Dear Friends,

The dialogue between David and Rosan draws me briefly out of hiding.
This is an extraordinarily important series of issues.

David's paper and his discussion of Wittgenstein suggest a greater
interest in causal explanation and theory than David himself seems to
acknowledge.

What is philosophizing but the search for explanation? Wittgenstein's
two great periods of thought addressed questions of thinking and
language formation in different ways. Neither was practical or
applied in any direct sense. For a great university such as Cambridge
to afford a Wittgenstein requires exactly what David calls "the
political economy of our universities or museums - the great train
spotting and stamp collecting institutions of our time."

Generating design knowledge requires deep explanation as much as it
requires pragmatic action. Practice and reflection, action and
theorizing on the results of action unite in effective theory-in-use.
Effective theory also considers the system within which we think and
act. Consequently, "knowing what" and "knowing how" increasingly
involve "knowing why."

This raises questions on design knowledge and philosophy of design
that will not be answered in a brief note.

Here are two quick thoughts before returning to my keyboard.

The first is that the relation between pragmatism and theorizing is
subtle and far-reaching. A review of the early pragmatist writings
bring up issues that have occasionally been forgotten since, that
pragmatism involves both a search for effective action AND a search
for reasoned principles on which we may know that action is genuinely
effective as opposed to merely seeming effective.

Designers of all kinds -- engineers, government policy makers, and
business executives as well as industrial designers, graphic
designers, and the like - often make what we label pragmatic
short-term decisions to solve local problems at the price of
introducing worse effects to the larger system these decisions
influence.

It is the nature of human societies and the need for decisions that
this must always be the case.

One long-term remedy is slowly to develop a stock of knowledge that
is not pragmatic. This stock of knowledge is, rather, theoretical,
and it seeks to understand, to know, to explain without immediate
consequence.

Consider the world of those pragmatic designers known as politicians.
George W. Bush is a good example. Mr. Bush is one of the most
influential designers in the world today. Many of us believe his
policies to be narrow and shortsighted. Others argue that he is
simply acting as an executive reaching pragmatic solutions for
problems with immediate consequences. Both statements are true when
framed in the larger fact that these political decisions have
long-term consequences that counteract the short-term benefits of his
actions. If Mr. Bush were more sensitive to the long-term, systemic
consequences of his short-term actions, he might think and act
differently.

Given that this requires an excursion into the world of theory - with
occasional stops in "the great train spotting and stamp collecting
institutions of our time" - this is not likely to happen.

There are good examples of pragmatic thinkers with a feeling for
theory. One of these was C. S. Peirce, a central figure in
pragmatism. Peirce was a mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He
was deeply concerned BOTH with thinking and acting based on practical
consequences, AND with knowing how to think and act so that the
practical consequence would be as it was intended.

W. Edwards Deming had a similar perspective. Trained as a
mathematical physicist, Deming's theoretical and philosophical
approach to innovation and quality control helped to reshape Japanese
industry during the second half of the twentieth century. Deming
argued for theoretical premises as the foundation of practical
results: "Experience alone, without theory, teaches management
nothing about what to do to improve quality and competitive position,
nor how to do it" he wrote in describing the problems of industries
that were no longer working in the West. "If experience alone would
be a teacher, then one may well ask why are we in this predicament?
Experience will answer a question, and a question comes from theory."
It is not experience, but our interpretation and understanding of
experience that leads to knowledge. Knowledge, therefore, emerges
from critical inquiry and scientific knowledge arises from the
theories that allow us to question and learn from the world around
us. This also involves the search for explanation

The second thought is simple. Our field is young. Fields such as
mathematics, and medicine have been developing their knowledge base
for five thousand years. Physics and philosophy began twenty-five
centuries ago. Even such modern fields as sociology and psychology
have been around for two or three hundred years.

The idea that we can afford NOT to look for causal explanation in a
field as young as design would leave us where other fields were in
their infancy.

I do not argue that everyone must seek causal explanation. I argue
that the search is valuable, and that we will not make serious
progress without it.

Without the search for theory and stable knowledge, there is no way
to know whether something works in practical terms - or whether we
merely think it does. We have all seen far too many examples of
design solutions that seem to their designers to work when anyone
with a larger, systemic view and a deeper knowledge of theory can see
that these solutions do not work well in comparison with possible
alternatives. Plausible theories often explain why this is so.

Anyone with no interest in seeking causal explanation is free to
avoid that kind of research. If however, we really want to "stand on
one square inch of firm ground," then we - like Peirce - must seek a
way to know that something is genuinely so, rather than merely
appearing to be so.

This takes the long, slow progress made by theory construction,
testing, debate, and all the difficulties implicit in the work of
"our universities or museums - the great train spotting and stamp
collecting institutions of our time."

This is a vastly oversimplified statement, to be sure. I hope to
expand on these ideas in the future. In the meantime, I will vote
with Rosan in seeking causal explanation as one component of design
knowledge.

If some people do not want to seek explanatory knowledge, that is
just fine. Some people work as physicians: they engage in clinical
diagnosis and the cure patients. Some people work in medical
research. They seek causal explanation.

The physicians of the 1800s argued that their practical knowledge
constituted "one square inch of firm ground" in comparison with the
theories of Semmelweiss, Lister, and Pasteur. They did not want to
wash their hands before attending patients or bother with basic
antiseptic practice because they did not believe that microbes had
anything to do with disease. Today's physicians take microbe theory
and antiseptic practice for granted. This is not because it is now
demonstrated. This is because no discovery and no practical results
have had greater or more widespread benefit in the history of
medicine. There have been discoveries that are more dramatic and more
astonishing medical results, but few have affected as many people as
positively as the simple practices that followed from the theories
that some physicians once labeled as "castles in the air."

In every field, some of us are eager to know why things happen. I am
happy to see today's physicians -- and today's designers - achieve
reasonably effective results based on yesterday's discoveries. I am
interested in building a foundation for tomorrow's practice, a
practice that will hopefully more effective than activities that seem
today to be based on "one square inch of firm ground."

If I seem to be beating David over the head with his own words, I
will add that his papers on design theory are far subtler than his
post in response to Rosan. I agree with David on many things, but I
disagree with the tone and impact of these specific words.

Best regards,

Ken

--

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