Yes, we need practitioners and we need design theorists and researchers.
I posted the law article simply to state that we could find ourselves
trapped. Law was solely governed by practitioners one and it is now
governed by academic theorists. So too with engineering. And i can see
other disciplines moving this way, for example journalism (which is
also struggling to identify its academic content). So too library
schools, which are rapidly becoming information schools populated by
an unstable mix of practicing librarians and theoretical computer
scientists psychologists, cognitive scientists, etc. On paper it is
a heathy mix: in practice it is filled with tension.
Yes, design needs a healthy mixture. Today's academic policies will
destroy the practitioners who do not publish, so we need new hiring
and promotion policies for academia, especially for the top research
universities which also ought to be the top teaching universities, but
they are not. But much of the kind of design research that takes place
today is not helpful: we need to stop studying how designers work and
start developing an understanding of design itself. The top design
journals do support this. We need more.
Don
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