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