It seems reasonable that any PhD student in the area of “Design Studies”
should have knowledge of a ‘canon’ of works that the research community
regards as core. But we have seen in suggestions so far that there is
little common agreement, because we are still a ‘community’ of individuals
with only some overlapping interests - we need to do some serious
community-building, as Victor and others have suggested.
Also, many ‘canonical’ works are papers, rather than books - I realised
this problem for new research students 20 years ago, and compiled what I
considered to be a basic ‘reader’ covering papers relevant to my
perception of the core:
Cross, N (ed.) (1984) Developments in Design Methodology, Wiley,
Chichester.
This book (now out of print) has been influential, especially amongst
newcomers to design research, largely because there was no other easy
source for getting into the field. It covered the period 1962-82, and
another is now due to cover the last 20 years (but it is more difficult
now, because so much more has been published in that period).
The books that I find most often referenced by myself are:
Schön, D (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, Temple-Smith, London.
and
Simon, H A (1969) The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass.
These two seem to me be particularly ‘canonical’ in the design research
field.
Architecture-oriented books are:
Lawson, B. (1990) How Designers Think, Butterworth, Oxford
and
Rowe P (1987) Design Thinking, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Engineering-oriented book is:
Bucciarelli L (1994) Designing Engineers, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
By the way, wasn’t this request for some introductory texts first started
by David Durling (on behalf of someone else) on the design research list -
it seems to have moved to the PhD list. Should it be copied/referred back
to the dr list. How do we do that, Ken?
Nigel
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