Dear Friends,

Glenn's entertaining and provocative note captures the inherent - and
necessary - quality of this thread.

The ideas that have been put forward here contain truth and wisdom.

When Glenn uses the verb design as he did, he uses the word in its
original sense. "This morning I designed the towel layout on the rail
and the position of the pyjamas placed on my duvet," Glenn wrote,
continuing, "I designed the butter layout on my toast and the
position of my seat in the car. I then designed where I put my
umbrella in the office and the layout of the rubbish accumulating on
my desk.

"I designed a few words for this email and will continuously perform
acts of 'design' throughout the day."

The first part of the note captures what Glenn rightly calls the
ridiculous part of the thread, for we design trivial and ridiculous
projects, processes, and artifacts all day and every day as we move
through the world.

This is the consequence of a simple fact. Design is a purposeful
planning activity. We design whenever we plan to do something or make
something to bring about a future different than our current
situation. While Herbert Simon's (1982: 129) definition of design is
reasonable and even scientific - to "[devise] courses of action aimed
at changing existing situations into preferred ones" - it is also a
very simple description of what most of us do most of the time.

Design is a planning process that most people do most of the time.
This sense of the word design has been used in the English language
for seven centuries!

It is this sense of the word in which Merriam-Webster's (1993: 343)
defines design as: "1 a : to conceive and plan out in the mind <he
~ed a perfect crime> b : to have as a purpose : intend <he ~ed to
excel in his studies> c : to devise for a specific function or end <a
book ~ed primarily as a college textbook> 2 archaic : to indicate
with a distinctive mark, sign or name 3 a : to make a drawing,
pattern or sketch of b : to draw the plans for c : to create,
fashion, execute or construct according to plan : devise, contriveŠ"
(See also: ARTFL Webster's 1913: 397-8; Britannica Webster's 2002:
unpaged; Cambridge 1999: unpaged; Friedman 2001: 36-40; Link 1999:
unpaged; OED Online 2002: unpaged; SOED 1993: 645; Wordsmyth 2002:
unpaged.)

Now arises the challenge. Several hundred million English speakers
use the word design in such a clear, simple way that every language
source records this as the basic meaning of the term. Among these
many hundreds of millions, a few hundred thousand belong to some kind
of profession that uses the term design in a limited sense - software
design, industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, shoe
design, process design, etc. each of these groups constitutes a small
and limited subset of all users. Many place so many constraints on
their specific usage of the term within their own professional group
that not all of these mean the same thing when they use the same word.

It is the second, short, paragraph of Glenn's note that captures the
profound aspect of this thread. Glenn writes that he, "will
continuously perform acts of 'design' throughout the day."

That's exactly what Kari-Hans and Klaus were saying. They were saying
something else, though. They were saying that others make too many
design decisions that can be entrusted to individuals.

Only professionals can make some kinds of expert decisions.

Examples:

Where shall I make the incision? How deep? Shall I file a protest or
wait to see the outcome and protest on technical grounds if the
results are bad? Should I change the gearing ratio or change the fuel
flow to negotiate this next channel?

Other kinds of decisions are better let to citizens:

Do I want my butter this way or that? Would I prefer my
representative in congress - or parliament - to be liberal,
conservative, or something else entirely? Do I want more cancer
treatment or am I ready to die rather than suffer the effects of
chemotherapy?

SOME kinds of decisions require both individuals and experts. Most
decisions that we label design decisions actually involve both those
kinds of decisions, made by groups of people working in teams.
Different aspects of the design - the strategic choices, the tactical
approaches, and the technical implementations - may be located in
several parts of the team.

This thread has deep and profound value precisely because it is an
opportunity to focus on the role of different stakeholders in the
design enterprise.

We often seem to be debating fundamental issues as we address the
challenges of design research. This must be so because we have not
considered these issues deeply enough in the past. It is natural that
we sometimes linger over seemingly simple problems. Some of these
simple problems are profound and important rather than ridiculous.
This is one of them.

Several months back, this debate turned up in another guise. In that
debate, I suggested that one of the central issues for design
research involves hearing the voices of the many stakeholders in any
design process. This is not the only purpose of design research, and
design research has many other important goals. Nevertheless, this is
an important purpose of design research, and I support Kari-Hans's
note and Klaus's response for this reason.

I do not think that anyone will have to leave his or her job because
of this. I think it means people who are called designers have to do
their jobs better, and this means involving stakeholders in the
appropriate phases and levels of the design process.

If things must change, however, I'll go with half a billion English
speakers and then some who use the words design in the second,
profound sense of Glenn's note rather than in the earlier provocative
sense he used as a joke.

One important job for design professionals - including design
researchers - is to ensure that design does indeed change "existing
situations into preferred ones." To do this, we must attend to the
legitimate needs and preferences of all legitimate stakeholders in
any design process.

Best regards,

Ken




References

ARTFL Webster's. 1913. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (G &
C. Merriam Co., 1913, edited by Noah Porter). ARTFL (Project for
American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language).
Chicago: Divisions of the Humanities, University of Chicago. URL:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/webster.form.html. Date
accessed: 2002 January 18.

Britannica Webster's. 2002. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Online edition. Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. URL: http://www.britannica.com/. Date
accessed: 2002 January 21.

Friedman, Ken. 2000. "Design knowledge: context, content and
continuity." In Doctoral Education in Design. Foundations for the
Future. Proceedings of the La Clusaz Conference, July 8-12, 2000.
David Durling and Ken Friedman, editors. Staffordshire, United
Kingdom: Staffordshire University Press, 5-16.

Link. 1999. Lexical FreeNet: Connected thesaurus. Pittsburgh: The
Link Group at Carnegie Mellon University. URL:
http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/. Date accessed: 1999 November 21.

OED. 2002. OED Online. Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. J. A. Simpson
and E. S. C. Weiner. 2nd ed, 1989. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Oxford
University Press. URL: http://dictionary.oed.com/. Date accessed:
2002 January 18.

Simon, Herbert. 1982. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press.

SOED. 1993. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Edited by
Lesley Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press.

Wordsmyth. 2002. The Wordsmyth Educational Dictionary-Thesaurus.
[WEDT]. Robert Parks, ed. Chicago: Wordsmyth Collaboratory. URL:
http://www.wordsmyth.net/. Date accessed: 2002 February 2.



--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University