not so much design thinking but one highlighted by the contemporary, external, world of complex social interactions; the ‘problem’ is a truly systemic problem, namely one of evolutionary adaptation.

Published
2019-12-09
Section
Articles