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There is a seductive logic in Abelson's 1979 paper Differences between belief and knowledge systems. This seduction comes in the form of an implicit promise that the formulation of a working epistemological address to the problems raised in the paper will give us a toolset that will blow away the fog of belief from the human landscape. This paper proposes that the very dynamism that makes the human landscape a swamp of wicked problems makes Abelson's conjecture – however true they may be on a meta scale – an unproductive addition to the designers toolbox. It proposes that middle-range theories offer productive addresses to the complex systems and wicked problems that define our world. This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- Arts
Published in
The Design Research Society Conference 2016Citation
DOWNS, S.T., 2016. I know this one, but the answer is complex. IN: Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds). Proceedings of DRS 2016: Design + Research + Society: Future–Focused Thinking: 50th Anniversary International Conference, Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016Publisher
Design Research SocietyVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-03-13Publication date
2016Notes
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence. It was presented at the Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference.ISSN
2398-3132Publisher version
Language
- en