Dear Klaus and friends

I agree with your statements Klaus, and thank you for this very clear and
unambiguous exposition.

To put it simply, the future is essentially unpredictable as long as future
human responses are at the heart of the possible outcomes. This is why I
like the two concepts proposed by Wolfgang Jonas on the one hand and by
George Soros on the other are so important for our understanding of design
thought and action. Jonas offers the concept of the Swamp, an unpredictable
space in which design action enters and he has outlined these in his papers
and book "Mind the Gap". Soros offers the theory of Reflexivity with
reference ti the financial markets where every action and intention enters
the public space only to be responded to instantly or over time by other
intelligent humans, all acting in their own self interest, each shaping the
possible outcome by virtue of their own response. Design is much like that
in my view and even design proposals and technology speculations have a way
of affecting the possible outcomes due to their collective actions. This is
why preemptive marketing has such an immediate effect in the new technology
space and the new product space as we have seen in so many cases of
competitive behavior of companies locked in intense competition.

Thank you for your comment. By the way your Semantic Turn does give us a
great platform from which to understand design within these terms of
reference. The last chapter on HfG Ulm gives us a rare insight into the
early founding of these ideas at the great school in Germany. I visited the
Ulm Archive last May and stayed at the campus studio of Nick Roerich in my
research effort to find connections between HfG Ulm and NID in the early
60's and well into the 70's and 80's through the contacts with Ulm alumni
and faculty. We conducted a one day conference on these conections in March
this year at Bangalore in collabotration with the Ulm Archive since we now
have a major exhibtion on HfG Ulm traveling to three cities in India,
Ahmedabad (February 2010), Bangalore (March 2010) and now Kolkata (September
2010). I mention this here since the work at Ulm is amazing and forward
looking and unfortnately not easily accessible when we look at the influence
of the Bauhaus traditions on design and design education. During the
Bangalore event we were able to prepare and release a digital multimedia DVD
with 21 Ulm Journals prepared from the single complete set that was
available in the NID library. These were released with permission from Prof
Gui Bonsiepe who was the editor of the Journal in the 60's while he was
teaching at Ulm. These files and the conference proceedings (Look Back -
Look Forward: HfG Ulm and Design Education in
India)<http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-back-look-forward-bengaluru-event.html>are
now available for download at my blog, Design
for India, <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com/> here at this link. I
am sure that these will be a valuable resource for any research into design
thought and action particularly since there is a growing interest in design
today and some of these early explorations are no easily accessible to the
scientific community outside the design space.
<
http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-back-look-forward-bengaluru-event.html
>

We are planing the next National conference at Kolkata on the 28th September
2010 and I will share the details as soon as we have the formal approvals
from the sponsors, The Goethe Institute and the NID. The theme for this
conference is basic Design, More soon on this event.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my imac at home on the NID campus
10 August 2010 at 9.10 am IST

-------------------------------------------------------------

Prof M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID)
Chairman, GeoVisualisation Task Group (DST, Govt. of India) (2006-2008)
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Tel: (off) 91 79 26623692 ext 1090
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
Fax: 91 79 26605242

email: [log in to unmask]
web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp
web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in
blog: <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com>
education blog: <http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com>
education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:17 PM, Klaus Krippendorff <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> dear ken, terry and others who contributed to this thread
>
> i was abroad and followed the thread on my blackberry.
>
> (1)
>
> terry's conception of design research having to be predictive implies an
> epistemology that is antithetical to design -- unless terry means something
> altogether different than forecasting individual behaviors.
>
> to me and in strict scientific terms, prediction is an extrapolation of
> past pattern into the future.  it's success depends on the extent a
> previously identified pattern persists, continues unchanged by human
> observation and action.
>
> predictive theories and evidence for the validity of predictions is the
> bread and butter of scientific research.  but for designers to buy into this
> paradigm trivializes design.  in my "semantic turn" i suggested that design
>  brings forth something that cannot be predicted without reference to the
> human actions that realize it.  so, design is inherently innovative,
> concerns itself with changing something that would not come about naturally,
> cannot be predicted from past observations.
>
> to me, design is an inherent social activity, affecting others' lives. one
> target of empirical inquiries of interest to designers concerns the
> understanding of the stakeholders of a design, whether they are willing to
> commit themselves to realize a design or use it in the process of affecting
> others.
>
> (2)
>
> i agree with ken on the ambiguity of freyling's distinctions.  in the
> "semantic turn" i adopted nigel cross' distinctions between:
> *  science(s) OF design, taking design as an object of research from
> various disciplinary perspectives, such as cultural history (margolin),
> psychology (norman), cognitive science, sociology, ...
> *  "design science, ... an explicitly organized, rational and wholly
> systematic approach to design"
> from which i distinguish a
> *  a science FOR design, a systematic way of making the practice of design
> communicable: for designers to more efficiently work together; independent
> of each other to be able to examine design successes and failures and draw
> debatable lessons from them; to introduce design students into the design
> profession; to compellingly justify a design (proposal, suggestion) to
> needed stakeholders; and improve the design discourse and with it the design
> profession.
>
> (3)
>
> i am somewhat allergic to using the word "research" without much reflection
> on what is involved. to me, "re-search" (and i know that ken prefers the
> french interpretation of the word while i write in english) means repeatedly
> searching for generalizable patterns that underlie available data. if one
> takes the task of a science for design seriously, one would have to SEARCH
> for  (a) what is changeable (not what persists),  (b) who, which
> stakeholders, resist or support design interventions and what would need to
> be done to overcome the obstacles to a design;  (c) what technological,
> material, individual, social and political resources are available or
> recombinable to realize a design.  (d) the sole purpose of (a) through (c)
> is not to predict or understand for its own sake but to provide convincing
> arguments (justifications) for a design to be acceptable to interested
> stakeholders (so that they can take up their stake in it).
>
> in light of criterion (d), one could say that all inquiries of interest to
> designers are to find ways to convince the community of stakeholders to back
> a design and eventually realize it.  terry's prediction of behavior misses
> the essential feature of human commitment to make something real.
>
> you may call these activities design research (and get trapped in
> positivist practices) or searches for compelling arguments or justifications
> (which i prefer).  predictions focus on phenomena that are besides the point
> of design activity.  in my conception, designers are innovators in the
> domain of (material) culture, intervene into ongoing social practices by
> encouraging novel interfaces with technology, and, by this definition, undo
> what is predictable.
>
> instead of talking about "design research," we might well talk about
> "creating support for interventions."
>
> klaus
>
>
>
>  rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
>
> -----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 Ken
> Friedman
> Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2010 7:42 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: types of design research
>
> Dear David and Terry,
>
> There is are interesting distinction in this interchange that are worth
> considering:
>
> [1]
>
> Design research may not be about improving outcomes, but design itself
> does involve improving outcomes or creating preferred states against
> current states.
>
> Design research involves a wide range of questions, and only some of these
> involve teleology or improving outcomes.
>
> Design is teleological. We design to create outcomes.
>
> I'm not disagreeing with anyone here, but teasing out a distinction, and
> this includes an aspect of the distinction that distinguishes between
> design
> research and design.
>
> [2]
>
> Terry argues that all design research involves "predicting behavioural
> outcomes
> to improve  them."
>
> To me, that is a sweeping statement. I can conceive of many forms of design
> research that involve other goals. There is also the need to clarify the
> term
> "behavioral outcomes." If by behavior, Terry means the behavior and
> function
> of metals or chemicals or artifacts as well as human behavior, that
> statement
> has one range of meanings. If Terry means behavior and interaction between
> artifacts and surrounding systems or end users, it has a different meaning.
>
> Even though I will argue that many kinds of design research do not involve
> prediction, I'd like to know what kinds of behavior Terry intends to cover
> in this statement.
>
> [3]
>
> Without agreeing that all forms of design research involve prediction, I
> agree
> that we can understand and predict far more than we understand and predict
> successfully today. That is clearly one purpose of design research, and a
> valuable purpose.
>
> One reason I value Terry's work so highly is that he spends so much time
> carefully and patiently working through the literature and practice of
> multiple
> design fields, applying what he learns to the process and practice of
> design.
> This has several consequences. One is a specific consequence of Terry's
> background in engineering and computation. On the one hand, this means
> that Terry seeks measurable and predictable outcomes. On the other, this
> limits the ambiguous and interpretive. That simply bugs some of us -- and
> I occasionally find it frustrating. The second consequence is general.
> Terry
> approaches issues in a scientific manner. This means the rest of us must
> work
> hard just to keep up with and understand Terry's work. Many of us find the
> demands on our time difficult -- we can't follow Terry's work without wide
> reading in fields where we do not often go. The third consequence follows
> from the first two: Terry is sometimes wrong. That is what happens when
> people actually work in a scientific manner. Some experiments fail, some
> hypotheses prove wrong. Terry has a genuine ethos of scientific inquiry:
> he wants to know whether his ideas prove out. In the grand style of Karl
> Popper's philosophy of science, he proposes bold hypotheses and tests
> them to build on what works while he cheerfully discards what doesn't.
>
> Terry is engaged in a long-term, progressive research program in several
> areas of design. In this respect, he is a model researcher. This is not the
> only model of research, to be sure, but I am glad that Terry is one of us,
> and I value his work.
>
> The third paragraph -- below -- is a typical Terry Love statement, and
> Terry
> really does work on the issues that he raises. What's so puzzling to me is
> that we have too few people in our field doing the very necessary kind of
> work that Terry does. I think that will change as more engineers,
> logicians,
> mathematicians, and physicists become interested in design.
>
> Warm wishes,
>
> Ken
>
>
> On Sun, 8 Aug 2010 23:08:07 +0800, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> [1]
>
> >You say that ' Design research, such as my own, into the philosophy of
> >design is not necessarily about improving outcomes, nor is critical
> research
> >of the kind done by Victor Margolin.'
>
> [2]
>
> >I claimed that at heart all design research has an underlying focus on
> >'predicting behavioural outcomes to improve  them'.  I suggest that this
> is
> >true of both your research and Viktor's although some research may appear
> to
> >be  less directly connected. Point me to a research paper that you feel
> this
> >is not true for and lets test it.
>
> [3]
>
> >You say ' There is a vast area of human activity which falls outside the
> >category of things that are potentially predictable'. I suggest 1) that in
> >the areas in which designers work, this is much rarer than designers
> claim,
> >and 2) where designers design in areas where behavioural outcomes are
> truly
> >unpredictable then they lay themselves open to  legal action against them
> >(on what basis would they justify that their designs were any
> good/optimal/
> >satisfied the brief?). Again, the test is to look at some examples. It is
> >true that one cannot exactly predict the behaviour of some indeterminate
> >systems. One can, however, predict a lot about them, and, systems that are
> >totally unknown in terms of their behavioural outcomes are usually not
> >terribly useful. Please give examples and we can work through them to test
> >them.
>



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