A few words from John Thackara (who wrote the afterword of Chris Jones “Designing Designing”) on Chris Jones’ mission and philosophy (the full post can be found on Thackara’s blog).
“As a kind of industrial gamekeeper turned poacher, Jones went on to warn about the potential dangers of the digital revolution unleashed by Claude Shannon.
Computers were so damned good at the manipulation of symbols, he cautioned, that there would be immense pressure on scientists to reduce all human knowledge and experience to abstract form.
Technology-driven innovation, Jones foresaw, would undervalue the knowledge and experience that human beings have by virtue of having bodies, interacting with the physical world, and being trained into a culture.
Jones coined the word ‘softecnica’ to describe ‘a coming of live objects, a new presence in the world’. He was among the first to anticipate that software, and so-called intelligent objects, were not just neutral tools. They would compel us to adapt continuously to fit new ways of living.
In time Jones turned away from the search for systematic design methods. He realized that academic attempts to systematize design led, in practice, to the separation of reason from intuition and failed to embody experience in the design process.”
All of the above ring very true today. The reductionist approach to knowledge, the general disdain for the richness of human knowledge and experience, the widespread contempt for embodied knowledge, the radical separation of reason and intuition, the hidden shaping of a new belief system around the superiority of rational machines, the invisible but violent bending of human friendly ways of living to fit machine dominated new ways of living.