Gunnar,
>
> What other disciplines slice through all columns of some groups of
> fields?
Recently I read The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable
World, by Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman. I also just finished the
book Managing Creativity and Innovation, part of the Harvard Business
Essentials series. The Design Way points out that design thinking
requires a systems approach that needs pieces of information from many
different specializations, no surpprize to anyone, but Managing
Creativity pointed out something that I hadn't thought about very much.
To specialists, often a designer or innovator will look like a
dilettante, just sampling from the knowledges without engaging or
understanding them deeply. The Design Way argues that design is
autonomous as a field of investigation, and not dilettantism, because
it uses a systems approach to engage broad categories of information as
a kind of knowledge, or almost as a knowledge process, that is equal to
specialization. Managing Creativity talks about the importance of
balancing work groups between specialists and generalists in order to
facilitate innovation. In it, the author didn't go so far as to define
what roles were specialist and what generalist, but I might suspect the
author would define engineers, chemists, and prepress operators (among
others) as specialists, while designers would fill the other category.
In an attempt to pull some threads together - education - defining
design - types of design, I might pose the following:
- education slices through multiple disciplines like design
- general studies departments should not be called general studies, but
rather "specialist studies" because they employ specialists in a number
of fields: english specialist, mathematics specialist, earth science
specialist, etc.
-design studies, because of its use of the "slice" or the systems
approach to cohere the "slice" into something that is more than a
slice, might be more general than "general studies"
-other disciplines that are teleological (another thesis from The
Design Way) as in a discipline whose "actions are considered in
relation to their ends or utility" (loosely quoted from the book) are
like design.
- if the above is the case, then law is like design more than sociology
or philosophy because the actions of these are possibly more
interpretive rather than constructive. A sociological study may be
done to understand youth culture to better market to youth culture.
the actions and utility would be in the marketing rather than the
sociology...
Mulling...
Alan
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