Community Engagement and What the Greeks Taught Us: Professor Robert Young

Design and philosophy united last night as part of Newcastle Philosophy Week and the upcoming Design Event, when Bob Young spoke on how Greek philosophy can help us improve our understanding and teaching of co-design.

Young suggests that we forget the crafty or Metis (if the name does ring a bell, yes she was a Greek goddess who was the daughter of Zeus, and indeed crafty) element of design, and must help designers achieve enkratic (decisions considered correct and true) rather than the more usual akratic (going against ones better judgment because of other difficulties). We need to achieve this through phroesis.

Complex? A bit. I found afterwards that looking at a map of a detail of the diagram helped immensely in getting a grip on how all the elements relate to each other (this has been mocked up based off the above picture, so there are a couple of words I couldn't make out). 

As per the rest of the talk, check out the sketchnotes below.

Amongst others, Young referenced Latour's 2008 talk at the Design History conference.