Pragmatism and Design (III): John Dewey
If Pierce was the father of the pragmatic method and James the popularizer, Dewey put it into practice, defining education as we know it. If you ever made a clay volcano model in your childhood at school, or if you used the case methodology at university, it is thanks to John Dewey.
After graduating from the University of Vermont, John Dewey (1859–1952) worked teaching classics, algebra, and science. After a PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1884, he became director of the new department of psychology, philosophy, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago.
When he arrived to Chicago, he found himself in a city with half-built skyscrapers, flooded by immigrant workers in the midst of social struggle, where strikes were repressed with violence by the state. Dewey soon empathized with them, got involved in social reforms, and struck up a friendship with feminist activist Jane Adams. Concerned about working for a university that perpetuated the establishment and deregulated capitalism, he concluded that the country needed different schools.
Learning by doing
His interest in the philosophy of education grew over the years, publishing several books on the subject. To test his theories, he founded in 1896 with his wife Alice Chipman, the “University of Chicago Laboratory College,” a university-linked elementary and secondary school, with a great emphasis on cooperative and active learning, based on experience and practice, abandoning the characteristic memory learning methodology of the 19th century.
The key to the new education was “manual training”. Before the industrialization and exponential growth of cities, children were used to interact with animals, crops, and tools. They were educated by nature “with real things and materials”. Urban children instead needed to sew, cook, and work with metal and wood. However, this new manual training should not be a mere instrumental education to learn a trade, it should be scientific and experimental, an introduction to the civilization.
Working in groups to make models and models, in the laboratory school the children learned to cooperate, understanding science without textbooks or lectures. Learning by doing and cooperating, also encouraging a democratic classroom, without elites, ethnic divisions, or economic inequality.
These theories of learning as a project-based interactive and experimental process have taken almost half a century to take root in the contemporary educational system, being the basis of much of the schools. Methodology that is even more prominent in the field of design.
However, things were not easy for Dewey with this project. They branded him as a communist and radical for his ideas, and after a dispute with the university president, Dewey and Chipman closed the school in 1905 and moved to Columbia University, where he was a professor until retiring in 1930.
Experiences and situations
In his ideas, Dewey combines Pierce’s scientific interest with James’s humanistic approach, bringing a very open and progressive sensitivity. More important than the scientific method itself, for Dewey the main thing is to apply critical intelligence to people’s problems, with the aim of leading a better life. This implies having an open and exploratory attitude, continually reviewing previous beliefs, using observation and experimentation techniques, in continuous connection with practical human concerns.
Dewey emphasized the importance of recognizing the meaning of human experience as the foundation of the research process. For Dewey, “experience” is a process located in a natural environment, mediated by socially shared symbols, that actively explores and responds to the ambiguities of the world. Therefore, experience is conditioned by our biological structures, as well as by the social context. The experience is always corporal, mental and social.
Inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, he advocated a naturalistic theory of logic, which stems from the claim that logic must be derived from our biological structures and functions, as well as from the relationships between the organism and the environment.
“An organism does not live in an environment; lives through an environment”.
Our responses, both mental and physical, are influenced by our cultural environment. The problems to be solved arise from relationships with others and the meaning we give to the world. The “situation” as the place of organism-environment interactions.
Confusion as the pattern for inquiry
Doubt is preceded by an imbalance in organism-environment interactions, which Dewey called an “indeterminate situation.” We feel doubts about a particular situation in which we find insecurity, instability, disturbance, ambiguity, confusion… The situation is not only “open” to investigation, but it is open in the sense that its parts are not united (following James’s scheme).
To resolve a situation, the first step is to look up the components that make it up, or the “facts of the case”, by observation. Since ideas are abstract, their meanings must be incorporated into some symbol (and here we return to Pierce). Without symbols there are no ideas, a meaning that doesn’t have body cannot be used. We have to be able to “see the idea”.
Ideas can become operational as they encourage and direct more activities. In the same way, facts are used to test and develop ideas, and these are only relevant if they interact with each other, if they can respond to a situation. These may be provisional “facts of evidence” in the process of supporting (or not supporting) the idea. The investigation ends when the original indeterminate situation becomes determined, that is, when it is a closed situation or “universe of experience”.
Dewey had a great sensitivity for Art, and in some way helped to dignify it as a discipline where ideas are elaborated. He drew attention to the fact of drawing itself and its process, where ideas emerge and are clarified through the interaction with pencil and paper. The activity of defining and forging connections actively produces new perceptions and knowledge as new elements are combined with existing elements and experiences.
There is no doubt that the process of sketching and prototyping, where the final solution to the experiment arises through interaction with physical objects and different types of sensory information, is intrinsic to the practice of design.
Closing the aesthetic experience
For Dewey, experience in its most complete, meaningful and rewarding way is the aesthetic experience. An experience acquires aesthetic quality when it “runs its course to completion.” Normally we experience distraction, dispersion, and disconnection between what we observe and what we think, what we desire and what we get. When a job is successfully completed and a problem or situation is resolved (eating, playing a game, having a conversation…) so that it can be consummated, without being interrupted or ceased, you have an aesthetic experience.
Therefore, the aesthetic experience is not limited to the artist or artistic creation, but is an important and integral part of all intelligent and creative human activity. A mathematical formula or a consummate sportive action gives us aesthetic pleasure. Thinking emotionally satisfies us because it is an integrated and concluded fact in our head. In fact, Dewey’s objective with his seminal book “Art as Experience” was to recover the continuity of the “aesthetic experience in the processes s normal life”.
Art is interesting to Dewey, as it fosters moments where the past reinforces the present and the future is more immediately perceived. This is when we feel alive: we are totally united with our current environment, and we are not concerned with memories of the past or anticipations of the future, that is, we have an experience.
As with James, for Dewey emotion is also important in the aesthetic experience, both as a mediator between the different aspects of the experience and as a qualifying component. It is also very important to be an actor in it, when we control its qualities in some way through our action. The aesthetic experience is therefore inherently linked with doing.
Either giving meaning to an artistic or design piece, or being an actor in the process of defining a solution gives us satisfaction. The works open to interpretation catch us because they require our participation to be closed. Sometimes we give meaning to objects, situations and people, just for the sake of concluding and making sense, because if there is something we hate, it is false closings.
Keep reading
This post is the third in a series of four on Pragmatism and Design:
- Charles Sanders Pierce (I)
Practical consequences, abduction and semiotics. - William James (II)
Mediation, body and emotions. - John Dewey (III)
Learning, experience and closure. - George Herbert Mead (IV)
Identity, social relations and objects.
Bibliography
Brag M. Pragmatism. In Our Time. BBC Radio 4.
Dalsgaard, P. (2014). Pragmatism and design thinking. International Journal of Design, 8 (1), 143–155.
Dewey J. “Art as a Experience”. TarcherPerigee, 2005.
Gibbon, P. “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker. HUMANITIES, Spring 2019, Volume 40, Number 2
Provenzoi, E. (1979). History as Experiment: The Role of the Laboratory School in the Development of John Dewey’s Philosophy of History. The History Teacher, 12 (3), 373–382. doi: 10.2307 / 491145
Rylander, A. “Pragmatism and Design Research”. Ingår i Designfakultetens series kunskapssammanställningar, utgiven i april 2012.
This piece was originally written in Spanish at Guindo’s blog:
“Pragmatismo y diseño (III): John Dewey”
