Dear Ken, Dick, Nicola, Jerry, Eduardo, Chris and all,

You have drawn attention to the activity of 'making' and its association
with design.

Many of the 'Art and Design' design fields emerged from experientially based
craft 'making' practices as practitioners began to add more thinking and
planning to their activities - because thinking offered benefits in terms of
dealing with more complex outcomes.

Design research can be seen as the next layer of adding additional thinking
to improve design outcomes further. 

With design research comes more scope than that addressed by practitioners.
The scope extends the potential for improving design activity in breadth, -
in which design practice is seen as one element of the mix; in depth - in
which the study of design practice goes deeper than practitioners can
subjectively perceive and deeper into the holistic abstraction of design
activity in world-scale systems; and in time - in which current design
practices can be seen as a snapshot of a dynamically changing development of
how designs for the creation of things are themselves created. (deep breath)

I suggest that in gaining the best benefits from design research, it is
crucially important to avoid reifying design practice, as it is likely to
limit and compromise the benefits and contributions that design research can
make to improving designed outputs.

In a plenary at Wonderground (Love 2006 - see below), I sketched out some of
the reasons why there is a problem with using professional practice as the
reference point for design research. 

A more practical explanation is that there are multiple precedents as other
design sub-fields have changed, grown and become more effective. Their
growth has required them to un-reify professional design practice along with
their adoption of the insights from design research and research from other
fields.

For example, for most of its existence, engineering has been regarded as an
Art, not a science. Many universities, including Cambridge in the UK,
awarded the Bachelor of _Art_ as the degree-level qualification in
engineering. I have a Bachelor of Art in engineering, as will many others on
this list. It changed the year after I qualified to students having the
option to choose a Bachelor of Art or a Bachelor of Science. At that time
and before, engineering design was seen as an artistic pursuit in which
designers were informed primarily by experience and intuition and
secondarily by (relatively unreliable) mathematical models. People studying
and practicing in engineering divided between those interested in designing
and those interested in mathematical modelling and research.

Over time, in terms of the quality of designed outcomes, particularly for
those design problems that would fit Rittel's definition of 'wicked
problems', the contributions to design activity of research and mathematical
modelling proved significantly more effective than continuing with the
established professional design practices that heavily on experience and
intuition. This is reflected in differences in remuneration.

There was tremendous resistance to this transition, and its effects are
still being felt as traditional forms of engineering design practice are
being routinised, computerised and automated and traditional design skills
(and designers) ousted. 

A recent example given to me by design managers in the oil and gas sector
here in Australia is the radical transition in design practice resulting
from new CAD software for piping. Piping layout design, particularly on
brownfield ocean going sites, has been considered a 'black art'. Thinking
and feeling one's way across very complex spatially limited three
dimensional pathways with multiple constraints of human access, repair, heat
loss, pipe size changes and uncertainties in location of other components
(because of previous manufacturing errors) and uncertainties about future
plans and safety standards required intuition and a feel for the
characteristics of each particular situation. The drafting of design
solutions is longwinded, complex and required deep guild-like secret
knowledge of regulations, standards, engineering calculations and design
heuristics. 

Now, this year, CAD software can deal with the same 'wicked' uncertainties
and complexities to produce designs rapidly and automatically from symbolic
process diagrams. 

The design solutions produce significant benefit for most constituencies.
The number of designers needed is, however, significantly reduced.

The gains have depended on design research that put aside existing design
practices.

Focusing on professional design practice leads to a blindness. In Art and
Design domains, many of the improvements in design outcomes have come from
identifying the breadth of routine design practice and automating it using
computers. The major technical device used in routinising and automating
design in Art and Design domains and reducing skill levels to 'press the
button' and get the effect' is the Mac computer. The Mac can be regarded as
scientific reductionism in a pretty case that titivates the designer into
believing that they are being more rather than less creative. Thinking of
the Mac in this way reminds me of situationist Larry Law and his cartoons in
his one-penny Spectacular Times booklets - 'The pill is safe. The poison is
in the sugar coating'.

I can see your point that professional design practices are important to
those working in the particular art and design fields - especially from the
point of view of those with an interest in avoiding retraining themselves or
having their work replaced by automation.

Improving design outcomes is however really important to the rest of the
world! 

Design research in the Art and Design' design domains likely to continue to
be relatively ineffective if it continues to be locked down by a myopic
focus on yesterday's professional practices.

Sargent (1990), put it succinctly, reminding design researchers and
designers that in terms of identifying radical advancements in design
activity, designers are not the experts - they are the subjects of study.

Like other design 'arts' before, it is likely that many of the previously
craft-based design sub-fields in the 'Art and Design' arena will follow
engineering. Interior architecture is already travelling down that path, the
graphic design fields are close behind.

To move on, using design research to facilitate improved outcomes for others
requires making some distance from current design practices. 

It also requires preparedness by designers to let the old ways go.

Best wishes,

Terry

Love, T. (2006). A Systems Analysis of the Problem of Professional Practice
in Design: "Why Mac Computer Systems Reduce Creativity and Inhibit Quality
Improvement of Novel Innovative Design" - Plenary.WonderGround, Designing
interdisciplinary discourse, conspiring for Design Leadership, Design
Research Society International Conference 2006 Lisbon, Portugal: IADE -
Instituto Artes Visuais Design Marketing. 
A preprint of the paper is available at 
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2006/prob_profprac.htm 


Sargent, P. (1990). "Give us the tools and we'll give you doorknobs." Times
Higher Education Supplement((30.3.90)): p. 15.