Re your interesting point/quote

One of the problems with system design for networked businesses runs
parallel to this.

The technical 'architecture' has to be aligned with/built around the human
architecture of
business systems (cognitive, social,organisational, cultural etc)

The design secret would seem to be the ability to map and then align these
coupled systems
in ways that create synergy. *Finding the problem* is central to this, and
requires the ability to explore the 'grammar' of other systems, the critical
objectives, and the points of interface where synergy or conflict will arise
in use

Design in a business context is often done to meet techical criteria of
excellence - robust design, on time, within cost etc without the wish to
uncover the conflicts and the gaps in knowledge that are implicit in being
*open-ended* and identifying the real problems inherent in designing one
system to meet the conflicting needs of diverse communities.

Re Lorraine's point about the design curriculum - an increasing amount of
design is done by people who have a technical rather than a design training,
and their choices are also shaped by
criteria and rewards of a single discipline, rather than a project brief.



...............
Plug all the numbers in and you should be able to get to some sort of
optimal 'design'.  Easy to assess for the teacher, and easy to do for the
student (once you've learnt the trick). This is how many problems are taught
in engineering curriculums worldwide.

Bucciarelli suggested that resetting the problem to be open-ended, that is
letting the students go their own way with the problem - who is the user
group? what colour should it be? which companies make diving boards? -
proved much more stimulating and satisfactory.  The students, in actual
fact, have to 'find' what the problem is.
...............


-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf
Of peter lloyd
Sent: 08 December 2003 17:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Response to Christena Nippert-Eng


Hi Christena and everyone,

Re: One dimensional bridge-building problems...

Christina writes: "I discovered that [the] civil engineering department
hosts a bridge-building contest each year.  Having experienced, read,
thought and written about bridges for some time, I was quite interested in
this event.  Well, it wasn’t as interesting as I thought.  They build these
models and then a prize is awarded to the bridge builders whose model holds
the most weight before collapsing."

At a conference we held at TU Delft in 2001 MIT Professor Larry Bucciarelli
presented a paper describing how engineering design education could be
transformed if engineers were able to look at problems in a more open-ended
fashion. Bucciarelli used an example of a diving board. As a traditional
engineering problem it is all about dimensions, moments, spring tension,
materials, and forces.  Plug all the numbers in and you should be able to
get to some sort of optimal 'design'.  Easy to assess for the teacher, and
easy to do for the student (once you've learnt the trick). This is how many
problems are taught in engineering curriculums worldwide.  Bucciarelli
suggested that resetting the problem to be open-ended, that is letting the
students go their own way with the problem - who is the user group? what
colour should it be? which companies make diving boards? - proved much more
stimulating and satisfactory.  The students, in actual fact, have to 'find'
what the problem is.  The
teacher is available to guide the inquiry and make suggestions rather than
to say 'right' or 'wrong'.  Time-consuming but satisfying work as nascent
engineers find out that there are more to problems than numbers.

This is all well and good, but nothing new for industrial designers and
architects where such problems are the norm.  Richard Coyne, professor of
Architecture at Edinburgh University was invited to respond to the paper,
and took Bucciareli's thinking in another direction.  I quote:

"One of the definitions of education that I like is: ‘a process that makes
the strange familiar and the familiar strange’.  For some philosophies of
education it is the negotiation within that space, between the familiar and
the strange, that learning is able to take place.  Looking at what you’ve
said in terms of strangeness and familiarity… perhaps we could see a
teenagers experience of a diving board; something between terror and
delight, something about the smell of chlorine and response to movement;
that is a familiar experience with which a student comes to an engineering
degree.  And then that somehow is rendered strange, so that the diving board
becomes an object of calculation, something that appears in diagrams as
strange symbols, subjected to algebraic calculations with variables under
notions of constraint.  Then of course you suggested that learning does take
place in that rendering of something strange, but then you were going
another step and suggesting another
level of strangeness perhaps, where the object under study becomes something
to do with mass production ? not the way you’d normally think of diving
boards.  There are issues to do with variation and negotiation and
discussion, that a diving board could be the subject of a journal and so on.
I was just wondering, in this trajectory of strangeness, how an architecture
course might treat a diving board, not all architecture schools are the same
of course, but thinking about some of my colleagues, what they might do with
the problematic of the diving board ? they might see it as a diving board
for very very fat people, or maybe a diving board for lemmings, or maybe an
object for diving into freshly picked cotton, or perhaps one can imagine a
line-up of formation swimming Phillipe Starck lemon squeezers, or perhaps
design researchers queuing up for their just desserts.  So I only have one
question and that is: why are engineers so serious? "

A nice response, I thought, that opens up a world of designing behind a
supposedly simple object.

The paper and discussion was published in Design Studies Volume 24, number 3
pp 295-311.  Videos of the Bucciarelli's presentation and Coynes discussion
can be found at
http://www.io.tudelft.nl/research/dic/virtual%20symposium.html

Keep up the good discussion,

Peter Lloyd

**************************************

Dr Peter Lloyd
Associate Professor in Design Theory and Methodology
School of Industrial Design Engineering
TU Delft
Landbergstraat 15
2628 CE Delft
The Netherlands

Tel: +31 15 278 9054
Fax: +31 15 278 7662

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