Abstract: The liberation from the view that only one way of making sense of experience is legitimate (the one that “corresponds to reality”), which follows from the results of20th century science and philosophy, puts us into a position to consciously choose and assign a purpose to the creation of meaning; and based on that choice, to develop completely new modes of information, to suit each chosen purpose. We present an instance of this approach, where information and knowledge work are considered as key societal systemic components, and then designed as it may best suit the various functions that pertain to this role, notably the function of illuminating the way to all other systemic self-organization. Design epistemology provides an academic foundation for this approach; the Knowledge Federation community implements it in practice.51129

Keywords: design; epistemology; collective intelligence; global problems

1. Introduction

A popular idea is that science is discovering the objectively true description of reality. According to this view, to fully deserve the reality status, a phenomenon must be explainable in the causal manner ,in terms of “scientific concepts” such as energy, mass and Newton’s laws, or chemical compounds and reactions.

    Developments in science and philosophy during the past century challenged this view , and brought to prominence an entirely different one: While there are multiple ways to make sense of sense experiences, people in a community tend to be socialized to accept one of them as “the reality” .

Any system of concepts and propositions limits not only what we can understand and communicate, but also what we can do and be . Science itself is not creating a single view of reality, but a multiplicity of “incommensurable” views (each organizing experience in a specific way, and serving better for some purposes and worse for others) . No longer considered a way to objectively picture reality, science is perceived as “an attempt to make the chaotic persity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought” .

    We interpret this change in academic self-perception as a mandate to liberate knowledge work from its subservience to traditional worldviews; and to create and use meaning, and information that conveys it, purposefully and consciously, as they might best serve contemporary people and society.

The liberation from the view that only one way of making sense of experience is legitimate, the one that “corresponds to reality”, puts us into a position to consciously choose and assign a purpose to the creation of meaning; and based on that choice, to design completely new modes of information, to suit

each chosen purpose.

    A century ago, a profound change was under way in the arts: An explosion of styles and techniques, and of creativity, resulted when the artists challenged the assumption that the purpose of art was to mirror reality, by emulating the techniques of Old Masters. A similar change is now possible—and, we in knowledge work, and in particular in the sciences. The “modern science” that, we envision, may result from this transformation, will however not be an academic equivalent of l’art pour l’art-ism but on the contrary, a way to make the positive difference that knowledge and knowledge work can and need to make, in this age.

    In this article we present a specific instance of this approach. We first define “design epistemology”, which provides the academic or epistemological underpinnings; we then outline how the mode of information that follows from it is being developed in practice, within a community called Knowledge Federation.

2. Definition of Epistemology

There are two ways to make a definition: By stating it as a claim (X is Y), and by stating it as a convention (when I say X, I mean Y). Meanings of words can be liberated from habit and tradition by using the second option, and that is the approach followed in this text. The concepts whose meaning is defined by convention making or postulation are italicized.