Mind the gap! - on knowing and not-knowing in design. Or: there is nothing more theoretical than a good practice

Abstract

The question of design foundations, or, "common ground" is open. Foundations are either "nothing" – the very beginning of cultural evolution, "Point Zero" (the stick and the stone), or "everything" – the history of what happened up to the present moment. From "Point Zero" to now we had an endless cycle / spiral / "history" of construction and destruction of artefacts and knowledge, or, of complexification (to avoid the overloaded word "learning"). And we have the moving "wavefront" of the present, where we experience the similarity of designing and "science in action". Both are acting in the hybrid swamp of artefacts, consciousnesses, communications and human bodies. But knowledge has different meaning, status and use in science and design. Science is aiming at predictability, thus needs stable models, which deliver "the same". Science has to purify its models in order to transfer them from hypotheses into prediction machines. Bodies, consciousnesses, communications and artefacts can be neatly split. Scientific problems are solved, as long as the solution does not turn out to be false, which means of less explanatory power compared to a new one. Design is aiming at single phenomena that fit various unforeseeable conditions. Design has to intentionally create variations, differences, because the "fits" dissolve, fade away, get old-fashioned. Design environments change too fast to talk of true or false design knowledge / facts. The archive of design knowledge is like a memory, a growing reservoir of variation as well as restriction. Expertise in design is the art of dealing with scientific and non-scientific knowledge, with fuzzy knowledge, with outdated knowledge and with no knowledge at all in order to achieve these value-laden fits. In other words: the art of muddling through. We are facing the paradox situation of increasing manipulative power through science and technology and, at the same time, decreasing prognostic control of its social consequences. Accepting these limits of project-oriented science suggests a new role for design: more modest and more arrogant.