Peter

Thank you. I will certainly take a great advantage using this text.

Bitiz

-----Mensagem original-----
De: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Em nome de Peter Jones
| Redesign
Enviada em: sexta-feira, 29 de abril de 2011 08:38
Para: [log in to unmask]
Assunto: Re: The New Paradigm: Why Design Education Must Change

Bitiz - Our colleague Gale Moore, sociologist and former director of U
Toronto's Knowledge Media Design Institute, has been speaking on the
emergence and distinctions of transdisciplinarity in scholarly and
institutional innovation. Her 2009 paper: (Re)defining Interdisciplinarity :
(Re)forming Universities http://hdl.handle.net/1807/18063 is a core
reading in our OCAD University MDes program in Strategic Foresight and
Innovation.

Gale relates the current trends back to historical scholarly roots in the
early 60's, and shows how the trend toward interdisciplinarity resulted in
creating a scholarly landscape of interminable new specializations. This
defeats the original impulse toward breadth learning across fields to more
fully understand the contributions of multiple disciplines to a problem area
by redefining that area. Transdisciplinarity helps resolves those issues by
preserving the culturally strong identities and core disciplines
contributing to the problem. And transdisciplinarity crosses knowledge
boundaries in service of the problem, a dynamic, reflexive and social
process that may result in new configurations of the problem itself.

There are great references in the paper as well, some of which (most?)
critically apply to the discussion on design education.

Best, Peter

Peter H. Jones, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Strategic Innovation Lab
Faculty, Strategic Foresight and Innovation

OCAD University
205 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Canada  M5V 1V6 


-----Original Message-----
From: Bitiz Afflalo [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2011 6:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: RES: The New Paradigm: Why Design Education Must Change

Friends

I have not written much on this list, but try to keep a constant reading.
I think the idea of a new paradigm suggests an interesting way.
In this sense, I'm working on the research of the intersection between
product design and urban design, considering all the disciplines that
interact. My specific goal in that moment is to establish differences
between interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.
John Zeisel, Edgard Morin, Derrida and some Brazilian authors have helped
me, but I really need other authors, because I am is still not clear on
these differences.
Thanks for any suggestions.

Bitiz Afflalo
PHD student
PROURB | FAU | UFRJ
Teacher of Product Design
EBA | UFRJ

-----Mensagem original-----
De: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Em nome de Ken
Friedman Enviada em: quinta-feira, 28 de abril de 2011 17:56
Para: [log in to unmask]
Assunto: The New Paradigm: Why Design Education Must Change

Friends,

Here, in my view at least, is the new paradigm.

It's been posted here before, but I'm posting it again for those that may
not have read it.

If you recall, these recent threads trace back to Terry Love's note on UK
standards for the design curriculum. These was possibly tiggered by the
prior thread that went back to Don Norman's request for curriculum
information.

The later thread wriggled away through metaphors to rhapsodies. We moved
from a conversation on teaching design to a conversation on the words for
different kinds of teaching. This devolved in turn to words game, abandoning
the actual issues on how to teach as a general case and how to teach design
in specific. When Francois Nsenga offered a thought that we might move
beyond word games to the "Tao of Design" as a new paradigm, I thought it
worth noting that there is a new paradigm already. In the long version,
there are many ways to tell this.

One of the great short versions is Don Norman's Core77 blog post, "Why
Design Education Must Change."

Ken Friedman

--

Why Design Education Must Change

by Don Norman

posted to Core77

http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.as
p


"Traditionally what designers lack in knowledge, they make up for in craft
skills. Whether it be sketching, modeling, detailing or rendering, designers
take an inordinate amount of pride in honing key techniques over many years.
Unfortunately many of these very skills have limited use in the new design
domains." (Core 77 columnist Kevin McCullagh.)


I am forced to read a lot of crap. As a reviewer of submissions to design
journals and conferences, as a juror of design contests, and as a mentor and
advisor to design students and faculty, I read outrageous claims made by
designers who have little understanding of the complexity of the problems
they are attempting to solve or of the standards of evidence required to
make claims. Oftentimes the crap comes from brilliant and talented people,
with good ideas and wonderful instantiations of physical products, concepts,
or simulations. The crap is in the claims.

In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon
physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational
structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience
design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a
result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are
woefully undereducated for the task. Designers often fail to understand the
complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They
claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why
these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail.
Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be
educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite
understanding. Design schools do not train students about these complex
issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior,
about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. There is little or
no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design.

Related problems occur with designers trained in engineering, for although
they may understand hard-core science, they are often ignorant of the
so-called soft areas of social and behavioral sciences. The do not
understand human behavior, chiding people for not using technology properly,
asking how they could be so illogical. (You may have all heard the refrain:
"if only we didn't have people, our stuff would work just fine," forgetting
that the point of the work was to help people.) Engineers are often ignorant
of how people actually behave. And both engineers and designers are often
ignorant of the biases that can be unwittingly introduced into experimental
designs and the dangers of inappropriate generalization.

The social and behavioral sciences have their own problems, for they
generally are disdainful of applied, practical work and their experimental
methods are inappropriate: scientists seek "truth" whereas practitioners
seek "good enough." Scientists look for small differences, whereas designers
want large impact. People in human-computer interaction, cognitive
engineering, and human factors or ergonomics are usually ignorant of design.
All disciplines have their problems: everyone can share the blame.


Time to change design education
Where once industrial designers focused primarily upon form and function,
materials and manufacturing, today's issues are far more complex and
challenging. New skills are required, especially for such areas as
interaction, experience, and service design. Classical industrial design is
a form of applied art, requiring deep knowledge of forms and materials and
skills in sketching, drawing, and rendering. The new areas are more like
applied social and behavioral sciences and require understanding of human
cognition and emotion, sensory and motor systems, and sufficient knowledge
of the scientific method, statistics and experimental design so that
designers can perform valid, legitimate tests of their ideas before
deploying them.

Designers need to deploy microprocessors and displays, actuators and
sensors. Communication modules are being added to more and more products,
from the toaster to the wall switch, the toilet and books (now called
e-books). Knowledge of security and privacy, social networks, and human
interaction are critical. The old skills of drawing and sketching, forming
and molding must be supplemented and in many cases, replaced, by skills in
programming, interaction, and human cognition. Rapid prototyping and user
testing are required, which also means some knowledge of the social and
behavior sciences, of statistics, and of experimental design.

In educational institutions, industrial design is usually housed in schools
of art or architecture, usually taught as a practice with the terminal
degree being a BA, MA, or MFA. It is rare for in design education to have
course requirements in science, mathematics, technology, or the social
sciences. As a result the skills of the designer are not well suited for
modern times.


The Uninformed Are Training the Uninformed My experience with some of the
world's best design schools in Europe, the United States, and Asia indicate
that the students are not well prepared in the behavioral sciences that are
so essential for fields such as interaction and experience design. They do
not understand experimental rigor or the potential biases that show up when
the designer evaluates their own products or even their own experimental
results. Their professors also lack this understanding.

Designers often test their own designs, but with little understanding of
statistics and behavioral variability. They do not know about unconscious
biases that can cause them to see what they wish to see rather than what
actually has occurred. Many are completely unaware of the necessity of
control groups. The social and behavioral sciences (and medicine) long ago
learned the importance of blind scoring where the person scoring the results
does not know what condition is being observed, nor what is being tested.

The problem is compounded by a new insistence by top research universities
that all design faculty have a PhD degree. But given the limited training of
most design faculty, there is very little understanding of the kind of
knowledge that constitutes a PhD. The uninformed are training the
uninformed.

There are many reasons for these difficulties. I've already discussed the
fact that most design is taught in schools of art or architecture. Many
students take design because they dislike science, engineering, and
mathematics. Unfortunately, the new demands upon designers do not allow us
the luxury of such non-technical, non science-oriented training.

A different problem is that even were a design school to decide to teach
more formal methods, we don't really have a curriculum that is appropriate
for designers. Take my concern about the lack of experimental rigor. Suppose
you were to agree with me - what courses would we teach? We don't really
know. The experimental methods of the social and behavioral sciences are not
well suited for the issues faced by designers.

Designers are practitioners, which means they are not trying to extend the
knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge. The
designer's goal is to have large, important impact. Scientists are
interested in truth, often in the distinction between the predictions of two
differing theories. The differences they look for are quite small: often
statistically significant but in terms of applied impact, quite unimportant.
Experiments that carefully control for numerous possible biases and that use
large numbers of experimental observers are inappropriate for designers.

The designer needs results immediately, in hours or at possibly a few days.
Quite often tests of 5 to 10 people are quite sufficient. Yes, attention
must be paid to the possible biases (such as experimenter biases and the
impact of order of presentation of tests), but if one is looking for large
effect, it should be possible to do tests that are simpler and faster than
are used by the scientific community will suffice. Designs don't have to be
optimal or perfect: results that are not quite optimum or les than perfect
are often completely satisfactory for everyday usage. No everyday product is
perfect, nor need they be. We need experimental techniques that recognize
these pragmatic, applied goals.

Design needs to develop its own experimental methods. They should be simple
and quick, looking for large phenomena and conditions that are "good
enough." But they must still be sensitive to statistical variability and
experimental biases. These methods do not exist: we need some sympathetic
statisticians to work with designers to develop these new, appropriate
methods.


When Designers Think They Know, But Don't Designers fall prey to the two
ailments of not knowing what they don't know and, worse, thinking they know
things they don't. This last condition is especially true when it comes to
human behavior: the cognitive sciences.
Designers (and engineers) think that they understand human behavior: after
all, they are human and they have observed people all their lives. Alas,
they believe a "naive psychology": plausible explanations of behavior that
have little or no basis in fact. They confuse the way they would prefer
people to behave with how people actually behave. They are unaware of the
large experimental and theoretical literature, and they are not well versed
in statistical variability.

Real human behavior is very contextual. It is readily biased by multiple
factors. Human behavior is driven by both emotional and cognitive processes,
much of which is subconscious and not accessible to human conscious
knowledge. Gaps and lapses in attention are to be expected. Human memory is
subject to numerous biases and errors. Different memory systems have
different characteristics. Most importantly, human memory is not a calling
up of images of the past but rather a reconstruction of the remembered
event. As a result, it often fits expectations more closely than it fits
reality and it is easily modified by extraneous information.

Many designers are woefully ignorant of the deep complexity of social and
organizational problems. I have seen designers propose simple solutions to
complex problems in education, poverty, crime, and the environment.
Sometimes these suggestions win design prizes (the uninformed judge the
uninformed). Complex problems are complex systems: there is no simple
solution. It is not enough to mean well: one must also have knowledge.

The same problems arise in doing experimental studies of new methods of
interaction, new designs, or new experiences and services. When scientists
(and designers) study people, they too are subject to these same human
biases, and so cognitive scientists carefully design experiments so that the
biases of the experimenter can have no impact on the results or their
interpretation. All these factors are well understood by cognitive
scientists, but seldom known or understood by designers and engineers. Here
is a case of not knowing what is not known.


Why Designers Must Know Some Science
Over the years, the scientific method evolved to create order and evaluation
to otherwise exaggerated claims. Science is not a body of facts, not the use
of mathematics. Rather, the key to science is its procedures, or what is
called the scientific method. The method does not involve white robes and
complex mathematics. The scientific method requires public disclosure of the
problem, the method of approach, the findings, and then the interpretation.
This allows others to repeat the finding: replication is essential. Nothing
is accepted in science until others have been able to repeat the work and
come to the same conclusion. Moreover, scientists have learned to their
dismay that conclusions are readily biased by prior belief, so experimental
methods have been devised to minimize these unintentional biases.

Science is difficult when applied to the physical and biological world. But
when applied to people, the domain of the social sciences, it is especially
difficult. Now subtle biases abound, so careful statistical procedures have
been devised to minimize them. Moreover, scientists have learned not to
trust themselves, so in the social sciences it is sometimes critical to
design tests so that neither the person being studied nor the person doing
the study know what condition is involved - this is called "double blind."

Designers, on the whole, are quite ignorant of all this science stuff. They
like to examine a problem, devise what seems to be a solution, and then
announce the result for all to acclaim. Contests are held. Prizes are
awarded. But wait-- has anyone examined the claims? Tested them to see if
they perform as claimed? Tested them against alternatives (what science
calls control groups), tested them often enough to minimize the impact of
statistical variability? Huh? say the designers: Why, it is obvious - just
look - What is all this statistical crap?

Journals do not help, for most designers are practitioners and seldom
publish. And when they do, I find that the reviewers in many of our design
journals and conferences are themselves ignorant of appropriate experimental
procedures and controls, so even the published work is often of low quality.
Design conferences are particularly bad: I have yet to find a design
conference where the rigor of the peer review process is satisfactory. The
only exceptions are those run by societies from the engineering and
sciences, such as the Computer-Human Interaction and graphics conferences
run by the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers or the Computer
Science society (IEEE, ACM and the CHI and SIGGRAPH conferences). These
conferences, however, favor the researcher, so although they are favorite
publication vehicles for design researchers and workers in interaction
design, practitioners often find their papers rejected. The practice of
design lacks a high quality venue for its efforts.


Design Education Must Change
Service design, interaction design, and experience design are not about the
design of physical objects: they require minimal skills in drawing,
knowledge of materials, or manufacturing. In their place, they require
knowledge of the social sciences, of story construction, of back-stage
operations, and of interaction. We still need classically trained industrial
designers: the need for styling, for forms, for the intelligent use of
materials will never go away.

In today's world of ubiquitous sensors, controllers, motors, and displays,
where the emphasis is on interaction, experience, and service, where
designers work on organizational structure and services as much as on
physical products, we need a new breed of designers. This new breed must
know about science and technology, about people and society, about
appropriate methods of validation of concepts and proposals. They must
incorporate knowledge of political issues and business methods, operations,
and marketing. Design education has to move away from schools of art and
architecture and move into the schools of science and engineering. We need
new kinds of designers, people who can work across disciplines, who
understand human beings, business, and technology and the appropriate means
of validating claims.

Today's designers are poorly trained to meet the today's demands: We need a
new form of design education, one with more rigor, more science, and more
attention to the social and behavioral sciences, to modern technology, and
to business. But we cannot copy the existing courses from those disciplines:
we need to establish new ones that are appropriate to the unique
requirements of the applied requirements of design.

But beware: We must not lose the wonderful, delightful components of design.
The artistic side of design is critical: to provide objects, interactions
and services that delight as well as inform, that are joyful. Designers do
need to know more about science and engineering, but without becoming
scientists or engineers. We must not lose the special talents of designers
to make our lives more pleasurable.

It is time for a change. We, the design community, must lead this change.