Just some musing ...
In the last ten days we had several posts oriented or tangent to the
interdisciplinary nature of design research. Most of the posts looked
at interdisciplinarity as a way to bridge gaps. This is a typical
disciplinary position -- bridging or overlapping. It comes from the
disciplinary organization of science and conceptualizes this problem
from a disciplinary perspective. In all cases, such approach
is better than working within strict disciplinary boundaries.
However, the disciplinary nature of the approach pushes down its ceiling.
The issue is how to transcend the disciplinary organization of
science and build a new organization of inquiry for design. This is
not only a problem for the design professions, but for all
professions as well, or at least for most of the professions engaged
with some kind of engineering. I mention this in order to delineate
the enormity of such endeavor. The problem is not resolved in any of
the professions. Some professions have limited success, others none at all.
There are a number of approaches in preliminary stages, ranging from
organizing individual agents in a team to inventing new
methodologies. In the 1970's, there were several attempts to resolve
this problem, but I haven't heard yet about a viable solution. One of
the proposals was very abstract, in its initial stage. It suggested
to build a conceptual configuration of the object of study and to use
this configuration for organizing the research effort. It talked
about aspects/facets of the object of study, but stopped short of
talking in disciplinary terms. (The concept of interdisciplinary
research is still an outgrowth of disciplinary thinking.) Talking in
non-disciplinary terms was the biggest success of this approach.
However, I haven't seen it operationalized to the point that it can be used.
Kind regards,
Lubomir Popov, Ph.D.
|