Dear Klaus,
In response to..
<snip> it is important to point this out, again and again,
as there are all kinds of activities -- terry's several hundred versions of
design -- of improving something that are not necessarily human-centered, or
better said, that manage to reduce the human interest in something to
technical terms and treat them thereafter that way.
<endsnip>
I'm not sure what you are meaning. Can you clarify it a bit.
The sub-field research indicates that the proportions of design subfields that are specifically centred on human issues (e.g. childcare program design, pedagogical design, palliative care program design) are around 40-50% of the total niumbers of sub-fields and are the area of design activity that appears to be increasing fastest. These are the subfields of design that focus on human and social issues rather than technical issues. The traditional Art and Design subfields (around 40) comprise 5-10% and technical subfields around 40-50%. Some of the areas of "art and Design' are not particularly human-focused and some of the technical areas of design are very human-focused. There is some fuzziness in classification for subfields such as information design that can be addressed in a variety of ways. This suggests that there is a substantial commitment to human-focused design activity hand in hand with addressing technical issues.
In your discussion of 'engineering' and technical, I think its worth making two distinctions. The first is to distinguish between 'engineering' and 'engineering design'. Most people I know in the communities of practice of engineers and engineering designers make this distinction. The second is between early forms of professional tertiary engineering education (say pre 1970) that were primarily technical, and more recent forms of engineering education that have a much broader human-focused agenda.
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr. Terence Love
Curtin Research Fellow
Design-focused Research Group
Dept of Design, Curtin University
PO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845
Tel/Fax +61(0)8 9305 7629 (home office)
+61 (0)8 9266 4018 (university office)
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Visiting Research Fellow
Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development
Management School, Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
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____________________
Conselho Cientifico
UNIDCOM
IADE, Lisboa
Portugal
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