Terry and Ken
@Terry
Thank you for the considered response and I agree almost completely with what you are arguing. I believe I'm arguing for a similar approach though. When I describe the "black box", part of it is about articulating what "I" as a design am doing, but I'm more interested in what designers, plural, are doing. The conversations that happen in front of a whiteboard and walls of post-it notes, for example. For many areas of design (not to mention some of the other disciplines you outlined), this is where the designing actually happens.
With this in mind it's possible to analyse this as an external observer, but it's also possible to be aware of this as someone being part of the process. My argument that designers should be more "consciously" (I'm using this in it's colloquial, commonly understand sense) aware of this and articulate and formalise this part of their method more clearly. While I see many attempts at this in the literature, I don't often see it in the practice of commercial design nor in the teaching of design.
A couple of questions:
> For such a new theory frame for design research to be successful, the primary criteria of its comprehensiveness is whether it can explain and predict mistakes and failures in individuals design activities and in the development of designs that fail.
I'm curious as to why the prediction of mistakes and failures should be the primary criterium. There are several other criteria that one might focus on (the ability to achieve a certain goal, the ability to affect behaviour, etc.)
> For some time now, I've suggested that there is a need to move away from a 'self'-based body of theory-making with its attendant focus on 'emotions',
> 'psychology and cognition' , 'design thinking' and the romance of self; and that Ethology in combination with other perspectives that focus on understanding human designing in the way that we would observe the complex behaviours of a relatively unstudied animal, offers a better starting point for a rebuilding of design theory and the literature of design research.
While I agree that an ethological approach would bring a great deal in terms of a different perspective to human designing, the biological perspective would surely be complemented by the necessary social and psychological views, would it not? Design is as much a social activity as many other human activities. In the play example that you mention from my research, the conundrum is that neither a biological nor a psychological/social explanation can alone account for it (which is why it's so interesting to me).
@Ken
Thanks for the links - I shall check them out.
> The issue is not the problem of a false dichotomy between theory and practice. It is rather that some folks imagine there to be an abstract function in the world known as "theory" and another function known as "practice" that has properties inconsistent with theory.
What's the difference between those statements? You seem to be re-phrasing the same essential point.
> This and other recent threads address provocative points. I'd be more comfortable if I had the sense that these conversations demonstrated a sense of what we already know about these issues. But that brings us back to Don Norman's (2010) comment on how often our papers and conversations fail to address what is already known.
Well, that's probably true, but it's also a design problem. Journals and conferences are terribly poor ways to share and build up a body of knowledge.
Cheers,
Andy
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Hochschule Luzern
Design & Kunst
Sentimatt 1 | Dammstrasse, CH-6003 Luzern
Twitter: apolaine
http://www.hslu.ch/design-kunst/
Dr. Andy Polaine
Forschungsdozent Service Design
Research Fellow / Lecturer Service Design
Co-author: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/service-design/
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