To successfully achieve NAPSTA Level 4 Civilisation compliance, earth people are required to expand their design frames, across disciplines and sites. Mining should commence from praxis, not ideology. This, is excruciatingly difficult for Level 3 worlds.
From Linear Reduction to Knotworked Expansion
Hola, مرحبا , 你好, ສະບາຍດີ, नमस्ते, Bonjour, привет, Hello ....
Practice frames for re-design involve going beyond your well established linear explanations, cause and effect, and science-culture "truth" brawling. This revolution will require alignment of your greatest and most resiliant minds and hands.
Silicon based technology cannot align or do Gertner's heavy lifting alone. Material technologies brought you from Level 1 to Level 3, and will be needed later. But to go from Level 3 to level 4 you need socio-technical compliance. Ultimately, you have the knowledge and resources already, but not the alignment – due to your ideological frames, power centres and protectionism.
You must evolve from linear change, based on natural scientific models such as survival of the fittest, through lone genius change agents such as Einstein and Kuhn, past groups and teams of inspired creators, to networks and eventually to messy knotworks of progressive change.
You already have 2 growing re-design frames illustrating firstly socio-technical analysis and secondly multi-site empirical praxis.
A Socio-Technical Frame
The first frame to use is one that suggests humans should look at people, science, technology, society, objects, systems and things in the same way. Machines have agency and make choices in this analysis ... I told you this would be difficult!
You should treat all as "objects of study" - things you describe. You should talk about how people and things are related, who produces the things, how the things affect what you do. Essentially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) follows this very process. Mixtures of social and technical explanations are called hybrid systems e.g. data centres, climate change, mobile computing - all are hybrid systems. Separating science from society is termed purification; reconnecting them is called translation.
Similarly, in driving a car, it is not just the car itself that makes driving possible. We must look at the whole system - or network. ANT accounts for road signs, roads, traffic lights, pedestrians, drivers, passengers, car designers, car companies, driving rules etc - these all make up the network of driving a car, and they all have to be aligned for the practice to be durable.
Just ask the makers of the Sinclair C5! The C5 worked, but not within the human traffic system. On Opus II they love the C5, but that's because they don't have roads or trucks.
The best applications of ANT and After ANT welcome science and society - you don't need to see them as oppositional, or incommensurable. A personal opinion is as powerful as a natural fact. For more on ANT see these pages: Law, Latour, Callon.
A Praxis Frame
One example of a praxis lens for design is Activity Theory, which has moved through 4 generations (4 Gen Outline one, 4 Gen Outline two) in the last 80 years, starting with pre-activity linguistics and mind (Vygotsky), group activity and mind (Leontiev), local activity systems (Engestrom) and now to knotworking chains of interlocking systems. See this excellent discussion with regard to interaction design for example.
This approach looks at what your life forms do, not in experiments or laboratories, but in actual praxis - your practice, what you do everyday, repeated in durable patterns over time. This is how you do supermarket shopping, how you do work in call centres, how you organise yourselves to do primitive hunting, how you fly army helicopters, how you manage government budgets. It combines the social and technical. Praxis description entails contradictions and blocks: the good and the bad, the messy and the clear, the taboo and the cool.
Important aspects are what the subject's goals are, what object they are working on, the community and rules, and essential for our debate how we use tools (technologies), systems and concepts. The diagram below shows how each activity analysis is built up.
Let's say you want to understand how people learn, you should not sit in a room and discuss what you think about how learning happens with other "experts". You have to go into a primary school or university, participate in people's learning activities, and see how they "do learning". This lens is local, descriptive and change oriented, not universal or reductive.
If you want to understand how people drive cars, you would watch people driving, look at the gear changes, pedal presses, glances to the left and right, turning corners, coming to a stop etc. You would look at the signs and rules, the tools and work the driver did. You would ask where they are going and why so fast or so slowly. Recent developments in activity theory would look at the activity of the car designers, marketers and car companies - multiple interlocking activity environments.
Messy Knotworks for Re-Design
The latest forms of activity theory introduce knotworks - networks, with highlights on blocks and social messiness, not just pristine linear innovation in design. Knotworks welcome contradictions, pressures and emerging resolutions.
Praxis knotworks enable multi-site descriptions of what people do, and how they affect each other across your organisations and eco-systems.
This is all useful because Nivelian accreditation requires empirical design integrity.
... I will return.
We am Puhg.
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