Diderot’s definition of facts, as presented in the original Encyclopédie:
Facts: You can divide facts into three types: divine, natural and man made. The first belong to theology, the second to philosophy and the others to actual history. All three are open to question.
…from An Unconscious Civilization1
It’s the last line that I find most significant; its understood within the context of philosophy, but in the case of the others, they often appear sacrosanct (yes history, too).
It looks like the first of the Canadian Geese are returning to False Creek after a pretty short migration. They were all zipping about, just getting their feet wet (literally), and settling in again after their time away. Lots of gawking and squawking and jockeying for territory. It’s nice to see them back but I’m sure I won’t feel that way later in the year when I’m trying to avoid their shit everywhere or their occasional rushing attack at the groin area (that only happened to me once actually, but it’s the kind of thing you don’t forget).
Recently, when reading Fuyuki Kurasawa’s “The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices”, I was struck by a similarity in his “three paradigms of social justice” to Tom Gleason’s notion of the fourth autonomy.
Gleason’s three autonomies relate to the role of design in a post enlightenment era. He speaks of the three autonomies of art, science and morality (or politics) and envisions design as a forth autonomy that uses the others to inform a praxis through design (or at least that is how I interpreted it).
Fuyuki Kurasawa writes of three paradigms of social justice that are philosophical normativism, politico-legal institutionalism, and global civil society empiricism. According to Kurasawa, “although [this is not] a comprehensive review of the multiplicity of writings on global justice”, these “three key paradigms” figure strongly in the shaping of current global social justice practices.
Links between the two may be somewhat tenuous, but it seems a reasonable comparison that might spur other thoughts on this subject matter.
1. Politico-legal institutionalism corresponds to the autonomy of morality, in that it deals with systems of legal and political institutions “in order to increase democratic accountability and socio-economic fairness”.
2. Global civil society empiricism corresponds to the autonomy of science, in that it uses a structuralist approach to analyzing, measuring and quantifying data about the various actors in the field of social justice.
3. Philosophical normativism could be seen to correspond to the autonomy of the arts in that it exists in the domain of sociology and specifically the notions of a larger personal world view or umwelt and, as a result, “specify[s] universal moral principles, such as hospitality and egalitarian reciprocity”.
But where notions of design as a forth autonomy that utilises the knowledge of the autonomies of art, science and morality, Kurasawa writes of a concern that all these approaches (accepting the comparison) are fundamentally “top down” and neglect the fundamental “realities of participants involved in the social labour of global justice”.
This seems a particularly important consideration to address. It suggests that great care should be taken not to focus exclusively on the authoritative domains at the top, and remember to give due consideration to those in a more grassroots position. Which leads me to think of Paul Hawken’s writing on the movement of movements in Blessed Unrest and then, by extension, Wade Davis’ writing in Wayfinders, about the kind of Indigenous knowledge that is so often overlooked and yet so profoundly important to a diverse pluralistic global society. And then this leads me to meta-design, because as a systems model, it feels like a way that design thinking and, what Luz María Jiménez Narváez refers to as “designs own knowledge”, can enable these disparate groups, cultures and communities, without suffering from the imposition of some kind of western authoritarian design hegemony.
An Interpretation of Umwelt through diagram of synonyms.
Kant writes, “Space is merely the form of all appearances of the outward senses, i.e., the subjective conditioning of sensibility, by which alone intuition of the outside world is possible for us.” (Uexküll qtd in Sebeok 194)
Kant’s view of space and time is that an organism cannot, through sense perception, be immediately aware of things as they really are because objects are altered by the very act of being apprehended. “The world of real objects is knowable only through reason, and solely by this act of symbolic cognition can some true propositions – thoughts about words, thoughts about thoughts, , in brief, signs about signs – be apprehended.”(Sebeok 194)
Here are a couple of grid templates for InDesign (around 450kb each). They are only for 8.5 x 11 inch pages and clearly for print layout, but you could use these as a starting point for developing a web-based grid system as well. Just change the units and increments to your needs and design it along similar principles as this (ie: proportional widths, gutters, etc.)
A 6 column grid: http://www.christopherhethrington.com/downloads/Grid_8.5×11_6c.indd.zip
A 12 column grid: http://www.christopherhethrington.com/downloads/Grid_8.5×11_12c.indd.zip
The link provided below is to a PDF (375kb) that gives a basic overview of using hierarchy in the organisation of content.
Visual hierarchy is the organization of visual elements into different levels of relative importance.
Through basic design principles (such as position, scale, value, and weight), the
communication designer emphasises one element over another so the viewer is visually
drawn first to the content which is most important…
For more download the PDF here:
http://www.christopherhethrington.com/downloads/visualHierarchy.pdf
For anyone interested in learning more about developing grid systems, whether it be for print or web, Mark Boulton has a very good tutorial that discusses it quite well. It starts with the basics of grid systems and different ratios, and goes all the way through the development of fixed and floating widths on a web page. Really good overview.
Here is the link:
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-designing-grid-systems-preface
Note that this link is to the preface. You can follow the links below that one to move progressively through the rest of them (though the navigation to the next links could be a bit more intuitive, it works well enough).
This describes an interesting idea on the rhetorical use of necessity as a notion or term.
“institutions of government must correlate with the structure of the economy and the information system”…
“Must correlate”? Did you notice? They insisted that we must correlate with economics and technology.
“Necessity.” William Pitt said two centuries ago, “is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”(Saul 112)
You have to accept that you live in a modern society where globalization and capitalism are the dominant systems, and learn to find a way to work within that system—the argument of a tyrant.
Here is a basic overview of sitemaps, process maps, and wireframes. It’s provided in PDF format (136 kb) so just click on the link below to download it.
Link: sitemapsEtc.pdf
Digital Thread
This site is an excellent resource for searching out interesting and inspiring exemplars in web and interface design.
http://www.digitalthread.com/webdesign/
Don Norman’s jnd Site | User Advocacy and Human-Centered Design
Don Norman is the author of The Design of Everyday Things and co-founder of the Neilsen Norman Group
http://www.jnd.org/
Use It | Jacob Neilsen on Usability and Web Design
Jacob Neilsen is a guru of web design and usability, widely recognised as one of the great contributors to web interface design theory and practice, and yet sadly, often referred to as “the web designer that designers love to hate”. He offers valuable insights into user interface design for the web. He is the other co-founder of the Neilsen Norman Group.
http://www.useit.com/