What Is Wrong With Design History - Assignment Example

What is wrong with Design History? Name Institutional Affiliation Instructor Date Design is the most dominant feature of all arts. It responds to the public and personal needs of people and embraces ergonomic and economic concerns. Design is everywhere, informed by various disciplines like art and architecture, ethics and philosophy, language and literature, science and politics. It is a complex combination of pictures and words, materials and processes concepts and technologies which add up to something distinctive and memorable. Objects in nature are very complicated and intricately combined in that they could not be probably the products of chance. This implies that there must be a supernatural being or designer. The argument of for the presence of supernatural designer is referred to “argument from design”. This paper seeks to uncover the discrepancies surrounding the design history. The analysis attempts further to answer the question “what is really wrong with argument from design?” and the possible reasons why design historians don’t regard evolution as design process. The argument takes different forms, complex and simple. Though some accounts of the arguments from design are sophisticated, they form the basis for traditional argument for the presence of supernatural designer. Modern thinkers have a tendency of rejecting the argument from design citing the fact that natural selection can lead to production of complex structures which appear to have been designed. As per the arguments of this line of thought, if one found something complex like a pocket watch in a biological world, it should not be assumed that the object was designed. Instead, it should the object should be viewed as a product of natural selection. In our scientific knowledge and understanding of evolution, this argument may seem quite reasonable. Science has proved that animals and plants emerged out of evolution and natural selection (Fichner-Rathus, 2012). There is also a strong believe by scientist that inanimate structures resulted from natural causes, though not all of the inanimate objects are products of natural selection. Scientists have discovered ways in which the instances of “design” can emerge from natural processes without any intervention by the supernatural designer. In some cases, those people who are interested with evolution are known well for referring to the design in nature as an “illusion of design”. In arguments by atheists, one is likely to here that there is an illusion of design in the universe (Rayment, 2007). According to this argument from design, the discrepancy with the argument is that what appears to have been designed does not really have to be designed. Visible designs can be produced by the process of evolution taking place in the physical universe. In order to justify the existence of these visible designs, there isn’t any need to think of a designer outside the context of the physical universe. This is basically the model counterargument to the argument for design though there are claims that the arguments from design were not believable after Darwin (EllegåRD, 1990). The argument from design is wrong but not for the basic reasons that sceptics normally gives. Humans are the best examples of designers. For instance, if a human being imagines of how to create a watch and then creates one, we can comfortably say that the watch is a designed object. If the same being through some ways manages to think and build a squirrel, the squirrel is said to be designed object as well. From a critical thinking point of view, one would ask; what are the processes of forces that really make objects designed by human beings to come into existence? Probably, they are processes that occur within the human body particularly the brain (Doordan, 1995).When people think of designing, they don’t think of designing their selves. Instead, they think of designing external pieces of work, such as sculptures. However, one may undergo self-design process when by designing system of thought s like theories which ends up being proved that they were not there before. Ruse (2003), argues that the design history generates conflicting ideologies across various disciplines. While religion holds to the existence of a God as the supreme designer, science argues that objects resulted from an evolutionary process. So far the design history fails to acknowledge the fact that the products of natural selection may be designed. It is not obvious that such products resulting from natural processes are not designed. There are two main reasons that can create ground for believing that evolution is not a process of design. To begin, the process of evolution is a combination of dumb and undirected events that occur naturally. The second reason is the fact that evolution leads to generation of other complexities without external efforts of the designer. Any of these reasons can be turned into a counterargument to substantiate the argument of evolution be or not being a design process. There is a third reason to believe that evolution is a design process. In the earliest stages of evolution, complexities are experiences. Just like humanly created design processes, there are a lot of complexities in the beginning. What prevents the founders of the design history from thinking and viewing evolution as a self-designing process? Why can’t they think of the biosphere as a physical system that exhibits self-designing? Why can’t they also say that nature designs it elf literary? Well the reasons for this could be as follows: the evolution is made up of mechanistic steps and it is purely natural. The process also does not involve any form of external complexity. Lastly, evolution commences with complexities. These reasons do not rule out the possibility of self-designing by the natural system. Throughout history, designers designed an object with a purpose. However, evolution does not have any goal. This could be another possible reason as to why it is not regarded by many as a design process. Contrary to some interpretations, evolution simply revolves around generation of new forms. In other words, there is no predetermined outcome to the process. Therefore, some people might argue that evolution can’t be a design process due to the lack of purpose. Human designers normally have a set of goals while designing something. It is quite easy to think of an artist designing a sculpture without any purpose in mind. In this case, it is possible to still argue that there is purpose for creation of such object because the artist is trying to create a work of art (Margolin, 1989). On the contrary, children can create art works without any goal in mind. Though their art may be simpler than that of adults, the fact remains that they still are designs. Psychotic arts may be driven by internal forces without necessary any purpose. Objects resulted from psychotic art have become even more artistic than those designed with purpose. Therefore, we should not conclude that objects are non-designed simply because the process involved in designing them did not involve a normal sense aim or purpose. Even non-psychotic artistes with strong impulses of creativity may be design objects off the cuff without a purpose in mind (Raizman, 2003). It is really possible for a person to design object without a purpose in mind and even without any idea of what the final product could be. Hence, there is no formal basis for claim that evolution is not and cannot be a design process given the fact that it is purposeless. Evolution may not have purpose, and so are some types of real designs. Purpose is simply not a prerequisite for design. The most significant fact concerning design for the present purpose is that when judging whether an object is designed, there is no need of knowing exactly the internal mechanisms that led to the creation of the object. When a sculpture is declared to be “designed”, it doesn’t mean that the sculptor’s brain has to be checked first to ascertain his normalcy. Even very odd brains might produce outstanding designs. The most important thing is the output. If all details of the process of making an object were to be known even before making decisions of whether an object is to be designed or not, the people would not have been in a position of telling whether people designed anything (Hingston, et al., 2008). Middle Age people did not have any idea of how human brain worked but still they were capable of telling how human tools and artworks were designed. This means that they were intelligent because of what they could design. In other words, it means that a person should not be judged on the basis of their internal physical going –on. By the same line of reasoning, people should not be judged to designers or not based on what goes on inside their bodies as they have the potential of producing objects that could be called designed. The evolutionary process led to the creation of designed objects. However, in the study of the design history, it should be noted that this has nothing to do with creationism, supernatural tinkering, “intelligent design” or any form related antics. As Darwin found it, the process of evolution produced real designs, following the principle of physical law and without the intervention by supernatural designer (Dembski, 2002). The design process in the brain of human being differs greatly from the evolutionary processes taking place on the earth. However, the two processes have two features in common. They both produce objects that could have been said to be designed if they were to be produced by human being (Jacobs et al., 2003). Therefore, there is no point of viewing evolution as a non-design process simply because it differs physically with the process that the brain of the designer goes through when designing. Secondly, both cases have processes which occur in physical medium. In the process, complex objects that could have not been created by chance emerge. Human design and evolution are not merely random processes. Instead, they are the processes in which the impacts of random variations are transformed by the medium in which it occurs and the process itself (Fallan, 2010). Based on the reasons given earlier, there is nothing to stop the founders of the design history from calling acknowledging and calling evolution a process of design. In fact, if the notion of design is applied instead of arbitrary exclusion of non-human systems, evolution should be called a design process. Just as the design process, evolution is a physical process that occurs naturally and leads to the production of multifaceted objects. The difference is that the design process in evolution is unconscious given the fact that the process is not purpose-oriented (Tweyman, 1986). However, some human designs are not created out of consciousness. Nonetheless, even if the evolutionary process could be said to be purposeless, the fact remains that is fitted well to the realities of its immediate surroundings. It is a form of design process that is very sensitive to the world, products of its activities and the physical conditions on the earth. The end product of the evolution process is the production of objects that are well fitted to their functions. The argument form design leads to a conclusion that design appears and exists in nature. This means that the appearance of design in nature can be used to infer the reality of design that there also exists a supernatural designer. Although sceptics of design argue that nature consist of an illusion of design, the fact is that some things that exist in nature can never be anything apart from designs. The objects may be the products of evolution, implying that the process of evolution itself can be designer. Design history and process should be looked from a broader perspective and not from human designing of tools, artworks and artefacts only. Under normal thinking, one may picture design as a process involving an external designer and the piece of work involved in. the problem with argument from design is that it assumes that the designer has to be external to the system being designed. What is actually wrong with argument from design is not the fact that it infers that natural objects are actually designed. The problem is that argument form design presumes the fact that the designer is something else other than nature itself. Evolution is a design process and design in nature is perhaps not an illusion of design. References Dembski W. (2002). Intelligence design: the bridge between science & theology. [S.l.], Intervarity Press. Doordan, D. P. (1995). Design history: an anthology. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.], MIT Press. EllegåRD, A. (1990). Darwin and the general reader: the reception of Darwin's theory of evolution in the British periodical press, 1859-1872. Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press. Fallan, K. (2010). Design History Understanding Theory and Method. Oxford, Berg Publishers. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=554577. Fichner-Rathus, L. (2012). Foundations of art and design. Boston, MA, Wadsworth. Hingston, F., Barone, C., & Michalewicz, Z. (2008). Design by evolution: advances in evolutionary design. Berlin, Springer. Jacobs, A. B., Macdonald, E., & Rofé, Y. (2003). The boulevard book: history, evolution, design of multiway boulevards. Cambridge, Mass, MIT. Margolin, V. (1989). Design discourse: history, theory, criticism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Raizman, D. (2003). History of modern design: graphics and products since the industrial revolution. London, Laurence King. Rayment, T. (2007). The problem of assessment in art and design. Bristol, UK, Intellect. Ruse, M. (2003). Darwin and design does evolution have a purpose? Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10328814. Tweyman, S. (1986). Scepticism and belief in Hume's Dialogues concerning natural religion. Dordrecht, M. Nijhoff. Read More