TRICKS OF THE TRADER

It was the sociologist Georg Simmel who pointed out that the stranger to a culture has the role/work/lifestyle of a trader, who buy and sell, and brings goods from one place to the other – owing goods, but no land, belonging to none of the cultures visited – living on borders. This form of life is close to that of the designer, and a designer can learn a lot from paying attention to the tricks of the trader.

PORTFOLIO AND STORYTELLING

For two weeks now, 9th semester Information Architecture students and I have worked on their portfolio information structure: What do potential audiences want to read, and how to structure content so that readers get the desired picture at a glance + get curious for more? We have tried to get the idea of relationship under the skin: It is not the content, it is not the readers or their context of reading per se, but the relationship in between, which generates interest. One solution, yet to be tried out, it that of storytelling: Storytelling has an information structure which already Aristotle put on form, and which more recently Ricoeur has elaborated: Mimesis. My suggestion is to try out building portfolio writing on the mimesis information structure. Like yesterday, we worked with Schutz's essay 'the stranger' and how, when being on the border between two cultures, you have to get conscious about your most basic assumptions, and then open yourself to negotiation. I suggest to make this a point in the IA students' method portfolio, by describing a personal experience of estranging yourself. The thing is: it is hard work, because you can not maintain the so convenient detached on-looker position, which Schutz so vividly describes, and which we as academics so enjoy.

ITEMS OF LEARNING

This week 9th semester Information Architecture students and I have been working on the relationship between 'presentation', 'practice' and 'perception'. I introduced Bateson's thesis that '...if we inflict a series of similar learning experiments on the same subject, we shall find that in each successive experiment the subject has a somewhat steeper proto-learning gradient, that he learns somewhat more rapidly. This progressive change in rate of proto-learning, we will call 'deutero-learning'. (Steps to an ecology of mind, 1972/2000, p. 167). I added that this explains Bateson's other thesis that '...Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality' (MInd and Nature, 1979/2002, p. 7) - Why? Because the pattern which connects the items of learning (= protolearning - thanks to Majken Kjærulff for clarifying that) is the deutorolearning, it is the habit of learning, which makes it possible to connect one instance to another, and create a rule. Hence the pattern of people, places, the things we do, the way we do them, should be kept stable for a certain case of learning. Scrum is an example: the morning meeting: standing in the same place, answering the same questions, provide a framework for understanding the differences, which makes a difference between last meeting and next meeting. So: Here's to rituals in teaching!