Outline

Introduction

What philosophy is
What designers do: empathy (as opposed to art which is sympathetic) creation of useful, usable and desirable things
Practical use of philosophy for design
Truth as reality interface (a useful, usable and desirable philosophy.)
Anatomy of this book: ontology, epistemology, ethic.

Ontology

Ontology = inquiring into being = asking “in what sense is this real?”
Being encompasses more than physical entities
Many kinds of being exist: objects, time, perspectives, imagination
Designer’s ontology: the more ways one sees in what sense entities can exist the more space a designer has to work
Order bounded by chaos
Chaos is superabundance of orders
Order filters chaos
Practical consequence of chaos: surprise
Knowing chaos means openness to surprise: nonsense might be not-yet-seeing-the-sense
Perpetual possibility of “otherwise”, esp. when otherwise seems impossible
Horizon and the otherwise — horizon always feels complete and excludes the otherwise
Pluralism: coexistence of ontologies united in possibilities of otherwise — possibilities which can (and ought) to be sought and actualized (“fusion of horizons”)
An ontological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of being (metaphysical manifold)

Epistemology

Epistemology = inquiring into knowledge = asking “how do we know?”
Knowing is filtering (determining relevance) and relating
Knowing is both explicit and tacit
An epistemological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of knowing (venn – name?)
Tacit know-how: skilled wordless interaction with concrete realities
Tacit morality: sensing value
Perspective and pluralism
Pluralism vs reductionism
Perspective and inspiration: the upside of pluralism
Knowing is social: “How do we know?” more than “How do I know?”
Self as a society
Knowledge shows realities: aletheia
Synesis: seeing realities as together with others together
Positivity and negativity: facts and questions
Knowing a subject vs knowing an object
Participatory knowing versus objective knowing
Hermeneutic holism: knowing wholes and parts
Social hermeneutics
Social creativity
A methodological framework: a simple way to approach social creativity (the outspiral)

Ethics

An ethics sustains an ethos (lifeworld)
Designer’s ethos: Maximum diversity within unity, mediated by things
Designer’s ethic: Commit to learning from others in order to design to them and provide them a place in the world
Designers outfit an ethos with things that support it — not preserve or conserve, but allow it to live and develop like a living thing
Enworldment: creating myriad ways to exist in the world with things and people
Virtue ethics
Virtue of receptivity: otherwise awareness
Learning a subject requires unlearning — unlearning is the hard part.
Learning involves letting go of what one already knows in order to know better
Unlearning is an anxious activity: immersing in perplexity
Virtue of sacrifice: willingness to suffer to understand another person
No method to emerge from perplexity
No way to predict the outcome
Virtue of fortitude: acceptance of the pain of learning
Inspiration as expansion of horizon: sudden acquisition of new way to see
Inspiration brought about by learning from others, suffering anxiety, accepting perplexity, emerging with new perspective
Virtue of reason: the obligation to demonstrate, persuade
Virtue of constancy
Virtue of honor – agreements

Thought scraps

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