Friends,

A couple of quick thoughts. The term discipline generally describes a 
field of study, or an academic subject area. This includes -- as 
Merriam-Webster's notes -- "training that corrects, molds, or 
perfects the mental faculties or moral character." That is, one 
studies the disciplines that lead to professional practice -- design, 
law, medicine, etc.

Once embarked in professional practice, one is not engaged in a 
discipline but in a profession or a field. If one goes back for 
advanced study or to teach, one returns to the discipline.

Thus at schools and universities, one must seek interdisciplinary 
approaches. In professional practice, we struggle with the ambiguous 
bundle of challenges that come our way: they are generally 
interdisciplinary whether we like it or not.

Johann raised the question of foundationalism. While I'd have to say 
that there are probably no foundations to design practice (the field) 
in any pragmatic sense, there is a history. Seeking conceptual 
foundations is one responsibility of research, whether or not we can 
achieve them -- something that may be impossible. Such fields as law, 
economics, or medicine emerged from practitioner fields and fields of 
inquiry into disciplines through the struggle to develop foundations 
and conceptual rigor. To be sure, this has been a struggle, with 
economics in some ways returning to its narrative origins to gain the 
depth that rigorous mathematical modelling sometimes stripped away.

To give up the search for difficult knowledge and fundamental ideas 
is to relinquish research for some other activity. That activity may 
be good, useful, and important in its own right -- but research 
entails something more. Professional practice addresses problems from 
the inside, research addresses problems from the outside -- though we 
may need to crawl back in to understand more, before going outside 
again.

"I'm deeply ashamed of the rest of the story, but there was something 
really instructive happening here, because there are two ways of 
looking at a problem; the inside view and the outside view. The 
inside view is looking at your problem and trying to estimate what 
will happen in your problem. The outside view involves making that an 
instance of something else-of a class. When you then look at the 
statistics of the class, it is a very different way of thinking about 
problems. And what's interesting is that it is a very unnatural way 
to think about problems, because you have to forget things that you 
know-and you know everything about what you're trying to do, your 
plan and so on-and to look at yourself as a point in the distribution 
is a very un-natural exercise; people actually hate doing this and 
resist it."

Daniel Kahneman
Professor of Psychology, Princeton University
2002 Nobel Laureate in the Economic Sciences for the development of 
behavioral economics

If you'd like to see how the search for foundational knowledge has 
played out in economics, take a look at Knowledge and the Wealth of 
Nations: a Story of Economic Discovery by David Warsh.

It's possible that there _may not be_ foundational knowledge in 
design. I'll agree to that proposition. I would not readily agree to 
the assertion that there _is_ no fundamental knowledge in design. 
That proposition is a belief rather than an argument.

One way to describe the difference between a discipline and a field 
is this: In a professional field, members of the profession have the 
right to state our beliefs based on personal and professional 
experience. In a discipline, we've got to provide an argument that 
offers others a sound reason to agree with our beliefs. In a 
research-based discipline, we've got to provide an argument that 
makes sense from an outside view.

Yours,

Ken

-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor
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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