Hi Amanda,
Thanks for keeping teasing the issues out - useful.
You commented, '.. as David Sless suggests, if its impossible to represent
the impact of design, then possibly design as we know it will die.'
One of the great things about systems is that they are not 'good' or 'bad' .
A system simply 'does what it does'. It may be that the way forward in this
system of product development that includes design activity , for ' design
as we know it' to end and be replaced by something different. This is
happening in bits all the time but many designers and design researchers are
not consciously aware of it and it doesn't see much light in the literature.
In relation to your later comment on externalities, I was saying something
slightly different. The discussion seems to be conflating 'externalities'
with 'issues that researchers ignore' and 'over-simplifications that
compromise analyses'. My suggestion was that often values naively identified
as being due to design are due to multiple sources and might be justifiably
claimed as values created by other activities. This is not primarily an
externalities issue. It's a natural consequence of an outcome being due to,
and reliant on, multiple parallel and highly interdependent and interlinked
activities and decisions. To illustrate this, a parallel example to
assessing the value of design is to ask 'What value is created by
mathematics in new product development?' (Remembering all the software,
information and logical ways of understanding that depend on mathematics.)
There would be many issues and processes to consider but, as I understand
it, most of these are not externalities, rather they are parallel to other
contributions that result in the development of value of outputs.
An issue that has not yet been mentioned is transaction cost issues of
design - of particular importance in some areas of product design such as
mass-customisation. Transaction costs associated with design give some
useful insights into relative effectiveness of the different value creation
processes associated with design activities in different product development
contexts.
Best wishes,
Terry
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