The Recovery of Wisdom: Design Dialogue
Harold G. Nelson
(First published in Feb 1995)
The challenge of this time is how to bring improvement to the human condition despite all the forces that mitigate against it including the overwhelming complexity of our everyday lives, individually but especially collectively. Achieving any progress, even if leading only to heuristic dead ends, can be considered positive in light of what is more typically a paralysis of collective decision making induced by conflict, competing interests and polarities of opinion resulting in little or no action taken in pursuit of the common good.
Two strategies; formalized conversation and facilitated dialogue, have been employed as an antidote to this state of immobility. Both serve some of the same ends as formal group processes do yet each adds additional dimensions to collaborative work providing greater leverage in moving common endeavors, public or private, to satisfactory outcomes. Facilitated dialogue has been used as an alternative to conflict resolution and mediation. Formalized conversation has been used as an alternative to workshops, conferences and institutes. Both have been used to create shared experience and common ground from which other strategies for collaborative action can be launched. Facilitated dialogue and formalized conversation methods are proving to be successful alternatives to the win-loose or compromise centered approaches used most often by business organizations and public institutions.
The outcomes of a successful dialogue or conversation include shared thinking, shared meanings, and common visions. These forms of truth are considered more productive and generative than objectivized or personalized truth is to collective endeavors. Experience shows that truth of every kind is not sufficient to support making good decisions for common or systemic action however.
It is wisdom which is needed in the making of well formed decisions and the taking of appropriate courses of action in pursuit of the common or corporate good. Truth is often held as equivalent of wisdom with subsequent attempts to draw out courses of action which are based on recipes or habits based on what can be simply described or explained. Truths of any type, even collectivized, are not the same as wisdom however and action arises from a different kind of knowledge than the analytic or rational.
Wisdom is not the final stage in the hierarchical development of rational knowledge from data, to information, to knowledge nor is it the unattainable abstraction of perfection that the critical mind often asserts. Wisdom comes through judgment. Judgment facilitates decisions and actions across a broad spectrum of human experiences. This turns out to be a very old idea in that most pre industrialized societies used some form of collective judgment to guide their decision making in natural and social environments of immense unpredictability and uncertainty. Judgment as a formal path to decision making can be done in the solitude of one mind but as a path to wisdom it must be done in concert with many minds through collective judgment. Design dialogue utilizes this process of collective judgment.
Design dialogue is dependent in many ways on ideas shared with formal conversation and facilitated dialogue processes but has significant differences as well. Dialogue, for instance, is not dependent on an agenda, has no expected outcomes, no leaders, tasks, or decisions to be made. Design dialogue, on the other hand, is based on intention. There is an intention to give form and being to an emerging pattern of collective insights and imaginative leaps. There is the expectation that design dialogue will lead to concrete action based an emergent design concepts serving the collective aspirations of the individuals involved as both agents and clients.
Both formal conversation and facilitated dialogue methods hold change as a purpose or goal. Change is usually not very clearly defined in this context. it can mean simply a change in what is believed to be true in a collective rather than an individual way or it can be a form of functional change where a problematic situation is implied and the change is merely a change to an unproblematic state. Change is made more difficult when the environment and elements involved in the situation are dynamic and unpredictable. The ability to facilitate change in this case is dependent on what has been called 'cunning intelligence', the ability to decide and act in the face of chaos and uncertainty, which is distinct from 'rational intelligence' based on the ability to secure explanation, description and prediction. Cunning intelligence can lead to successful if not wise actions.
Design Dialogue has a different focus on change in that change in this case is not the ends but the means by which something is brought into the world as artifact, both concrete and abstract. The ability to mobilize change in service of an intended outcome is dependent on 'design intelligence" which strives for wisdom as well as success.
Facilitated dialogue explains and describes a shared reality gained through a deep understanding emerging from many perspectives and viewpoints. Dialogue is therefore observer related. It is clearly not an objective observing but a subjective or relativistic observing. Terms like perspective, viewpoint, lens, and insight are used to describe this aspect of facilitated dialogue. The terms reference a mode of inquiry that is grounded in the paradigm of cool, rational observation whether literally or metaphorically.
Design dialogue however evokes what will become functionally real, have form and visibility in the world and become a temporal part of the collective life that it helps to define. Design Dialogue is not based on gaining an improved collective observation literally or abstractly, but on the experience of imagining and making (i.e. it is both practical and productive) something that is novel and particular at the same time. It is experience in the sense of making something that has been conceptually willed rather than sensually apprehended. Design dialogue is a process of collectively engaging in creative inquiry (imagination) giving rise to a shared image that is collaboratively made real and that can be called wisdom.
Sophia is the Greek term for wisdom, a concept that has changed dramatically from its original Homeric meaning. Sophia originally meant skill in craft or making; the knowing aesthetic hand [McEwen]. By the time of Aristotle however, sophia had come to mean knowledge that came from the rational faculty only. Wisdom had been cleaved into domains of knowledge with the focus on rational analytic knowledge becoming dominant which has remained the case up to the present. Knowing what to make and how to make things of quality in service of the common good was replaced with the practical aspect of science; technology. Decisions became associated with what could be done rather than with what ought to be done.
Design dialogue is a complex and nonlinear process yet there are episodic stages through which individuals seem to pass as they engage in the process of collective design which is inclusive of design dialogue but which transcends it as well. Neither the design process not the supporting design dialogue is clear and distinct in a way that can be laid out in clear demarcations and steps prior to the actual experience of the design. The knowledge of episodic stages comes from reflecting on and mapping the processes as experienced in the past.
Character is as important as skill in these processes. The confidence which comes with competence in applications skills must be balanced by courage to immediately adapt and change hard won skills to match the particular circumstances of the design situation. It also requires courage to act in the face of unknown but emerging outcomes when every instinct is to be buried in the security of the craftsman's world where outcomes are predetermined or given.
After the initial call to action individuals form the crucible or limits of their creative domain together. This is done with their own preparation as individuals to become open to new ideas through imagination and immersion. They then seek the complexity of the design effort and to make it apparent to everyone in the dialogue. From this, the independent threads of inquiry begin to weave patterns that identify the initiating urges or volitional forces that push the inquiry. The design dialogue then reaches points of Emerson when creative insights have led to collective transformations of discrete impressions into coherent images (conceptual compositions) of desired outcomes. Strategies for reaching these outcomes are collaboratively determined and animated.
Since design dialogue is primarily verbal its power and authority in a design process is limited. It requires the augmentation of another form of dialogue which is a form of cognitive art. This dialogue form, diathenic graphalogue (letting a thing be seen through representation) is an essential partner in the process of communicating design messages among collaborative designers.
Design dialogue is an attempt to integrate the cloven elements of wisdom into a whole once again and to give us access a process from which wisdom can emerge. The opportunity in this is that we can learn to become more intentional about creating the world we want to live in and less willing to be victims of a world of chance or necessity even if more accurately or agreeably explained and described. We can also become more accountable and responsible for the aspects of the world we make because we can become wiser together about what we choose to create.
References:
1. McEwen, Indra Kagix, Socrates' Ancestor. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1993