LonelyStreets.com
Designing History
History is one of those things that most folk take for granted, but which most folk also realize is largely subjective (even if they may not think about it much). I remember that in my own primary education, the Viet Nam war was never mentioned. There was usually a chapter devoted to it towards the end of my textbooks, but we somehow never got that far. As an undergraduate student, I once took a class on the history of US diplomacy with a great visiting professor at Grinnell named T. Mills Kelly. Prof. Kelly assigned us a paper taking a stance on whether or not the US’s decision to drop The Bomb on Japan in WWII was correct. I no longer remember what I argued, but I do remember that the question led me to exploring the “wicked problem” that was “how the heck do we end this war?”
Wicked problems are, in fact, what writing history is really all about. Time mists things in ambiguity, and written accounts can never be objective because they were written by people. When I write a historical account, then, I am designing a perception of the past so that I can communicate it to others. This is not to say that one should fail to be entirely thorough when researching a history, but the form of language means that ambiguity will always exist in text. If I leave one thing out, but include another, I have made a design decision. Hopefully, I have done my research and, as with any design, am making an appropriate and defensible choice, but it is a subjective choice nonetheless.
I find this interesting, in part, because of the implications it has for modeling the domain of design (something I’ll be doing in an independent study this semester). Can I argue that all of the social sciences are within the domain of design because they focus on communicating ideas, which is a big part of what design is about? I have often struggled with these sorts of questions because they sound arrogant to me - I don’t like to believe that designers have the right to strut around saying that they can jump right into any other field and improve the way things are done. On the other hand, I feel passionately that design and design thinking have much to offer other fields. Most realms of study and activity can only benefit from cross-pollinating with other areas of inquiry.
I’ve been thinking about all this because of the negative reactions my article for Interactions has gleaned. I have yet to write a formal response (though I will do so soon), but in the meanwhile I can’t help but say “I told you so” to myself. Writing a short history for a magazine meant leaving a lot of things out, and I have unsurprisingly angered a few folk who felt that I made the wrong design decisions with my history. In a way, this makes me happy though - any dialog around the history of sound in computing is better than none because we have so much to learn from those that have come before us.
One Response
Leave a Comment
January 7th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Communication Design, Design Thinking |
January 24th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Certainly our knowledge of history is limited to our sources. If one person writes down their impression of an event and the other 50 people there do not then our history of that event is limited to what one person wrote. As our writing becomes more evanescent (blogs, videos, sound recordings on digital media) there will be a gap in knowledge about the early digital period. Publishing in an archived journal is worth much more than the academic carping of a few a few people who claimed to know more. Keep writing and publishing!