Dear All,

Without wanting to start a new thread on the ontology of the future,
the philosophy of design, or the pragmatics of solving problems, I
incline to agree with Terry Kavanagh on theological grounds. It is also
a wise practical position. We must know where we are and what has come
before us if we are to know either where we are headed or where we are
going.

This also gets back to Robert Harland’s point, and to Francois
Nsenga’s point.

Klaus Krippendorff’s suggestion that we should ask where we want to
go is a good designerly question. The suggestion that where we are now
does not matter as much as where we want to go is a common designerly
response, and it is not nearly as good. This response often makes it
difficult to solve the genuine problems that problem-owners or
stakeholders bring us to solve in our professional capacity as
designers.

The result of asking only where we wish to go is often at the heart of
design solutions that generate as many new problems as the those that
have been solved. In the worst cases, asking only where we want to go
without seeing where we are -- and understanding what that means --
generates new problems while making the old problems worse, rather than
better.

Design is not a magic key to future. Design is one among many human
tools. Design thinking and designerly ways of knowing work best with an
array of tools. We can usefully compare designers with physicians in
this respect. Physicians do better work when their medical practice is
embedded in a larger community of practice that enables them to work
with and to learn from teams that include nurses, pharmacists,
physiotherapists, and many others. 

The old notion that only physicians should play the key roles in
professional healing lead to many of the problems that we commonly see
in medicine. For my doctoral education, I took many core courses with
psychologists, anthropologists, and even a psychiatrist or two. One of
our professors was a physician and psychiatrist who gave a series of
lectures on the nature and causes of iatrogenic illnesses. These are the
classes of illnesses caused or exacerbated by physicians and by medical
care.

This class of illnesses is relevant to the present conversation.
Herbert Simon’s definition of design covers most professions that
guide us toward preferred states – as medical practice does – and
medicine in this sense of Simon’s definition is one of the design
sciences. And, no, I’m not claiming that all physicians are designers.
I’m claiming that medical practice is one of the range of professions
that can learn from each other because we all base our work on design
sciences without being what we’d call “designers.” I’d like to
avoid one of those hair-splitting discussions we have seen here of late,
so I hope everyone will take my point as I intend it. The point is not
that physicians are “designers,” but that physicians – in exactly
the sense of Simon’s definition – are prone to the successes and
failures of all professional practitioners whose role it is to serve
other human beings by helping to solve the problems that they bring us
in making us their designated helpers and servants.

The great promise of design research is to help us understand better
where we have been and where we are going. And, again, I’m going to
forestall the hair-splitting debate by stating that design research is
not an oxymoron because the word “research” does not mean “looking
backward.” The word “research” means to search thoroughly for the
purpose of answering a focused question or understanding and solving a
problem even though we have not been able to focus our question at the
start. 

To me, this includes the future as much as the present or the past. It
is only by having a sense of where we want to go that we can understand
our research problem. It is thus an orientation toward the future that
guides our inquiry. Our understanding of the present and our location is
vital – this is where we are now as we inquire, and this affects both
our current state and our ability to plan the transition. In much the
same way, our understanding of the past involves trajectory, and helps
us to understand the web of events, situations, entailments, and
contingencies that have something to do with our current situation bad
our possible future – or our possible choices among several different
likely or created future states.

Just as medicine flourished in the era of medical research, so design
research opens to us a way forward.

(Rather than go through the entire debate on the word research, permit
me to point to an article in which I analyze the word research. It is a
2003 article titled “Theory construction in design research: criteria:
approaches, and methods.” It appears in Design Studies, 24 [2003],
pages 507–522.) 

While research is forward leaning and forward looking, research also
requires an understanding of the different states and times along the
continuum. This is a feature of several knowledge traditions –
something that is essential, for example, to indigenous knowledge and
key in fields such as design anthropology. 

The idea that designers plan a future and leap into it is both typical
of the heroic design tradition and the technocratic position.

The idea that we ought to know where we are and how we got here, that
we ought to think about the future we create from a rich and responsible
understanding of our present position seems to me far more useful. 

When we undertake design projects, are never certain that we will get
the future we intend. It if tens seems that we do not. It would be
facile and cynical to suggest that we always get the future we deserve.
We do not. Nevertheless, we are inevitably located in the future that we
get. 

Appropriate reflection on past and present as steps and locations
toward the future generally helps us to deserve a better future, and
sometimes helps us to move toward the future we prefer.

Warm wishes,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia