基調講演
There are no theories of design (of art), only programs - open programs - hat can lead to evolving styles of individual artists (Palladio, Mondrian) or of long-lasting eras of cultural, as well as of short-lived movements, (Romanesque, Art Nouveau).
Theories are built on laws of nature. Programs are built on rules of men. From a set of consciously chosen rules, the open program evolves by jettisoning spent rules, rule by rule, and wresting, out of need, rules with promise, rule by rule.
One of two things happen to a theory: it is reasonably verified or it is refuted for all time.
Rules are embraced so long as they serve; or conversely, they serve so long as they are tolerated. Rules are retained or cast aside at will - sometimes with shallow frivolity, sometimes with deep deliberation.
The readiness of colleagues in design to speak about "design theory" is perplexing. If there truly is a theory of design (or of art), then those who advance Creationism as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution cannot be denied; They would have a point.
Rather than seeking theories of design, designers should be programming methods of design - in the realization that methods are highly circumstantial, inevitably transitory, and wholly alterable; for methods are but collections of rules.
Certain commonalities have been recognized between those who investigate and uncover laws of nature, on the one hand, and those who devise and apply rules of design, on the other. Such realizations have spawned many new organizations, like SSDS, of an interdisciplinary nature. These shared efforts, however, must not be disappointed on any attempt to reintegrate science and art, in the manner that human curiosity and human strivings had been organized through the ages (up to the end of the Early Renaissance) under one unified quest, philosophy. When science was born with Galileo, science irreparably separated from art.
What the new organizations can facilitate, however, is the ageless transfer between knowledge and practice - now bifurcated into separate branches of human endeavor that are not coequal, but reciprocal.Like Plato's original man, split by the god for his arrogance into two parts, there is a yearning of these counterparts for each other to conjoin (to cohabit, as it were), but not to rejoin.The architect Louis Kahn articulated the following;
Change, nature's concern, is nonconscious.
Change in [respect to] man is conscious. It has to do with rule and not law.
The conscious or subconscious search for making choices. Different camps are formed by different groups favoring different sets of reasons for choices. In which camp is SSDS?