I know this debate sort of dozed off last week. But I have the time to
respond now and was prompted by a news brief that supports my case.

I find the debate of science vs. design to be full of false choices and
falser boundaries. The way in which "design as practice" is framed in our
discussion, I hear design as a practice, as professional practice. This
false boundary is the compared to a strawman of scientific practice or of
scientists, who supposedly don't get it. There are honest reflective
critiques we can and should make, but the list discussion around scientific
practice has been devoid of self-reflection and it ignores the reality of
science in practice (as opposed to scientific method in abstract).

Until we clarify our positions better, we are oddly belittling the
enterprise of science when we ought to be strengthening the
interdisciplinary design of scientific practice. And science has tremendous
potential to help the "project of design" become a valued societal domain of
professional practice. In my opinion.

But my opinion is from someone who (professionally) designs information
services for scientific and clinical practice and decision making, and
conducts ethnographic and activity research on work practices. And
occasionally publishes in scientific (not design) journals findings from
these design studies.

Science is a long-term societal project with the aim of collecting producing
and bettering knowledge for fundamental and applied understanding of nature,
humanity, society, and behavior. Design is an intentional practice of
constructing preferred outcomes in artifacts, services, and systems.
Whether or not long-term thinking is involved, design projects are
instrumental and about deliveries, created artifacts, services, systems.
Steve Job's concern for the unseen brass screw in the Mac is an instrumental
design concern. It's a choice. My design concerns are often about
scientifically derived understandings of behavior in context. It is social
sciences research, not "just" design research.

There are times I'm conducting pure design research - rapid iterations of
creating, evaluating, and creatively evolving prototypes and supporting
service artifacts. These are rich practices involving multiple methods for
understanding, change, and design decisions. But I'm just as often
conducting (separately) social sciences research for design projects with
sufficient strength to yield a paper, if the client allowed the findings
released. Usually this is interpretivist research, so no hypothesis is
established. But sometimes there are clear hypotheses, AND design outcomes.
This is not at all unusual in healthcare design research., which is why I'm
writing a book (for Rosenfeld) on healthcare design
(http://designforcare.com )

Let me lay out a couple more positions. Scientific practice tolerates
research cycles of 5-10 or more years to comprehend natural or social-human
phenomena. The dysfunctions being pointed in our discourse are institutional
issues, and are not inherent to the work of science. The scientists and PhD
level engineers that I study and know are extremely creative, and there's a
sense in which they are designers in every meaning of the word. Designers of
research plans, experiments or prototypes, interventions in natural or
biological systems, designers of structured outcomes. The canonical view of
scientists that non-scientists have is a myth. Good science work is
creative, and discovery is a collaborative and co-creative process (see
Dunbar, not Robin:  )

Science is a necessary public good that we - as design and social scientists
- should be supporting with our own styles of practice.

Design is not a societal project in the same way that science can be thought
of, in that society does not share in the outcomes of design as they
(eventually) do in science. Science deserves social respect for its values.
If our preferred state is for design to gain societal recognition, we need
to espouse and act on values consistent with those long-term projects for
social benefit. But I'm not convinced by the national design strategies that
became popular 10 years ago or so. Those end up being design industry
strategies in disguise, economic strategies, but are not good cultural
change strategy. We might instead integrate design practices as tools for
problematizing and prototyping, and legitimizing informal human research
methods from design practice for accelerating appropriate scientific
projects. As well as health sciences, governance, resource management, and
other fields of course. I don't see that design in business is going to
yield societal recognition at the same level of social impact as scientific
research. But we might do the same with scientific fields as we did with our
- admittedly - closer relatives in business.

Don had pointed out the problem of specialization, which has roots in
institutional practices and cultural elitism as well. Specialists get more
respect and are paid better, in nearly every field. So young people don't
know what they're giving up when they go down the narrow track of doctoral
education. Don said:

"This disease actually impacts much of the university, not just science. The
push toward ultra-specialization is aided by the promotion polices of
universities that increasingly want evidence that the faculty are the top
workers in the field. This is measured through publication in peer-reviewed
venues and by letters from other international authorities. But each
authority only knows the workers in their own sub discipline. The person who
publishes in several disciplines is apt to get lost, for each judge states
that they barely know the person, or that there have been only a few
publications, for they are unaware of all the work done in disciplines they
themselves do not follow."

Design is one of the few exceptions to this rule. Design is a practice, and
practices must cut across disciplines, using the knowledge, methods, and
findings of multiple disciplines in order to create valuable and useful
artifacts.  Great designers are generalists, knowing a little about many
different topics."

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that the biggest institutional driver of
them all, NSF, is now encouraging interdisciplinary research. And for some
of the right reasons, but it's worth noting that this is a high-leverage
intervention with potential paradigmatic change:

National Science Foundation Steps Up Its Push for Interdisciplinary Research
Chronicle of Higher Education (02/13/12)

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is dispatching top official and
University of Michigan professor Myron P. Gutmann to college campuses to
promote the need for greater interdisciplinary research if they wish to win
NSF grants. Gutmann notes that such research has yielded rapid advances in
various fields, such as healthcare applications of atomic-scale science and
the study of extreme weather events through analysis of both natural and
social variables. NSF director Subra Suresh has prioritized the push for
more interdisciplinary research since his arrival in October 2010.
Emphasizing more interdisciplinary research is both financially and
scientifically sensible, says Columbia University professor Mark C. Taylor.
He notes that graduates are becoming too specialized to find employment due
to the unsustainable nature of department-based hierarchies. Economic
anxiousness could aid the NSF in its interdisciplinary efforts by making
universities and their researchers particularly keen to comply with its
mandate. Gutmann notes that NSF still believes in the importance of
traditional disciplines, and says that in his department about 33 percent of
research grants are interdisciplinary. "It doesn't need to be 100 percent,"
he says. "But it might want to be 60 percent."

Design and innovation management were part of my interdisciplinary training
at the doctoral level, with social/organizational psychology and information
studies. I believe design practice and research (not just "thinking") ought
to be integrated into scientific education consistent with the primary
discipline. I think this differs from the Stanford d.school initiative, but
they are acting on the value of design practices across their faculties,
well ahead of most of us.

We need creative scientists who can produce good research but also spinoffs
that yield designed artifacts and effects from that research. We are the
ones who should be leading those initiatives at our universities.

Best, Peter

Peter Jones, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Design
OCAD University, Toronto

http://designdialogues.com