Dear Terry,

It’s a mistake to argue for engineering design as the source of
working answers to all design problems. You wrote, “For any analysis
in this kind of area, look to engineering design. Engineering design has
already addressed (and found working answers to) all the same issues
that ‘art and design’ is now addressing.”

There are two problems in this claim. 

The first problem arises in dividing design into the two categories of
“engineering design,” and “art and design.” This is an
inadequate account for a far more complex field.

The second problem arises from the notion that engineering design
addresses has working answers to all design problems. This is not so.

Design includes a wide range of professions that act on the world to
create preferred future states. Practitioners in these professions
generally solve problems for stakeholders of different kinds –
clients, customers, or end-users, as well as the users of services.
Stakeholders employ designers to solve designated problems on their
behalf. In addition, some designers find problems that interest them and
create preferred future states by creating something new and useful,
even when no stakeholder has brought them an obvious problem. Personal
computing is a case in point. Because companies like Xerox could see no
obvious problem to solve and therefore no profit, they did nothing with
the potential advances in personal computing that companies like Apple
brought to life. For the greatest part, though, people bring problems to
designers seeking solutions and improvements: a bridge, a manufacturing
system, a medical treatment, a corporate identification system, a tax
policy, a shoe… and so on. 

The design sciences include design professions that use partly rigorous
and partly heuristic means to design and to solve design problems.
Whether you use Herbert Simon’s view of the design sciences or
Buckminster Fuller’s, designers work in a far wider range of partly
rigorous fields and subfields than engineering design accounts for.

In many posts to this list, I have referred to engineering and
engineering design as good examples of workable traditions. I value and
respect the successes of engineering design. Nevertheless, engineering
design cannot solve all design problems. If engineers could solve all
design problems, we’d live in a different world. If engineers could do
it all, there would be no need for anthropologists, standard economists,
behavioral economists, psychologists, sociologists, biologists,
physicians, ergonomists, physiologists and other professionals who also
solve design problems.

Some professionals specialize in solving problems that engineers create
by using engineering methods to solve problems that require
interdisciplinary design. There are also forms of engineering that
thrive by solving problems that traditional forms of engineering can’t
solve. While mechanical and electrical engineers solve important
problems brilliantly, they don’t seem to build better toasters,
refrigerators, or consumer goods, and sometimes they don’t even build
better automobiles. Many engineers who do great work on straightforward
problems have a hard time dealing with the systems and logics that
create products with a good human interface. Simply put, many engineers
create highly functional systems that do not meet human needs.

For these reasons, I challenge the assertion that “engineering design
has already addressed (and found working answers to) all the same issues
that ‘art and design’ is now addressing.”

Many forms of design also fall outside the rubric of “art and
design.” While many design programs are located in faculties of art
and design, this is not universal. One example is close to home for me:
the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology does not
include art in its offerings. We do offer research and teaching in
design anthropology, neuroaffective design, product design engineering
(with our engineering colleagues), strategic design, and other fields,
as well as a comprehensive array of traditional design disciplines.
Evidence suggests that a design faculty without art is as creative as an
art and design school. The quality of the artifacts our people produce
and the awards they’ve won suggest that a design faculty without art
does as well on aesthetic grounds as art and design programs do. It also
demonstrates that there are effective approaches to design that are
neither engineering design nor art and design.

Some of the best design faculties in the world today are neither
engineering design nor art and design, though they may have links to
either field or both. At Delft University of Technology, the Faculty of
Industrial Design Engineering is an industry-focused faculty with a
powerful emphasis on great products for people, and the approach is
driven by psychology and economics and not by mechanical engineering or
engineering design. At Loughborough University, the Loughborough Design
School brings design and technology together with human sciences,
ergonomics, and safety research. In addition to the design school,
Loughborough has a school of the arts for art and design, as well as
five schools of engineering: aeronautical and automotive; chemical;
civil and building; electronic, electrical, and systems; mechanical and
manufacturing.

We agree on the value and importance of engineering design. Where I
disagree is that engineering design has workable models for all design
problems – and I disagree with the suggestion that art and design is
the other main approach to design. There are many design fields, and
research-based practice is common to several of them. The challenge we
face today is ensuring that research-based practice becomes as common to
design as it is to medicine and engineering.

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
39214 6078 | Faculty