Language: Macro Framework for Action

You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you
Long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
for the hour of new clarity.

Erich Maria Rilke – quote of the month at Community Intelligence
 

 
Here I am working based on having a clear separate time/energy for design and decision-making. The act of continuous decision-making requires an automatism, something that supports us in framing the whole system in a way that simplifies without reduction, and allows a fast access that is supported by previous reflection and design. This is a bit like designing procedures to help you frame a problem like making your shopping list or exploring the Porter’s forces. The frames cannot give you the truth, but possibilities that is likely to be truth within a context.

I am reading some references of root metaphors and act-in-context. The act of framing seems to be a way of defining context until a certain extent.

The underlying context, however, seems to be that human beings are creators of both metaphors and actions and therefore I imagine – in a macro level – language being our underlying framework. That would imply that in order to design new systems, or the process of design itself, is also a redesign of language.

A new system only emerges from conversations where the description of the system through language changes. The language as it has become is the macro-framework for our coordination of coordination of actions (see Maturana & Varela). A designed framework through language will represents a second level of consensus coordination that supports personal and group decision-making.

It that true, it looks like that the process of design requires making decisions on how far down the hole the system wants to get. It is a moment to observe the language we are using within the system.