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The issues here are concerned with boundaries and definitions. Pragmatism is a method of study, or as Peirce puts it, of ‘right thinking’: it may be used to justify the inclusion or exclusion of objects or events in a domain, and to justify the boundary of the domain. It cannot be used to assert the truth or otherwise of the proposed domain, or of the events or objects of study.
In everyday life, the appeal to pragmatism has, generally speaking, little to recommend it. It is used to defend the unpleasant effects of one’s activities. For example, it is used as a justification when villages are drowned to create irrigation dams. “He is a pragmatist” is often said of someone whose activities and speech seem to ignore the delicacies of feeling claimed by others. To be a pragmatist in such terms is simply to ignore effects outside the range of one’s interest.
In a rather more rigorous study, the principle of ‘inclusion by interest’ could mean, for example, that I am free to propose my own boundary to the domain of ‘design’. The pragmatist will say that within my proposed domain only those events and processes count that I consider make a practical difference to the intended result as I conceive it. Thus a (rather brutal) defence of my proposed domain and activities would be that “I am only interested in these kinds of results”. Although permissible, I will not use this argument, but will adopt the rather more critical spirit of Peirce, who proposes that the inclusion of an event or object should concur, as far as it is possible to ascertain, with that which, with suitable development, all interested parties would eventually agree. A vain hope, but a laudable intention. I therefore intend to develop justifications for each of my main proposals in this spirit, and this intention should be taken as a given in subsequent discussions.
So, to set the boundary to my domain, I must decide whether a design process has a verifiable intended result (target) that can be sufficiently well defined that it could help me identify activities that contributed to its realisation.
This may sound odd, but, for example, if Ove Arup designs a building to win a competition, are the administrative activities associated with filling in the competition forms a part of the design process? It would certainly make a practical difference in that if they missed the closing date, the design would not get done. Is part of the intended result to win the competition? Of course, as is the desire to accumulate new expertise, to solve new problems and to impress competitors. These kinds of intentions (and others), however, will be specifically excluded in the present study.
So, my immediate problem in this area is ‘what activities count as design activities?’.
There is also the difficult problem of describing the place of visualisation in this process, and of adequately translating the features and benefits of visualisation into the model. The VRI98 conference helped with a few references that I’ll follow up:
Ellen - electronic cocktail napkin 95, 96, 97, 98 - similarities in what architects draw
Suwa - what do architects see in their sketches 96, 97
Verstijnen - what cognitive activities does sketching facilitate?
Chris Tweed at VRI98 reminded me that architecture is not entirely concerned with the visual aspects of buildings, however, and this may prove a significant point. /Next Process
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