When Understanding Follows 'Experiencing': A Report from Research in the Field*

This paper describes two case studies where immersive `experiencing' of a novel concept led to a better understanding of it. This approach helped bridge cultural and academic divides. By having a shared experience, the members of a multi-disciplinary, distributed project aimed at poverty alleviation created shared meaning. The creating and experiencing of prototypes proved to be a transformative experience. These cases suggest the engineering students, who are increasingly working on design projects in developing countries and other culturally unfamiliar situations, would benefit from learning to undertake such immersive experiencing as part of how they approach design. This argument is made in the context of John Dewey's model of `active doing and undergoing'.

[1]  R. Labonté,et al.  Empowering social action through narratives of identity and culture. , 2003, Health promotion international.

[2]  D. Hulme,et al.  Chronic Poverty and Remote Rural Areas, CPRC Working Paper No. 13 , 2002 .

[3]  W. Ong.  Orality and literacy , 1982 .

[4]  E. Sanderson,et al.  Progress in participatory development: opening up the possibility of knowledge through progressive participation , 2004 .

[5]  Elizabeth A. Lange.  Transformative and Restorative Learning: A Vital Dialectic for Sustainable Societies , 2004 .

[6]  Benjamin Shaw,et al.  More than the sum of the parts : shared representations in collaborative design interaction , 2007 .

[7]  Jack Goody,et al.  The interface between the written and the oral , 1989 .

[8]  Linda Smith,et al.  Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples , 2000 .

[9]  Ray Bert,et al.  Book Review: \IThe World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century\N by Thomas L. Friedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 , 2006 .

[10]  A. Frank.  Why Study People's Stories? The Dialogical Ethics of Narrative Analysis , 2002 .

[11]  A. Jonker.  Origins of the modern mind. Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition , 1998 .

[12]  L. Finlay,et al.  "Reflexive Embodied Empathy": A Phenomenology of Participant-Researcher Intersubjectivity , 2005 .

[13]  Alex Heckert,et al.  a new typology of deviance: integrating normative and reactivist definitions of deviance , 2002 .

[14]  D. Hulme,et al.  Chronic Poverty: Meanings and Analytical Frameworks , 2001 .

[15]  David Hulme,et al.  Chronic Poverty and Remote Rural Areas , 2002 .

[16]  R. Desmet.  The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding , 2009, Process Studies.

[17]  U. Geiser,et al.  Local Environmental Management in a North-south Perspective: Issues of Participation and Knowledge Management , 2002 .

[18]  Robert A. Margo,et al.  Understanding the Process of Economic Change , 2005 .

[19]  David Wong,et al.  Beyond Control and Rationality: Dewey, Aesthetics, Motivation, and Educative Experiences , 2007, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[20]  Gloria Mark,et al.  Extreme collaboration , 2002, CACM.

[21]  T. Kuhn,et al.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. , 1964 .

[22]  Francesca Polletta,et al.  COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS , 2001 .

[23]  Sara Kindon,et al.  Participatory video in geographic research: a feminist practice of looking? , 2003 .

[24]  E. Gendlin.  The primacy of the body, not the primacy of perception , 1992 .

[25]  Ann Swidler.  CULTURE IN ACTION: SYMBOLS AND STRATEGIES* , 1986 .