I am engaging in this class. 🙂 Even though I am not used to write my idea.. what I want in this class is that I am trying to apply my understandings of some theme/context into my writing, based on this lecture Prof. Jeff gave us rather than mention directly the theories. It is more useful for me. (sometime more earlier haha) Thanx Prof, Jeff you make me connected to the difficult theories. By the way, here is another question for you. Maybe you have an answer. Haha As a designer, I have intensively trained to present my idea in different process since my high school years. Drawing taught me open-ended approaches. However in HCI area, I have to change my thinking process. Yes.. Sometime, I felt my creativity/originality would be attacked by too strict thoughts. It is too intimidate for me to communicate with others. I have no idea to persuade them. I might be wrong in this area. I also know I need to be trained to organize my idea logically in the area and I need to take various points of views from others to support my idea to be objective and to achieve higher design goal that I pursue. I am getting used to be here but still have no idea. I don’t want to lose myself. Opening my five modalities is so hard. What am I supposed to do? What is designertic thinking?
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Thank you for writing this and giving me an opportunity to address it.
Let me say that “constraining” your thoughts is the exact *opposite* of what all of us will happen as you go through this program. I certainly understand that early on, as you learn new theories, concepts, and technical vocabularies that you feel pressure to explain and justify yourself using them. And I can understand why that would feel constraining.
But at the end of the day, your explanations don’t matter as much as your designs (which is not to say the explanations don’t matter!). So, for example, when I teach you a new concept, my hope is that knowing this concept, you will be able to see the world in a more nuanced or interesting way, and that that new vision will, in turn, enable you to see and think in new ways. In other words, theory should expand, not constrain, your thought.
That is why I stressed the importance of “play” on the blog. For example, Adam explored the concept of “transparency” here. By playing with this idea, he was able to come to some new understandings, in part through a dialog with me in which he ended up restating more clearly what he was thinking. His restatement was thoughtful and original, and I think it could be useful to original design. But the purpose of that post was not “master” the concept of “transparency” or prove to everyone that he had it exactly right. Instead, the purpose was to explore a concept, to see how and where it might be useful, and to share those thoughts with others.
Thus, as you learn theory, I hope you don’t worry to much about mastering it, or being able to prove that Stolterman (or someone else) is or is not a phenomenologist or poststructuralist or whatever. The most important thing is to understand a concept just well enough to be able to play with it, to apply it to real-life design problems, or to try to see ways that it might help you understand existing designs better.