some notes on mode 1 and mode 2students who were able (not only ‘physically’) to draw their own comments on the
lectures and to argue with the messages of the lecturer’s diagram.
The diagram is an icon. Being an icon the diagram is characterized by its
similarity to its object – but while the image represents its object through
simple qualities and the metaphor represents it through a similarity found in
something else, the diagram represents it through a skeleton- like sketch of
relations... The diagram is the only sign by the contemplation of which more
can be learnt than lies in the directions for its construction.
(stjernfelt 2007: 90)The usefulness of diagrams in studies of literature and the other arts, leading to
the establishment of an approach called diagrammatology, was first discussed in 1981
(mitchell 1981). Yet, the diagram has not earned the name of a form until it has been
interpreted or explained in some verbal or propositional expression (mitchell 1981:
628). after having conducted the diagramming of Wordsworth’s poem ‘The prelude’,
some of mitchell’s conclusions were:
The form of the poem is the structural image plus the interpretive rules or
principles, which make it apply to the text. Take away the principles and you
have the mute image, declaring its own importance but unable to spell out
what it is. Take away the image and you have a lot of talk about the poem but
no concrete sense of its form.
(mitchell 1981: 631)The diagram which will be studied in this part of the chapter consists of three
diachronic parts. The first part of the diagram illustrates how doctoral dissertations
by practitioners have developed in the scandinavian countries since the early 1970s
and until approximately the beginning of the 1990s. The middle part of the diagram,
concerning the period from the early 1990s and until around the first five years of this
century, presents the development of ‘doctoral scholarship’ in the same geographical
region. The third part of the diagram is devoted to the recent international developments
in new modes of knowledge production and suggests several possible ways for how
design- related knowledge can become an important contributor to the new ‘knowledge
landscapes’.^2
The whole diagram ‘introduction to knowledge forms and knowledge production’
consists of four figures which appear diachronically. For each figure, illustrating the
relationship between doctoral scholarship in architecture and design, and other forms
of knowledge, three kinds of utterances are given place. First, comments on situations
observed in the scandinavian context are provided. Then the graphic part of the
diagram follows, with a brief argumentation for its specific shape, thus complying with
mitchell’s plea for the interdependence between the visual and the verbal parts of the
diagram. Finally, references to various authors are given to support the logic behind the
construction of the diagram. While the first part is a report, written in an ‘impersonal’
form, the two following parts are written as the author’s personal narrative, which
describes and argues for her own graphic and textual steps in constructing the diagram.