If something designed is evaluated not only by its objective specifications, but also by how it appears, the meaning it exerts, and the value it has for human beings, then the relationship between design and psychology becomes essential and inseparable. If phenomenology is one of the philosophical foundations of psychology, then at least one of the core philosophical aspects of the design can be found in it. This is because it is an approach to understanding the existence and meaning of things in relation to consciousness, which is always the place where they appear.

According to 20th-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of phenomenology, any acoustic or visual object appears to consciousness in a certain way (noema: the seen or the known). And since it appears in consciousness, we can assume the act of the consciousness that constitutes it (noesis: seeing and knowing). Husserl’s famous words, “Consciousness is always consciousness of something,” mean that consciousness is established from two aspects: the pole of the object side of consciousness (noema) and the act of the consciousness that constitutes it (noesis). Thus, an object that seems to exist in itself, beyond consciousness, insofar as it is a phenomenon of consciousness, is nothing but a part of consciousness as a noema.

Phenomenology’s refraining from judgment as to whether or not the object in question exists independently outside of consciousness is thus called a transcendental reduction. Husserl calls the field where everything in the world appears and unfolds the transcendental subjectivity.

According to phenomenology, the objective reality assumed by science is also an ideal existence that is constructed by consciousness through certain procedures such as the interaction of experiment and theory. Therefore, phenomenology criticizes a certain kind of scientism (objectivism of science) that regards scientific knowledge as realities that exist prior to and unrelated to the consciousness and assumes that human consciousness only finds them later.

The form, meaning, and function of a designed object have no existence apart from human consciousness. In this sense, positivistic design approaches such as perceptual psychology and subjective evaluation methods are closely related to phenomenology. This is because, for these approaches, it is not the object that exists independently of humans, but the function and meaning of the object for humans that is important. However, as long as perceptual psychology considers the process of cognition as an objective mechanistic process in the sense that it is unrelated to the consciousness that finds the process itself, and the subjective evaluation method considers human subjectivity as relative and individual, these psychological assumptions are inconsistent to the basic idea of phenomenology.

Husserl’s phenomenology was succeeded by Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), a French philosopher of the 20th century, who shifted the focus from consciousness to the body. According to Merleau-Ponty, the consciousness that faces an object does not exist on its own but is always supporting the object and being supported by another thing including the object, and it is this alternation of supporting and supported (i.e. “Kinaesthese” in Husserl) that gives the consciousness and its object substantial reality. However, the reality here is not the one of the body as an entity that exists independently of consciousness, but rather a sense that the consciousness toward an object feels that it is being supported at the same time when it perceives, therefore, supports the object.

This sense of being supported is called “affordance” by American perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson and cognitive psychologist Donald Norman. When we climb stairs, we unconsciously change the movement of our legs because we have already sensed that the stairs will support our body. The stairs “afford” us the opportunity to ascend them. We are already immersed in the sea of such a sense of possibility at the same time as, or even before, we become explicitly aware of the object. If this is the case, then we already know something about what kind of movement will be possible next, at the level of our physicality. It is because of this level of physicality that we are able to design something and use it appropriately.

This sense of being supported is called “affordance” by American perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson and cognitive psychologist Donald Norman. When we climb stairs, we unconsciously change the movement of our legs because we have already sensed that the stairs will support our body. The stairs “afford” us the opportunity to ascend them. We are already immersed in the sea of such a sense of possibility at the same time as, or even before, we become explicitly aware of the object. If this is the case, then we already know something about what kind of movement will be possible next, at the level of our physicality. It is because of this level of physicality that we are able to design something and use it appropriately.

(KOGA Toru)

Related Classes

Design Futures Course, Philosophy of Design

References

• Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortraege, Husserliana I, Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 2013.
• Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Houghton Mifflin.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Éditions Gallimard,1945.