Sensemaking, storytelling & synthesis, visualizations, and other narrative tools from the creative arts and design fields all exist in order to facilitate shared understanding of imaginary concepts and yet-to-be-built machinery among all the diverse stakeholders involved in societal design projects. This is a clearly defined phase in the design process and practitioners know that it can make or break the client presentation and the future implementation of the concept in the real world.
Design as a noun, as a verb, as a field of practice, as a skill and talent, or as a discipline of scholarship has become far too intertwined in its implicit meanings as digital, technological, software, and internet related operating environments for the design artefacts, be they products, services, or business models to connect end-users with solution providers.
There is still the practical wisdom (see Aristotle’s phronesis, as framed by Jentoft to capture the experiential and embodied knowledge and skills of coastal Nordic fisher communities) that craftsmanship and creativity of practice transfer from generation to generation. What are you looking for, mother, when you handle tomatoes and choose a dozen in a basket to be weighed? No textbook can teach you this knowledge.
So how do we communicate this ‘understanding’ of what to ‘feel’ for in a tomato to evaluate as good for purchase? This phronesis of housewifely knowledge (Mohd Shazali Md. Sharif et al., 2015, pg. 201) gleaned from decades of wet market purchasing is transmitted almost wordlessly except for some guidance to the child-novice imitating behaviour beside her. The wet market is a recognized social and temporal “place” in the classic sense of the word of human social cooperative creation of a conceptual and real world place for certain subset of regular activities. As the reflection from Shanghai shows, is the beating heart of every community – women walk down to the nearest wet market to meet and chat and socialize during the daytime.
We problematize the type of multi-sensory knowledge generation and transmission that is the designer’s hands on skills transfer approach and process.
