Program
Keith Russell
On Ducts and Design
For the ancient philosophers, the everyday world was the location of their thinking, much as it is for design. Things are found in the world; things are made in the world. For the ancients, it was a serious question to be asked: Can this thing be bent? If it can, then it has the property of being intensional, that is, it can sustain straining, or stretching, or bending. We might make a bow, or an arrow, or a staff: each would require a different intensionality.
When the mind is bent towards an object of its attention, this thinking is said to be intentional. That is, such thoughts illustrate that the mind can be bent to such a relationship. If our minds could not be bent towards things, and if things did not bend our attention, then we would be disconnected and locked in mere self-thinking. We are bent towards the world as the world is bent towards us. In Heidegger’s terms, we outstand and the world approaches us.
Things are ductible if they can be drawn or extruded; some materials are ductile, and others are not. The same applies to thoughts. Some can be drawn from observations, some from speculations, some from the ether of the imagination. Such drawings have, over time, acquired argumentative, and, in some cases, logical authority. We readily embrace de-duction, we tentatively accept in-duction, we dismiss re-duction and we scramble to compensate for our wayward thinking by claiming the complexity of ab-duction.
For design, there are other kinds of duction that need to be introduced into the methodologies of research. For example, con-duction, pro-duction, sub-duction, and e-duction. We can have bouncing concrete!