| id |
ddssar0031 |
| authors |
Witt, Tom |
| year |
2000 |
| title |
Indecision in quest of design |
| source |
Timmermans, Harry (Ed.), Fifth Design and Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning - Part one: Architecture Proceedings (Nijkerk, the Netherlands) |
| summary |
Designers all start with a solution (Darke, 1984), with what is known (Rittel, 1969, 1970). Hans Menghol, Svein Gusrud and Peter Opvik did so with the chair in the 1970s. Not content with the knowledge of the chair, however, they walked backward to the ignorance of the question that has always elicited the solution of chair and asked themselves the improbable question, “What is a chair?” Their answer was the Balans chair. “Until the introduction of the Norwegian Balans (balance) chair, the multi-billion dollar international chair industry had been surprisingly homogeneous. This chair is the most radical of the twentieth century and probably since the invention of the chair-throne itself (Cranz 1998). Design theorists have tried to understand in a measurable way what is not measurable: the way that designers think. Rather than attempt to analyze something that cannot be taken apart, I attempt to illuminate methods for generating new knowledge through ways of seeing connections that are not logical, and in fact are sometimes ironic. Among the possibilities discussed in this dialogue are the methodological power of language in the form of metaphor, the power of the imagination in mind experiments, the power of mythological story telling, and the power of immeasurable intangibles in the generation of the new knowledge needed to design. |
| series |
DDSS |
| full text |
 file.pdf (185,463 bytes) |
| references |
Content-type: text/plain
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| last changed |
2003/08/07 16:36 |
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