Reductionist or a Systems Approach?

The mere idea of reflecting on knowledge and how it has been acquired in the last 400 years is something that is entirely foreign to me. I have been enlightened merely by the posing of the question. Reading for this class and all of my graduate courses for this semester has had some element of reflection on this question.

To summarize my understanding of how knowledge has been acquired, I can see that there is a significant distinction between knowledge that has been acquired through the field of science, referred to as the reductionist approach, and that from the arts, referred to the humanist approach. Science  focuses on one particular aspect of a problem, studying it thoroughly, and piecing the little bits of information together to gain a greater understanding of the system as a whole. Or that of a humanist approach whereby a problem is regarded as a system and the system is studied as a whole. I can see these two approaches being used in the field of medicine. For example, many doctors specialize in one aspect of the human body and become an expert on that area. When someone has an issue with a shoulder injury, they go to a shoulder specialist. On the other hand there is a movement in medicine to study the body as a whole system. Osteopathy is an approach where the practitioner may have a patient come in with a back issue which is really as a result of a knee injury that they experienced 2 years prior. The treatment approach, looking at the body as a whole results in the practitioner treating the knee to deal with the back problem. This approach is not highly regarded here in the Western world where we have a reductionist philosophy dominating our beliefs in the acquisition of knowledge, whereas a Eastern belief system that is more based on the narrative philosophy embraces this approach to healing.

What does this mean for us as design students? Vicente (2004) calls us to deal with design problems from a systems approach, " . . . what I'm advocating as an example of systems thinking- a holistic, problem-driven way of looking at the world, an approach that focuses on relationships between some system element, whatever form those elements happen to take (in our case, people and technology)." (p.46)  Avoid designing technology for the sake of having the technology but design it in such a way that is simple to use taking into account the limitations that humans have, physical, psychological, team, organizational or political (p.61). 

Vicente, Kim J. (2004). The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live with Technology. Toronto: Vintage Canada

Textbooks and Presentations enhanced through a hand held application for Students

User Centered design. . .

My class neighbor and I were discussing different problem groups within a school setting that we would like to design a technology to help them. I think that we have settled on the group of under achieving students whose needs are not being met in the regular classroom (this could include gifted students, students with learning difficulties or ESL students). Michele Jacobsen, our instructor, mentioned a feature on the pages of magazines which are being used to enhance the content of an article. You use a camera from a mobile device that you have and hold it over an icon and information gets displayed on the screen that is related to the material in the article.

I am just brainstorming here, but I think that you could use something similiar with a textbook. Say there is some content in a high school textbook that a student is struggling with, the student could use an application where the presence of an icon in the text or as part of a presentation allows the individual to access information that aids in there understanding of the material. The initial display could provide options for the student as to how they can be helped. For example three icons could appear: 1. "More"- enriching the content that has been presented, 2. "Help"- providing alternative explanations for the material that is presented. . . potentially touching on the different intelligences and 3. "Diagnose"- an application that would help the students recongize why that are not understanding the material being presented. Students would either be participating in a presentation during classtime or reading their text at home, they would encounter difficulties or would want to know more. Students would pull out their mobile device and hold it over an icon and boom, here is the help that they need to understand that content or provide greater insight into why they are not understanding the content. The development of an application like this would be a very large task and would require a very large design team with a large amount of funding. I do feel that an application like this will, if it has not already been done, help students and would truely be user centered.