Dear Ken and Gunnar

This is getting interesting.

IMHO, Design is neither a "science" nor is it "art". It stands apart as a
third leg in my metaphorical stool of human knowledge and skill sets - both
tacit as well as explicit ones. Design Research is trying to make it a
science and Design Practise is trying to perfect it as an Art, or so it
seems to me from all these arguments and ongoing discussion about the
definitions of design both here on this list as well as elsewhere.

My first design teacher at NID, Prof Kumar Vyas, told us in the sixties and
seventies that design is easier explained than defined and the situation I
believe has not changed since then, although we have hundreds of new books
on the subject and many of them in the design theory and design research
space. Ken, your horse will have to wait for several rounds of
reincarnation that the Hindu faith provides for if it is to have a chance
to breast the tape, if at all.

I tell my students the parable of the blind men and the elephant when it
comes to defining design. This old Buddhist and Jain parable has many
interpretations and there are several interesting versions of this online
including one on YouTube that is listed below.
Wiki has this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant>
Jain world site has this <
http://www.jainworld.com/education/juniors/junles19.htm>
and You Tube has this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JseHDbrm6Lc>

I must distinguish the term designer from the term design. Terry is right.
The tasks that (traditional) or (new-fangled) designers did or will do in
the future could be replaced by new processes (and teams) or automated by
new tools including computer based tools besides others including ideas,
innovations and methods. However, wicked problems are wicked just because
they cannot be defined and these will need design and strategy to address
them adequately. However, "the designer" is an evolving form of human
response and we will need to accept that reality in both education and in
practise.

I do not see how science centric explanations and definitions can or will
resolve this dilemma. This is why Jonas's swamp appeals to me. Yes, we need
to explain the value of design to business and government decision makers
as well as to the academic world. Design has always had this problem in all
periods of human evolution since it always leads from the front and helps
form culture in its wake. Design will perhaps live outside the frame of
acceptable and defined (peer reviewed) science since having solved one set
of real world opportunities we will move on to the next set of challenges
that will raise a whole lot of new issues and questions.

What do you think?

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my Mac at home on the nID campus
13 August 2012 at 11.05 pm IST

-------------------------------------------------------------
*Prof M P Ranjan*
*Design Thinker and author of blog -
www.Designforindia.com<http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/>
*
E8 Faculty Housing
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
email: ranjanmp@g <[log in to unmask]>mail.com

<[log in to unmask]>web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp
<http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp>web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in
<http://www.ranjanmp.in/>blog: <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com>
education blog: <http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com>
education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com
<http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com/>
------------------------------------------------------------

On 13 August 2012 12:30, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Dear Gunnar and Ranjan,
>
> Gunnar’s bet is probably safe. It seems to me unlikely that design
> professionals and researchers in the field will ever agree on a broad,
> common definition. This is quite different to seeing the reason for –
> and value of – a broader and more common definition than the simple
> definitions in wide use.
>
> Simon offered his definition at a time that increasingly greater
> proportions of the world were governed by Fuller’s concept of class
> two evolution. We are seeing this to be the case, for example, in a
> debate on catastrophic climate change in which one key aspect of the
> debate has to do with whether human beings and human-made – designed –
> forces have anything to do with climate change. Those who argue that
> there is no reason to believe this argue for business as usual on the
> grounds that since we have nothing to do with climate problems, we
> cannot do anything to improve the situation. The second part of the
> debate concerns possible effects and the consequences that flow from
> these effects (see, f.ex. Schwalm, Williams, and Schaeffer 2012). If
> current conditions are within a normal range of variance, we have
> nothing to worry about. But even if they are nothing, if it is true
> that we have no responsibility for these changes … well, we’re back to
> the first part of the debate.
>
> While this is a massive, macro-historical issue, I’d argue that a
> different sense of the uses and powers of design agency would give
> more people a sense of what we should be debating.
>
> If you look at such organizations as MindLab, the SITRA Strategic
> Design group, or Policy Lab, you’ll also see the kinds of issues over
> which a broader definition of design gives us greater purchase.
>
> Closer to home, an inappropriately limited definition puts us at the
> mercy of any common definition in general, public use. If design is
> limited to computable activities or to fashion, the implications are
> quite different to the kinds of design education that deserve public
> funding or the kinds of research that deserve public support.
>
> Very few people other than those who follow these debates will ever
> bother to understand such notions as a “Loveian” sense of design, or
> even possibly Simon’s sense if you use his name as an adjective.
> (There is no “Friedman” sense. I use Simon’s definition and accept the
> consequences that follow from the broad coverage Simon’s definition
> affords.)
>
> The better way to go is a better understanding of what design means in
> general as a verb and as a noun. Then, it is simple enough to limit
> the broad term with adjectives. That’s what’s adjectives are for. It
> delimits such professional fields as communication design, information
> design, product design engineering, strategic design, industrial
> design, fashion design, and the rest.
>
> In years gone by, I recall your lamentation over the faculty that
> senior university managers where you worked never quite understood the
> importance or value of design, and were therefore unwilling to provide
> the resources needed for the education you hoped to deliver. Most
> deans – though not all – share this problem. If the design field is a
> modest and poorly-defined discipline focused on the specific
> hand-production of artifacts, then universities can simply ally design
> to an art faculty or a craft production faculty, letting artistic
> concerns or craft-centered concerns dominate design. If the design
> field is an adjunct to engineering or a computable process, then
> design can be placed in engineering or IT with no adverse
> consequences.
>
> As I see it, there are adverse consequences to such a disposition of
> resources. Design is interdisciplinary and those who work in design
> must therefore be in a position to work with equally important and
> significant professions that also engage design process in one way or
> another. A better definition should also allow us access to the
> resources we need to deepen and enrich our field for better service to
> society as well as to specific clients, customers, and end-users.
>
> To use a definition with broad coverage is not to understand design
> process and profession in one single way. Rather it allows for many
> ways and multiple perspectives. The difficulty of competing
> definitions is simple: people are notoriously bad at keeping several
> dozen competing definitions in mind. If there were, say, five useful
> definitions for each of five specific forms of design practice, people
> might remember them. But this is not the case – the breadth of design
> professions, practices, and research fields is far greater. This
> relegates any definition to a low common denominator based on the
> primacy effect, the first usage people hear. In the world today,
> that’s likely to be something like “designer shoes,” “designer jeans,”
> or design applied to fancy home interiors.
>
> I’m partly agreeing with both of you – and I certainly do not say you
> are wrong. My position is slightly different: my position is that
> Simon’s definition gives broad enough coverage to demonstrate the
> multiplicity and wide variety of useful forms that design practice can
> take without limiting us to one definition. Adjectives can delimit and
> specify.
>
> If anyone prefers another definition, they’re free to use it. My
> argument is simple enough: the diversity of simple definitions that
> are workable for a small segment of the field while failing to cover
> the rest leave us unable to explain the value of design well or
> clearly to those who fund our universities and national research
> programs. If this remains the case, it will leave us where we are
> without any significant improvement for the future.
>
> There are many debates within such fields as economics, physics, or
> psychology about the relative value of approach, the limits or
> boundaries between kinds of issues and questions, and the different
> practices that these fields require for research or for professional
> practice. Nevertheless, there is some kind of broad understanding of
> what such words as economics, physics, or psychology mean.
>
> If we can shape a broad understanding amongst ourselves on design, we
> have some hope of explaining ourselves better to audiences that do not
> now have any sense of what we do. In my view, this accounts for many
> of the problems we face relative to such fields as economics, physics,
> or psychology.
>
> To be sure, these fields have been around far longer than we have
> been. Economics has been around for roughly a century and a half in
> its roughly contemporary form, though it has precedent disciplines
> going back nearly two millennia. Psychology has a similar provenance,
> with a bit more than a century in its current form as a discipline.
> Physics goes back two and a half millennia, taking modern shape
> roughly since Galileo or Newton, but finding its way to its current
> shape from the early 1800s with thermodynamics, the mid-century with
> electromagnetism, and the years before and after the turn of the
> century with the first steps toward quantum physics and relativity.
> Design as an industrial profession and an applied social science is
> far younger than these.
>
> Given the relatively new shape of design, I suppose, we could expect
> to spend a few decades more on the quest for understanding – perhaps
> even a century or so. Statistically, however, I only expect two to
> three more decades on this planet. Gunnar might win his bet, but I'm
> still hoping for my horse to come in. Rather than say we’re in a
> swamp, I’d like to learn something from other professions and from the
> disciplines that inform them with respect to the intellectual
> development of the discipline. A definition with broad coverage
> provides the first step in that direction – and it leaves us plenty of
> choices by filling in the diagram of fields and sub-fields,
> disciplines and sub-disciplines, each defined by an adjective, much as
> astrophysics, behavioral economics, and clinical psychology manage to
> do.
>
> 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
> 3 9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
>
> --
>
> Schwalm, Christopher R., Christopher A. Williams, and Kevin Schaeffer.
> 2012. “Hundred-Year Forecast: Drought.” New York Times. August 11,
> 2012. URL:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/extreme-weather-and-drought-are-here-to-stay.html?src=me&ref=general
>
> --
>
> Gunnar Swanson wrote:
>
> —snip—
>
> I see no reason that Terry can’t or shouldn’t limit the definition of
> design as long as he’s making it clear that his definition is what he
> means. That doesn’t stop anyone else from using a more expansive
> definition as long as they make it clear that the more expansive
> definition is what they mean. The quest for singular definitions seems
> like a search for clarity but it seems to almost always result in a
> sort of intellectual slippage where multiple people engage in multiple
> conversations while suffering from the delusion that only one
> discussion is happening.
>
> I suspect we’d all be better off if instead of saying “Design is x,”
> we’d say “Design (by the Simonized definition) is x, “Design (of the
> Loveian sense) is y,” and “Design (in the Friedmanesque usage of the
> term) is z.”
>
> —snip—
>
> MP Ranjan wrote:
>
> —snip—
>
> Design is indeed not understood in one single way, but in many many
> ways and there are conflicts galore in academia and in business and we
> will need to learn to navigate all of this with our research and
> insights from practice or miss the point altogether.
>
> —snip—
>



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