From: Elizabeth Tunstall <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:11:34 -0500
To: "Lubomir S. Popov" <[log in to unmask]>, <[log in to unmask]>
Conversation: Design as Margaret Mead
Subject: Re: Design as Margaret Mead
Hi Lubomir,
I think you raise significant issues about desires of designers, pressures
of the market, and design outcomes. Yet, only some designers only want to
just design; some want to do a little research for personal inspiration for
design or to solve a specific set of design problems; and some want to do a
lot of research to formulate the problem itself. There are pull and push
pressures that have led designers into research.
Pull is the general interest in the challenges of problem solving and the
“power/control” of being able to define the problem. The push is that
industry does not want to have to hire separate designers and researchers to
increase productivity and reduce costs. Now this happens in large
organizations as much as small, at least in the US in the high-tech and
marketing sectors where I have practiced.
IDEO has the concept of the “T-person” as one that has a deep area of
knowledge (ex. Design) and general expertise in a wide range of subjects
(Design, research, biz strategy, project management, engineering). Hybrids
happen when the proportion of two or more areas are pretty even. At the
beginning you can have 50% knowledge in both or more, after 20 years you
may have 100% (in which you are a true genius.) Tee hee.
My question is that if you are a designer who wants to do a lot of research
to formulate a problem are you not venturing into territories already
inhabited by anthropologist, psychologist, business strategists, and others
who live at the front end of that process. If you set up home there, do you
not become an anthrodesigner or something else. My concern is with a said
designer who wants to claim that they are doing design “not in the Herbert
Simon sense we all do” but as the extended craft production (because the
claims they are making about designerly thinking are gained from their
studio based training not from their extensive exposure to differentiated
but perhaps not as different ways of thinking from other disciplines.)
So the programming + design case is similar to the challenges in an
anthropology + design case, you have first generation that will challenge
it, second generation that will embrace it, and perhaps a third generation
in an Oedipal struggle for identity try and kill the stronger parent.
Thanks for responding. You sometimes send this out into the ether and wonder
if your tree has fallen in the forest.
Dori
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