Transforming Grounds

I have written on my blog earlier about one of my favorite books, Donald Schon's "Beyond the stable state". Unfortunately this is a book that is almost forgotten. Probably because people see it as 'old'. It was first published in 1971. The core idea of the book is that there is no 'stable state' in the world and never will be. Change is the normal, stability is abnormal. Schon makes the case that any form of knowledge that can support designers, therefore, need to be based on the notion of 'no stable state'. I will here only point to the most wonderful pages in the book where Schon presents his notion of 'projective models'. This is a concept that captures what designers do and in his language an 'existentialism' approach instead of a 'systems analysis' approach. He develops this briefly in a subchapter called "Other ways of knowing". He does this on only 10 pages, p 227-237. It is possible to read the argument