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A Dictionary of Received Ideas

FS — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:45:08 +0000

Her colleagues often repeated that 'there is no perfect solution to a design problem'. Rebecca was pretty sure she had read it somewhere within the context of computer science or learning technology but after looking all over, she still had not found a solid source for the idea. After posting her question to the mailinglist, Luke e-mailed almost instantaneously:

It sounds like you are looking for Rittel and Webber's third of ten characteristics of wicked problems:
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad¹

The 'third characteristic' Luke was referring to, came from a book on the theory of planning:

For wicked planning problems, there are no true or false answers. Normally, many parties are equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge the solutions, although none has the power to set formal decision rules to determine correctness.

Jude thought that it was something Herbert Simon might have said:

Evidently, organisms adapt well enough to ‘satisfice’; they do not, in general, ‘optimize’.
A ‘satisficing’ path, a path that will permit satisfaction at some specified level of all its needs.²

In her e-mail Jude explained what she thought Simon meant by that:

What is good enough is certainly better than what is not good enough.

and

The bar for what satisfices can be raised over time, this achieving the even better, but not necessary the best.

Neil agreed with Jude and added a reference to Henry Petroski's Small Things Considered where the same concept of 'satisficing' accounts for the role of decision making in design. Rebecca was not sure which of these two quotes would be more useful for her research.

Design must always conform to constraint, must always require choice, and thus must always involve compromise.

or rather:

We live in a world of imperfect things, just as we do in a world of imperfect fellow human beings.³

Prue suggested the gnomic but brilliant remark made by Ray or Charles Eames:

The best you can do between now and Tuesday is a kind of best you can do.⁴

Terence was not being very helpful. He felt she might first need to ask herself what it meant for something to be a 'perfect' design solution.

Derek suggested that all of this was spinning around good oldfashioned pragmatism. Therefore the relevant source would not be a designer, but psychologist and philosopher William James:

We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.⁵

Ranolph liked to apply Samuel Beckett's famous quote from Worstward Ho as a definition of design:

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.⁶

and pointed her to the reworked Rittel and Webber statement by Jeff Conklin:

Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.⁷

She closed her laptop, smiled to herself and thought:

Perfect is the enemy of good.⁸

Rittel, H., & Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169.
Simon, H. A. (1956). "Rational choice and the structure of the environment". Psychological Review, Vol. 63 No. 2, 129-138.
Small things considered: Why there is no perfect design. New York: Vintage Books, 2004
Quoted in Eames Demetrios, 2001, An Eames Primer, New York Universe Publishing p 173. Prue Bramwell-Davis.
Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. William James, 1907
Samuel Becket: Worstward Ho, 1983
Conklin, Jeff; "Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems," Wiley; 1st edition, 18 November 2005
Voltaire in La Bégueule, Contes, 1772

The Dilettante Expert

FS — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:33:55 +0000

'Dilettante expertise' as a way to make practice meet theory:

Expertise is the classical foundation of all geekdom, whether it is encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare, of the Star Trek universe or the registers of an 8-bit controller. Dilettantism is the unavoidable condition of drawing the bigger picture. It can end up badly like with the pseudo-mathematics and pseudoscience in the books of Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard and Deleuze debunked by Sokal and Bricmont, especially to the extent that some of their discourse - Lacan's in particular - lacked doubt and humbleness.

Sokal and Bricmont published "Intellectual Imposters" in 1997. Retrospectively, it seems to have marked an end of speculative cultural studies and media theory, except for shrinking niches in the contemporary arts and in political activism. And deservedly so, I would say, because you could see the grand media theorists shutting up very quickly when the new media technologies became a reality and you could no longer get away with theorizing about "virtual reality" while not being able to operate your own laptop.¹

Florian Cramer: The Medium is not the message, On The Future of Media Studies http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1112/msg00023.html

Pen and paper

FS — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 23:00:26 +0000

The LGM splash

An M for Meeting

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

For the 5th edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting, OSP proposed to replace the paint splash by an abstract drawing of three squares forming a flag and also the letter M.¹ The splash had been in use since 2006 and some community members felt alienated by the proposal. On 10/10/2009 AL explained on the CREATE-mailinglist: "The main issue for OSP, is that we don't think continuity can be resolved by going back to the paint splash. We honestly feel it misrepresents the pleasure of using and developing Libre Graphics Tools and we have consciously decided to work with imagery that avoids such remediation."²

Two years later, the Scribus Icon Contest (deadline October 31!)³ seems to have run into a similar argument. One of the proposals features yet another stylized iteration of a fountain pen:

Original Scribus logo

Scribus 1.3.5 introduced: Handwritten textboxes

Calligraphy AND textboxes. Proposal: Ian Hex

I am not the only one who doubts the calligraphic turn. LD responds:
"The pen has been around for ages. Yet, a pen has not much to do with DTP and has always seemed to me a bit out of topic or a bit misleading. Typography is not calligraphy. No pen is involved in the work, really. It's also arguable what a "scribe" has to do with DTP but here I find myself more comfortable since the scribe's work was in fact to put down the ideas on paper. From that to layout, I think the link is pretty clear."⁴
GP does not altogether agree: "I think the connection makes some sense in that you have something of a depiction of the work of a scribe, which at least connects to the name Scribus. Furthermore, scribes worked as individuals, sometimes adding embellishments of drop caps and artwork in the margins (primitive layout) and were therefore much like the idea of an individual doing publishing on his own."
He adds: "The difficulty with using computers, screens, mice, keyboards, etc., is that these might be used in the logo for almost any software"

Avoiding the problem: Adobe InDesign (2011)

Reverse evolution: From a typographer's portrait to a writing tool. Aldus Pagemaker (1985)

An individual doing publishing on his own?

It puzzles me why the Scribus community -- like other Libre Graphics projects -- would want to ignore the rich source of imagery provided by their own object of development. Some keywords for a dreamt logo:
Box, Canvas, Chain, Character, Colour, Column, Curve, Diagram, Document, Figure, Font, Frame, Gap, Grid, Guide, Hyphen, Image, Layer, Line, Margin, Masterpage, Origin, Padding, Page, Pagenumber, Paragraph, Path, Point, Script, Sentence, Shape, Space, Stream, Stroke, Style, Table, Word.