Dear Francois,

You asked, “would you please at least give us the essence … of your differing arguments? So we each can make our own judgment and opinion.”

This refers to the thread titled “Re: Design Thinking Readings -- going deeper.” On Wednesday, December 12, 2012, I sent a post to the list on three specific issues where I disagreed with a post and blog link by David Sless. You’ll find the post in the PhD-Design archive.

The post examined three specific issues. 1) The first issue is the concept of designthinking. I have a different, and – I believe – a more nuanced view than David does. 2) The second issue is the notion of “the Big D.” Different people mean different things by this term. Some of these concepts are valuable. 3) David’s blog comment that no participant in the online conference on design education in the university offered evidence for the benefits of design and design education and his statement that the University of California Irvine designschool report lacked evidence for the value of design education in the university. In my view, this position is mistaken and irresponsible.

The essence of my argument on these three points is this:

1) The term “design thinking” is a clumsy label for genuine and useful ways of approaching the world. Consultants sometimes use this term to sell questionable services while designers sometimes make more of it than they should. These problems involve consultants, designers, and marketing –the core issues remain worth considering. Erik Stolterman launched a valuable thread, and many readers – myself among tem – have had real benefit from resources and comments posted in response.

2) In an effort to critique the hyperbolic marketing of design services, David criticized aspecific term, “the Big D,” as a concept. I pointed to the Singapore University of Technology and Design as an institution that uses “the Big D” as a valid and appropriate concept. I provided a link to the SUTD web site:

http://www.sutd.edu.sg/thebigd.aspx

While I thought David meant something different, David wrote that this is indeed what he meant in his critique, and he suggests that the SUTD approach also involves marketing hyperbole. I’d suggest that people visit the SUTD site to make up their own minds. In my view, the people at SUTD and the people from MIT who take part in the SUTD project bring real value to our field, and to the larger world around us.

3) List subscribers can find the full conference in the PhD-Design list archives. Click on the year 2003, then organize by date and start on November 14. The full text of the University of California Irvine School of Design Report is available in PDF format on the bottom of my web page:

http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html

That’s the essence of my three points.

Let me wrap up with a general conclusion.

David’s reply to your question criticizes research universities as a problematic institution. Here, David and I disagree. There are roughly 14,000 universities in the world today. Many would once have been called polytechnic, college, hochschule, hogskola, or hoyskole, depending on theirnation and what they do. Apart from these, there are several thousand full-fledged research universities. 500 or so are first-rate, and another 500 or so are serious. Any review of the innovations from which we benefit today – technological, scientific, medical, creative – will show that research universities play a great role in the lives we live.

If we were to lose all the benefits of contemporary life that research universities have had a role in developing, we’d be living the kinds of lives that people lived three centuries ago. There would be far fewer of us to live these lives, and most human lives would be far shorter. Without the contributions of the modern research university to humankind, the Communications Research Institute of Australia would not have many of the tools it uses for its work – but no one would know, since it is statistically unlikely that either David or myself would have lived long enough to engage in debate on an Internet that would not likely have come to exist.

David’s replies and blog posts are charming but mischievous. He says he writes to provoke, and he values irony. David also writes, “make the assumption that at least 95% of what I write is wrong, and the other 5% is probably not very interesting.” The puzzle of this claim is this: while David may assume that 95 per cent of what he writes is wrong, he nevertheless seems to believe that he is right in each instance. David is a great communicator and a marvelous writer, and I’d say he does both very well.

In my view, David is not wrong 95% of the time. I disagree with him this time, on theseissues. David believes that I have “the pigeonhole already waiting” for him. It’s not a pigeonhole. It’s a place of honor on my bookshelf. David’s book – Writing About Medicines For People: Usability Guidelines for Consumer Medicine Information – is an example of first-rate research for evidence-based design.

For me, any disagreement among scholars – or between a skeptic and a scholar – should have a tight focus and defined limits. That’s the case here. My post on December 12 contained my argument on these issues with evidence that allows each reader to form a judgment.

Warm wishes,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design




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