Dear Birger, Terry, and All,
The concept of arbitrage drawing on different disciplines and methods seems vital to me. I've been working on an article that address the role of design for value creation with Goran Roos, Chairman of VTT International, the international branch of the Technical Research Centre of Finland. We draw on economics, political science, management, and history to identify reasons for the value of design in generating innovations for firms operating in a high-cost environment. This explains the success of Swedish and Swiss companies operating with strong currencies in high-labor-cost nations that nevertheless export successfully. It would be tough to write a piece like this without significant arbitrage.
This kind of writing requires interdisciplinary perspectives and some depth in each of several fields.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with Terry on any specific point, his critique of much design research is reasonable. I don't see much work of this kind in design research -- and certainly not rigorous work. This is fairly much the same problem that Don Norman identified in his article, "Why Design Education Must Change."
Like Don, I am often forced to read bad research. Over the past few months, I've reviewed several dozen articles and conference papers. While I agree with Birger that things are better now that they were a decade ago, they are not yet what they should be. The cure involves more than mild antibiotics. Of five or six dozen articles and papers, only one offered a comprehensive and well argued case for a novel idea. Most of the submissions -- even the interesting ones -- were marked by serious flaws in method, documentary structure, or such basics as proper referencing to the stated style. The kind of flaws I'm seeing in a typical paper should be resolved in a PhD program, not by a reviewer.
To me, this suggests genuine problems. Do I agree with Terry on solutions? Only in part. I feel that some of Terry's approaches are too engineered and algorithmic. But I understand his frustration with the situation.
As Miyamoto Musashi would have written, "This requires deep reflection."
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
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