Dear Colleagues,
Here is Klaus Krippendorff's paper from the 1998
conference on doctoral education in design at Ohio
State University.
This paper is a background paper for the coming
on-line conference, Building the Field.
The on-line conference will begin on September
10, here on the PhD-Design list.
Best regards,
David Durling -- Ken Friedman -- Lorraine Justice
A Field for Growing Doctorates in Design?
Klaus Krippendorff
The Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
3620 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104.6220
T: 215.898.7051
E: [log in to unmask]
November 2, 1998
--
Published in:
Krippendorff, Klaus. 1999. "A field for growing doctorates in
design?" In Doctoral education in design. Proceedings of the Ohio
conference. Richard Buchanan, Dennis Doordan, Lorraine Justice,
Victor Margolin, eds. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: The School of Design,
Carnegie Mellon University. 207-224.
--
Bruce Archer's Message:
Hearing of this conference, Bruce Archer faxed us something he wrote
as a "stimulus paper" for a similar gathering in England. It was
meant to constructively intervene into an ongoing debate between two
schools of thought on a doctorate degree in such practical
disciplines as architecture, art, dance, design, education and
engineering:
"One school of thought (he suggests) favours the amendment of
universities' traditional Ph.D. regulations so that submissions for
examination in such disciplines may be presented largely in
non-written form. Š There are those in conventional academic
disciplines who have objected to the 'watering-down' of (such)
regulations, arguing that this debases the standing of the
traditional research degree."
"Elsewhere, some university staffs in practitioner related
disciplines have objected to the adoption of 'watered-down' M.Phil.
and Ph.D. regulations on grounds that the traditions of scientific
and scholarly research distort the proper study and acquisition of
competence in advanced practitionership. Such objectors favour the
wider adoption of doctoral degrees that are explicitly degrees in
practitionership, rather than degrees in research or scholarship."
Then he goes on to note that there already are doctoral degrees in
practitionership, some with a respectable history, for example in law
and in medicine, recently also in education and in engineering. He
concludes recommending that one may want to examine such degrees as
models that overcome the gap between the two positions outlined above.
I want to take this recommendation to heart. I too have asked myself
in the past why medicine, for example, which is as practical as is
design, has developed such an astonishing body of professional
knowledge, solid institutions and respect in society, all of which is
lacking for design. Let me use another area for comparison with
design, communication, with which I am quite familiar.
In fact, I am holding two advanced degrees, a Diploma in Design from
the Ulm School of Design and a Ph.D. in Communication from the
University of Illinois. On account of the latter I teach at
University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.
Communication is only half the age of design but has gone so much
further and comparing it with design might well hold the answer for
what is needed to establish a doctoral degree in design.
In the following I will give a brief history of how communication
rose to prominence, compare its principal features with the state of
design so as to show what needs to be done, and conclude with five
propositions and for generating advanced graduate education in design.
A Brief History of Communication as a Field
"Communication" is a somewhat strange designation for a field of
inquiry. It is what all humans do in everyday life, it denotes the
object of communication scholarship, and it also constitutes the
medium in which the results of such inquiries are presented to peers.
Evidently, it lies in the nature of communication to reflect on
itself. Some colleagues call themselves communication researchers.
Some university departments consider themselves engaged in
communication studies. Some speak of communication science. At some
point the word communicology was coined but it did not take root in
the U.S. This terminological variety might be confusing to marketers,
but "in the field" it seems not. I surely do not want to call
communication or design for that matter a discipline. This conjures
images of punishment for bad behavior, strict conformity with a norm,
or what the military does to its recruits -- Michael Foucault wrote
cogently about that. Unlike disciplines, fields need to be cultivated
and seeded in order to grow many varieties of plants, including
weeds. With this in mind, let me sketch its history.
Journalism is the origin of communication. Journalism is a very
practical activity, much as design. Unlike designers, journalists
write reports, but much as designers, for large audiences. Until
about 60 years ago, journalists exclusively wrote for journals,
newspapers and magazines. This made journalists part of a particular
technology that mass produced print and their daily practices were
subject to technical, legal and economic constraints -- which is what
journalism schools had to teach besides good writing. Journalism is
also a public affair and entails professional responsibilities to the
public. Much of what journalism teachers had to do was to look into
these responsibilities, formulate ethical principles, and instill
them in the how-to-do courses in journalism schools.
During WWII, radio entered the public sphere, later followed by
television. These two novel media threatened newspaper publishing and
created competition if not ideological confrontations between the
institutional proponents of these media. The fact that they also
offered new kinds of jobs challenged the monopoly of journalism
education as well. Journalism schools reluctantly responded by
expanding existing curricula to include radio and television.
In 1948, the University of Iowa was the first to grant a Ph.D. in
Mass Communication to a student from its journalism school. Only two
years before, in 1946, the word "communication" appeared for the
first time in the title of a graduate-only course. It was used then
as an umbrella term to embrace what these three media had in common.
The word "communication" did not however alter the journalism
paradigm of responsible reporting, objective writing, the creation of
a product that large mass audiences would appreciate for its
information value. With the embrace of the new media, journalists
managed to remain in charge of the news in radio and in television,
but lost control over fictional programming, which came to be
considered outside journalistic ethics and pursued Hollywood-style,
just as it had lost control over newspaper advertising in the early
part of the century. Critical examinations of the
social/cultural/economic dynamic of these new media fell outside
journalistic concerns as well. A Bureau of Radio Research was founded
at Columbia University, initially financed by those concerned with
the effects of the new media, later renamed Bureau of Social
Research, which pioneered communication studies outside the
journalistic paradigm.
The architect of the "communications plan" for University of Iowa's
journalism school, Wilbur Schramm, impressed the President of the
University of Illinois, Urbana IL, so much that, in 1947, he was
offered and accepted two positions that were to become instrumental
to the future of communication. He became the director of the
University of Illinois Press and he was given the opportunity to
build an interdisciplinary Institute of Communications Research.
As the director of the University of Illinois Press, one of his first
projects was to publish Claude E. Shannon's Mathematical Theory of
Communication together with commentary by Warren Weaver. This was in
1949. The theory and its commentary appeared in less accessible
technical journals the year before and came on the heels of Norbert
Wiener's 1948 "cybernetics" as the science of communication and
control. Unbeknownst to most contemporaries, the small book proposed
a new paradigm that radically challenged our way of thinking. It saw
communication no longer as a written product, but as the transmission
of information from senders to receivers via channels, this
information being variously encoded, decoded and processed. It
generalized communication across all media, past, present and future.
It was less concerned with the truth of a report than with "who? says
what? to whom? through which channels? and with what effects?" It
introduced a new vocabulary into the discourse, addressing phenomena
heretofore conceptually unavailable. It generated a huge literature.
After 50 years, Shannon's 1949 book is still in press.
As the director of the Institute of Communication Research, Schramm
was able to obtain the cooperation of faculty from several
departments at the University of Illinois and to attract others to
join his Institute. The institute was organized around research
projects rather than a structure. The word "inter-disciplinary" was
not commonly used then, but today we would recognize the Institute as
an example of that kind of cooperation. In 1949, the Institute
announced a (in retrospect the first ever) graduate program in
communication, terminating with a Ph.D. in Mass Communication, in
1953 renamed a "Ph.D. in Communication." The first Ph.D. in (Mass)
Communication from the University of Illinois was granted in 1951.
In this remarkable convergence, the institutional backbone of the
field began to take shape, not just around a literature, initially
books followed by widely used textbooks, research reports that
advised government and industry and journal articles in numerous
related fields. The Institute also produced the first round of future
teachers who would open communication departments everywhere,
scholars who would contribute to these publications, and jobs in
academia and industry.
In 1950, the University of Illinois School of Journalism, a leading
school in the U.S., renamed itself School of Journalism and
Communication and accepted the Institute's Ph.D. as its terminal
degree. Other schools followed suit and it became almost fashionable
to use the term "communication" in journalism courses with a broader
scope and to develop educational programs with advanced degrees in
communication. Renaming by itself did not necessarily reflect a
change in educational missions, especially not in how communication
was conceptualized and taught. Old paradigms die slowly. Till this
day, there are graduate departments that continue to reproduce the
older journalism paradigm by thinking of communication as the
production of messages. This text-centered conception has survived in
so-called media studies, emphasizing media as representations,
without process and without human's social involvement. We would now
say it is not human-centered. Casting old theories in new cloths
added a technological and universalizing twist to the idea of writing
journal articles, but it began to become eventually aligned with the
new way of conceptualizing communication. I think it is fair to say
that it was the emerging consensus on a new communication paradigm,
not the use of a fashionable name for an old professional practice
that made all the difference, literally in the world.
In 1950, a group of teachers and practitioners, all members of the
Speech Association of America (SAA), founded the National Society for
the Study of Communication (NSSC) and a decade later walked out of
SAA, renaming itself the International Communication Association
(ICA). This association provided communication researchers a
professional association of their own. It now has about 3,000
members. In this association, journalism was no longer a category.
Its initial divisions were:
Information Systems,
Interpersonal Communication,
Mass Communication, and
Organizational Communication.
The generality of communication became the organizing principle of
this academic association. The word "international" expressed a
belief in the limitlessness of this human phenomenon. Today, there
are about seventeen divisions and interest groups addressing numerous
communication issues. ICA is not the only communication association
serving the intellectual needs of its members. Its annual meetings
are one of several places where communication scholars get and test
their ideas, where scholarship is evaluated and authenticated, where
communication research findings are made visible to peers.
Around that time, several journals foe related issues were published
and read widely. I am thinking of Journalism Quarterly, Journal of
Broadcasting, Public Opinion Quarterly, Behavioral Science, Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology to name but a few related ones. But
ICA started to publish its own trail-blazing Journal of
Communication. Now, quite a number of journals have aligned
themselves with the study of communication and communication scholars
have numerous outlets to publish their work.
The new communication paradigm that fuelled these staggering
developments not only embraced the emerging media of communication,
it also attracted scholars from a variety of disciplines to join
hands and elaborate it, sometimes even to fertilize their own fields
with it. There emerged sociologies of knowledge, ethnographies of
speech, political systems theories that took communication to be
their central feature and political-economic analyses of the mass
media. Organizational consultants realized that it was communication
that held an organization together, psychologists reconceptualized
their interest as intra-individual communication, psycholinguists
tried to bridge knowledge of language with that of human behavior,
and so forth. Cybernetics, put its conceptions on the table, enriched
the discourse of communication with numerous concepts and brought
diverse technical professions into the fold: information theorists
and communication engineers, mathematical systems theorists and
computer scientists, and so forth. Communication became an
inter-disciplinary if not multi-disciplinary undertaking without
aiming at it.
Now, doctoral programs in communication are widely accepted. This was
not without struggles. Other disciplines started to claim the
territory that communication scholars had opened up for inquiry.
Occasionally, communication programs were downsized or discontinued,
but demands rose as more and more problems could be linked to
communication. Now virtually every major university in the U.S.
teaches at least undergraduate courses on the subject, many of which
feed Ph.D. programs in communication. A typical doctoral program in
communication offers:
A variety of own graduate courses on the basic concepts in the field,
on theories of communication, supported by textbooks and journal
articles. Most communication departments also collaborate with other
departments in their university that could offer courses in related
areas.
Training in the key methods of inquiry: content analysis, survey
research, experimental design, data analysis, literary techniques,
and ethnographic methods.
Opportunities to work with professors on various projects, applying
these concepts and methods of inquiry to contemporary problems with
theoretical or practical implications.
Encouragement to engage in professional discourse by expecting
students to present papers at academic or professional conferences,
subscribe to communication journals and publish.
Doctor of Philosophy degrees predicated upon completion of an
original piece of scholarly work.
Some help in finding jobs in government, industry, academia, or as
communication experts in numerous professional areas: research,
management, the mass media and law, even in therapy.
In sum, within a rather short period of time, shortly after WWII,
communication organized itself around a new paradigm. It grew out of
journalism's need to expand to radio and television but quickly
expanded its domain of application numerous areas far from
journalistic concerns and came back to alter the conception of
journalism and of communication in society. It also inspired many
scholars and practitioners to collaborate on this new conception. An
institutional infrastructure developed that consisted of a network of
research institutes with exciting projects, educational programs
toward advanced degrees, and connections to industry and government
with new kinds of problems to tackle. This, in turn, generated jobs
and more funding. A body of literature developed around theories of
communication. Books, journals and text books recorded the history of
the field, allowed knowledge to grow cumulatively and, above all,
provided visibility and generated public respect for people working
in this field. It simultaneously encouraged a community of scholars
and practitioners to grow, whose members, read and contributed to the
same journals, spoke the same language, and met regularly at
professional associations of their own. In this community, individual
members present their projects, critically evaluate those of their
fellow members, arrive at a consensus on acceptable methodologies of
inquiries, but also generate employment opportunities. The idea of
communication has caught on in very many free countries all over the
world (in fact after serving as President of ICA, I am the current
chair of an International Federation of Communication Associations).
Communication has enriched the understanding not only of what
journalists are doing but also of human communication in general. We
can say communication has made it.
Ph.D. education was only one feature in these concerted developments.
I am suggesting that it cannot succeed without parallel efforts to
build institutional, literary and community support.
Where is Design by Comparison?
Design is far younger than medicine but twice as old as
communication. Why has it not taken off the way other fields of
inquiry did? Let me present some observations that might suggest ways
to overcome these obstacles -- and I am speaking here as an insider
to design and as an outsider to it as well.
In the U.S. there are many well-known schools of design. They have
graduated some of the best designers in the world. Some universities
offer terminal MA and MFA degrees. The Illinois Institute of
Technology (IIT) has a Ph.D. program since 1992 from which one
student has graduated so far. On the undergraduate level, education
is well instituted. This is comparable to the state of journalism
education in the 40s, when it came to be challenged by radio and
television. Now, design is challenged by the newer media. If it does
not embrace their implications, it will remain what it was and allow
the torch of excitement to be carried elsewhere.
Most participants at this conference were surprised to learn that the
University of Minnesota offers a Ph.D. in Design as well, and how
many Ph.D. degrees were granted in other countries, from Finland to
Australia, even so close to the U.S. as in Montreal. The lack of
knowledge of Ph.D. education in the U.S. is indicative of one of the
problems design is facing. Designers do not know much of what other
designers are doing -- except for the disciples of a few design
beacons whose work is published in slick magazines. A well-organized
community of designers is nearly absent. A community requires that
members talk to each other, know of each other's work, respect and
support each other. Without such a community, institutional
infrastructures can be neither build nor kept going. In
communication, networks of researchers that could work together
across different areas formed quickly, even before a consensus on the
name became apparent. Communication programs did not exactly sweep
the country; in fact it often was an uphill battle, with students
demanding more and administrators resisting new degrees.
Nevertheless, such programs emerged within a few years of each other
and their graduates and teachers formed professional associations
that furthered their work. Journals did their part in holding such
associations together. This is not yet so for design.
In his dinner address, we learned from Craig Vogel, President of
IDSA, that the majority of IDSA members are not likely to favor a
Ph.D. in Design. This is a sad and unfortunate reality that can only
be overcome by building a community that is supportive of advanced
degrees, perhaps by starting an Association for Design Studies
outside IDSA, or by building an active Internet community that keeps
the well-meaning designers informed and in touch with each other. I
do not think a Ph.D. makes sense without a viable community that
appreciates their work and supports scholarly contributions to design.
Too often, design is seen as a service to industry, as having no
right to claim a separate body of knowledge. This is already
inscribed in the label "industrial design." Fashion designers,
interior architects, graphic artists and architects enact this
dependency by deferring to clients, certainly for the definitions of
their problems, but often also for the criteria applicable to their
work. Consequently, research by designers is mostly geared to solve
the problems that arise in the course of developing a commissioned
product. Fundamental research, inquiries into principles of design
and the development and testing of methods to implement them are
different tasks, rarely pursued and even less often published. In a
way, design has not overcome its "parental dependency" stage. It will
have grown beyond it when it actually drives human interfaces with
technology and its clients stand in line to fund its innovations. Not
even industry's interests are served by designers, who compete for
making a product more attractive, when innovations in the domain of
the human use of artifacts are badly needed.
It has been suggested that this dependency on industry does not apply
to historical or critical scholarship on design. This is true, but,
as Sharon Poggenpohl suggested at this conference, historical and
critical scholarship on design looks at design from its outside, to
which I like to add, with categories of scholarship borrowed from
other disciplines. This stance can hardly support designers'
understanding of themselves as designers. The few design teachers
that hold Ph.D. degrees have earned them largely in art education,
art history, or English literature, often holding on to these
outside-observer perspectives.
Along the same line, design has comparatively few journals of its
own, at least in the U.S. The few that are published are rarely ever
used in classrooms. This may be traced to the fact that design
journals tend to take the aforementioned outsider's perspective on
design, which is not particularly helpful to those within it.
However, the responsibility for this state of affairs lies squarely
by the design practitioners, who do not like to read and do not write
much either, leaving the writing on design to non-practitioners.
Public presentations by designers often boil down to slide shows of
products with commentary, the oral version of picture books with
captions. This may impress clients but does nothing for the
development of a body of professional literature that the community
of designers can identify with and build upon. A counter example is
that many designers, at the onset of a project, feel the need to
create bibliographies. These are often shared but rarely ever used or
converted into survey articles. In other academic areas one would
find such bibliographies in handbooks or an article that routinely
reviews the relevant and latest literature on its subject. In the
social sciences, separate bibliographies are rarely created. Unless
designers start inquiring into their own practices, publish their
methods, tie their own work to that of others, open their
intellectual resources to colleagues and use design publications in
their own work, Š unless there is an appreciation of design
scholarship, Ph.D.s in Design may end up being very lonely and
virtually lost to design.
Apropos indigenous design knowledge, I recently had reasons to
reexamine the curriculum at the Ulm School of Design and was
astonished rereading what was offered there in the early 60s when I
studied towards a Diploma in Design: philosophy of science,
aesthetics; methodology, planning techniques, game theory, decision
theory; information theory, communication theory, semiotics; social
psychology and physiology of perception; sociology and cultural
anthropology. These areas, perhaps not as well taught as we could
teach them now, helped us to define arguable paths for design to move
forward. To be sure, today, we are faced with a vastly different
technology, for example technological virtuality; we have new
concerns, for example ecology, cultural diversity and semantics.
Still, thirty years after Ulm, it is amazing that there seems to be
no school or institute of design that makes a comparable intellectual
effort to generate design specific knowledge.
There also are no research institutes in design in which design
knowledge is formulated, investigated, written down and passed on. It
takes considerable amount of trust for funding agencies and
universities to invest in such institutes. Communication started out
with nothing more than the promise of a new approach to seeing the
world. It made good on this promise by providing compelling research
results and valuable advice to government and industry. Its case was
also made by many reputable scholars who felt attracted to this new
paradigm and became part of the communication discourse. The case for
institutes of design studies has not been made and backed up by
tangible results. As it is, most design departments are poorly
financed in contrast to departments of communication -- not to
compare them with the traditional areas of scholarship from
engineering and the humanities to medicine and management. Research
proposals by designers without a Ph.D. have a hard time competing
with those who have this certification for scholarly work.
There also are no common textbooks. Texts that do claim some
generality, often published at considerable personal expense, end up
not being used because someone else wrote them! A social pathology,
widespread among designers, surfaces in only hesitatingly
acknowledging the good ideas of others - passing them on only with
criticism or usurping them by adding some "improvements" and another
name. Its effect is that outstanding ideas become diluted to the
point of unrecognition. In other fields, there are pioneers who work
at its frontier, followed by researchers who fill in or work out the
details, followed by the writers of textbooks which are in turn read
by thousands of students, trying to work their way to the frontier.
In other fields, textbooks are a big business with publishers
pressing to get updates every few years. They create a history of the
field and a body of knowledge to build on. They provide common ground
for collaboration to take place and for cutting edge scholars to be
recognized for their contributions. My text on Content Analysis,
published 18 years ago, is translated in four languages. Design does
not need to be compared with economics, psychology or English
literature, which is taught almost everywhere and to large classes,
but engineering or medicine should offer good models -- as Bruce
Archer suggests - and so would communication seem to be. In these
areas, basic ideas need to be mastered to serve as stepping stones to
independent work. In design, there seems to be no consensus on what
the basic conceptions are and its literature seems not to produce a
shared history, a sense of continuity, cumulative growth and
coherence across educational institutions, which is constitutive of
other fields.
It has been said that design is fundamentally concerned with visual
images whereas scholarly work is based on writing. This is true, but
only superficially so. As a social practice, design needs to inspire
enough and especially the most creative people to be part of it. It
is in collaborations, in conversations, in demonstrations of the
virtues of design to non-designers, in building consensus on past
accomplishments that visual phenomena obtain their meanings. The new
media, which combine words and images and allow for an interactivity
that has been unknown until recently, could fuel design communities
and design institutions of unimaginably different kinds. But, without
designers' willingness to publish the images that matter to them, to
describe their methods and particularly their failures so that others
can learn from them, even the visual browsers of the future would be
useless. I am suggesting that it is not pictures but people that can
make design viable.
Perhaps the most critical difference between design and communication
is that much of design seems to be stuck in a paradigm that has not
changed much for the last century and no longer inspires the best
people to want to be part of it. Part of the reason lies in the
above. Let me explore some new beginnings.
In 1969, Herbert Simon wrote a remarkable proposal for The Sciences
of the Artificial. It explored the logic of making rather than of
describing things and contrasted the practices of engineers,
architects and managers with those of traditional scientists.
Although his proposal was informed largely by engineering, committed
to an old positivism, and marred by a celebration of the kind of
cognitivism that derived from his earlier work in artificial
intelligence, it does contain the seeds of a new approach to design.
It outlines a new logic of the design process. I am glad his name was
mentioned several times in this conference but I dare to claim that
his ideas have not permeated the thinking of designers, not even
today. In fact, most of the conference participants I asked had not
read his work.
Another writer whose name was mentioned, albeit in passing, is Donald
Schön, who in 1983 gave us, among other books, The Reflexive
Practitioner. Like Simon's proposal, it addresses issues of design
quite generally, but unlike Simon's, it was no longer positivist and
is modeled less on engineering decisions than on that of practical
designers with a keen understanding of what they do to get where they
want to be without adequate information.
In my view, both are attempts to liberate design from a concern for
objects, images and aesthetics to processes of creating new things,
from products that leave the factory to the practices that change the
world intentionally. They describe a mindful way of being in design.
Just like the move from journalism to communication, both redraw the
boundary of design by embracing a variety of practical professions
whose commonality was heretofore unrecognized, both describe
processes of creating a desired but not yet existing world. I see
these works as describing different dimensions of a shift in design
thinking that is comparable to the one that gave birth to
communication -- but this new paradigm needs to enter the discourse
and practices of designers in order to have a comparable effect.
I myself have been encouraged along these lines by constructivist
thinkers like Ernst von Glasersfeld, Paul Watzlawick, Wiebe E.
Bijker, Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, by second-order
cyberneticians Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, (and Gregory
Bateson), by language theorists/philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Mikhail Bakhtin, and George Lakoff. Their works
seem to converge on the idea that reality is socially constructed by
processes in which design could see itself as a conscious
participant. This idea goes back to the 18th century Italian
administrator and philosopher Gambasttista Vico. Now, it has come
back to provide a new philosophical ground for design.
Two years ago, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a
conference on the future of design at Raleigh, NC. With the
intention to develop a national infrastructure for the coming
information society, NSF missed designers' participation in creating
this future. It wanted to learn from the invited participants what
design could contribute to these technological developments and how
NSF could help design to reorganize itself to become part of that
future. These were fair but challenging questions. The deliberations
resulted in a report that discussed future technologies, outlined new
design principles for the next millenium, made recommendations on
design education, and proposed a future research agenda for design.
Regretfully, only very few designers have seen this blueprint for the
future of design. Perhaps this conference could have gone far further
had we been able to digest its proposals. Without a viable community,
we are doomed to remain in the ritual of reinventing the wheel every
time we meet.
The NSF report cited Herbert Simon but went beyond his work in
understanding design not as composing technical artifacts, but as
technologically intervening into the social fabric of their users.
Let me list the suggestions made for a national research agenda in
design:
Support the systematic articulation and elaboration of a (re)search
paradigm for design.
Assist in the development of a second-order science of the artificial
as a step toward creating truly human-centered technologies.
Aid the elaboration of a semantics for (users' or stakeholders')
interfacing with artifacts.
Encourage multi-disciplinarity: networking design centers, developing
collaborative designware, finding methods for involving stakeholders
in design processes, enabling a future kind of electronic citizenship.
Sponsor research to reconceptualize "information" interactively,
dialogically, realistically and in reference to its users.
Information should after all help redesigning the world.
Reconceptualize technology in terms of the coordination it enables among users.
Encourage the development and use of rigorous evaluative techniques
for human-centered design.
This was suggested for NSF to sponsor, but it could also serve as an
agenda that designers could embrace in order to create their own
meaningful future: research projects, institutes, professional
networks and advanced degree programs.
As the latest and possibly the most dramatic contribution towards the
new paradigm, I have to mention the ongoing semantic turn in design.
It responded to a new understanding that is emerging consequent to
the fusion of computer and communication technologies. Reinhart
Butter and I, in collaboration with several designers, educational
institutions, and industries have worked for some time towards a
human-centered design approach that takes the meaning, self-evidence
and understanding of artifacts as its central concern. We call it
"Product Semantics." From its early presentation in Innovation and
Design Issues , it has undergone several transformations and
extensions. It has generated several conferences, the last one in
February 1998 . It has been presented in several workshops all over
the world, with courses on the subject taught at Ohio State
University, the University of the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art as
well as at the University of Salford, UK. A related approach to
meaning has been developed at the Design School (HfG) Offenbach in
Germany. Without semantics, interfacing with computers would be
unthinkable. We explored and generalized what was learned from these
and similar applications and found it extremely productive to design
everyday things in terms of meaningful interfaces and claim that
meaning is axiomatic to design. In concert with evaluative techniques
that our concern for meaning rather than form or function makes
available, design is developing an unprecedented rhetorical strength
vis-a-vis older justifications and so-called harder disciplines. A
book with the subtitle A New Foundation for Design is in press . We
consider this our contribution to the shifting paradigm in design.
Let me try to sketch some dimensions of the profound shift in design
thinking we are observing:
From: product-oriented - - - > To: human-centered approaches
From: focussing on surfaces and forms - - - > To: addressing the
dynamics of interfaces
From: talking of a typical end-user - - - > To: acknowledging
diverse stakeholders
From: perfecting functionality - - - > To: affording the enactment
of multiple meanings
From: theorizing a prescriptive aesthetics - - - > To: developing
relevant user-conceptual models
From: satisfying given specifications - - - > To: being
accountable for intervening in an ecology of artifacts
From: culturally insensitive designs - - - > To: culturally
sensitive designs (acknowledging different uses)
From: imposing rational goals - - - > To: affirming users'
intrinsic motivation (fun, flow, immersion)
From: designers' understanding - - - > To: designers'
understanding of users' understanding
From: relying on past scientific findings - - - > To: creating
future truths, arguable paths toward viable futures
From: assuming authority on end-products - - - > To: assuming a
constructive role in a project with stakeholders
From: general and unspecific knowledge - - - > To: expertise in
cultures (meanings) of technology.
I see these as clearly recognizable and powerful moves to a
human-centered approach to design, an approach that puts the
understanding of technology into the center of design concerns. These
moves have been paved by numerous developments not just in technology
but also by other cultural and philosophical paradigm shifts. They
open spaces of unprecedented opportunities for design to unfold.
Five Propositions for Design (Education)
Instead of making concrete suggestions for a Ph.D. program in design,
which I had intended, let me list five propositions that have guided
my own explorations and would serve as my ground on which to
construct intellectually rich graduate curricula in design:
1. On the Axiomaticity of Meaning: I think we have to realize that
artifacts cannot exist within a culture without being meaningful to
someone (their users, commentators, including designers). Meaning is
central to human-centered design. The commitment to take meaning and
understandability as primary target for design enables designers to
claim expertise in a domain of human experiences that no other
profession has claimed for itself. We have taken it as the conceptual
foundation for an interactive semantics for design, product
semantics, interface design, etc. Relying of an irrefutable and
self-evident truth gives designers an unprecedented rhetorical
strength in justifying design vis-à-vis all other professions. This
proposition on meaning also enables designers and design educators to
draw on the wealth of available anthropological, social psychological
and linguistic knowledge.
2. On its Reflexivity: The users of technology are intelligent and
understand their own world in their own way. New artifacts always
intervene in that understanding. Under these conditions, designers of
new artifacts must understand the understanding users bring to a
technology. Designers' understanding of users understanding is an
understanding of understanding, or a second-order understanding,
which is fundamentally different from the kind of understanding the
sciences encourage. The natural sciences, for example, assume that
their object, nature, does not understand how it is being observed,
investigated and used. Today, it would be unconscionable not to
respect the reality of multiple and culturally diverse ways of
understanding. Artifacts do not have the same meaning to everyone.
Designers' understanding is necessarily different from users'
understanding, but not therefore superior, right, or the only one
that counts. Designers' commitment to a reflexive form of knowing
would clearly distinguish them from engineers, for example. It is an
exciting new form of knowing. In these terms, Simon's work is tied to
a first-order understanding, not what is suggested here.
3. On its Logic: To design is to search for or invent practical paths
to viable futures. The (inductive) logic of science is predicated on
re-search, on a repeated search of past observational records for
generalizable pattern that make the future more predictable and
certain. The logic of design, in sharp contrast, is geared to alter a
future by constructive actions. To this end, it needs to question
existing beliefs in certainties, to find the sites where
generalizations can be violated, or to overcome or undo conceptual
barriers to thought and action. The logic of making the unthinkable
possible is incompatible with the descriptive logic of science, as
Simon already noted, or opposed teleologically. While scientific
knowledge can aid design in areas where changes are unwanted, design
is less interested in past truths but in creating future truths for
others to be able to live with. Its aim is to compellingly articulate
constructive actions. This calls for the development of methodologies
that are design specific, not borrowed from scientific practice.
4. On its Social Nature: Design is a project that can succeed only if
it inspires stakeholders to actively support it. As such a project,
all design fundamentally is a social activity, one that is predicated
on enlisting the collaboration of stakeholders, experts, clients,
producers, promoters, opponents, and users and inviting them to
assume responsibilities for parts of it. Designers are always but one
part of a project, leading in what others may recognize as their
strengths, but, unlike the prevailing myth, they are never entirely
in charge of it. In any project, designers are accountable to its
stakeholders for the particular paths they propose to pursue, for the
methods used to create them, for their designs. Where people are
involved, design processes can no longer be, cognitive, computational
or mechanistic but social. Realizing the social nature of design
calls for a social, political and cultural conception of the design
process, which has to be part of responsible design education.
5. On its Discursivity: Design discourse is the medium in which the
four propositions reside and unfold into design practices. Design
discourse is not just talk. It is a process of languaging among
designers in which meaning is a central concern, second-order
understanding is common, different cultures are respected, possible
futures and alternative paths to them are contemplated, diverse
people can claim their stakes and negotiate their involvements, and
knowledge accumulates . Design discourse is not a theory of design
but the very practical process of designing and redesigning design, a
process that interrogates itself and can thus bootstrap design out of
its own institutional confinements. This paper sought to do just this.
Design stays alive as long as its discourse continues and produces
more livable futures for everyone. The development of a rich design
discourse should be the foremost aim of graduate education,
especially towards a Ph.D. in Design, whether it enlightens design
practice, structures design curricula, or shapes institutions that
can preserve it. Practicing designers may not have the resources to
address these issues in ways design institutes or design schools can.
However, if everyone contributes a small amount of their energy on
"fertilizing the field," the harvest will prove to be a benefit to
everyone. I am convinced that the emerging paradigm in design is on
its way to reorganize design as powerfully as communication theory
did when it transformed journalism into a new understanding of what
humans do. A Ph.D. in Design could create the kind of practical
thinkers that would give design the social status it deserves.
However, it does not come on its own. It needs suitable institutional
infrastructures and wholehearted commitments by practitioners "in the
field."
[1] Design in the Age of Information; A report to NSF. Design
Research Laboratory, Shool of Design, North Carolina State
University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7701.
[2] K. Krippendorff and R. Butter (Eds.) Product Semantics, (32
pages) Innovations 3,2 1984.
[3] K. Krippendorff and R. Butter (Eds.) Product Semantics, (140
pages) Design Issues 5,2, 1989.
[4] Part of the Proceedings of this conference are available on the
Internet: http://semantics-in-design.hfg-gmuend.de
[5] Die Semantische Wende; Eine Neue Grundlage für das Design.
Frankfurt/M: Form Verlag GmbH (Planned for 1999)
[6] Klaus Krippendorff (1995) Redesigning Design; An Invitation to a
Responsible Future. Pages 138-162 in Päivi Tahkokallio and Susann
Vihma (Eds.) Design - Pleasure or Responsibility? Helsinki:
University of Art and Design.
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