Dear Ken and others:
Ken, you have made a good case for research on products and their
social consequences being done in other fields. It shows us that that
there is a lot happening. It also points to the fact that these
folks have been drawn only rarely to the design research conferences
such that there is no broad discourse on design and its social
consequences that touches on all these separate areas of research. If
we are interested in how design impacts the social world, then we
need to build a framework within the design research community that
connects to these separate fields. Your point about teaching
organization design to design students is a good one. In fact, it is
a good idea to provide a broad framework for various design
possibilities while still instilling specific skills. Yet, I don't
know that much of this is being done. I also wonder how much of this
broad research base guides students who seek doctorates in design. I
suspect that there are some disconnects within our design research
community that make it difficult for us to access all this other work
and bring it to the attention of our undergraduate and graduate
students in design. Perhaps we need more folks to look at design
synthetically and pull references from various fields. That would
mean raising larger and broader questions about design and its
consequences. I would certainly welcome that. While I assume that all
disciplines are overwhelmed by too much research; i.e. the Modern
Language Association which certainly no longer has a coherent map of
literature and its study, the challenge of overcoming this situation
remains for all, including those of use in design. Perhaps we need
more studies on broad topics that can help to frame research agendas
for others. One way to encourage this would be to invite synthetic
thinkers from other fields to speak at design research conferences.
We as a design research community face our own design problem, which
is to structure our broad field of inquiry to take advantage of all
the good work that Ken has told us about.
Victor
--
Victor Margolin
Professor Emeritus of Design History
Department of Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
935 W. Harrison St.
Chicago, IL 60607-7039
Tel. 1-312-583-0608
Fax 1-312-413-2460
website: www.uic.edu/~victor
|