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Design Research Seminar #4 Autumn 2013

Seminar

Time
11 November, 2013, 14:00 – 15:00
Location
Grupperom vest

Discussion of John Shotter’s article “Knowledge in transition: The role of prospective, descriptive concepts in a practice-situated, hermeneutical-phronetic social science”.

Abstract
What is special about our everyday activities is that they occur within the ceaseless flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things existing as separate entities prior to their interaction, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be found anywhere – a flow of events occurring within intraactions in which we ourselves are also immersed. Bringing the nature of these flowing processes to light requires the use of concepts of a kind very different from the well-defined concepts expressive of theories or models. I have called them prospective, descriptive concepts, and below I explore their nature and their use in characterizing how our surroundings can influence the unfolding shape of our utterances and other expressions within them.

John Shotter (2011): “Knowledge in transition: The role of prospective, descriptive concepts in a practice-situated, hermeneutical-phronetic social science,” Management learning, 43(3), 245-260.