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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