Designing Representations, Affecting Reality: A Meta-Model Proposal to Address the Question of Design Epistemology from the Perspective of Cognitive Science

Abstract

The paper concerns representation intended as abstraction of a model from reality through perception. The relation between reality and its model is a key issue to design because while the project is thought on models, it always affects reality, and this epistemological gap is the reason for many design failures. In particular, models are adopted in top-down approaches to abstract only what decision-makers consider useful information to pursue their objectives. The bottom-up approach, instead, adopts as model reality itself intended as the total set of physical stimuli passed intact to agents which react by spontaneously transforming their environment. This approach lacking representation proves itself automatically reflexive and contingent. Nevertheless representations which make top-down approach strategic make it also rigid and vulnerable to changing conditions. The present paper outlines a research path to solve this contradiction by positing that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive but the extremes of a scale which can work as meta-model to regulate the relationship between reality and model in design activity, thus defining an intermediate design object which would determine neither a passive nor an active role of the subject with regard to his environment, but a reciprocal encounter at the phenomenal level.

Keywords

• design epistemology
• top-down approach
• representation
• design uncertainty
• bottom-up approach
• affordance