Hi, Amanda,
This is my final contribution to the thread on “measuring the impact
of design in product development.” The thread opened when Jurgen Faust
asked about the specific contribution that design process makes to goods
or services. Despite the importance of the question, the thread has
probably gone as far as it can for now, at least for me.
Some replies raised methodological issues worth teasing out. Not all
replies were aimed at Jurgen’s question, though. I addressed one of
the methodological problems that frame and develop a research question:
“Can we answer question [x] to solve problem [y] with this
approach?”
Even though you “... have no inclination to re-invent [your]self as
an economist [to] demonstrate how design contributes to value chains,”
you offered proposals on how to do it.
Offering proposals on how to solve research problems requires
understanding the methods and methodology of the field. This requires
methodological awareness and methodological sensitivity. Methodological
awareness in research involves the ability to understand research
methods, using them effectively to answer questions. This requires:
understanding the reasons for choosing a method, understanding
appropriate methods for examining kinds of questions, and an awareness
of theoretical presuppositions. Adapting methods from an article one has
not read by substituting words in the abstract doesn’t work. The
problem is not whether the source article is good or bad in its original
context. The problem is that using methods from an article from another
field without understanding the issues involved is unworkable.
As I wrote the other day, no one serious believes that all economists
follow a single method or adhere to one set of conclusions. This is
clear to anyone who reads articles or books by economists. Even if one
did not take the time to read economics, however, economics is a
behavioral science. Mathematics is a technical tool for most working
economists. The fact that economics uses numbers does not mean that
economics is a branch of mathematics, and it is not axiomatic or logical
in the same way. It follows from an understanding of the behavioral and
social sciences that not all economists follow a single method or adhere
to one set of conclusions.
There remains a difference between economic representations and the
attempt to designers to deploy economic arguments.
If you’re curious to see economic representations, you’ll find them
in many fields. My favorite representation of the economy is the MONIAC,
the hydraulic analog computer invented by New Zealand economist Bill
Phillips. He built the first of these at the London School of Economics
in the late 1940s. You can see one of the Phillips machines in
Wellington at the Reserve Bank Museum in Wellington.
http://nzier.org.nz/about-nzier/moniac-machine
History is filled with intriguing economic representations. Economists
are responsible for some of them – if you’d like to get a sense of
the differences among the way economists conceive economics, I’d
suggest reading Mark Blaug’s excellent books, Great Economists Before
Keynes and Great Economists Since Keynes.
It may be that there are useful representations of economics emerging
among the designers and design fields you are examining. To know this,
you’d have to pay some attention to economics. You don’t have to
reinvent yourself as an economist, but you do need to learn enough to
understand the issues.
With this, I’m going to go silent for a while. Thanks for an
interesting debate.
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia
|