Friends,

In discussing the fuss about disciplines, it seems to me that we are
discussing several ideas. These do not contradict each other, but
rather reflect different aspects of what we seek to understand. I
tend to agree with Chris and Chuck -- the design process is not a
divided field but an instantiation that has relatively few boundaries
or sub-divisions.

Eduardo's note captures my earlier comment: whatever "design" is or
may be, it emerges in the professional practice of a community. That
professional community and the academic communities that train people
to enter professional practice have a strong culture. In many places,
the culture is so strong that people dress alike. In other places,
they do not dress alike, but they do share strong common values,
vocabularies, customs, and behaviors. This is not entirely bad --
this is how guilds function, and this is one way that guild cultures
preserve and transmit the hard won forms of expertise, and the
activated information that guilds embody in knowledge for action.

The price of this culture is that the cultural structures that
preserve and transmit sometimes do so by restricting and constraining
members of a group, and by establishing barriers against perceived
outsiders and perceived outside influences.

One reason that I began to study the nature of design disciplines and
subdisciplines, fields and subfields is that I found myself
perpetually puzzled by assertions in different design communities and
design professions. These assertions were generally boundary
statements of the type that argue "We are designers. They are not." I
found that the different "we" designers would often admit --
sometimes reluctantly -- that the "they" designers might be designers
after all based on what they do, as distinct from what they are
called or where they learned to do it.

Many designers readily acknowledge people who learn about design in
schools of art and design or professional design schools. They accept
people as designers who posses degrees with that label them as
designers. They tend to reject people who learn design skills in
other kinds of schools and people who have other kinds of degrees.

The gray zone for reluctant acceptance is quite large in one sense --
people who design software, houses, cities, tend to fit in. "Oh, yeah
-- I guess they are designers. I just don't think of them that way."
At the same time, the gray zone does not stretch to include people
from well-defined professional cultures that draw their own visible
boundaries, especially when those other professions are high status
and well rewarded. It excludes people who design laws ("lawyers,"
"senators"), surgical procedures ("physicians," "surgeons,"
"anesthesiologists"), tax policies ("lawyers," "economists,"
"accountants," "congressional representatives,"), or many of the
kinds of things that "managers" design, including food delivery
systems, compensation programs, hedge funds, etc.

If it is true that designing is "fluid discipline or field" and "a
coherent, universally applicable mental discipline," then we have
something to learn about design based on understanding practices and
processes throughout the design domain without regard to the target
of our practice. In this sense, experiences and problems arise from a
broad world rather than from the background disciplines within which
target questions seem to emerge in professional and academic
communities.

At the same time, these communities -- both professional and academic
-- create the context within which designers make things happen and
through which we find, select, and solve problems.

This gives rise to a range of interesting issues that function in a
dialectical tension. Choosing one set of vocabularies, metaphors,
contexts, or languages discriminates against others. The question of
interdisciplinarity as a specific field of inquiry is fascinating
because it focuses on both sides of these issues. On one side, we see
the cultures that preserve and transmit what humans have managed to
learn over the past five thousand years of recorded history. On the
other side, we see actions that "[focus] on experience rather than
technology," becoming " instantiated when applied in any problematic
situation, profession, or field." The beauty and the horror of our
different organizations -- the Jesuits and others -- is that they
help us to learn and to know while shaping our understanding and by
establishing boundaries to what we learn and know.

Just back from a lovely week at Cape Town University of Technology at
the Design Educators' Forum of South Africa, where I saw Johann van
der Merwe, Angharad Thomas, Ria van Zyl, Ezio Manzini, Linda Drew,
Venny Nakazibwe, Ian Sutherland .... I met old friends and put faces
together with names I have been meeting online. If you have a chance
to attend a DEFSA conference, take it.

Warm wishes,

Ken

--

Chris Rust wrote:

I prefer to consider designing, when it is focused on experience
rather than technology, as a single fluid discipline or field, rather
than worry about sub-divisions within it.

Chuck Burnette wrote:

Whether designated by a noun or verb, in my view, design is a
coherent, universally applicable mental discipline that becomes
instantiated when applied in any problematic situation, profession,
or field.

Eduardo Corte-Real wrote:

It got me thinking, this disciplines fuss, about the use we give to
the term, maybe as a result of Jesuit organization.


--

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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