Nadia’s blog

In week 7, we were delivered a lecture on theory and explanation and the French theorists Foucault and Bourdieu by Keith Robertson.

What is theory?
A set of facts, propositions or principles analysed in their relation to one another and used, especially in science, to explain certain phenomena.

Theory is often the difficult side of research and often the most exciting.

• Delving into areas you’ve never been before
• Driven by philosophy
• Many opposing positions can be taken (theorists often entirely reject other theorists’ work)

Not really looking at ‘the truth’; theories are just angles or windows on the truth – interpretations.

Design theory is new and in its infancy, however, this is not entirely so – design theory borrows from many other areas. Ideas are mined from other areas.

• Complex, rarely simple – bringing together a whole lot of areas
• Borrow and interpret phenomena through theories that already relate to each other
• Bologna model – specialists in education are taught simultaneously with other educational disciplines with the hope that a broader education might facilitate a wiser more versatile knowledge base that might produce better informed judgements than those made from a narrow point of view (though this is only one theory) – should education be more general?
• Theories are new ideas

Foucault

• Madness and civilisation
• Philosopher, of sorts
• Didn’t dissect ideas so much as collect them
• Discovered that madness had a much more acceptable and less stigmatised status than it does today. Mad people were accepted for the talents they had. But now it is a ‘mental illness’.
• Madness keywords: Archaeology (learning about the past by digging up facts about the past and assembling a truth which hadn’t been done before his search) and genealogy (family tree stuff – mapping of changes in direction of the history of madness).
• Suddenly, from people being tolerated or appreciated for their worth in society, they were locked up in asylums.
• Madness became medical and medicine became scientific.
• Electric shock ‘therapy’ – brain got fried
  
  See Sarah, told you I’d do it! :P
• Now we treat mental illness with drugs – drugs, drugs, drugs for everything!
• Discipline and punish
• Controlling techniques: Hierarchical control, normalising judgement and examination.
• Execution, humiliation (public rituals) – throw rotten fruit at people with their heads in the stocks
• Panopticon – multi-storey building – creating surveillance for observation. Used in prisons. One observer and many observed.
• Concern with normality is a modern phenomena
• Panopticon became a metaphor for modern society – control of masses of people enforced by schools, etc.
• History of modern sexuality
• Science of sexuality. Controlling sexuality.
• Sex vs crime
  
• Modern control of sexuality parallels modern control of criminality by making sex (like crime) an object of allegedly scientific disciplines, which simultaneously offers knowledge and discipline of its subject.
• Education is a method of ‘normalising’ people.
• People controlled internally – willing self-control
• Panopticon – design to change behaviour.
• Design when used in this way is never neutral, it’s an instrument of power and it controls how people interpret information.

Bourdieu

• Social direction
• Influenced by his conscription and being a peasant.
• Looked at social change
• Created new concepts which went against the old concepts.
• Uses any research method that does the job
• Pedagogic violence – authority figures, empty vessels being filled by teachers, top-down, using position to inflict views in a one-directional way – THIS IS A VIOLENT ACT.
  
• Cultural abitraries – things we assume are normal and okay (Bourdieu says that when things become accepted in this way, we must then begin to question them).
• Fields – a concept developed by Bourdieu.
• ‘Value maintenance’ – the role of formal education.
• Society in every area is in a struggle.
• Keith says these concepts as relating to design.
• Habitus
• Best way to learn is through learning from our environment (learn from our parents) rather than schooling – schooling reinforces our original values
• Designers relate to habutus at every level
• Distinction
• A book about taste – patterns of taste, why is it distributed throughout society in this way.
• Questionnaires, interviews, observation and photography – about French cultural consumption
• Working class people enjoyed more literal entertainments (ie: didn’t like experimental stuff, liked accessibility in art, didn’t like things that were too difficult or esoteric).

I found this lecture to be quite evocative of imagery, so I might even do a few more visualisations if I get the time!

In the week 5 lecture Craig Austen described the work of Edward deBono in his lecture On design thinking: A conversation between certainty and possibility: Revisiting the work of Edward deBono. Craig also outlined his process of visually representing deBono’s theories and also integrating them with the design process.

Edward deBono’s work is all about the way the brain works – he approaches this from a medical background, and not a design one, like Allan Whitfield. He is probably most known for coining the term ‘lateral thinking’ and his ‘Six thinking hats’ model.

deBono on Design thinking

• With 11 pieces of clothing, there would be 39916800 different ways to get dressed – the brain makes patterns so it doesn’t get confused. The brain is a brilliant self-organising system
• Creativity is a dysfunction
• There are many shades of grey between black and white (on/off, yes/no)
• Lateral thinking is almost the opposite of fuzzy logic (vertical thinking is the opposite of lateral thinking – lateral thinking is thinking sideways
  
  
• Socrates looked at critical analysis, Plato looked at truth and untruth, Aristotle looked at categories and identity
• We must have understanding/experience to analyse or judge – we won’t even realise, it just happens for us to survive (analysis- and judgement-oriented thinking are past-based – generative (creative) thinking is not)

Developing a design process model

• Simplifying is a complex process
• We have evolved to be more complex
• There is a context to everything
• Is the design process linear, or when we hit a wall, do we wander within the design process?

Developing a design thinking framework

• deBono’s models:

o Parallel thinking (six thinking hats) – directs thinking
o Lateral thinking – shifts perceptions
o Direct attention thinking tools – deepens and broadens perception

• We have a major pre-disposition to the main track of thinking that we don’t notice other branches (tunnel vision)
  
  
• Adversarial thinking is more black and white – politicians
• deBono coined the term ‘surpetition’ to refer to something more than just competition in the corporate world
• We can all be designers because we can all be involved in design thinking
• “We try to do too many things simultaneously – let’s unbundle it!”
• A company brainstormed 29000 ideas, but it took 9 months to harvest them
• Funneling and sorting is one of the most important design concepts
  
  

Six thinking hats

• Blue hat: Thinks about the thinking being used and is used for the process control – for organisation and for ‘conducting the meeting’
• White hat: In charge of data, facts and information – what you need to know
• Green hat: Creative , pause to allow your brain to make things up and suspend judgement – creative thinking, new ideas, alternatives and possibilities.
• Yellow hat: Looks for benefits, value, feasibility and logical positive assessment
• Black hat: Critical judgement, caution and logical negative assessment
• Red hat: Feelings, intuition, hunches and emotions

A task-oriented design thinking framework

• There are things you know, things you don’t know (these comprise 50 per cent) and things you don’t know you don’t know (the other 50 per cent)

In Lecture 4, Tony showed us a video called The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.

A summary of what the film is about can be found here. You can learn more on the Power of Community website.

‘Peak’ oil refers to the point at which oil production reaches its height (after this, there is always less produced). However, peak oil is just the beginning; the same process will occur with natural gas, coal and uranium.

Most developing countries have the wrong vision for the future, in terms of sustainability. For example, China and other developing countries aspire to be like America, in that, they want to consume like America. However, even America won’t be able to consume like America at some point.

The major use of fossil fuel is on food production (which surprised me).

With relation to Cuba, they fell into a deep economic crisis (known as the ‘Special Period’ after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The average Cuban lost 20 lbs. There was no imported fuel and blackouts for hours on end. You would have to wait three or four hours for a bus that might be full anyway.

The US “suffocated” Cuba by denying any ship that docked in there access to the US for six months.

A lack of fuel led to a lack of food. Out of sheer need, Cuba made drastic changes.

There was a major effort to convert every piece of arable land to agriculture. Any idle plots in the city were converted to ‘urban agriculture’. Cuba has become a shining example of the ‘permaculture‘ movement.

Today Cubans are much more self-sustainable. They work and study closer to home and eat local produce. Farmers are among the highest paid workers (they are also at an advantage as they already have food, and can also sell it) and others are able to supplement their income through permaculture.

Cubans also use more sustainable sources of energy, like solar power, particularly for schools and clinics.

Cuba has changed its entire social ethos. From being a country that used to use huge amounts of pesticides, to being one which has 80 per cent organic produce is a huge leap. Cubans truly live on the land – “The first ethic is to take care of the land, the earth, if we don’t take care of the earth, the earth will take care of us, get rid of us”. They work with nature, not against it.

And it is about community
• “It’s not the technology, it’s the human relations”
• “Recovering the sense of neighbour is not going backwards”
• “We need more friendship, more love because we only have one world and it’s for all of us”

Whilst I feel we can all learn valuable lessons from Cuba’s example, the cynic in me says that in prosperous societies, little will change until it has to. In Cuba, they didn’t change their ways until it was forced upon them, and I feel that the same will happen for us. Whilst it is a matter of life and death, it is, to most people, not something that feels real. Until it feels real, there will be very little action taken.

The visualisation above shows Fidel Castro and Kevin Rudd saying the same things. These are all the messages Fidel Castro would have had to deliver to his people in the midst of the oil crisis or ’special period’. Imagine how Australians today would react if Kevin Rudd told us we had to change our ways so drastically. Would anyone make these changes voluntarily? We already complain that our public transport system isn’t good enough – who would voluntarily wait three or four hours for a bus?

Whilst the Cubans provide an excellent case study of how to deal with a crisis in a way that promotes a beautiful society in which community and environmental values are held in high regard, it is hard to envision Australia in this light until it reaches its own crisis point. It would only be then that we could see the messages the Prime Minister would inevitably have to deliver as a positive message, hence the negative/positive execution of the piece.