ABSTRACT

The last chapter was about design; design both in teaching and in doing science. It was about how the acts of design precede science or teaching and act as lenses or as molding agents on what can happen next. But design is also interactive-it occurs as a dialectic process between person, objects, and purposes. It occurs while the science and the teaching are going on. A design is recognizable within a context; it is formed out of that context. The act of design-designing-can't be decontextualized. The trick, however, is that designs give the appearance that they can exist separate from context, can be abstracted. Designs are metaphors for what can be done with them. They are then generalizations, simplifications; they only capture some aspects of the context from which they are derived. They are recognizable as entities because they are abstracted, partitioned. In many instances this is the cumulative effect of patterning. We recognize a design because of the repetitive quality of the patterns it contains. The repetition of a design, however, also creates a pattern.