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April 07, 2005
Searching for monsters . . .
As a quick follow-up to my post here yesterday I thought I'd do a quick search (outside of NZ discourse) for 21 terms I associated with my notion of the 'monster' in two well known design journals ó Design Issues and Visible Language. The results were surprising!
Failure = 0
Chance = 0
Speculation = 0
Random = 0
Practitioner = 0
Poetic = 0
Serendipity = 0
Guess/Guessing = 0
Incomplete = 0
Unfinished = 0
Unacceptable = 0
Error = 0
Loose = 0
Evolve/Evolving/Evolution = 1 in DI, and 2 in VL
Mutation/Mutate = 0
Exploratory/Explore/Exploration = 1 in DI, and 4 in VL
Discovery/Discovery-led = 0
Hybrid = 1 in DI
Marginal = 0
Monster = 0
My search wasn't that methodical, I searched Design Issues for references in the titles only, and searched Visible Language for refs in both titles and abstracts. In fact it should be noted that all but one of the 'hits' in Visible Language were in the abstract not the title. One other thing I found interesting was that the term 'Exploratory' didn't appear, only 'Exploration'. Like I say I'm not really sure where I'm going with this? But it was interesting as an initial 'look' at the use of language in dominant design discourses. And the overwhelming emphasis on the 'user' as opposed to the practitioner was, ummm . . . shocking!
Posted by Luke Wood at April 7, 2005 11:56 AM