Dear Chuck,

Thanks for your reply. I, too, am sorry that it was not possible to
join you in Barcelona. I was down with flu and had medical advice not to
fly. With respect to the off-list note I sent you, I’ve discovered it
does indeed have no content. We use a kludgy system called Groupwise,
and it drops the content from time to time. I can only apologize. The
issues I raised would have been some of the issues I put forward in my
note to Jeff.

Let me run back through the thread to explain my arguments. While
anyone who wishes to read the arguments in full can review them in the
list archives, I’ll repeat a few key points here. You’ve asked me to
state the issues I find problematic. I will. I hope you won’t find my
comments intemperate, but on some issues, they will be critical.

One of the key problems I mentioned in the lost off-list note that I
did not address at length in my note to the list is the problem of
ambiguous, unclear writing. This starts in the way that your post frames
expectations for the paper. Your post to the list was addressed to those
“interested in how philosophy might inform design thinking.”
That’s how I read the rest. This statement covers the claim that
“there isn’t much of a similar nature out there.” If the issue
is “how philosophy might inform design thinking,” there is a great
deal out there.

The contribution this paper makes to the field is a description model
of thought modes. It is different to Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking
Hats, but it is similar to the de Bono approach. While de Bono’s work
is different to yours, de Bono “proposes a comprehensive approach with
a practical and tested foundation in collaborative problem solving.”
De Bono’s methods have been subject to an immense amount of testing
over the past four decades. 

There are also reasonably systematic approaches to collaborative
problem solving in the poorly named but useful collection of techniques
known as value engineering, along with a few others. What some of these
systems lack is a comprehensive philosophical foundation, and your
search for such a foundation has value. 

If the focus of this paper is on thinking and thought modes, I’d
classify it as an original contribution. I understand now that this is
the core of the paper. The core of the paper is a model of design
thinking. If this paper had focused on that model with a title
reflecting this specific issue, I’d have responded differently. My
comments would have been small and tight: I’d have noted de Bono.
I’d probably have suggested minor changes in language – an
example might have been using verbs to describe processes rather than
labeling processes with noun phrases, and adding process descriptions.
In a fundamental paper, it helps to state everything clearly and to make
the arguments within the paper itself rather than using references to an
argument made elsewhere.

With this as the frame, this paper is a contribution to the literature
of how designers think. It contains a proposal to suggest that using
Daniel Dennett’s models of intentionality will help us to understand
design thinking better and it will therefore help us to think better
when we design. I am not making a strong claim to my interpretation of
the core issues in the paper. This may be a mistaken interpretation
reading out from what seems to be the core of the paper. Unfortunately,
unclear writing makes it difficult to identify what you as the author
see as the core issues in this paper. 

From your current note, I suspect that this is a reasonable reading of
the core issues. You write that this contribution is a “comprehensive
approach with a practical and tested foundation in collaborative problem
solving. Part of the confusion in the field is due to the lack of a
systematic synthesizing framework for the many points of view that
exist.” 

While it is true that “part of the confusion in the field is due to
the lack of a systematic synthesizing framework for the many points of
view that exist,” it is not clear that you provide a “comprehensive
approach with a practical and tested foundation in collaborative problem
solving.” If this approach has been tested, you offer no evidence of
the tests or the results. In contrast, some of the authors who have
worked on how designers think have offered evidence, if not an
integrative and systematic synthesis. And one might argue that some of
their work provides evidence for some of the specific modes of thought
you present in this paper.

While I understand Jeff Chan’s and Jerry Diethelm’s views, I’d
argue that they read into the paper some ideas you may have intended
without stating them clearly. Perhaps I might have done so, but it is
the author’s business to be clear, especially in philosophical
writing, or at least in philosophical writing that describes processes.
This gets to the point of why Jerry and Jeff were more generous in this
respect than I was.

The opening sentences of the paper frame the paper as a large-scale
contribution to philosophical thinking about design: “Philosophical
interpretations are essential to design thinking because as an act of
imagination and choice it is not dependent on objective phenomena and
causality in its logic.” This claims raises the issue of a literature
on the philosophy of design and philosophical interpretations of
design.

But the paper can be read another way. Jerry identifies this as
offering “design theory that ‘is responsive to wants and needs, is
goal oriented, and guided by preferences and experiences’,” one that
is “explicitly centered in purposeful thinking and that helps explain
the intentional wholeness of {preferences and their embodied actions and
expressions}.” There is an even larger literature in this precise
area, theory of design.

If the paper is a contribution to “a systematic synthesizing
framework for the many points of view that exist,” it would help to
sketch those views and demonstrate how this is a systematic synthesizing
framework. Nevertheless, I hope I’ve made clear why I read the paper
as I did and why I argue that you’ve neglected a rich and significant
literature.

There is a large and growing literature on the philosophy of design.
This literature addresses philosophy of design in its own right and it
addresses philosophy of design as a branch within the philosophy of
technology for those who see it that way. The literature on relationship
of philosophy of design to design thinking is weaker because the
literature of design thinking requires careful thought and better
definitions. The paper offers none. 

But this paper also raises the issue of “thinking,” and this is an
area that has been subject to a century of work. It’s not a case where
no one has written on “thinking” -- what it is or how it works.

There are significant statements that require substantiation the paper
does not provide. As an example, here is one such claim: “The only
form in which an object of thought physically exists is as a neuron
group within the brain of a thinker. A neuron group becomes identifiable
in cognition when its salience achieves consistent recognition. It is
always linked to other neuron groups that contain information relevant
to it. To the extent that neuron groups are determined by genetic
development they are said to be innate (an “instinct” for language
for example).” The reference for this claim is the entirety of a
523-page book by Stephen Pinker. My reason for raising this is not to be
fussy about reference style, but to critique the ambiguity and
conceptual weaknesses that made me critical toward the article.

If this article is a philosophical contribution, it isn’t necessary
to make claims to neuroscience. While you’ve written that “a
philosophical system must establish its own substantiation through the
reasoning it employs,” this is not the case here. This assertion makes
claims to psychology and neuroscience. These are empirical claims, not
conceptual claims. These kinds of empirical claims require
substantiation.

The reference does not substantiate the claims. Rather than using a
citation constructively to substantiate and advance the argument of the
article, this paper uses the citation as a form of external
argumentation. In an article such as this, an author should argue the
case in the explicit narrative of the article. External sources support
an argument. They cannot replace the argument. This use of Pinker
confuses the two. But it’s more problematic than that. A precise,
fine-grained reference would permit the reader to locate material at the
exact location in the source document. Fine-grained, precise references
allow the reader to question and challenge cited sources. To see what
Pinker writes on this topic, I’ve got to read an entire 523-page book.
Only then can I see if this paper makes proper use of Pinker’s text.
Even if the paper uses Pinker well and Pinker’s text does support the
view presented here however, it would only be possible to understand
whether his views are usable after I search the 523-page book to locate
his thinking on these issues.

Most of the references are equally loose, and some of the other claims
are equally broad and sweeping. It may be true that “a philosophical
system must establish its own substantiation through the reasoning it
employs.” I can accept this provisionally. But this paper hasn’t
done this. It makes claims that do indeed require substantiation with
respect to design, to philosophy, and to thinking. To understand the
paper properly, it would help to have a proper reference base with
carefully developed references pointing to the evidence for these
claims. The other way would have been to adduce a fully reasoned
argument based on claims internal to the paper, but this is not the
case.

Rather, in several cases, the paper suggests that other authors make
the arguments on which the paper draws. Nevertheless, the paper does not
state the arguments explicitly or apply them to the subjects of this
paper. Instead, the paper refers to external arguments that somehow
support the case without being applied to it. In other cases, the paper
makes claims that have a basis in such fields as psychology or
neurobiology. Once again, there is no basis for the assertions that
appear in the paper. There are designers and architects who work in
psychology and neurobiology, but this is not the case here. This paper
makes claims that a psychologist or neurobiologist would reference
carefully. 

This gets to the core of my critique. I do not provide the full kind of
argument the Jerry suggested would be valuable. That is, I don’t state
all the issues I’d consider in writing such a paper, and I haven’t
reviewed the full literature as I might do to help develop a full,
synthetic statement. I acknowledge that Jeff may be right in suggesting
that my tone is too sharp – and you may be right in saying my position
on this has been intemperate. It’s my view that the kinds of claims in
the paper require a challenge. That’s a different issues to whether
I’m prepared to offer constructive rewrites or to propose other
ways forward. Many claims were too broad and sweeping and the paper
offered empirical claims in areas that require substantiation rather
than adducing a philosophical argument based on reasoning alone.

While it may not be that anyone has offered “a systematic
synthesizing framework for the many points of view that exist,” there
are good holistic accounts of design process by Klaus Krippendorff,
Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman, Henrik Gedenryd, Don Norman, and
others. While I agree with Don’s argument argues that we don’t need
more studies on how designers work, I’d find a serious systematic
synthesizing framework on how designers think useful if it were more
than another study of each step in what a designer did. I’m not
criticizing the design methods work or some of the important
conclusions. These studies had value in developing the field. Now it’s
time to find out how design works rather than yet another series of
studies on how designers work – unless, through such a study, one can
point to real advances by proposing  a “comprehensive approach with a
practical and tested foundation in collaborative problem solving.”
That requires evidence. The claim that something is “practical and
tested” is a claim to external evidence rather than a claim to a chain
of reasoning developed within the paper itself.

It might have been that we could have resolved some of these issues had
we been in Barcelona. And it may be that I’m intemperate here. It’s
the paper I am criticizing and not you – your work interests me and I
am fascinated by your approaches to designing and teaching design. I
have real problems with this specific paper, problems I hope I have
stated in a clear and reasonable way.

Warm wishes,

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

Chuck Burnette wrote:

—snip—

The off list note you sent came marked “no content”. Please send it
again. 
Please indicate what paper you are referring to when you claim that
“nothing similar “ is not accurate. I know of no other work that
proposes a comprehensive approach with a practical and tested foundation
in collaborative problem solving. Part of the confusion in the field is
due to the lack of a systematic synthesizing framework for the many
points of view that exist.

Also what do you mean by “requiring substantiation”. In my view a
philosophical system must establish its own substantiation through the
reasoning it employs. Perhaps you didn’t notice or properly understand
how my approach builds out from the Interpretationalism of Daniel
Dennett. As I am working out of my Theory of Design Thinking I would
love to locate other papers that address Intentional Stances in design
(Thank you Nathan Crilly) which are directly relevant if not of the same
scope.

Finally, I find your remark that “there is no basis for the
assertions that appear in this paper” simply outrageous as you know
better. What exactly is your motive here? 

I’m sorry you could not attend the Design/Business conference in
Barcelona. Perhaps your intemperate judgments could have been avoided if
we could have discussed our different approaches to scholarship.

—snip—