Notes from Knut

Definitions When new artifacts and services are introduced they are based upon some previous work, either intentionally or as a natural reflection of living in an inter-textual world. The result is a gradual change of the characteristics of designs. This constitutes what I define as the evolution within product design. The gradual change in an evolution exists within a framework of methods, references and practices that constitute a paradigm as discussed in the previous entry (insert link). In the natural sciences you can observe that the new paradigm fits better than the previous to the experiments and research. This is arguably a result of the positivistic notion that you can reach a final and perfect theory that all observations can be explained by (this is of course debated). In the social sciences and arguably in product design paradigms are human constructions that are subject to judgment by other humans. This result in relativistic paradigms that are true or false based on who

The title of this entry is related to my current course this semester at aho called "technoForm". The course aims to physically explore the words: "evolution, revolution and paradigm shift" within product design. What is a paradigm? The word ”paradigm” is originally used to describe a table of all the different forms of a word. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn shaped the word to describe a ruling framework of ideas, theories, methods in science that empirical facts are placed into. The resulting picture is thus a result of not only the cold facts, but also the intrinsic experience in becoming a scholar with all the reading of previous scientists work and experiences. Every so often there is anomalies that does not fit into the dominant framework and those are often forcefully fitted, or even fitted by bending the framework, which makes the ruling paradigm less elegant and more fragile. Then a concurrent paradigm, which tries to fit more of the anomalities without bending the fra