The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design

Krippendorff, Klauss. The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. Taylor & Francis, 2006. 

• Krippendorff, Klaus. Meaning in an ecology of artifacts. Media Lab Helsinki. mlab.taik.fi/~fsen/PDF/CH6.pdf. 
• Krippendorff, Klaus. “On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition That ‘Design Is Making Sense (Of Things)".” Design Issues, vol. 5, no. 2, 1989, pp. 9–39. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1511512.

The ‘turn’ in the title of this work, refers to the change in direction that design has been taking for the past decades, towards being human-centered. In making his thesis, Krippendorff assesses the history of various aspects of design. He makes the case that designers need to start telling their own story, using their own vocabulary to gain a discourse of their own.

The word Semantic in the title refers to the human act of constructing meanings for artifacts. For Krippendorff, the interesting aspect of human-centered design is how humans make sense of their artifacts. His central axiom is: “Humans do not see and act on the physical qualities of things, but on what they mean” 

In discussing designers’ level of sensitivity to what artifacts mean to others, he writes:

Designers’ extraordinary sensitivity to what artifacts mean to others, users, bystanders, critics, if not for whole cultures, has always been an important but rarely explicitly acknowledged competence. … Without realizing its strength, designers are doomed to chase the ghosts of other discourses. (p. 50) 

Krippendorff’s in-depth discussion about artifacts and their meaning, impacts my thinking on how digital discovery may impact role of artifacts in shaping Holocaust remembrance - 

Krippendorff sets context with history, presents a thesis (the centrality of the making of meaning of artifacts), and works it out at four levels:

• Use: meaning of artifacts in use
• Talk: meaning of artifacts in language
• Lifecycle: meaning in the lives of artifacts
• Coherence: meaning in an ecology of artifacts

p. 42 Definition of Artifact:

Equating truth with what has been done or could be made is also rooted in the etymology of the word fact, from the Latin factum something done. "Artifacts" are facts that are created with craftsmanship or special talent. Their truths lay in their workings, not in what they are... Vico would have liked this extension toward holding people accountable for the facts they make, conceptualize, arrange, manage, or destroy. 

His views and the in-depth examples that he gives, opens the door to considering the shaping of 21st century educational discourse – particularly around the impact of artifacts in a digital age. In the context of my research, as physical artifacts relating to the Holocaust are being digitized and put up to the Internet, alongside an ever-increasing deluge of new Holocaust data repositories, matters of provenance and authenticity become ever-more acute. Big data tools coupled with new media –ever mutating enabling technologies, open up present and future generations’ ability to collect stories and all of the objects that go along with those stories, to help tell the story of the Holocaust to future generations – in new ways. How enabling technologies help establish frameworks that facilitate collective participation and cumulative outcomes, will affect the role of artifacts on Holocaust remembrance into the future. 

In examining the evolution of artifacts, Krippendorff notes:

Page 198. In an ecology of artifacts, the meanings of an artifact consist of its possible interactions with other artifacts, both, with its own kind, but more importantly, with artifacts of other species. Ecological meanings, where recognized by individual stakeholders, guide artifacts to their energy sources, set them in motion, bring them into interaction with various other artifacts, and have global ecological consequences. An ecology of artifacts is the net effect of…what very many stakeholders do locally. Any ecology recognizes three kinds of interactions: cooperative, competitive, and independent.

Krippendorff then goes on to examine the role of MYTHOLOGY…

… We need to be reminded that ecologies of artifacts result from human participation in those ecologies… an ecology of artifacts is not closed. It is constantly attended to by design… What holds an ecology of artifacts together, what makes it grow beyond the ecological meanings of participating artifacts and their stakeholders is mythology.

The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux

Davidson, Cathy N. The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Basic Books, 2017.

Cathy Davidson has a long distinguished career in academia. In 2002 she co-founded HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), an international organization dedicated to rethinking the future of learning for the information age). This work is important for its focus on the future of learning institutions in our digital , networked age and for exploring new teaching and learning environments. 

Davidson has been focused for many years on the history and impact of technology on ways of learning. This is her latest work. She goes in deeply on what it is going to take to breakdown the ossified education barriers and enable networked learning. She notes:

networked learning is predicated on a deeply interwoven into the fabric of open source culture…The connectivity and interactivities made possible by digitally enabled social networking in its best outcomes produce learning ensembles in which the members of both support and sustain, elicit from and expand on each other’ s learning inputs, contributions and products.  

In discussing the need to champion public education, Davidson focuses on the impact of drastic cuts in public education and the impact on equity particularly for low income and poor /minority students.

 Page 187 location 2855

Universities require championing public higher education at the level that was commonplace in America between 1945 and 1975. We need to focus on our values, reconsider shortsighted policy decisions that affect public education, and rethink the decisions made over the past decades about how the public money should be spent-for instance, as tax rebates to huge corporations or as subsidies, at a fraction of the cost, that support public higher education. We, as a society, made different decisions during the golden age of public education. 

She asks: “What would it mean to redesign higher education for the intellectual space travel students need to thrive in the world we live in now? “ (p.6). Davidson sees participatory learning in ‘learning institutions’ that act as mobilizing networks - as being the driver of an answer to her own question.  In relation to my research, this all points to the challenge of breaking out of the ‘Google mentality’ and being able to focus on questions first – rather than answers.

She states that so far:

 no institution of higher education in the country has tested in a comprehensive way new methods of learning based on peer-to-peer distributed systems of collaborative work characteristic of the new Internet Age. 

It is this kind of experimentation that Davidson says, will drive and inspire new forms of knowledge and product creation.  In relation to my research, this suggests that there are ways because of big data, to gather feedback from both students and teachers and then be able to make predictions and alter the curriculum based better understanding of the needs of students that are discernable from newly gathered, timely data. At the same time, big data has significant implications for improving professional development and resource access and for instilling the importance of life-long learning in students in order for them to thrive in the world of the 21st Century.  An example of evolution happening today – towards more basic process-centered education can be seen in the STEAM education movement now.

In concluding, Davidson writes:

Page 254· location 3887

… The new education must prepare our students to thrive in a world of flux, to be ready no matter what comes next. It must empower them to be leaders of innovation and to be able not only to adapt to a changing world but also to change the world. That is the core requirement of the new education. All the rest is merely elective.

As We May Think

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, July 1945. Accessed 2 January 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

• Crow, Michael. “Inventing the Future.” Issues in Science and Technology, vol. 14, no. 2, 1997, pp. 93–95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43311765. 
• Simpson, Rosemary. “50 Years after ‘As We May Think’: The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium.” Information Programming. March 1996
• Zachary, Pascal. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. Free Press, 1997 (p.379).

Vannevar Bush was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War. , He more than any one at the time, recognized the power of organizing large-scale science and technology. Digital discovery in the 21st Century owes a debt to a revolutionary way of thinking and working described in writing, but never built, by Vannevar Bush just at the end of the Second World War. Many decades later, Bush’s ideas which took him 15 years to develop, became the Internet as we know it today. 

This article is particularly relevant to my research because of the profound impact of the Internet and information technology on education and on changing research methodology and process in particular. A new kind of pedagogy is emerging – one that is focused on meeting the needs of individual students, where minds are less and less bound by physical limits. Bush’s thinking as expressed in “As We May Think” helps us to continue to think of novel ways of seeing and new ways of knowing.  My research focuses on inquiry-based research and on the importance of asking the ‘right’ question. Now that students have easy access to advanced computational systems, and access to big data, the ground is set for students and scholars to accomplish what Bush’s Memex set out to achieve: 

a revolutionary way of thinking and working that would take place because of, and by means of, emerging technology. The memes visualized a way for researchers to collect and navigate information, and leaving their own personal comments on it.   

A gifted engineer himself, Bush realized early on that engineers were the engine of 20th Century capitalism – as were entrepreneurs. Perhaps his greatest accolade was to be thought of as a ‘moral thinker’ – and he never lost his faith in the ‘power of one.’

The Editor of The Atlantic, responsible for its publication, introduced Vannevar Bush – this way:

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article, he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. —THE EDITOR

Bush foresaw the dangers of information deluge and our inability to sort ‘the wheat from the chaff.’ As he put it:

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. 

Certainly, Vannevar Bush’s concerns about significant statements being lost in the ‘mass of the inconsequential’ have indeed come to pass. The Internet, the World Wide Web, the advent of mobile communications and Smart phones, new media communications social networking etc., have all contributed to an ever-increasing information glut – in which we are all drowning today. In relation to my research, this suggests opportunities for educators to research what students are looking at – at scale – to gain insights and guide their students on both an individual level and a collective level to approach their research with a more ‘aware’ and critical eye to information bias and in particular, the provenance of all information they choose to act on. 

It is interesting to comment on the outcomes of the Vannevar Bush Symposium held in 1996 to herald the extraordinary prescience of Bush over 50 years.

 In “50 years after We May Think” – three specific themes stood out to all the participants at that event. They were:

• That technology has enormous potential to augment human power, increasing our ability to achieve our goals or shape new ones.
• That by far the most significant augmentation is achieved via technology’s ability profoundly to reshape the structures and dynamics of human collaboration. 
• That the co-evolution of technology and human practice is producing fundamentally new ways of human/machine interaction.