After Luhmann

He is right, Luhmann: systems do not understand each other, they disturb, they mingle, and then maybe they change - but although informative for a social scientist, this position is not very helpfull to a designer - we must be concerned with what understanding - despite all disturbance - can run from a user to a producer and back, because the flow between producers, retail/politics, and users is the flow that eventually inform our choices and make things end up the way they do, in the market place or as an application on my desktop. So - designers can not stop at sense making as phenomenologists would recommend - we need to invent pattern languages which against all odds can generate communication between users and designers, between designers and engineers, between designers, engineers and customers. To say that communication in this chain is impossible is to say design is impossible.