Dear All,

Eduardo Corte-Real wrote, “… it is very important to understand why
the “design community people” weren’t interacting with Don Norman
and his century setters’ terrific pals. What were they doing at the
time? Were they doing essentially different things? And if they did,
were they doing it because they were essentially designers? And why and
when they came along after?”

With some rueful amusement, I can tell you what the “design community
people” were doing at the time, and why they weren’t interested.

In the late 1980s, I found myself in Scandinavia where people like
Pelle Ehn and Erik Stolterman were working in HCI and computing, and
where people like Johan Olaisen or Jon-Arild Johannessen were working in
information science, Yrjö Engeström was at work in cognition and
activity theory. There were more, but they weren’t working in design
schools.

The then-president of the National College of Art and Design (now Oslo
National Academy of the Arts) heard that there was a designer in Norway
with a PhD. At that time, I was the only one in Norway and there could
not have been more than one or two more in all five Nordic nations. The
president, Roar Hoyland, asked me to dinner and said that he’d like me
to develop a program for design research at his school. His idea was
that all three professors would welcome this initiative and if they all
agreed, he’d fund it.

This was late 1988 or early 1989. For the next two years, Roar tried to
get all three professors to meet and talk. Two agreed. The third
repeatedly refused. After two years, the third professor – a
long-since-gone professor of industrial design – finally agreed to
meet me for lunch. When we met, he talked with me for about ten minutes.
He explained that designers did not do research and he implied that he
had no use for anyone with a PhD. After delivering his sermonette, he
suddenly stood up. He looked at me, saying “You should be teaching at
a business school.” Then he walked off without another word.

Not long before my conversation with the professor of industrial
design, the Oslo Business School asked me to lecture on design
management and strategic design. The response from the business students
was outstanding, so I proposed a course in strategic design. The course
did well, and this became a senior-year elective. Even more interesting,
some of the students who took the course went on to successful careers
in the design industry.

While we tried to develop a cross-school collaboration with the design
school, it never worked. We did have some design student audit the
course, though, and they had a valuable experience. It was the first
time that business students and design students worked together in
Norway.

At one point, the Oslo Business School merged into the Norwegian School
of Management. At that point the course vanished. Not long after,
though, Johan Olaisen became dean at the Norwegian School of Management
School of Marketing and he hired me to develop a design program. As it
is, life takes odd turns. Johan was having problems with the program in
leadership and organization design, so he asked me to delay my plans for
strategic design and design management to focus on reshaping the
leadership program. He was happy to fund my research in design, no
matter what I was teaching, so that worked well for me. I had so much
fund with my leadership and organization courses that I never taught the
design courses at NSM. One of the reasons that the invitation to come to
Swinburne University of Technology Faculty of Design attracted me is the
opportunity to work in a design school, developing the ideas that
interested me first back in the late 1980s.

As a footnote, I used Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things as the
textbook in the OBS course in strategic design. This was the the first
course in strategic design in Scandinavia. Taking the strategic design
perspective rather than the design management perspective, it may have
been the first in Europe. I don’t know of others in 1990, but that
doesn’t mean there might not have been one or two. In those years, of
course, even courses in plain-vanilla design management were few and far
between.

Where were the “design community people” in those days? In
Scandinavia at least, designers said “We don’t do research” and
they thought that people with a PhD shouldn’t teach at design schools.


As Don, Lubomir, Jonas, and others note, it was a different world for
HCI, participatory design, information science., or cognitive science. A
list like this brings people from all these communities and more
together under the rubric of design. Back then, people who worked in the
entities known as “design schools” were not part of research
communities such as this.

As for the debates in that decade, and what came next, I wrote a book
chapter in 1997 for a book from what is now the Faculty of Art and
Design at Aalto University.

Friedman, Ken. 1997. “Design Science and Design Education.” The
Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, editor. Helsinki: University of
Art and Design Helsinki UIAH, 54-72.

You can get a copy in PDF format at:

http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/189707

This note – and the book chapter – explain where some “design
community people” were in those years. While that was a long time ago,
some of the issues and problems described in the book chapter still
challenge design schools. Times have nevertheless changed, and they have
changed for the better.

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design