Clive,

I feel you are right to encourage us to congratulate new graduate programs
in design for sustainability/design futures. 

Increasingly these new programs are 'negotiating practice and  theory' via
theoretical and analytical discourse in increasingly complex ways. Many
postgraduate offerings teaching design now do so in ways that go beyond
sustainability to include most other arenas of human interest for the future
across the Humanities, Sciences, Business-related fields and Public
Governance.

In this congratulatory spirit, we should also congratulate other design
courses that fit this mold.

Three groups come to mind.

Post grad programs like the  Masters in Environmental Architecture at the
Research Institute for Sustainable Energy;  delivered on the basis of a
great breadth of practice-based, theoretical, analytical and philosophical
discourse. 

New programs of engineering institutes that focus on design across a wide
variety of human perspectives and discourses. Many encompass curricula of
'Art and Design' degrees alongside social and philosophical dialogue and
engineering analysis. In these courses, there is always a strong focus on
futures. In many, the focus on sustainability and environmental issues is
also strong. These developments are to be congratulated. The transformation
of these programs has been steady and the significant changes overlooked by
many design researchers.

Sukanta raised the importance of a systems perspective. To be congratulated
most are those postgraduate design courses that draw on systems philosophies
such as those of Forrester and others at MIT. Remember 'Limits to Growth'  -
a philosophical and practical foundation of sustainability and environmental
design based on systems philosophy? These systems-based courses in design
(stand up you know who you are)  assume that design decisions  are mostly
wrong  - especially when done intuitively in complex situations. Perhaps the
graduates of these  programs may be the new design (and design research)
heroes.

Thoughts?

Best wishes,
Terry
____________________
Dr. Terence Love FDRS, AMIMechE
Design-focused Research Group, Design Out Crime Research Unit, 
Associate Researcher at Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence
Institute
Research Associate at Planning and Transport Research Centre
Curtin University, PO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845
Mob: 0434 975 848 Fax +61(0)8 9305 7629 (home office) [log in to unmask]
Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise
Development
Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. 
Visiting Professor, Member of Scientific Council, 
UNIDCOM/IADE, Lisbon, Portugal
____________________ 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Clive
Dilnot
Sent: Tuesday, 18 March 2008 12:48 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Master of Design Futures & Design + Social Sciences

All,
I would have thought that for most people on this list the development of
new graduate programs in design for sustainability/design futures  would be
a matter for congratulation and not for a somewhat snide comment (Phd list
3/15). 

The promotional language used to announce a program is of scarce import.
What matters is content, and since in this case the DPP papers and its
editor/s have  already developed a highly  significant level of theoretical
and analytical discourse around design futures the prospect of a graduate
program which attempts the messy but  potentially rewarding business of
negotiating practice and  theory in these areas is a matter of great
interest. How does theory work to inform practice? How does
theoretically-informed practice work to create "projects" which challenge
the existing limits and models of understanding? Setting in chain that
relationship, and especially in relation to sustainability, is key to future
practice and study in design.

Programs attempting to explore these issues should therefore in principle
be welcomed. 

Be that as it may, the questions, and challenges, posed by Uma Chandru are
much more interesting, for they indicate  the major paradigm shift in design
studies over the next decades which is the shift from the attempt to model
design  quasi-scientifically or technologically to a situation in which
design enters into a  much deeper and more complex dialogue (and I stress
this word) with the social sciences as a whole. 

There are  numerous straws in the wind that suggest that is the case, both
in practice (the increasing use of social scientific methodologies,
especially in research) and theoretically (as the DPP papers indicate) It is
very difficult to see how it could not be so. Design is after all
endemically the process through which the social is mediated in relation to
artifice and artificial systems.

But as Uma Chandra's questions indicate, establishing such a relation or set
of relations will not be easy--especially at the theoretical level (the
pragmatics of practice will often allow for more expedient adjustment of
contrasting ways of acting than will entrenched theoretical models). All
this points to the fact that, at present, the design analytical community
has almost no adequate "institutional" means of exploring these
relations--or of developing depth-expertise in design for social scientists
or of the social sciences for designers. What might ask whether this is not
a project that should taken up by the Design Research Society and its
equivalents? 

Clive Dilnot 


 


Clive Dilnot
Professor of Design Studies
Dept. Art and Design Studies, Rm 609
Parsons School of Design,
New School University,
2w 13th St.
New York NY 10011

T.1-212-229-8916 x1481