Dear Rob and Terry,
For me, the point of design research is to find ways to subject
different processes and issues to analytical inquiry from several
directions. The challenge of reflective practice involves bringing
assumptions forward.
In one of his notes on integration, Peter quoted John Chris Jones's
statement, "If reason comes first and intuition second, then
intuition declines to come."
While this may not be the case in every instance, it does point to
the value of linking intuition and reason for good results in all
areas of practice, both the professional practice of design and the
practice of research.
IMHO, we could go a long way to reducing the failure rate of designed
artifacts and services if designers were to practice reasoned inquiry
as well as seeking intuitive global optimized solutions. The point of
adding design research and training to design education is giving
today's students the skills they need for better professional
practice as designers. Traditional design education has always been
strong on craft, form skills, and intuition. The missing issues
include work in such fields as systems thinking. One must be able to
work with systems to generate an optimized global solution. That, in
turn, requires logical, analytical, and rhetorical skills.
The greatest single twentieth-century example of an optimized global
solution would probably be Einstein's two theories of relativity, the
special theory and the general theory. Einstein developed his
theories using intuition. Einstein's intuition was an educated
physical intuition based on prior advances in physics, and a deep
classical understanding of how particles, objects, systems, and
fields behave in physical terms. Once Einstein developed an intuitive
insight, he subjected his insight to a series of rigorous tests and
critical procedures.
Designed systems and artifacts more often resemble biological
entities, evolutionary systems, or non-linear physical systems than
the linear physical systems of classical physics or even relativistic
physics. Even so, the rigorous inquiry involved in systems thinking,
evolutionary biology, or complexity theory is a step that moves far
beyond pure intuition.
It is difficult to find only one solution to all problems in an
optimized global solution if your only resource is intuition. This
explains the extraordinarily high failure rate of design projects.
In this sense, Terry raises significant issues.
Educated intuition is the product of many kinds of experience.
Einstein felt that one important foundation for his mastery of
intuitive physics was his early experience mastering the principles
of Euclidean geometry. It is my view that analysis, rhetoric, and
logic can play a similar role in helping designers to educate their
intuition to the point that intuition leads to the optimized global
solutions we require for effective products and services.
Best regards,
Ken
Terry Love wrote:
>"It's serious question to ask why designers conflate the TWO questions
>(or answers) into ONE ? It seems that designers do this automatically,
>consistently and without any awareness that they have done so or that
>it might be analytically flawed. What are the underlying reasons?
>Habit? Lack of clear thinking skills? Lack of perception? Reading
>problems? "
Rob Curedale wrote:
>"I am not familiar with the details of your study but could this
>difference show that design is about optimizing many unrelated variables
>to find an optimized global solution rather than following a strictly
>logical path of serial yes/no answers? For a designer the answer is a
>red hammer not a color and a hammer because there is little logical
>connection between the seperate inputs to a design problem such as cost,
>color, usability but the designer must somehow unconciously find only
>one solution to all problems."
--
Professor Ken Friedman
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Design Research Center
Denmark's Design School
+47 67.55.73.23 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
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