05
CULTURE AND HISTORY OF DESIGN. VISUAL LANGUAGE ANALYSIS. DESIGN AND MARKETING. TECHNOLOGY AND INFORMATION PROCESSING,
1991
Communication, culture and design: praxiological-systemic approachCommunication between us is always relative, indirect,
and uncertain.
José Ortega Y Gasset
Introduction
The problem of communication has been studied by many disciplines for many years. Namely by philosphy (e. g. Bunge1), cybernetics (Wiener2 and his followers), sociology (see: Szacki3), semiotics (Eco4), semantics (e. g. Tond5), science of science (see: Mirski and Sadovsky6), psychology (e. g. Lindsay and Norman7), and of course engineering, just to mention the most important ones. Nevertheless the exhausting and satisfactory systemic model of the phenomenon has not been developed yet. The literature offers subsystemic or non-systemic, sometimes declared as systemic, models instead. In this paper we are going to limit ourselves to the
review of the interrelations between communication, culture and design. The
approach that will be used is called praxiological-systemic because it is based
on the praxiology of Tadeusz Kotarbinski8 and the system of social
philosophy of Jose Ortega y Gasset.9
Praxiology and the system of social philosophy Praxiology and social philosophy are surprisingly close to one another. This is probably because Koiarbinski and Ortega y Gassel were members of the same generation. In all probability their intellectual mentalities were framed by the same or similar reading lists. Both were involved not only with philosophy but also with languages. Ortega y Gasset was also a writer while Kotarbinski was partial to poetry. Both tended to study the philosophy of technology. Praxiology was connected to by Alfred V. Espinas. the author of «Les Origines de la Technologie»10. It was Espinas after whom Kotarbinski labelled his general practice as «praxiology», and very similarly, Ortega y Gasset was familiar with the essay of the French sociologist presenting his meditations on technology, although he never used the term «praxiology» in his works, Kotarbinski and Ortega y Gasset differ in their philosophical Unkings. The former was related to the Lvov-Warsaw philosophy school founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, a professor of the Lvov University, and pupil of F. Brentano. The latter was a neo-Kantian and a phenomenologist, especially in the late period of his philosophical activity. Kotarbinski's philosophy was analytical, he sympathized with positivism and was against the negligence of evolutionism as regards the methodology of the humanities. Kotarbinski's praxiology and Ortega's social philosophy
alike were oriented towards studying human action. According to Ortega y Gasset
action is the destiny of human beings. The Spaniard identified three phases of
human existence: (1) alteration: a man feels himself as a waif abandoned among
other things: (2) vita contemplative! or bios theoretikds or ensimismamiento:
a man retreats from reality to his heart of hearts in order to produce
ideas of things that will help him to dominate the world: (3) vita activa or
praxis: man returns to reality to act on the basis of a plan he made
beforehand.
It seems that the idea of the circularity of the
phases should be assumed for any of the practical situations of human being.
This reminds us of a conception of Kotarbinski's compulsory situations, i.
e. situations in which one's refraining from action/alteration not only
preserves bad circumstances creating situations, but also worsens the
conditions of the subject of the situation. Therefore man is forced to rethink
the situation, to formulate a plan on how to overcome it, and finally to act
according to the designed way. Kotarbinski believed in progress claiming that
compulsory situations and the efforts to overcome were the motor of progress. A
similar attitude is suggested by Ortega y Gasset's idea, although he declared
himself not to be a progressivist. «Culture —he wrote in his study— has always
been the utilisation of difficulties.» 11
A concept of an
action
Action is the influence of man over the environment of
material things and other people, which is guided by a plan designed by him
during previous thinking or reflection.» 12
According to praxiology an action is both the
purposeful and conscious behaviour of a man. carried on by him according to his
will. The purposes of actions are states of things thought by a man as worthy
to aim at. It is easy to notice that aims understood in such a way are in fact
actualisations of a superior purpose, identified above as man's influence over
the environment. Any action except for the simplest needs preparation that will
make it possible or easier13. According to Ortega y Gasset. «one's
action is not an accidental collision with things and other people around him
or her: it would be behaviour of a lower than human level, i.e. an
alteration)).14
A systemic interpretation of an action should be
founded on the basis of Bunge's definition of a system as an ordered triple
made up of composition, environment and structure.15 According to
this an action is an ordered septuple of: agent of action (A), resources (R),
tools (T) —for action's composition—. environment (E) and goal (G), criteria of
evaluation (K), method (M) —for action's structure—: a <A. R. T. E. G. K.
M>.16
The conceptual preparation of and for an
action is designing17 or planning.18 Designing and planning, although natural, are
understood now as a way of externalized professional thinking.
Both thinking and acting
are important for man's survival but should be balanced. Overestimated thinking
creates «cultural bigotry» while overestimated action creates voluntaristic
«pure action».19 Balanced culture needs communication for better
understanding man and his society, and for the preparation by him or her of sound plans and designs in
order to perform relevant actions.
Communication
strata:
From action as communication To communication for actions «Communication is an essential ingredient of social behaviour in all gregarious animals». writes Mario Bunge in the «Exploring the World» volume of his Treatise on Basic Philosophy.20 What is communication or, more precisely, a
communicative process? It is «the passage of a signal (not necessarily a sign)
from a source (through a transmitter, along a channel) to a destination», as
Umberto Eco defines the concept, adding the most important comment to the
definition: «every act of communication (except for the stimulation process,
for instance) to or between
human beings —or any other intelligent biological or mechanical apparatus—
presupposes a signification system as its necessary condition.»21
Even when not being gregarious, I (or you), though I
am considered a member of the family of gregarious animals, receive signals
from the world I live in. This world is a system consisting of something that
is important for me, of progmata. The world of circumstances, or practical
situations. 22 is a wide pragmatic or practical reality. All kinds
of colours, lights and shadows, sounds, voices and noise, hardness and softness
are signals according to which we run our life.23 Are those signals
only stimuli or elements of the lowest stratum of communication, communication
between my surroundings and me? Your surroundings and you?. If I happen to be
an element of your surroundings or you happen to bean element of mine you are
forme a system of actions and I am a system of actions for you, actions each of
us expects from the other or is afraid of or both. This is because each of us
takes it for granted that the other is formally, constitutively, perilous. It
does not necessarily mean, however, that your actions are suspected to be bad:
they may even he good, but dangerous for me. In order to feel sure about your
actions I try to examine, to experiment with you. In order to do this I start
approaching you carefully. You have the same problem with me and do the same.
Both of us start to perform actions that are essentially useless in the common
understanding of the term. They are performed to test and communicate attitudes
and intentions of one of us toward the other. The actions that make up the
procedure of welcoming are a good example of such communication.24
This is the second stratum of social communication. And this is real
communication, not just signals. This is because a signification system is
attached to the system of the language of actions25 in a given
culture. This is why «me» written on a blackboard means something abstractor
nothing at all, while the shouted «me!» is very concrete.
The signification system inbuilt in actions is of an
etymological nature. Customs and habits are the etymology of actions. « Words
have their etymology —wrote Ortega y Gasset— not because they are words but
because they are habits.»26 A man is an etymological creature, he
concluded. The next higher stratum of communication is communication through
language.
It is obvious that there has been a need of
communication in man, since he was becoming human, much higher than the needs
characteristic of all other animals. The need was so pressing because the
animal that would shortly become a human being had «enormously much to talk
about». There was something in him that did not occur in other animals, namely
the rise of his «internal world» which called for externalization, for
expression. [...] the animal who eventually turned out to be man had to
originate thanks to the extraordinary development and overabundance of a
primary function which was imagination. [...] Internal richness, alien to other
animals, gave life to the community and an entirely new character to the
existing type of communication between human beings, for the question was not
only to generate and receive signals relating to the situation in the
environment, but also to manifest the inward life which called for tentative
interpretation. 27
This gave birth to the higher stratum of communication —linguistic communication. The process of language discovery is a never ending
process: therefore we, or at least some of us, are involved in creating still
higher, more sophisticated, strata of communication. This is because our
knowledge of life related to other people as well as to ourselves is an open
knowledge, never fixed, and with fuzzy boundaries.28
Communication for
design and design for communication
Both Kotarbinski and Ortega y Gasset understood man as a technologist. For technology is a specifically human composition. Thanks to his ability to reach inside of himself, to ensimismarse, man became a planner, a designer of his ideas on how to change the world according to his desires and will. He communicates with himself when processing relevant knowledge, and having designed his plan he goes back to reality to impose it on the external world, thus humanizing reality. This requires communication with others. Both are types of communication: communication for designing and for performing the designs. Since design-making is a conceptual preparation of and/or
actions, it is of an informational nature and is based on different kinds of
communication performed in language (in the general sense of the word) through
appropriate means which altogether create a system. The better the system is,
the more relevant the plans and/or designs for action are. So not only is
communication needed for design but also a conceptual preparation, i. e. design
is needed for communication.
Planning and designing as well as decision-making,
programming, and other actions of a similar nature
are in their very praxiological character the
pre-actions.29 More so the abovementioned actions are pre-actions of
a specific type. They are actions over other actions, therefore —like language
and meta-language are differentiated by logicians— praxiologists differentiate
them from actions and call them meta-actions. Meta-actions concern processing
not just other actions but also mappings of the actions, i. e. their models
which are retrospective or prospective (designs). The substance of meta-actions
is information, and such actions are: the acquisition of knowledge
(identification and interpretation), knowledge utilisation in planning and
designing processes, and knowledge transfer in the processes of permanenl
education. The technical means of processing information are the response to
the communication and designs challenge.
Concluding remarks
It is necessary to remember that communication as well as designing are not just value free technologies to impose what we want over the world. They are also, or even predominantly, social activities dependent on the culture they serve. The fate of culture and man's destiny depend upon
whether he in his heart of hearts is aware that only uncertainty is certain.30
What is needed is not just a culture for survival. Changes in the existing culture are needed. It is not easy to make changes in a given culture but,
on the other hand, as it has already been said, a culture is an art of taking
advantage of difficulties. The difficulties we face are: the scarcity of
resources, the poluled environment, dirty technologies, and an ocean of
unfulfilled human needs.31 This is why so many men of intellect from
different countries exhort to act toward creating a new culture: Valaskakis,32
Peccei,33Kostopoulos34 These people call this culture a
system design culture.35 This is why communication between
individuals as well as global communication is so important.36
1.
Bunge. M., «Ontology II: A World of 'Systems». in Treatise on Basic
Philosophy. D. Reidel. Dordrecht, vol. V. 1979. pp. 180-181: «Episiemology
and Methodology I: Exploring the World», in Treatiseon Basic Philosophy. D
Reidel, Dordrecht, vol. V. 1983, pp. 95-125.
2.
Wiener. N., Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1948.
3. Szacki,
J., The History of Sociological Thought (in Polish), Polish Scientific
Publ., Warsaw, 1983, pp. 587, 591-592, 598-599, 613-654.
4.
Eco. U., A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press. Bloomington.
1976.
5.
Tondl. L., Problems of Semantics, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1981.
6.
Mirski, E. M., Sadovsky, W N., Communication in Contemporary Science (in
Russian). Progress Puhl,. Moscow. 1976.
7.
Lindsay. P. H,. Norman. U. A.. Human Information Processing: An
Introduction to Psychology. Academic Press, tendon. 1972.
8. Kotarhinski, T., Praxiology:
An Introduction to the Sciences of Efficient Action. Pergamon Press,
Oxford, 1965.
9. Ortega y Gasset. J., El homhre y la gente, Madrid, 1969 (quoted
after the Polish translation: Rebelion of the Mass and Other Sociological
Writtings. Polish Scientific Publ.. Warsaw, 1982).
10. Espinas. A. V., «Les Origines de la
Technologic». Revue Philosophique. Paris, 1890.
11.
Ortega y Gasset. J., ibid.
12.
Id., ibid.
13.
Gasparski. W., «On Praxiology of Preparatory Actions». Int. J.
of General Systems, vol. XIII. n° 4. 1987a. pp. 346-347.
14.
Ortega y Gasset. J., ibid.
15.
Bunge. M., ibid., pp. 5-8.
16. Gasparski. W.. «Praxiology». in Systems
and Control Encyclopaedia: Theory. Technology. Applications. Pergamon
Press. Oxford. 1987fc. p. 3852. 17. Gasparski.
W., Understanding Design; The Praxiological Systemic Perspective. Intersystem
Publ., Seaside. CA, 1984.
18.
Nadler. G.. the Planning and Design Approach. Wiley. New York.
1981.
19.
Ortega y Gasset. J., ibid.
20.
Bunge. M., ibid., 1983.
p. 97. 21. Eco, U. ibid., pp. 8-9.
22. Gasparski. W., ibid 1987. pp.
.149-350.
23.
Onega y Gasset. J., ibid.
24. \d.,ibid.
25. Nowakowska, M., Language of
Motivation and Language of Actions, Momon, The Hague, 1973,
26. Ortega y Gasset, J., ibid.
27.
Id., ibid.
28.
Id., ibid29.
Gasparski, W., ibid. 1987a.
30. Ortega y Gasset. J., ibid.
31.
McHale. J., McHale. M. C, Basic Human Needs: A Framework for Action. Transaction
Books, New Brunswick, N. J.. 1978.
32.
Valaskakis. K., Sindell. P. S., Smith. J. G., Filzpatrick-Martin, J., The
Conserver Society: A Workable Alternative for the Future. Sindell Research
Ltd., Montreal, 1979.
33.
Peccei. A., Cento pagine per t'avvenire. A. Mondadori Ed., Milan.
1981.
34.
Kostopoulos, T., People of Knowledge become Revolutionaries: A
Manifesto of Nomocracy. Nomocralia, Stockholm, 1989.
35.
Gasparski. W., ibid. 1989. pp. 191-209.
36.
This paper has been prepared at the invitation of Dr. Rafael Rodriguez
Delgado. Founder and Vice-President of the Sociedad Española de Sistemas
Generates (SESGF), to he presented at the International Congress on Systems and
Communication Media for Development. Madrid. 20-24 November. 1989.
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About Author
WOJCIECH GASPARSKI
Chief of the Science and Praxiologic
Department of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of
Science. Theorist on design, he has published, among others, the following
books: Design Methodology, an Outline. 1981. and Praxiological
Studies. 1983.
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