Final Version
The Construction of a Dancing, Dangling
Conversation
Johann van der Merwe
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Abstract
This paper investigates alternative methods of teaching design studies in a
school of design that still largely follows a traditional apprenticeship /
practice-based programme. It looks at sustainable and student centred design
educational methods of teaching and learning that are underpinned by social
constructivism, soft systems thinking and second-order cybernetics. In the first
two sections I construct an imaginary dialogue to demonstrate some of the
difficulties in teaching design, especially theory, followed by a remodelling of
this teaching scenario using Stafford Beer’s muddy box regulatory system as a
learning device. The following sections deal with conversation theory, story
telling and projection, the way we construct and construe virtual frames of
existence, while the last section deals with how we can imagine ourselves as
autopoietic systems that have the capability of communicative interaction.
Keywords: social constructivism, systems thinking, conversation, projection, autopoiesis.
Introduction
This paper is written from a systems and constructivist learning and teaching
viewpoint, and makes no attempt to either justify or defend that viewpoint –
that has been done by others. What this paper does attempt to do is tell a very
simple story, one that systematically developed from what my students and
myself have experienced over the course of a decade or so. This story is what I
have come to believe in, as a methodological approach to design teaching and
learning, increasingly backed up by continuous research into design thinking
and design education. The latest evidence for this way of looking at renewing
teaching and learning comes from Katja Tschimmel, who believes that
“instead of teaching in the traditional way, we should give the students tools,
which provoke a new way of thinking,” and this story of mine is simply about
just that, a set of tools (another set, if you must) that will enable a design
student to begin “the construction of one’s own world” (Tschimmel, 2004).
This is one of the biggest problems facing teaching and learning: how to deal
with too strong subjective and / or objective viewpoints or ways of
understanding the world. If too subjective it is student opinion without
justification, and if too ‘objective’ that usually means the teacher’s viewpoint
being slavishly copied. Yet we can only learn from within our own constructed
world/environment, so the teaching and learning approach that allows the
students to be “initiated into the proceedings of design thinking, design
interaction and the learning process itself” (Tschimmel, 2004) has, I believe,
the best chance of succeeding, where other approaches might fail.
Even the best teachers can fail to reach their students, can fail to teach them, if
by ‘teaching’ we mean giving them the tools to provoke new ways of thinking,
when such tools are rejected. Michael Pearson experienced just such a
situation, one in which the student body changes due to external
circumstances, and one in which students demand to be taught, but equally
seem to demand that it is their right not to be forced to think too deeply and
too analytically. Michael used to enjoy going to work, would enjoy, indeed,
being confronted by student questions that would shake his “fundamental
assumptions of existence … out onto the floor in heartfelt interrogations by a
vibrant student life force blazing their way with sheer bloody mindedness”
(Pearson, 2004). He used to be inspired by this, but “Now, I cry in my sleep
for them. Where are they?” What happened to them? Why are they “choosing
‘the way of the problem solver’ – they say problem solving theory takes the
world as it is; we live in this world – this is the reality – live with it!” This
scenario should be very familiar to many teachers of design, and they will
know what Michael means when he states that
I scream (inwardly) that my students shy away from the complementary
concept of critical theory, which calls into question the world as it is –
the ‘existing institutions and social power relations … why are they not
‘enquiring into their origins and nature of change’ … I struggle to get
my students involved in this interrogation so that they can reap the
rewards it offers: particularly as Bellamy informs us ‘critical theory is
inherently reconstructive because reflecting upon these assumptions …
is thus a necessary part of thinking anew’. (Pearson, 2004)
Design education should be such a ‘reconstructive’ process, one in which the
students’ learning, or pedagogical experience, becomes a voluntary
restructuring. Being a personal experience, the teacher can have no direct
contact with that experience. On the other hand, the pedagogic experience, in
terms of simplistic and practical problem solving techniques, is of no interest
to me; necessary, yes, but the most important? No. The real challenge lies in
that kind of pedagogic experience that happens to the students in their own
reconstructed (anew) worlds, where I, as teacher, have no control. You cannot
observe the (conceptual) structural changes a (student) system experiences
during the learning process, because “there is no way for an external observer
[teacher] to determine if a system has changed its structure” (Whitney-Smith,
1987/88). This is the constructivist pedagogic experience of the individual who
freely chooses to ‘learn’ – or as Michael would say, the individual who has the
sheer bloody mindedness to want to know WHY. This is the individual who
asks that question, in class, of myself, yet cannot, must not, listen to ‘my’
answer, indeed learns to know that it is not my ‘answer’ that matters, but a
new way of listening to the information that is available at this moment,
coupled to the information that can still be accessed, must still be accessed.
Learner become auto-teacher, in a systems theory sense. Do not try to
understand this kind of pedagogic experience in others, but instead learn to
understand it in yourself, first, if that is at all possible. The story I am trying to
tell in this paper concerns this issue, the difficulty of ‘teaching’, when in fact
nothing can be taught in the sense of easily and unproblematically transferring
so-called knowledge from one mind to another. However, this type of
pedagogical experience can be provoked in others because what can be
observed “is not ‘learning,’ an internal change of state, but the behaviors
associated with learning” (Whitney-Smith, 1987/88), and these changes in
behaviour can be observed using the muddy box regulatory system (discussed
below) as a learning device.
As for the concept of a conversation in design education, “Whatever else we
are doing, we are all doing language” (O’Rourke, 2003), and using reflective
and exploratory language in a design conversation becomes a pedagogical tool
as a means towards an end. It is what conversation as a tool is used for that is
important, and not what is being said as such. A design educational
conversation is not about the what of learning but about the how and why of
learning. As an example, Kees Dorst thinks of Schön’s notion of reflective
practice as a ‘constructionist theory’ that describes design as a ‘reflective
conversation’, and during this process the design task is set and possible
solutions are outlined, “all in one ‘framing action’” - this happens because the
designer is the structuring agent in this process, and the extent of the
structuring is determined by the potency of the frame. But the designer, as
recognised by Schön, also routinely uses implicit knowledge (‘knowing-inaction’), which is fine for practice but extremely difficult for education. “What
can be thought about and taught is the explicit reflection that guides the
development of one’s knowing-in-action habits,” or Schön’s reflection-inaction (Dorst, 2003). Now Dorst says something that I cannot agree with: he
maintains that Schön ignored the a priori structures that any element in the
design mix would have as normal baggage (my description), because of a
failure to link reflective practice theory to a structuring or framing model of
design tasking. “If anywhere, the structure of the design problem should be
found in the frame a designer uses.” Agreed. “It is a pity that Schön never
addressed the questions how frames are made, and what the properties of a
good frame would be” (Dorst, 2003).
This paper, I now realise, attempts to address these very questions, although I
think that, instead of ignoring the a priori structures that are brought into the
design tasking / solution-finding mix, Schön was keenly aware of these, but
focused rather on the importance of transcending the limitations of all a priori
(subjective, objective, cognitive, material) elements. In that sense he did
provide the groundwork for a model of framing, and, as I interpret his work,
especially his reporting of the teaching project1 that Jean Bamburger and
1
The teachers using the Montessori bells (visually similar but each producing a different pitch) were
criticizing the reflection-in-action methods of a 14-year old boy in trying to put together the sound elements
that would make up the tune “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” and they were puzzled and upset that this boy,
after finding each next tone in the sequence, would start all over again, ringing each bell in turn. What these
teachers were forgetting, or rather completely overlooking, was that this boy was employing the reflectionin-action method by searching not for individual elements, by sight (in this case impossible), or even by
single (and therefore isolated) auditory clues, but by searching for the ‘correct’ relationship between the
previous tone and the one that should follow, and the quickest and surest way of doing so was to sound each
Eleanor Duckworth did while working with teachers using Montessori bells,
he convincingly demonstrates that his reflective practicum becomes a possible
all-encompassing frame for learning, and for coach (Schön’s alternate word for
teacher) and student that becomes a “dialogue of reciprocal reflection-inaction” (Schön, 1987). This conversational learning frame is the very basic
one that all design students should begin to understand from their very first
year of education, namely that everything, absolutely everything, depends on
the relationships between all the elements you have chosen (or, very often in
design practical circumstances, have chosen or found you) to work with, be
these good, bad or indifferent choices we make in the indeterminate zones of
practice.
This frame of relationship building, this stepping into a new world in the
making, is, as Schön says, full of loss and uncertainty, because the teacher
cannot tell the student what to do or how to do it, much like Meno had to be
shown by Socrates that the student had to construct his own world of meaning,
that all students have to “plunge into the doing, and try to educate themselves
before they know what it is that they’re trying to learn” (Schön, 1987). How
then is it possible to learn anything? A constructivist classroom setting, mixed
liberally with cognitive psychological insights (so often so close to MerleauPonty’s version of phenomenology as makes no great difference) and systems
thinking provides the background wherein answers to Dorst’s questions can be
found: how are the frames made, and what are the properties of a good frame?
One viewpoint could be that frames are made through autopoietic structuring
and restructuring, as I explain in this paper, and the properties of a ‘good
frame’ are fluidly restructured each time we encounter a new design problem
space, because “the behaviour of an organism is determined by its structure”
but unfortunately also by its often pre-set patterns of belief, due to the fact that
“perception operates as a ‘self-organizing-information-system’”(Tschimmel,
2004). Confronted by each and every new design problem space we as
designers have to become this new person, renewing our belief structure or at
least tailoring it to each specific design situation / environment, and, I believe,
only systems theoretical thinking can fully explain how this seemingly
impossible and contradictory notion could possibly work. If Dorst’s view is
correct that the structure of a design problem must be found in the frame used
by that designer, then how can this (re)structuring happen, and how are the
frames made if we as human beings operate as self-organizing-systems? These
are questions I attempt to answer by including the designer in both the
structure and in the frame, and as Adams et al (2003) put it, when looking at
learning from a complex, dynamic systems perspective, “important
considerations include what elements drive the system, how the system
responds to internal and external disturbances, and how the system stabilizes
and evolves over time.” We may blithely accept that designers must be
problem solvers, but Restrepo and Christiaans (2003) remind us that design
problems need a lot of structuring, and good designers are the ones that can
move quickly from gathering information to using that information, that,
indeed, designers, far from being mere ‘problem solvers’ are, in fact,
bell from the start. When challenged by Jean Bamberger to do it ‘their way,’ not one teacher could do what
they expected the boy to do.
information processing systems able to cope with uncertainty (lack of
information, therefore lack of structure). A complex dynamic systems
perspective will therefore include the designer and everything and everyone
connected to the design problem environment: here we find the potential
frames within which, often, multiple restructuring must take place.
Human systems are structured, hence are fluid structures that require constant
maintenance. Restructuring brings innovation and renewal, and a social system
may find its new configuration, not specifically in any particular property of a
constituent part, but in the new perspective gained by the system as a whole if
it allows this new property (which is usually a familiar and always-been-there
property) to influence the direction the system takes in its development, a
development towards the as-yet-unknown. In that sense design cannot be
isolated from the world, and design must change in order to keep up with ‘the
world,’ and change in an ontological sense – as a human system it must
reinvent itself and continually begin itself from within while looking to the
outside 2. This paper deals with design education in just such a changing
environment, as a question of communication, in which speaking and writing
design is a circular and reciprocal communicative act between designer and the
social world, creating the transitory, dancing and dangling conversation that
invites participation, memory and a Schönian flair for artistry3. Design
students have to learn how to look beyond themselves, their own
circumstances and immediate environment, and begin to see the possibilities of
and for the future. There is no such thing as a designer, without a partner,
without the other of society, and when Von Foerster (Waters, 1999) equates an
invitation to dialogue with an invitation to dance he is speaking about a type of
willing or consensual togetherness: “when we are talking with each other, we
… invent what we both wish the other would invent with me”. This is the task
of conversation in the learning process.
I am tremendously encouraged by Artemis Yagou’s questioning of the
conventional methods of teaching design history, and even more so that he
regards our duty to students as one that will “engender understanding rather
than knowledge, and encourage intellectual engagement and articulation”
(Yagou, 2004), which echoes Peter Lloyd’s (2002) view that design education
must expose students to multiple viewpoints, because design education’s task
“is to show students how they can construct their own ‘world’ and for this to
happen what one needs to teach is how to learn. That is, to a great extent, all.”
It is in this sense that I declare that I cannot teach you all about design
knowledge because I do not know what that means, and even if I did have this
knowledge I cannot teach you what it means by transference. What I can do is
2
I will not attempt to discuss, at this stage, whether referring to design as a system in its own right is
correct, since I do not believe it is, following Luhmann’s lead in stating that language is not a system but
operates as a linking device during the structural coupling of system boundaries (Luhmann, 1997). What if
design is just such a linking device, and like language becomes another tool to facilitate social
communication? For the sake of argument and clarity of meaning I will continue to refer to design as a
human system, for want of a better term, but in doing so I also believe that design can only manifest itself
through the individual, through observation of how the individual, as a system, learns to understand the
world of which it is a part. Design as a human system then really refers to the use it has to make of the
active agency of the human system.
3
Not to be confused with artistic subjectivity. A flair for artistry should be read as that balance between
analysis and creativity that designers should be able to communicate to the user.
ask transformational questions, based on what other people seem to know and
what they get up to. I am inviting you to a conversation that is like a dance in
an effort to teach you how to learn, but it also has to be a dancing, dangling
performance in the sense that it has to avoid being static and boring, and above
all hold out the carrot of promise: what can all this do for me? My
performance was exposed by the first year student who said: Now I know what
he’s doing. He’s leading the horse to water and fooling it into thinking it’s
thirsty. A first encounter with autopoietic structural coupling of boundaries.
A constructivist classroom
What is this auto-poi..poem type nonsense? And how can you say there is no
design knowledge, no such thing as a designer, and on top of that, you tell me
you cannot teach me what design is? What am I paying you for? You’re not my
shrink, so go ahead and teach me!
Have you ever considered that a designer might be what is now recognised to
be a knowledge worker? This worker is being described as the new
journeyman, much like the artistic term bricoleur4, denoting, let’s say a worker
in stone, going into his shed, and whatever he finds inside, that’s all he has to
work with. It’s called ‘making do.’ So, what do you have that we can work
with? I am willing to share with you what I have, and much like the shrink you
say I am not5 I could possibly help you tell the story of what you do know so
far, and help you decipher some of the stuff you have come across but have not
assimilated yet.
I’m supposed to teach myself? What’s going on here? So far you haven’t said
a word about design.
Oh, but I have. Perhaps Jim Howell could explain this better than I can. In his
presentation The Knowledge Worker (Howell, 2002:155-162), these points
were emphasised: 1] the social context of solving problems, 2] the correlations
between individual and group level problem solving, 3] the value of
intangibles (variables) in this process, and that 4] the knowledge worker is
seen in the context of information rich business environments …
Here, hold on! You’re doing it again. Teach me about design, don’t talk about
business!
I think I may have something that should help. Let’s deviate to George Kelly
for a minute. In formulating his theory of personal constructs Kelly wanted to
get away from the Pavlovian stimulus-response concept, and he did this by
4
“The methods of qualitative research thereby become the ‘invention,’ ... even though, as bricoleurs, we all
know we are not working with standard-issue parts, and we have come to suspect that there are no longer
any such parts made (if ever there were)” (Lincoln and Denzin, 1998:426).
5
Following George Kelly’s reasoning we may ask if it is not their human character that makes designers
what they are, in terms of design and research principles and practices. Kelly's perspective of comparing
normal human to scientific endeavour was further developed in that he compared his teaching duties
(directing graduate studies) with his role as a psychotherapist. In directing a graduate student in the
intricacies of research, Kelly would, as `scientist' in theory, encourage the student to follow certain
paths/patterns of discovery. Later that same day, Kelly would, as psychotherapist in practice, help one of his
patients to work on possible solutions to the problems he is experiencing in his life, by encouraging him to
follow substantially those same paths/patterns of discovery (Bannister and Mair, 1968:2-3).
changing the focus to anticipating instead of responding, which should mean
that you can start to recognise motivational features in any conversation, and
turn these into some form of predictive behaviour. This paraphrasing may take
liberties with Bannister and Mair’s text (1968:13), but not too much. Do you
see that you do not have to wait for a morsel of ‘design knowledge’ to which
you can then respond as a stimulus, but instead it becomes possible for you to
extract from any conversation ‘motivational features’ that can be ‘turned’ into
what you would call design knowledge, that you can, in effect, learn to
‘anticipate’ in the sense of ‘I will recognise it when I hear it’ – which simply
means that you will start to explore and make connections, from previously
(design) unconnected bits of information to connecting or applying these to
design situations. The way you listen to any conversation …
Now wait a minute. I ask you to teach me about design and you prattle on
about conversation this and conversation that. What on earth has this to do
with design education? We’re talking, aren’t we? That’s a ‘conversation’ isn’t
it?
We may be talking, but are you really listening? More to the point, how are
you responding? As I was saying, the way you listen to any conversation, and
here conversation can also mean reading a book, can mean the difference
between waiting to be fed and helping yourself. Kelly was of the opinion that
"Anticipation is both the push and pull of the psychology of personal
constructs," and as Bannister and Mair (1968:13) further stated, what Kelly
believed was that you are a form of continuous motion, and that the way you
listen, given that you do so with ‘anticipation,’ gives direction to the motion of
your development. The way you listen can also apply to (visual) perception,
and in that sense I would include this active and investigative human ability in
a broad notion of conversation. Everything a designer does - a verbal
conversation with others, reading any book / document both visually and
textually, observing the environment through visual perception – is an act of
mental communicative interaction that has understanding as the motivating
factor (cf. Pask’s Conversation Theory, below). Therefore, when Katja
Tschimmel (2004) maintains that you must realise that perception is an active
and searching process led by your own expectations, she is underpinning what
Kelly meant with conversational anticipation, a new way of listening, of
seeing, a new way of thinking, even. The force of this conversation is
determined by you, the listener, because, as Kees Dorst (above) mentioned, the
extent of the structuring is determined by the potency of the frame. The
structuring (and in many cases the re-structuring) can only be effected by you,
the student, and how far you are able to go depends on the frame6 you develop
for yourself, through this conversational anticipation, because “We have to be
aware that the repertoire of patterns, which we have in our minds, will
determine our recognition, our classifications, our analysis and all of our
subsequent thought processes” (Tschimmel, 2004).
6
If the designer is the structuring agent in this process, and the extent of the structuring is determined by
the potency of the frame, then the frame can be equated with Kelly’s notion of personal constructs.
However, it is also true that the frame refers to the other autopoietic systems in the design mix, and to be a
viable design frame, it must depend on good communication among all the social actors concerned with the
design problem, depend, in fact, on a very good conversation.
OK, so you threw in the word design a number of times and told me how I
should talk to you; now what?
But I haven’t been telling you how to … To return to Jim Howell; remember
that he was making a number of points, sketching the background or
environment in which the new knowledge workers find themselves. Now, if
you do the Kelly thing, and listen with ‘design anticipation’ you may start to
make sense of all of this. Jim’s last point was that 4] the knowledge worker is
seen in the context of information rich business environments as well as the
networked organization – i.e. the context describes complexity, change,
diversity and interconnectedness. This knowledge worker in the new
knowledge age is one who is believed to be able to ‘turn’ information into
knowledge, given some or all of the above contextual elements. It is therefore
imperative to understand what knowledge is and how the ‘turning’ process
works in order to transform the perceived problem situation into an improved
situation – lack of ‘knowledge’ (despite a surplus of information) ‘turned’ into
Jim’s ‘performative’ knowledge (Howell, 2002:155-162).
I’m not sure I quite understand the connection between design knowledge and
what I’ve just been listening to.
You have to manufacture your own ‘design knowledge’ in the sense of
‘turning’ information into Jim’s ‘knowledge performance,’ which means the
new knowledge worker / new designer knows where this design knowledge-inaction comes from, knows how to design ‘the performance,’ knows why it is
done in this way. What Jim Howell is talking about is Systems Theory, which
has much in common with design theory, for the strengths of both lie in an
adaptability in the face of not only different cultural conceptions of reality, but
of rapid change and increasing uncertainty. Designers will have to deal with
the complexity of practitioner / social environment interactions that stem from
fast changing variables. Design now becomes the co-producer of knowledge
and meaning and designers will learn how to be open to contextual signals
from outside the immediate confines of the design / research project, inputs
which can have a substantial bearing on the outcome.
Oh my word, you’re not talking about me, are you?
Yes, I am.
A constructivist classroom, scene II
This imaginary dialogue with a typical student demonstrates some of the issues
that could be discussed, but also what can go wrong in a constructivist
classroom, if the students do not actively participate in their own teaching and
learning. A constructivist learning environment depends on this dialectical
conversation between teacher and student (to begin with, at least), because that
conversation becomes one of the teaching tools (Tschimmel, above) we can
give to students, and to paraphrase Dorst, this conversation can facilitate both
the extent of the structuring and the subsequent potency of the frame. A
conversation then becomes what Maturana calls a linguistic activity, or
languaging, which means that this constructivist conversation is not meant to
tell you anything at all, as Piaget realised, in theorizing that “cognition is not a
means to acquire knowledge of an objective reality but serves the active
organism in its adaptation to its experiential world” (Von Glasersfeld, 1997).
Conversation or languaging is a tool to engender cognition, which Maturana
believed
does not mean conveying news or any kind of ‘information’, but refers
to a social activity that arises from a coordination of actions that have
been tuned by mutual adaptation. Without such coordination of acting
there would be no possibility of describing and, consequently, no way
for the distinctions made by an actor to become conscious. To become
aware of distinctions, is called observing. To observe oneself as the
maker of distinctions, therefore, is no more and no less than to become
conscious of oneself. (quoted in Von Glasersfeld, 1997)
All of this means that we can usefully employ systems thinking, the notion of
languaging and conversation / dialogue, as tools to understand design
education and get closer to design knowledge. When we equate systems
thinking with design, I believe we will find more than enough reason to justify
changing the focus from design knowledge to systems knowledge for design
(application)7. This was our focus for the action research pilot project we have
been conducting in our social constructivist classroom, a student-centred
learning environment that requires the students to ‘teach themselves’ as far as
‘knowledge’ is concerned. We can supply masses of information, but who is to
do the ‘turning’? In the systems model of a constructivist classroom / learning
environment that is discussed below, the students practice how to deal with
Howell’s lack of knowledge despite a surplus of information, and how to
‘turn’ that situation around through and into a ‘performance’ – they have to
become their own ‘teachers’ through becoming part of an observing system,
but only when they achieve the level of an observer of the observing system
can they, with hindsight (called reflection), truly observe their own ‘blind
spots’ by observing the blind spots of others, and so move beyond these
barriers to learning. I therefore endorse Jonas’ viewpoint on the ‘non-specific
properties’ of design education: students must become familiar with
“analytical thinking, associative / connective power, synthetic and generative
abilities, evaluative competencies, communicative skills of visual & verbal
type, etc.” (Jonas, 2004). Students must learn to distinguish (become
consciously aware), must learn how to become the maker of distinctions (cf.
Luhmann’s system / environment distinction, below) as Maturana states
(thereby effectively making or constructing their own selves and then their
own knowledge), and I believe the constructivist classroom can enable (or
provide the level of affordances necessary for) this coordination of actions that
have been tuned by mutual adaptation (above). When answering the question,
what does it mean to learn, Elin Whitney-Smith (1987/88) effectively
7
Jorge Frascara (1999) suggests “that human cognitive performance is context-dependent and multidimensional, and that to really understand human cognition it is not possible to approach it as a selfcontained system. Human cognition should be approached as an integrated structure, where cognitive
processes vary from situation to situation, depending on situational differences that relate to a broad variety
of categories which overflow traditional definitions of cognition”. Exactly. Replace human & cognitive /
cognition with design and systems thinking illustrates the dependency of design (‘knowledge’) on the
human (cognitive) system, and even more so the dependency of design on external contexts.
described this mutual adaptation as the structural changes a system has to go
through “in response to the experience of its environment.”
In the next sections I will deal with some of the influences that could be used
to facilitate such a learning environment, which is an evolving and selfregulating educational conversation-in-the-classroom (an ‘autopoietical
dialogue’) that uses Stafford Beer’s ‘muddy box regulatory system’ as a base
model (Fig. 1). Beer (1979:57-73) deals with many facets in the evolution of
this regulatory system, among them the notion of a feedback adjuster plus the
role of management, and an adjuster organizer – I will only deal with these
concepts on our own terms and not necessarily quite in the manner dealt with
in Beer’s book. However, it does seem to me that there are so many
correlations to be drawn between Beer’s insights into organizational learning
and educational learning organizations that adaptations are more than likely to
work in our favour. The main idea is that this muddy box regulatory system8
“is a learning device” (Beer, 1979:69), and that we are dealing with interactive
systems, which means that the manager (teacher) has to deal with the muddy
box’s (classroom’s) impulse to reproduce variety, but more importantly, that
this “proposition applies to the entire contents of the box, including those …
all-important variety proliferators – people” (Beer, 1979:57).
Figure 1. Simplified version of Beer’s Muddy Box (Beer, 1979:63).
This model is deceptively simple, but it serves as the working environment of
the social constructivist classroom that accommodates as many autopoietic
systems as there are students. There are multiple outputs in real time that have
to be observed and fed back on two levels, based on the notion of recursivity /
reflection, while the teacher-researcher has the further task of managing the
participatory action research process that has a grounded theory approach to
data collection and evaluation (Adams’ what elements drive the system).
Our adaptation has the adjuster (feedback and organizer) and the manager as
being one person – the teacher. While the muddy box (classroom + students +
8
So-called because if it is a black box you have no access to whatever is going on inside the system; a
transparent box in which everything in the system is equally accessible is too utopian (or draconian) to
contemplate; the box / system is muddy or messy because that approximates the complexity of real life and
of design situations.
questions) produces variety as a matter of course, it is the task of the feedback
adjuster (teacher) to manage the system via the feedback loops, both for
immediate feedback in real time, and for ‘delayed feedback’ in terms of replanning the input, thereby reducing operational variety, but at the same time
the task of the teacher is to not-manage in the sense of being an adjuster
organizer, whose task it is to induce organizational variety (adjusting the
viability of the box to progress from structured solvable problems to dealing
with ill-structured wicked problems). Now, to the question, why this seeming
contradiction, let’s look at Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, which,
according to Beer (1979:84), is still poorly understood. The first insight is that
variety absorbs variety (:86), not in the sense of numbering states but in
developing matching states – i.e. students, faced with information overload,
deal with all this stuff out there by finding ways to match this information
variety – this means structuring and frameworking the ‘research questions’
with which and through which they look for information. Appropriate variety
confronting information variety, at first to reduce that variety (in order to
answer a specific question in a structured way) but at the same time being open
to the fact that variety can and must be induced (the more you follow the
structure the more that flexible structure provides you with more focused
questions to ask, and the more you can …etc.).
The second insight is that only variety can absorb variety (:89), which means
that students need to practice not only analytical thinking, but crucially,
associative thinking, pattern recognition, generative capabilities and all manner
of evaluation, in order to match the variety of information with their own
variety of response (Adams’ how the system responds to internal and external
disturbances). This, of course, is a literal and human impossibility, which is
why Schön’s Law (the least amount of control) has to include – in the light of
the above – the notion of the regulatory process of intrinsic control, which
“sees to it that Ashby’s Law is automatically obeyed; therefore there is no loss
possible in balancing the variety equations” (Beer, 1979:91). Easier said than
done, but the balance between attenuation and amplification must be
attempted, and in Beer’s example of the learner-teacher relationship (:234) he
states the cybernetic principle by which this can be achieved: “every regulator
must contain a model of that which is regulated”. Any viable system must
contain an adequate model of the larger system it belongs to (wishes or needs
to belong to), or wishes to investigate (Adams’ how the system stabilizes and
evolves over time), and in student learning terms that has many consequences,
the most important being that this model can become not only the new learning
environment / system, but the new person. This is a model that can help to deal
with Dorst’s questions: how are the frames made and what are the properties
of a good frame? Autopoiesis evolved to the next level through Kelly’s notion
of anticipation, through storytelling, social communication, conversation
theory and dialogue, and above all, through building on foundations that are
not there at all.
The telling …
And now to continue the story of how this model could be brought into being,
or, the ontological changes in design thinking. Conversation Theory, put
simply, describes the constructivist classroom ideal very well: it concerns
Pask’s idea of a conversation between teacher and student with the latter being
expected to “teach it back,” and using reflective practice, both parties can
agree on what has been learned. Taking this process further, Glanville states
that Conversation Theory, through its particular reflexivity, becomes “a theory
of theory building”(Glanville, 1997a). The muddy box scenario depends on
this type of ‘talking about it’ negotiation, and our aim with this action research
project was just this type of (learning) theory building using the Grounded
Theory approach. But again we have a problem, which is that “the
conversation says nothing about meaning,” because meaning cannot be
communicated (Luhmann’s the other side cannot be reached, it can only be
imagined, below); we make our own meanings which are not part of the public
domain (Glanville, 1997b). The eternal problem of imagining someone else’s
tacit knowledge; for that reason we shall look as closely as possible at what
happens when two autopoietic systems interact (below). The second point
being made here is that this conversational talking about it and teaching it
back willingness to explore means ‘mistakes’ are tolerated (if not encouraged
and managed) in this circular and reciprocal many-viewpoint, manyparticipant communication that, in design terms, interactively allows for the
emergence of the new (Glanville, 1997b).
This dialectical idea of ‘teach it back’ does go a long way towards the
emergence of meaning and understanding, for both sides. Now, following on
from the idea of emergence, there is yet another influence or viewpoint that
may help clarify the process of learning, one that is directly linked to the
working of autopoietic systems interaction, and that is the idea of addressing
directly the gaps or spaces between communications. We mentioned (above)
Beer’s cybernetic principle that in order to deal with the proliferation of
variety every regulator (every human system) must contain a model of that
which is regulated (being observed) – in teaching and learning terms this
means the teacher-system must contain a model of the student-system that is
being observed / investigated, and every student-system must contain a model
of the proliferating variety that confronts every knowing being, more so if that
student-system wants to observe and match variety for the sake of education /
research. The problem is communication, or its lack of. Because knowledge
cannot be transferred directly, nor communication, gaps or conceptual spaces
occur, and these can be dealt with in various ways, including conceptual
models, image schemas, projection, anticipation. The way we deal with the
world and its proliferation of information / variety, is to tell stories, to
conceptualise and project, in short, to mentally structure the regulatory process
of intrinsic control. We do so by using language (playing language games),
and by creating our own versions of what we imagine we are dealing with.
"Since nobody can carry the physical world within himself, the process of
conceptualisation is indispensable to the process of structuring and ordering
called communication" (Roelofse, 1987:12). Part of this conceptualisation
process is what Turner and Fauconnier (1995) call conceptual integration /
blending, using mental spaces as constructions of normal cognition. During the
process called conceptual integration the input from two or more mental
spaces (image schemas, abstractions) are projected to a separate blended space,
one that has elements of all the original inputs but that, crucially, now contains
emergent structures not perceptible before. “Blending is at work in many areas
of cognition and action, including metaphors, counterfactuals, and conceptual
change” (Turner and Fauconnier, 1995).
This is not communication, but mental projection, to make sense of the world
and makes sense of ‘blends’ or new configurations, new shapes, new
situations. To start to communicate, student to teacher, that excellent Paskian
notion of ‘teach it back’ comes into play, but we are still dealing with two
autopoietic systems that are interacting, and according to Luhmann (1994),
communication between the two is impossible. Communication between two
newly structured frames is, at this stage, impossible. This is in accord with
Conversation Theory that states “the conversation says nothing about
meaning,” because meaning cannot be communicated (Glanville, 1997b), and
Luhmann’s “the other side cannot be reached, it can only be imagined” means
consciousness is inaccessible for communication (Luhmann, 1997).
Consciousness can only interact with communication through language, and
these two “have a relation of interpenetration” (Jonas, 2003), which means
they can at best have a virtual relationship one to the other. This is, in effect,
what happens inside Beer’s muddy box.
… of virtual spaces …
In that sense we can turn to these virtual words / worlds and try to imagine
what happens, because as Turner and Fauconnier (1995) point out, conceptual
integration and blending can lead to conceptual change (Dorst’s structural
change), and we should realise that we are the conceptual blends. You realise,
of course, what this means? In design at least, we become the observer of our
own observing system, and that is perhaps where a particular ‘design
knowledge’ as a way of knowing comes to the fore. We can see our own ‘blind
spots’ and not just those of other systems we are observing, and therefore we
can really learn, or more correctly, evolve. This is where frames are made, and
where the properties of a good (viable!) frame can be found. I wrote (above)
that students must do the ‘turning’ in Howell’s sense of information-intoknowledge, and that students have to become their own teachers through
achieving the level of an observer of the observing system, but now, instead of
becoming aware of your own blind spots through an awareness of the blind
spots of others, two systems observing each other, you are both the observer
and the observed. It is at that moment, when these two systems are still,
potentially at least, equal for being the same9, that learning can be lost because
no evolution is possible (for various reasons: cultural, social drawbacks, fear).
I further wrote (above), paraphrasing Beer’s cybernetic principle of the
regulator having a model of what is being regulated, that this model can
become the new learning environment / system, and it can become the new
person. This can only happen if you recognise / admit the existence (although a
virtual existence) of the new possibility, the new blended self, and have the
courage to travel to this new country, for as Polanyi (1962:123) argued, this
step really allows us to “gain a foothold at another shore of reality”.
9
In concpetual blending, when you are the subject of your own blending, the original ‘inputs’ - which
represent your previous self and your levels of knowledge / awareness up to that point – are still so strong
that you will not want to let go (the control you have). You might reject the new blend that represents the
evolution of your autopoietic system from one state to another, opting instead to believe that there is no
difference.
Schuhmann (2004) interprets Beer to suggest that ontological identity be
replaced by differences, and thus we can understand Luhmann’s system /
environment distinction, which leads to: “the same distinction of ‘system /
environment’ that generates the system is copied into the system and produces
a model of its form”. I suggest that this is the same as Beer’s model, and that
both are system projections that can lead to these new conceptual blends: “A
system is always an observer that gives birth to itself” (Schuhmann, 2004).
This process, as do all processes, depends on information, and “In order for
information to be understood, the creation of an additional space for
possibilities of selection is required” (Luhmann, 1994). Everything is circular,
and we have been discussing this very point from the beginning. Learning is
only possible as an individual undertaking, while, paradoxically, no learning is
possible without other peoples’ knowledge, without two system boundaries
interacting and the other being available to the self. Change in an autopoietic
system is only possible as a renewal of the internal structural dimension/s of
the system, while this very change / transformation / evolution is only possible
because of something external to the system itself. Design is a social act, and
when Luhmann speaks of additional spaces for possibilities of selection, he
does not only appear to refer to Jonas’ groundless field theory, but to what
Ohlsson (Langley and Jones 1988: 181) calls ‘gaps’ “between one's current
state and the goal state” when a designer is confronted with a seemingly
unsolvable problem. When this happens, and restructuring can occur or be
induced in the learning environment, it means looking differently through the
descriptive problem space. Looking from while looking through this
descriptive (induce variety) problem (create perturbations) space, as part of the
original input, to the new possible conceptual blend where new meaning can
emerge, requires these additional and virtual spaces (discussed below), which
we find in the writings of Luhmann, Kelly, Winnicott, Dimitrov and De
Weerdt.
… that lead back to a new beginning
Life itself is autopoietic; as human beings we owe our existence (who we are)
to how we autopoietically evolve – we are at the same time the product and the
producer (Dimitrov and Ebsary 1997; Mariotti 1996). Many would agree with
the statement that an autopoietic system is at the same time (information,
cognitive) open and (operation, organisation, normative) closed, and that
therefore a very unique boundary is formed that both suspends and renews the
system’s relationship with its environment (Dimitrov, 1998; Johannessen,
1998; Luhmann, 1997; Maula, 2000; Metcalf, 1999; Navarro, 2001). Design
education fits this description of autopoiesis, largely because what really
matters is not ‘design knowledge’ or ‘design content,’ but the human systems
that make up the contents of Beer’s muddy box learning environment, and so
design can become its own producer and its own product, and of course, being
what it really is, a people mix looking for a new conceptual blend, design is
both open and closed at the same time. Now, we have stated that change can
only happen as an internal restructuring because of something external to that
which needs to change / evolve, but at the same time this system carries within
itself a model of that which needs to be regulated (Beer model), while the
system / environment distinction (that which is external / other) copies itself to
the system (Luhmann model). This means that the Turner / Fauconnier model
of projection makes sense: there is really nothing that is new in the sense of
never having existed before, and we carry within us a ‘Luhmann-Beer Model’
of the future, a model of ‘possible otherness’ that is the real generator of these
‘additional and virtual spaces’ – we are not autopoietically restructuring under
the influence of (operational and normative) externals because those impulses
come from within, from the model / copy of that which is possible, in the
outside world, that we already have as part of our (cognitively) ‘open’ system.
Just as I have been telling my students, ad nauseam, that design is always
elsewhere, we can now state that understanding and learning is always
elsewhere, but, given the above, it is our own ‘elsewhere’ that is already and
always present to us as the model / copy of these ‘elsewhere possibilities’.
Nothing we encounter and interact with, as autopoietic systems, will ever
make any sense if we cannot ‘fore-touch’ it with our minds, if we cannot ‘feel’
our way cognitively into what this could possibly mean, if we cannot succeed
in copying ‘this other’ into our own system. We are dealing with virtual
reality, with things that are not there, yet, which is why Metcalf (1999) could
interpret Luhmann’s vision of an autopoietic system as one that “constructs
itself upon a foundation that is entirely not there,” which makes of design
practice and design education a virtual reality process. All the elements that
comprise a design conversation are autopoietic systems (people) or are subelements, creations (ideas, events, objects), of these systems, and thus we can
say that a design + educational system conversation pre-constructs its own
environment that then already contains its own unique distinction - social and
design realities and meanings are autopoietically constructed inside the system,
so it only influences itself, in that respect, and change takes place as an internal
restructuring. Yet this system is still ‘open’ to the world in the sense that the
‘unique boundary’ of an autopoietic system, separating it from the
environment through allowing only internal influence but also reuniting the
system to an ‘external environment,’ consists of the roles and functions
performed by people (designers) who form not an isolating but “a connecting
and absorbing surface” between the system and its environment (Maula 2000).
This people-boundary of a design + educational system in dialogue, as a
connecting and absorbing surface, cannot afford to be influenced (as far as
restructuring is concerned) from outside the system, since a conversation that
is goal-driven “suffers from directional overdose,” and the participants
encounter fixed agendas and perspectives that insist on agreement and attempts
to control the discussion (De Weerdt 1999: 66). This is not and cannot be
Beer’s version of intrinsic control of variety proliferation, for it will
completely negate the necessary paradox of real-time oppositional inducement
of variety. Yet, as Kelly has pointed out, and De Weerdt confirms, there is a
need for direction, which Kelly treats with personal construct ‘anticipation’
and De Weerdt calls a space for emergence.
Virtual Systems Methodology (VSM), on the other hand, wants to discover the
virtual connections that are brought into being by the productions of human
activity systems. “Virtual logic is not logic … It is the pivot that allows us to
move from one world of ideas to another. The meaning of what is going to
emerge is a virtual meaning” (Dimitrov 1998). VSM, in dealing with
autopoietic systems, creates a limitless free virtual space for the “self-
organizing capacity of complex dynamics to reveal the characteristic signs of
its nature” (Dimitrov 1998). These additional, virtual and emergent spaces,
that Luhmann, De Weerdt and Dimitrov are talking about, are generated by our
Luhmann-Beer models of otherness, in the same way and for the same reason
as Winnicot’s notion of potential space and Kelly’s psychological space –
these all describe how the connecting and absorbing surface of the autopoietic
boundary is formed, and they all use the intensional, virtual logic of the story
structure of narrative. The stories we tell of virtual events are descriptions of
conceptual blends, and since we can establish that we are these conceptual
blends, that we are our own virtual reality, it would make sense to use systems
methodological tools to investigating design + education as a human activity
system, and to realise in turn that this is dependent on the larger scale social
structure, but more importantly on the smaller scale single personal construct
that every person creates. “Each man erects for himself a representational
model of the world which allows him to make some sense out of it and which
enables him to chart a course of behaviour in relation to it” (Bannister and
Mair 1968: 6). This virtual logic explanation of Kelly’s personal construct
model is entirely not there, just as Luhmann’s foundation for an autopoietic
system is entirely not there, both corresponding to Winnicot’s potential space
that is “neither inside the individual nor outside in the world of shared reality
[but is] the location of cultural experience itself” (Fuller 1988: 202). In these
spaces or gaps between ‘knowing’ and ‘not-knowing’ are to be found the
locations of design knowledge (manifested in cultural experience), because it
is during the appearance of these entirely not there potential spaces that we can
observe the structural coupling of autopoietic system boundaries, and it is here,
in this charged and active conversational space, that learning / understanding
takes place.
Conclusion
We present no definite (research) conclusions, as yet. The action research pilot
project finished at the end of 2004, and starting beginning 2005 we will
implement the full participatory action research process that has a grounded
theory approach to data collection and evaluation. The pilot project has proven
quite successful, with added insights into systems + design thinking coming
from documented student feedback. For the next three years my co-researcher,
Catherine Albertyn, and myself will be conducting a research project to,
among other things, empirically prove that autopoietic systems thinking is
design education.
The focus of this paper is, however, not on the research project as such, but
remains the telling of an unfolding and continuing story that looks at and for
systems methodological tools for investigating design + education as a human
activity system. I have been teaching design students for some time now, and
systems thinking crept up on me without warning, without Kelly’s
‘anticipation,’ because I was not even aware of such a category (to look
forward to). A happy accident (designers must read, everything) allowed me to
compare what had been emerging quite naturally in the constructivist
classroom situation to ‘knowledge in the outside world’. Systems thinking
acted as a key to allow me further access to what was at first a really muddyto-black box situation regarding design education. I have merely been
describing the developmental understanding of what has been working for my
students and myself for a number of years now, and since sharing this
approach with others, I find that it seems to be working for them as well. It is
not the content of a design curriculum that matters, but what is done with that
content, and even more importantly, the fact that any real conceptual
restructuring (understanding, learning) is for the individual concerned a
magical moment, an arrival at Polanyi’s ‘other shore of reality.’ This is what
makes of conversation such a revolutionary and evolutionary tool for teaching.
In that spirit I offer this story to anyone who wants to share it. It is yours; make
of it what you must.
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Johann van der Merwe
I am the HOD: Research, History and Theory of Design in the Faculty of
the Built Environment and Design, Cape Peninsula University of Technology,
Cape Town, South Africa. One of my tasks is to teach research methodology to all
fourth year BTech students (60 students from 5 departments), and to act as the
structural supervisor for their research proposal. I am also working with 4 masters
students, of which 3 are concentrating on design educational research.
Contact details
Tel: +27 21 460 3442
Fax: +27 21 460 3704
Email: vandermerwejj@cput.ac.za