Opening a page at random in John Chris Jones’s “Essays in Design” (one of my all time influences), I found this:
“Context (a name I prefer to environment, because it sound less like a separate thing from ourselves) is the hardest thing to perceive, because it includes us, our ways of thinking. The fish cant see the water. ‘It’ is the source of change, of unexpectedness, the real generator of newness, design, of evolution. Aims, purposes, requirements, functions: these are words for how we see what is needed. But when we name them we tend to exclude the main part, the least predictable: ourselves, our minds, and how they change, once we experience something. It is ourselves, not our words, that are the real purpose of designing. The biggest mistake is to take the product alone as the aim. Its always secondary. Always a means, to process, to what we’re doing now or will be doing later. Dont comprise the process: get it right.
The best kinds of evolution we know, natural, linguistic, hand-crafted, are planless but highly responsive to change of context. With astonishingly coherent results.
The first step to attempting something similar in design, in continuous designing, is, I think now, to acknowledge publicly from the start that when we design our knowledge is of necessity incomplete. And to design the design process to reflect that modesty, that expectation of learning what the problem is as we try to solve it, discarding first thoughts. To make the meta-process sensitive to what is learnt in the highly informative process of designing.”
J. Christopher Jones, “Essays in Design” John Wiley & Sons, 1984, pp 212, ISBN 0 471 90297 7
Oh serendipity!