A Question of Praxis

As I looked up, taking a moment to think about the question, I was distracted by the visual excess that attempted to signify to the patrons that this was a British pub—we were at Tom’s Little Havana Café in Halifax, Canada.
“What do you mean by design praxis?”
Right. I returned my attention to the question.
“I’d never heard it before” he continued “so I looked it up on Wikipedia and it just seems to mean taking ideas and putting them to practice.”
“Well yeah, that’s a basic explanation. At the root, it’s taking knowledge and practice, or action, and applying them for some ultimate result, I guess.”
“But that’s already what we do as designers so why don’t you just call it design practice?
“Well look, stripped away of all its details, this place we’re in is just a bar, but it’s the details that give it significance. You said to meet at Tom’s Little Havana Café, not the bar, so I would know where to go, and you told me the street. Still, it was hard to find, and when I entered the place it looked nothing like a Havana Café, so I was confused and uncertain. But now, with these details I will know exactly what you mean when you refer to the Havana café, and if we come here enough you could just call it the pub.”
“So what’s your point?”
“My point is that language is the the same as this place. If you strip away all the details you just have a basic word that doesn’t really signify anything. Praxis can mean almost nothing, but it has details in it. It has a rich and deep history of usage that has evolved over time. If we allow it to lay dormant it will die but if we use it we contribute to its evolution and it has the potential to signify uniquely, unlike any other word or even phrase can, a dense and detailed meaning.”
“And that is?”
“I mean it in the way that Marx used it in Capital, or I think it was Capital anyway, and more recently, since the English publication of The Prison Notebooks, the sense that Antonio Gramsci had of the term. In this sense praxis is the union of a wide body of knowledge with action, or in design what we call practice. And this…”
“But design practice uses knowledge every day, so how is praxis different?”
“Well first, when I speak of a wide body of knowledge I’m talking about reaching out beyond design’s basic knowledge, you know, the one that often expresses itself in technical or aesthetic areas. I’m thinking more of what Jiménez Narváez, in Design’s Own Knowledge, referred to as the ‘Noesis of design’. She said that the Noesis of design was derived from the social sciences, and so what I’m talking about is a deeper knowledge that may be part of design but isn’t necessarily in most cases. I’m talking about incorporating domains of knowledge such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, or philosophy. But here’s the thing, whether you call it knowledge and action or theory and practice, that’s still not praxis in the sense I mean. If we follow on from Marx and Gramsci then we come to here” I said, drawing an imaginary line and pointing to an empty space on the table. “This is praxis, and it includes, it requires actually, the directing of that ‘ultimate result’ of knowledge and practice toward the betterment of society. It requires the process be directed toward social progress.”
“Okay, but I still think what’s the point if no one knows what it means.”
“If we use it people will. Tell me to meet you back at the pub tomorrow and I’ll know what you mean.”
“Hey!” Another hungry voice from the table spoke out. “Are we going to order something or what?”

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Driving home that night I wondered why I felt the need to defend this notion of praxis. Beyond the issues of language, what was it about the concept of praxis that was so important to me? Why was I so concerned about applying design to the process of social progress? In fact, I knew very well that it started over 20 years ago on Christmas day in 1987. I’ve never forgotten.