Workshops

Cultural Premises, Conscious Purposes, and Design: Conversing with the legacies of Gregory Bateson and Vern Carroll

Organised by Eve Pinsker

Tim Gasperak, Michael Lieber, Eve Pinsker, Fred Steier, Daniel Wolk

#NewMacy hybrid studio—dialogue 02 workshop

Analytically identifying “cultural premises” (which Carroll developed from Bateson’s “epistemological premises”) is a way of stating what goes without saying, the shared assumptions or ways of parsing the world and construing context that are socially learned, usually unconscious, embedded in stories as well as embodied in interaction, and shared in varying degrees in wider communities. This Studio shares cases from both ethnography and design practice to discuss the relationship between identifying cultural premises and dialogic explorations of ‘sense-making’ and, furthermore, whether incorporating cultural analysis in innovation research methods can serve the larger purpose of designing beneficial social interventions, bearing in mind Bateson’s warnings against narrow notions of conscious purpose.

KEYWORDS: pandemics, wicked challenges, second-order cybernetics, systemic change, ontological security, conversation, ontogenetic resilience, recursive feedback.

Cultural Premises session cases

Cultural Premises reference articles

#NewMacy ACT II Studios—Redefining Stability

At RSD11, six #NewMacy Studios created opportunities to engage with interdisciplinary approaches to systemic design through conversations for action.

Contributors

Pille Bunnell, Carlos Castellanos, Damian Chapman, Kate Doyle, Xiao Zoe Fang, Tim Gasperak, Mikal Giancola, Michael Lieber, TJ McLeish, Paul Pangaro, Eve Pinsker, Larry Richards, Eryk Salvaggio, Fred Steier, Mark Sullivan, Claudia Westermann, and Daniel Wolk

newmacy.pubpub.org

Bateson series

dialogue 01

dialogue 02

workshop

Posted September 2022

©­ Author, published by the Systemic Design Association

Open Access article published under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. This permits anyone to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or form according to the licence terms.

Suggested Citation Format (APA)

Author(s) (20##). Article title. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD#) Symposium. rsdsymposium.org/LINK.

by-nc-nd.eu