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COLLOQUIA & CONFERENCES
DESIGN KNOWLEDGE: IS IT FOR REAL?
Ann Johnson
Departments of History and Philosophy
University of South Carolina
September 15, 2006
Friday, 3:30pm-5:30pm
Nursing, Room 127
It is a common claim in engineering design textbooks, as well as in the
seminal historical-epistemological work on engineering, Walter Vincenti's
What Engineers Know and How They Know It, to see knowledge as both a
necessary input and outcome of the design process. But this claim is
never substantively investigated and seems somewhat incommensurable with
claims from mainstream epistemology about what constitutes knowledge at
all. This paper is an attempt to unpack two related questions:
- what do designers need to know in order to produce new things?
- what kind of knowledge is produced in the process of making new
things?
Examining these questions leads one to consider whether a new category of
knowledge is called for. The reason design knowledge presents a problem
for philosophy is that it violates too many of the basic precepts of
epistemology. Following Baird's Thing Knowledge, design knowledge
is often presented in physical manifestations rather than as textual,
propositional (justified, true, etc. ...) statements. But design
knowledge, while necessarily including "thing knowledge," is also more than
"thing knowledge," since it also takes a squirrely, non-universal,
partially justified form, which can be propositional (but isn't true
in the JTB sense) and must include embodied knowledge, in the form of skill
and know-how (which I argue, unlike Pickering, are legitimately knowledge).
Because of these problems, the usual tact is to exclude the whole of
technological knowledge from epistemology, which I think is an illegitimate
move. Given the importance of science to epistemology, the fact that so
much scientific knowledge either produced by, for, or in design activity
(for example, nearly the whole of chemistry, which is by and large aimed at
making molecular stuff) means that design knowledge cannot simply be
dismissed as something that doesn't make the epistemological grade. While
I agree that scientific and engineering knowledge-producing communities are
often socially and historically distinct, I will argue here that looking at
processes of design efface many epistemological distinctions. If we are
going to include chemistry (esp. nano and MSE) in science, we need a new
umbrella under which to fit much of today's scientific knowledge — a
category of design knowledge. Well, we'll see ...
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