Friends,

Three posts on philosophy of design and design theory caught my eye
yesterday. Terry Love posited the internal human activity of design
process as the only subject of design research. Anne-Marie Willis
proposed an alternative approach: how designed artifacts act in the
world. Dick Buchanan argued for pluralism as the way forward in
building our field.

Internal design process and the relations between artifacts and the
world two issues among many. The field is far larger.

The field of design is interdisciplinary, and a wide range of issues
must necessarily interest those who inquire into design. Each of us
has our own areas of inquiry. This is important for the field, since
there is much work to be done filling in the gaps in what we know.

My interests, for example, include epistemology, ontology, and theory
construction in design. This began to interest me in the late 1980s
when I observed a lack of progress or development in our ability to
understand design. I thought that if one could develop a philosophy
and theory of design independent of a target field within which any
given designer might practice, it might shed light on many issues,
design processes and how artifacts work in the world among them.

A philosophy of design requires ontology, epistemology, and a
philosophy of design science. To achieve this and to go further, we
also need to understand theory construction and knowledge creation.
This, in turn, requires that design research overlap other fields.
Psychologists, management scholars, and others deal with some of
those fields. Our challenge is to see what we need to use from our
perspective. At times, this allows or even requires borrowing and
using work from other disciplines. This benefits us, since it puts
more brains to work on our problems.

In the early 1990s, I developed a taxonomy for four domains of design
knowledge. The first domain involved the process skills required to
work effectively with design knowledge, including problem solving,
interaction, research skills, analysis, rhetoric, and logic. The
other three were substantive domains: the human, the artifact, and
the environment.

The latest version of the taxonomy (Friedman 2000: 11) contains some
130 or so rubrics, and there could be more.

The scope and scale of design fields is larger than most people
recognize. When conference reviewers listed their expert subject
fields for a recent event, unprompted responses revealed over 500
different terms. For an earlier project, Terry Love and I accumulated
over 650 terms. When we integrated these lists, it will be
interesting to see how many terms we have in the complete list.

It seems reasonable to say that the realms of design knowledge,
philosophy of design, and design theory ought properly to be as large
as the range of interests and activities in the field. In fact, it
seems necessary, given the gaps we have yet to fill.

Philosophy of design is a specific field in its own right. In May
2002, Design Studies published a special issue on philosophy of
design that remains an unsurpassed resource. Per Galle, one of the
editors of this special issue is now director of CEPHAD - the Centre
for Philosophy and Design. Per (Galle 2007) adapted his editorial for
the CEPHAD web site.

The eight issues he describes are, "conceptualizations of design,
methodology of design, criteria for quality in design, the
phenomenology of design, designers bridging the gap between function
and structure of an artifact, negotiation and persuasion in
collaborative design, paradigm shifts and history of design thinking,
metatheory of design." he does not stop there. The article has an
appendix in which he described many more.

For those who wish to learn more, Denmark's Design School hosts the
CEPHAD web site, a growing source of free resources in philosophy and
design:

http://www.dkds.dk/%7BC26441C2-8C43-4DC6-9BDA-115F8D95D6F4%7D

Warm wishes,

Ken

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References

Friedman, Ken. 2000. "Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into
Practice." In IDATER 2000: International Conference on Design and
Technology Educational Research and Development. P. H. Roberts and E.
W. L. Norman, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department of Design and
Technology, Loughborough University, 5-32.

Galle, Per. 2007. "Philosophy of Design. An Editorial Introduction."
CEPHAD - Centre for Philosophy and Design. A point of contact between
philosophy and design research. URL:
http://www.dkds.dk/%7B3F51F077-F813-4684-A31C-F65694AEF08F%7D
Date Accessed 2007 March 31.


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Prof. Ken Friedman
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo

Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen

+47 46.41.06.76    Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95    Tlf Privat

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