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Monday, September 22, 2003

Design and Social Progress

Dick Buchanan is back from Australia and teaching Seminar again. We revisited the Dean Barnlund article "Communication: The Context of Change" again. It is the introduction to the second interpretation of interaction design: Transaction: Existential Interaction.

Barnlund is an existentialist. He feels the world is meaningless, that the meaning we give to things is only what we give it ourselves. There is no regularity; the world is absurd. Context is only relevant based on your perception, as is subject matter. But how we deal with subject matter is important.

Barnlund argues that we need other people. Otherwise, the world would be stagnant. Another person with a different point of view provokes change. (In the same way a design point of view can change the fixity of a subject.)

Communication breakdowns are caused by source (people who threaten us), content (subjects that threaten us), and manner (the way the subject is presented).

What does this have to do with design? It's about people and the exchange of their ideas through dialog, through interaction. Whatever is created in interactions is created by us. And why bother? Because interactions create social progress. It's how things change.

posted at 05:16 PM in design theory | comments (1) | trackback (0)

 

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