Dear David,
for me, what you are announcing is the tension between a professional who works based on technique and a theorist/researcher who seeks to derive technologies from solutions. Is your scoping/problem domain setting process a technique that gives you the status of a professional or a more generalisable process that could be a method and/or a theory of process?
cheers
keith russell
OZ Newcastle
>>> David Sless <[log in to unmask]> 06/30/08 2:53 PM >>>
On 30/06/2008, at 1:51 PM, Filippo A. Salustri wrote:
> The question I worry about is what do we need to know in order to
> work effectively in *any* problem domain.
I think you might be putting the cart before the horse.
Perhaps if I elaborate slightly it might help. When I talk about the
'problem domain', I am referring to something we seek to describe AT
THE END of our 'Scoping' stage (For those of you who don't know what
we mean by the 'Scoping' stage, see:
http://www.communication.org.au/publications/course-texts/Designing-medicine-information-for-people--introduction-to-the-course
It will give you an insight both into what we mean by scoping and also
what we mean by 'problem domain', or as we sometimes refer to it
'problem boundaries'.)
One of the things we do, as designers, is reinvent the 'problem
domain' on a case by case basis, often shifting the boundary of the
problem domain as we go. You can see that at work in some of the
little case histories I give in the above paper.
Shifting the boundary in this way requires new or different features
to be taken account of. Thus I would resist the idea that there are
'common features'. There may well be some on some occasions. But I
suspect, as with other aspects of definitional debates of this kind,
it's like Wittgenstein's family resemblance. Sometimes the features
will overlap, sometimes they won't.
This comes back to a central issue of design theory: the socially
constructed nature of 'problems'.
Is there a common way of knowing how to work effectively in 'any'
problem domain? If there was, we would not have a category of things
called 'problems'.
David
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