Michael Clark: [PHD-DESIGN] UCI School of Design Proposal-Comments by M
P Ranjan

Dear Dr Michael Clark

Coming from a non-designer background your discourse on the virtues of
design as a future university discipline clearly show that design is and
can be appreciated by those who come into close contact with it, and in
this case your involvement in the School of Design proposal, seems to
have strengthened your own convictions that design will have a role
within the University and that it will play an important role in
providing the binding within the interstices of the numerous disciplines
that find a home at the University, as an academic discipline in it own
right. I do believe that design will need to find many champions outside
the community of designers who value the activity and its potential
offerings if we are to see design taking an important and necessary
position as an academic discipline that can produce new and vital
knowledge for the future of humanity as a whole. Here I would draw your
attention to the claims made by a fellow Californian, Prof. Christopher
Alexander, in his many writings, including his most recent book that
design is the discipline of the future that would help provide us with a
means to develop our future world-view just as science had enabled
humanity to form new understanding of the world which still holds sway
over all of us.

Before I add my comments to your paper I would like to thank Ken and the
UC Irvine team for inviting me to be involved more closely with the
deliberations at this online conference and let me tell you in no
uncertain terms that it has been an extremely stimulating and satisfying
intellectual experience for me and I believe that this event will send
its ripples down the design academia to return with renewed vigour the
call for deep change and deeper reflection in design practise, which
only a place located within a University (perhaps) can provide.

The scale of your thinking dwarfs anything that I have been involved in
over the past thirty odd years of design education, having taught at a
very small Institute (60 faculty and at most 350 students [now 500
students]) while the UC Irvine is dreaming of a place, including all
disciplines, of upward of 1500 faculty and 30,000 students when it
reaches mature proportions!! Design activity that is located within such
an active setting with close proximity and with a structured
collaboration with the other disciplines of the University will
certainly create a platform from which much value can be derived by all
those who are engaged in these activities, both designers and
non-designers. The new role of design as an integrating dicipline will
need to find a bigger space for non-designers and encourage the massive
cross-linking of expertise that will be locally available in new and
meaningfull ways to further the research agenda of the University as a
whole. Design can and will provide the glue that can bind such research
and much value can be derived if this scheme proceeds as planned.

Design as you aptly call it, is indeed a "syncretic discipline". Design
has its body of knowledge that needs to be articulated through sustained
reflection on the practise of design in many domains of need from which
a body of robust theory will indeed emerge. You have said, I quote "The
integrative power of design as a conceptual process should be an object
of knowledge in itself and would certainly be a primary topic of study
for faculty in Design Studies." - Unquote. The role that the practise
and study of design processes and transactions have in the building of
future knowledge is only (just about) being discovered and appreciated
by those outside the community of designers and the location of the
proposed School of Design within the University at Irvine will give an
impetus to the articulation of this role in greater detail. In a recent
course that I conducted for a group of furniture design students dealing
with systems thinking, I got these students to build a model to
represent human knowledge in a visual form which could show both the
location of each discipline as well as the sequential emergence of each
along an extended timeline. Their model was very interesting and I will
take a few moments to describe this (in the absence of the picture)
model that was collaboratively built by the team after much debate and
discussions with local experts and with numerous references for our
Knowledge Management Centre (as our library is now called). The time
line works like the ripples in a pond when a stone or pebble is cast
into the centre. The point of contact is the centre of the circle and
the timeline extends outward from the beginning of time to the current
day using a sort of geometrical progression for the scale. The
con-centric rings, each of one centimetre, represent a period of time
that becomes smaller as it reaches the outer perimeter. Over this was
superimposed a radial diagram with Philosophy at the centre, language,
mathematics and "Visuality" in the next circle, and all the disciplines
falling outside these areas while being radially aligned to each of the
inner concepts mentioned above. For instance, the sciences sat in the
space above mathematics, while the disciplines of sociology and
psychology sat above language while art and design was located above
"visuality" by using the meaning offered by Prof Gui Bonsiepe as the
framework for this model. In the outer space the names of key
contributors (Thinkers) were distributed along the ripple timeline, each
aligned to the discipline mentioned in the overlapped radial diagram.
This assignment gave the students an opportunity to research "all of
human knowledge" at least what was available in the history of science
and language and art, and to try and organise the findings into a
representation that had an agreed structure after discussions with
numerous experts (many outside the NID campus). Further, using this
diagram, we were able to locate disciplines that could contribute to
some difficult design situations and needs the tools and processes that
traditional design lacked or did not use in an active manner as yet. I
learned a lot through this experience and the students too came out of
this three week long assignment with a feeling of having achieved a
better grasp of the huge field of knowledge that they would need to
interact with in a selective manner, with discrimination and judgement,
in their understanding of complexity and in their choice of appropriate
design strategies that reflected the context that they are being asked
to serve. This is a very convoluted description of a fairly simple
diagram, but I can send a jpeg picture to anyone who is interested in
seeing the model developed by the students if they ask for it offline.
Our understanding of how human knowledge is interconnected is still very
sketchy but with design getting an active place in the University one of
the key benefits will be in the emergence of clarity of the way these
special disciplines can work together in a mode of "Synthesis" rather
that the mode usual of "Analysis."

This is what people like Leornado da Vinci, William Blake and Frank
Gehry have perhaps been able to bring to their work through intuitive
means and individual brilliance which we now seek to bring in a
systematic manner to all design tasks.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my office at NID
12 December 2003 at 5.05 pm IST