Hi, Julia,

In response to your note, I read Maz Raein's paper. It raises 
interesting point, but it seems to me to be on a rather different set 
of issues that voice and person in scholarly publishing.

The debate on your site may have been different in context, but this 
seems to me a topical essay. In this essay, Maz makes some awfully 
sweeping claims. The one that jumped out at me is this:

"Research is an inclusive and generative activity, whilst the making 
of works of art and
design or writing about them is an exclusive and reductive activity."

As I understand the essay, Maz argues that because design "is an 
exclusive and reductive activity," it therefore follows that 
designers should write in the first person.

This is problematic in two ways. First, the premise is incorrect. 
Design practice is not "an exclusive and reductive activity." This is 
not true historically and it is not true today.

Design is a group activity, and most professional design practice 
takes place in studios, groups, or teams. This goes back to the days 
when much of what now constitutes design practice took place within 
the craft guilds. With the development of modern industry, this 
intensified. Companies large enough to maintain internal design 
centers have teams of designers working with other design 
professionals outside the team. These are usually engineers, design 
managers, marketing specialists who interface between design groups 
and others, manufacturing groups that work with design and interact 
with designers for product adjustments, etc.

Consider the steps in the design process as an event flow. This will 
show how many different individuals and groups within an organization 
play an active part in the design process. Buckminster Fuller (1969: 
319) divides the process into two steps. The first is a subjective 
process of search and research. The second is a generalizable process 
that moves from prototype to practice.

The subjective process of search and research, Fuller outlines a 
series of steps:

teleology -- > intuition -- > conception -- >
apprehension -- > comprehension -- >
experiment -- > feedback -- >

Under generalization and objective development leading to practice, he lists:

prototyping #1 -- > prototyping #2 -- > prototyping #3 -- >
production design -- > production modification -- > tooling -- >
production -- > distribution -- >
installation -- > maintenance -- > service -- >
reinstallation -- > replacement -- >
removal -- > scrapping -- > recirculation

For Fuller, the design process is a comprehensive sequence leading 
from teleology - the goal or purpose toward which the process aims - 
to practice and finally to regeneration. This last step, 
regeneration, creates a new stock of material on which the designer 
may again act. The specific terms may change for process design or 
services design. The essential concept remains the same. At most 
steps, many people work together.

This is also true for design studios. Even on small projects, a team 
may be involved in creating and executing the design of a brochure, a 
package, or a new credit card. For large projects such as corporate 
identity, the team may grow to a dozen or more, inside the design 
firm and inside the client firm.

Today's massive industrial artifacts generally require teams. A major 
project -- a new automobile or a train or an airplane -- may have 
hundreds or even thousands of designers. For some products, these 
teams may even have specialized design teams working on projects 
necessary for but different to the main project -- take, for example, 
the people who design and produce documentation for a plane, or the 
people who design the interior architecture and interior design of 
the passenger cabin. Large scale software projects may have three 
full design teams in three time zones that allow round-the-clock 
development and workload hand-off to keep a project moving forward to 
completion.

One cannot say that design is exclusive and reductive. It may not 
even be true of art. This may have been true of 19th and 20th century 
individual studio artists, but it was not true of master artists 
before that time, and it is not true of culturally generative art 
forms today.

There is a minor second problem here. A false premise doesn't lead to 
a sound conclusion. In fact, there are occasions that one might speak 
of an "I," but not the boldface, top-level premise stated in the 
article is not among them.

The often cited and rarely read Donald Schon (1983, 1987) discusses 
these issues, both in his work on design studios and in his writings 
with Chris Argyris on organizational learning (Argyris and Schon 
1974, 1978, 1996). I recently spent a week in Lithuania interviewing 
manufacturers and they make the same point, distinguishing between 
designers who can work successfully with groups in a full 
manufacturing process as contrasted with individual artists who can 
only draw or model a form.

On the relation of these issues to ancient guild culture and to 
contemporary practice, I'd suggest two articles. I wrote one 
(Friedman 1997) and Bryan Byrne wrote the other with Ed Sands (2002). 
I trace the evolution of design practice from guild practice and 
discuss how these issues lead to a certain kind of community or 
practice. Bryan and Ed talk about how design studios today resemble 
the guild studios of centuries past, and they show how the relations 
between masters, journeymen, and apprentices function. These 
relations also constitute communities of practice, and they function 
as inclusive and generative group relations rather than exclusive 
individual practices.

Yours,

Ken

--

References

Argyris, Chris, and Donald A. Schon. 1974. Theory in practice: 
increasing professional effectiveness (1st ed.). San Francisco: 
Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Argyris, Chris, and Donald A. Schon. 1978. Organizational learning: a 
theory of action perspective. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley 
Publishing Company.

Argyris, Chris, and Donald A. Schon. 1996. Organizational learning 
II. Theory, method, and Practice. Reading, Massachusetts: 
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Byrne, Bryan, and Ed Sands. 2002. "Designing Collaborative Corporate 
Cultures." Creating Breakthrough Ideas, Bryan Byrne and Susan E. 
Squires, editors. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Friedman, Ken. 1997. "Design Science and Design Education." The 
Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, ed. Helsinki: University of 
Art and Design Helsinki, 54-72.

Schon, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books Inc.

Schon, Donald A. 1987. Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San 
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publications.

--

Julia Lockheart wrote:

Hi all,
Lurking enjoyably....
On the 'I' this may be of interest. (One of our seminal debates - a bit
old now though!)
http://www.writing-pad.ac.uk/index.php?path=photos/20_Resources/07_Discussion%20Papers/10_Where%20is%20the%20i/
Julia




-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

+61 3 92.14.68.69	Tlf Swinburne
+61 404 830 462	Mobile

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