Hi, Rosan,

Your post puzzles me. It’s a bit difficult to understand what you
mean by “projection before analysis” in response to Derek Miller’s
post.

It is truly difficult to see how you get this out of Harold Nelson or
Horst Rittel. To say that you’re acknowledging that their ideas
influence you seems to me a slippery way to avoid telling us exactly
what Nelson or Rittel may have said. I can just as well say the
opposite, and I, too can claim that Rittel or Nelson influences my
views. 

Now if you mean that we project or seek a preferred future state as
against a current state, you can get that out of Rittel, Nelson, or
Herbert Simon. That’s what all designers do. What Derek is saying is
something different.

What Derek is saying is that when you create projects for human beings
in a real world with serious consequences, you must understand the
situation before you act. That’s why analysis is required.

If you’re not aware of Derek’s work at The Policy Lab, I suggest a
visit to the web site:

  http://www.thepolicylab.org/

This is difficult, challenging work. When you get this kind of policy
work wrong, you don’t scrap a prototype and start again or rejig or
CAD parameters to see what the second model looks like. That’s why
analysis makes a difference.

On this issue, I’m back to Don Norman’s point in the Core77 post on
“Why Design Education Must Change.” When you think you can simply
engage in projection before abalyzing and understanding the situation,
you demonstrate that you don’t know what this kind of work requires.
Don wrote,

“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.”

If you haven’t yet read the argument, you might. It may help to
clarify your thinking. It is available at URL


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

In several on-line debates, you’ve argued that design and design
research need to build a research tradition based on the art and design
school way of doing things. That doesn’t work when designers work on
problems requiring a foundation in behavioral and social science. I’m
going to make a statement that will seem a little blunt for some folks,
but I’m going to make it anyhow: your proposal is the kind of idea
that one could only make coming out of the art school tradition. This no
longer works.

You’ve got to know something about the people you are working with
before you start proposing solutions. And this explains what is
problematic with your approach to participatory design. Before you start
creating prototypes, you must understand something about the
participants for whom you design. You’ve got to know something about
their world, their experiences, and the problems they face. That is
where analysis comes in.

Your suggestion is that designers should “Do not start your project
with describing the context (the culture of the local), but think
striaght away about what the policy and program COULD be like, after
all, you have many experiences and there are many good or bad
precedences/designs. Take your first protoype to the local people (your
users)and discuss with them, employing the particaptory approach and
methods. From this discussion, you might not only have a more refined
design, but also might learn about their culture and your own
persumptions.” 

Most experienced designers suggest meeting first with participants.
Participatory design engages the users in prototyping. It’s all very
good to suggest that we have many experiences, but not all experiences
are applicable. To say that there are many good and bad precedents and
designs is a bit like the argument once made for the “contextual
review,” choosing the precedents or designs that please us without
respect to the needs at hand. Someone with rich experience in the UK may
not understand the culture in Denmark. Someone who knows Norway needs to
speak with local people before developing policy proposals in Estonia or
Australia. 

It’s always possible to get a bright idea you might want to try on an
end user, but what often happens when designers prototype before they
examine the problem is that they impose solutions on other people rather
than helping to solve their problems. 

It could be that I’m wrong on this, of course. 

And even though I’ve read Horst Rittel for myself, I might have
missed the part where he suggests jumping in with a projection or
prototype before learning anything. If you can show me where Rittel
offers this suggestion, I’ll read it again. As I see it, Rittel’s
IBIS model was quite the opposite, seeking to research, analyze, and
model a problem and the possible solutions to that problem before
engaging in projection. If anything, the conceptual problem with IBIS is
precisely that it does not always help to sort out the next step –
that is, the project or prototype. Rittel clearly did not argue for
jumping in with a project and sorting it on the fly. What he did say is
that people often do this, and that is one way that wicked problems
arise.

But I might be wrong on this, too, so I’ll be happy to see what
Rittel has to say if you can demonstrate how – and where –
Rittel’s argument supports your view.

Yours,

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