On Wicked Problems and their Gory Details:
Using Essay Collections to Reflect Designers’ Needs
Jim Rizkalla
INF 385U
Professor Melanie Feinberg
2 May 2013
On the authority of scholar Arthur Quinn, I am given to
understand that the rhetorical device known as praeteritio denotes
“the inclusion of something by pretending to omit it”.
If used with
subtlety and with moderation, the term can put a colorful touch on the
turn of a phrase; in the wrong hands, a transparently feigned
ignorance is generally considered an annoying affectation. Either way,
the device has demonstrated its capacity as a vehicle in delivering a
statement and is thus capable of conveying meaning to the
reader/audience.
If effective at the syntagmatic level, then by
extension the same potential might be found on a larger scale, and the
guise of omission could be taken to perform a number of related
rhetorical tasks.
Is it conceivable that one may construct a
successful argument for or against this notion by using a strategy
driven primarily by that same figure of speech?
The aim of this paper is to provide an answer to that question,
and to show how, by suspending collectively in uniform solution a
number of elusive and disparate elements which tacitly maintain
associative relationships, other likeminded questions may be posed in
the endeavor to establish a sturdier epistemic base upon which to
build more sustainable information structures. While some of the
methods I will resort to may occasionally stray from convention, I
wish to make known my strict adherence here to one principle that
seems to satisfactorily replace all other academic standards for the
present purposes, seen here as an application of the notion of
tactical formlessness as illustrated in the Lowgren, et al. reading.
What follows will be a sequence of error-generating trials I
expect will culminate in a uniform field of (pre)predicted failures,
but a range of errors which I am eager to re-arrange in a pattern
which may suggest the image of a not-error (a placeholder to describe
this inchoate entity).
Should this suggested image resemble a
conclusive defense for my argument, then it may safely be assumed that
an opening statement has already been delivered, and that the thesis –
having previously acted only as a McGuffin in relation to its
concomitant argument-- has adequately provided its own defense, about
which more later.
But before charting the course of this rococo regression, I must
attend belatedly to three questions which are of central importance to
the matter at hand and which comprise the rubric with which the
present investigation will be evaluated:
How can a digital collection foreground residual experience?
How do qualities specific to the digital milieu make a difference
within that difference?
[An untouched upon topic of economic incentive might consider the
untapped market of all of those nebulous un-groups and shadowindividuals who are just as eager to be expressed demographically as
are those demographers hungry for the business of officiating the
newest consumer category]
How does one describe the authoring experience of such a
collection? We are assuming that such a collection is possible,
thus the activity which defines its creation is also a phenomenon
dependent on a definition.
What makes the reading experience possible and is that
experience of necessity different from the authoring experience?
Why? How is that difference calculated?
My preferred delivery method of answers to these three-became-six
questions incorporates the grinding of fossilized sycamore resin into
an ox scapula with the cavalier manipulation of big data sets, a
marriage of augury and algorithms, neither of which will be used here.
Instead, I look to the questions themselves; due to the inherent vice
exhibited in their unfalsifiable collective nature, they are perhaps
better understood in conjunction with any (and every possible) answer
as being exemplary of wicked problems.
//
This deserves an explanation easily found at the heart of the
situated reading experience, which at the moment requires the reader
to be fully immersed in a pool of bad writing, the unavoidable
byproduct of active cognitive labor and not dissimilar to the residue
that collects in the tailing pools found in mining operations.
Should this tiresome tour seem to be at the reader’s expense, I wish
to demonstrate how its true value is worth more than the price of the
ticket and will surely be appreciated at this final stage of the
previous explanation, from which shines this diamond in the rough:
{ ? = $premise of thesis
//The aim of this paper is to [use any verb] the topic of //
<p> While writing on the topic determine whether the strict adherence
to a scholarly tone is indisputably the most effective means in
deploying the reflective essay form, particularly if that information
structure is not known to be built from an acknowledged prototype or
any standardized model, cognitive or otherwise.
Specifically, if said
essay discusses the various riches that have been mined from the
depths of ambiguity, is it paramount that it does so with crystalline
clarity, or could there be some potential in the notion that
?
</p>}
The preceding was offered in the attempt to generate a textual
description from a purely visual diagram of one of the many
conflicting thought processes at work and play when reflecting upon
the operative questions listed above.
But in order to maintain the
level of semantic hygiene and appropriate cosmetics required of an
academic work, and in lieu of a more practical prefatory gesture, I
should disclose exactly what is intended by this paper’s three “false
starts”:
They provide convenient and alternating openings-up //,
admittedly a bit trying at times, but as the process of trying is the
ontological foundation (though maybe not always the existential
reality) of the essay form, they are at least marginally relevant, at
most absolutely crucial in these proceedings.
They accrue like the connectable dots in the child’s puzzle of
similar name. Likewise they are intended to lead to the visual
depiction of a mental image (as opposed to non-mental images?), though
herein not restricted to those of cardigan-wearing rabbits, or of
dumptrucks filled with popcorn and such.
They round out a triangular grouping of three, this last one
lending support to the previous two. Rather, the third serves to mark
a boundary between the others, to maintain a navigable interzone and
provide a buffer from conflict generated by binary opposition. In so
doing, a loosely-gathered collection of options informed by a review
of recent literature on invitational rhetoric has made itself
available, and the consideration of them may allow for the embodiments
of the logic upon which information objects have been designed to be
more felicitously incorporated into larger or altogether different
bodies of knowledge that may lie just beyond the standard guidelines
of data sanitization previously mentioned.
The exchange that takes place between these lines, and sometimes
quite literally in between them, does not exactly coincide with the
give-and-take of meaning beyond them, where an “unknown quantity”
perpetually oscillates, //going back and forth though not headed
anywhere in particular, a marginal reverberation lacking precise
definition that manages to acutely render that exteriority which
confirms and validates the presence of the well-formed informational
entity itself, like the radio static that may be distinguishable but
never fully separated from the music and other transmissions in the
catalogue of frequencies.
Read merely as a catalogue of titles, the following Ninety-Five
Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Digital Collections in
Foregrounding the Residual Experience are as hermetically banal as a
stranger’s grocery list selections (Lactaid and raw sheep’s milk
cheese? Who knows why? Who even cares?) Taken individually and
contextually situated however they prove to be more than dismissible
curiosities. [But what percentage of idiosyncrasies is in fact
universally shared?
Who was it that said that everybody is a member
of somebody else’s residual category at one point or another?]
Thesis One:
An inquiry into the unknown cannot be assumed to be an
authentic position if a preconception about what is known still
prevails. This is an ineluctable aspect of the human condition, it
would seem. Authenticity is validated by the ignorance of both the
known and the unknown.
Beginning our adventure with an adventuresome
spirit, we can never be sure when our travels begin and where our
revels now have ended.
How the West was won. A Boy’s Life. A Design for Living. Kojak.
Burning incense and waiting for that rasa moment, on a fishing
expedition for epiphanies. Unraveling a welter of revelations to
reveal the knot of harmonious contradictions that my browser would not
refresh. These, glorious incongruities all, are incongruous with the
principled incoherence of my current operating system.
“Doing theory” in the guise of art with one eye fixed on the design
prize. How to eat one’s cake and have it? How do we best package the
“Thinking Outside the Box” concept?
Will it go over as well as
Mannequin Construction for Dummies? Are art and design one and the
same, peas in a pod, roses by another name, like kith and kin?
Design solves problems, while art creates them.
Despite evidence to the contrary, this is not coy attitude I have
taken.
A Parthenon stripped of paint and missing a roof comes closer
to art than a legion of bespectacled architects might ever conceive,
whereas the same conditions in our current city hall would amount to a
building violation.
Critical design.
Doing theory with no professed telic imperative but
still aware of the theory.
Claiming no fixed intention but driven
unswervingly by market forces masquerading as other methods.
Is this oxymoronic? Is it not simply art, after all? Since the fine
arts have been coarsened with the handiwork of fashion houses and
interior decorating firms, why shouldn’t the designers of a more
sophisticated cast and keener powers be entitled (or self-entitle
themselves) to the opportunity of engaging in legitimate art activity.
If one can find Apple II monitors in the Dumpster behind the Goodwill
and in a vitrine flanked by didactic panels in the rotunda of a highdollar fine-art cathedral, then how soon till poetry slams, pie fights
and pyrotechnic displays in the middle of the Apple store?
Or will
some circles never be squared?
Thesis Two:
To pretend to see from the inside a group that is
at best only seen from without or not at all is in effect a desperate
move toward imagining a subjective experience without objectifying it.
(Is this a feigned ignorance of its own kind?)
All pejorative
connotations aside, objectification is design’s bread-and-butter. It
is specifically indicative, a designation, a layout of lines that
converge and transect in modeling an image, as do lines of reasoning
in modeling a thought in the art of cognition.
But the design image
is not the end, as it is used in either producing another “final
draft” image or other end-product, even if it be a non-material
solution to a most material problem.
The design is the sketch for
something else. It is the recipe not the repast.
But “Art” is not
beholden to such limitations: a drawing can be of something, for
something, in place of something, for something else, or just a
drawing.
Or a drawing of a drawing. Or a drawing of a design.
And
each of these possibilities can have their own iterations and
permutations and drafts and determinations without having to be
determinate of anything other than being the record of the determined
act of self-validation, while the act also validates itself as a
practice.
(By contrast, we do not design liposuction pumps and escalator handrails and flexible drinking straws so that we may participate in the
universal colloquy of the human spirit, but to get people safely up to
the men’s tie collection on five, or to keep the margaritas from
drooling down the cheeks of white people while they dine in corporate
restaurant chains decorated with tomorrow’s nostalgia.)
Thesis Three:
It wasn’t until the last class meeting in the course
for which this essay is being devised that I even considered any
potential viewers/users of my transformed collection much later and
what that interaction might be like.
Designing something for a
specific purpose and with an intentionally short life-span comes with
its own demands and directives.
Thesis Five:
How many of my design decisions in the transformative
process can be attributed to me, and not the second, third and ninth
personae that seemed to be doing the ghost-writing in the interface
itself, that zone of interaction where—-wait, a minute… could an
argument be made in support of the mischaracterized though not
underrepresented voice of the ersatz hybrid of human/machine which is
most pronounced in that seemingly direct screentime interaction, the
same voice seems to be in a constant sotto voce dialogue (monologue?)
throughout our daily lives, perhaps even as we sleep, e.g. the voice
of that iPhone concierge guiding one through one’s dreams and
interpreting them?
Thesis Six: The only truly unrepresented group deserving of mention in
the matter of Sustainability, the one that I should have seriously
contended with and foregone the baroque rigmarole of dissociated
sensibilities and semi-parodic paranoid breakdown, is the global
community understood as a whole,
but most noticeable in the faces of
the poor and the dispossessed, not only those who are currently
displaced, but basically everybody (including the unborn future
generation, whose voices are also unheard) who stand to suffer from
the continued predation of whatever’s left of the stuff that might
promise any semblance of social equity.
On the other hand, no one in
the global community has never lived in such a state, it is by
definition a “Utopia”, which is already established within literary
fiction, so why imagine the struggle to to preserve an unsustainable
metaphor when I should be focused on practical matters, like learning
more about Dewey’s purported bon vivant reputation and memorizing
keyboard shortcuts specific to foreign alphabets?
Thesis Seven:
I may have grossly misunderstood what parafunctionality
means to those scholars who invented the term.
Have I been
subconsciously using it parafunctionally nevertheless?
Relatedly, I have tried to narrow the list of design objectives down
to:

Designing for a reader (that I know, might know or will never
know)

Designing for an audience of readers (some of the above might
carry over here)

Designing as my own audience of readers, and more narrowly, as
the only audience member—-though as myself, just an individual
surrogate

Designing as an authority vs. for an authority. Being able to
design the authority which authorizes one to design the audience
itself.
How much practiced design work and implementation thereof do critical
designers “do”, beyond the design of information structures to house
their neologisms and robust cognitive models used to design more
models? Again, there seem to be a lot of anemic emulations of projects
and products conceived previously by conceptual artists within the
last fifty years, so it’s curious to see similar fancies return to as
innovative design.
I should probably give this passing critique
sturdier legs to stand up against criticism directed at it, but that
would require significant mention of emotive key chains, talking
tools, jealous photocopiers and the like.
(An even less salubrious fragmentation ensues…)
Whatever else it may be, every collection is just a heap of language.
The ongoing drive to produce from this heap something of value, is
this an urge that human beings can ever resist?
The ubiquity and unparaphrasibility of metaphor.
The thing I find especially odious about Anzaldua’s borderland
metaphor is that it casts a shadow, as Americans historically have
done, on the very real and unabstracted territory lived in by the
residents of Mexico, for whom the border is also (I daresay
“”primarily and undeniably”) a physical, material barrier that imposes
demands and restrictions that cannot be re-negotiated through
fantastic imaginaries cobbled together from doggerel.
The luxury of
willful rebirth and whimsical self-recreation, although not exclusive
to Americans as a nation, is arguably not one that is shared by most
humans in general, let alone the descendants of the majestic warriorpriestesses and historically-revised shamans.
At last, I have found the beginning of my essay closer to its
material end, though I’ve come no closer in unambiguously defining my
distinct reflections on the utility of employing ambiguity in this
specific cultural context as the primary constitutive metaphor for an
exploration of a subject that is much more complex than the former
late-20th century avatar of Coatlicue chose to construe it, which is
definitely at a significant remove from not only the principles
maintained in the invitational rhetoric of Foss and Griffin, but also
in striking contrast to a great deal of the approaches taken and
notions entertained in the readings.
At the same time Star and
Bowker’s mention that the self-consciousness inherent in the lived
experience of residuality generates a confusion and unease which may
also be used as
a source of power is something that I have been
personally aware of long before it was ever canonized in print, and
Anzaldua’s carte blanche employment of that power, the energy that
emanates from that undeniably real situatedness (as much as I am
loathe to
descend unintentionally into New Age-y piffle, I know of no
other verbal tools in getting around this), however awkwardly it may
be expressed (see pp. 1-13, above), and with no intended allusions to
the heart-rending history of human sacrifice being utilized in
sustaining solar energy as a renewable resource, seems to be a highly
effective method of getting away with bloody murder, metaphorically
speaking of course.
If it appears that I have not honored a commitment to answer
adequately certain questions posed earlier, it is not due to casual
neglect, logical incapacity, or unmitigated coquettishness, but simply
that other, no less substantive concerns, compelled me to stray from
the path I undertook at the onset of this Batesian berry-picking
foray, which is not to my knowledge either an anathema or an anomaly
in an informational universe illuminated by reflective essays.
However, a reasonable assertion of my claim that I have delivered
a satisfactory example of a reflective essay, much less one at all
remains a subject of further speculation.
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