Friends,

The current lively series of exchanges has been lively and hotly
followed. Terry Love kicked it off under the heading "Design - the
Problem of Art." I'm going to take a different and hopefully nuanced
view, reframing this as the challenge of art.

Let me start by saying that I value Terry's contributions. I appreciate
his systematic, rigorous thinking. I like the fact that he takes an
argument forward to a consistent, logical conclusion. I respect his
genuinely research-based approach and the way he links findings from
multiple disciplines in a responsible way.

In this particular case, though, I’ve just got to disagree with
Terry, at least in part. While it is true that only some 7% of the
design fields and the design sciences are located in the art and design
sector, this does not mean that the artistic dimensions of design are
problematic or unimportant.

Herbert Simon’s design sciences include such fields as engineering,
management, medicine, and nursing. In all of these fields, researchers
and practitioners are coming to value the artistic components of
professional practice in these fields. In management, for example, there
exists a network known as AACORN – Art. Aesthetics, and Creativity in
Organizational Research Network. Many scholars are engaged in the
examination of how we can improvement management through artistic
approaches and philosophical approaches.

While several contributors to this thread have spoken about the
importance of the irrational, I’m going to politely disagree by saying
that it is not the irrational that is important, but rather the
emotional. That said, we can study the logic of emotion. The field of
behavioral economics began with questions on how and why people make
decisions in daily life. Books such as Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of
Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics or
David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations suggest the ways in
which the science of economics is now growing to account for such
factors as emotion, behavior, and culture in a broad perspective related
to our understanding of complex adaptive systems. Systems that include
human beings and other living forms must necessarily include emotions
and the artistic.

Any genuine design science must do the same.

Where I agree with Terry is in his view that design and design studies
must make greater use of empirical research, algorithmic approaches, and
advanced technology. Where I disagree is that this is the whole of the
way forward.

In the 1840s, Soren Kierkegaard raised a series of profound questions
in his analysis of decisions and life choices from a psychological
standpoint. The great intellectual movement prior to Kierkegaard’s
work involved the aspiration of many 19th century philosophers,
scientists, and engineers to place everything in a logical framework
open to quantitative analysis. Even the study of human behavior was
framed as a form of “social physics,” with such scholars as Comte
and Quetelet attempting to bring the human sciences into the empirical,
mathematical tradition of such giants of physics and mathematics as
Newton and Laplace. Comte himself coined the term “positivism,” and
philosophers struggled to create the grand world systems of which
Hegel’s work was typical.

Kierkegaard simply observed that this perspective fails to account for
many aspects of human life. For this reason, Norbert Elias quite
justifiably argues that Kierkegaard was the first psychologist.

Design can benefit from empirical research and progressive research
programs related to such fields as engineering, materials science,
physics, and nanotechnology – as well as to the biosciences,
ergonomics, and other fields distinguished by quantitative measurement.
Design and design research also require the human sciences, not only
those human sciences elaborated by Dilthey and the hermeneutical
tradition, but behavioral economics, organization theory, symbolic
interactionism, and other areas that deal with emotion, culture, and
with phenomena that we can describe and understand even though they defy
the kind of analytical traditions for which Terry argues.

Even though I am dean of the only faculty of design in Australia that
is only a faculty of design and not a faculty of art and design, I find
myself in the position making an argument for the virtues of art as an
area of appropriate learning and inquiry in relation to design.

A few differences apply. Those among us professionally designated as
“artists” pose and solve problems for our own satisfaction while
those among us professionally designated as “designers” accept and
solve problems for the stakeholders and problem owners that employ us.

Some of us, many of us, fill both roles at different times. As a member
of the laboratory of artists, designers, architects, and composers known
as Fluxus, I learned a great deal that I seem somehow to have found
useful in my design work. And that remains true despite the fact that
many of the issues I wrestled with in the Fluxus context were playful,
ironic, quarrelsome, and even occasionally “useless.”

Where I’d agree with Terry is that a great many designers treat their
work as though they are independent artists solving artistic problems
for their own pleasure while the client pays.

Where I agree with Terry’s interlocutors – Chris, Robert, Justin,
Dag, Robin and the rest – is that design has an artistic dimension. We
neglect that dimension of design to our peril.

When I moved to Norway in the 1980s, it seemed that engineers designed
many products solely on engineering performance criteria. Things worked,
but they were not always pleasant or comfortable. Many “workable”
products served the machinery of production or some other mechanical
requirement rather than serving people. When I left two and a half
decades later, life was better and far more pleasant thanks to design
improvements – and this includes improved services and processes in
addition to better products, better interfaces, and more livable spaces.
All of these involve the emotional aspects and the artistic aspects of
design.

Even mathematics and physics involve elements of beauty. Occam’s
Razor and the concept of elegance are often good heuristic devices in
the sciences.

Art and artistic understanding are valuable to design. They do not help
in isolation, and this is the problem we face in some art and design
programs where people do not read widely, do not learn math or study
ergonomics, and avoid the rich range of issues required for a
well-rounded human being engaged in the ethical practice of design. The
same is true of isolated or narrow practitioners in such fields as
medicine, engineering, or law.

The issue here is the appropriate breadth that gives rise to wisdom and
virtue in practice.

Yours,

Ken

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

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

Phone Dean's Office +61 3 9214 6078
Phone Faculty Switchboard +61 3 9214 6755

URL: www.swinburne.edu.au/design