Designing for Meaning: The Designer’s Ethical Responsibility (original) (raw)
2013, Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment
Our contemporary " fi rst" world societies seem to be drifting in a state of cultural crisis. This has been notable for the past several decades. As planning theorist John Friedmann (1993 , p. 482) put it sometime ago: What we are living through in the fi nal decades of this [20th] century is something altogether different. It is nothing less than the collapse of the Euclidean world order of stable entities and common sense assumptions that have governed our understanding of the world for the past two hundred years. Rather than abating, this crisis seems to have become chronic and perennial, though often ignored. It relates to profound changes in how we see the world (our conceptual frameworks or paradigms), in how we come to know (epistemology), in how we decide what we ought to do (morality or normative ethics), and in how we fi nd meaning in our lives. The fi rst wave of change came from the modernist replacement of religious faith by science as foundational source of knowledge and justi fi cation. This led to scientism-the claim that the scienti fi c method was the only source of knowledgeand the dominance of a mechanistic and instrumental mode of thinking. The second wave 1 was the postmodernist questioning of the very possibility of any sure foundation for knowledge, leading to a loss of the modernistic faith in science (Harper and Stein 2006). The result of this challenge was an erroneous 2 (but widespread) view that there is no longer any way to justify our beliefs and values. Our contemporary (economically) advanced societies seem to be under the sway of a confused combination of modernist "instrumental reason" and postmodernist "soft relativism," leading to a narrow and self-absorbed search for "authentic identity" and a loss of vigor in political culture (Taylor 1991) .
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