Dear Colleagues,
I hope this post is not too long. I simply want to help people understand what is being proposed. I also want to give it context relative to the times and cultures in which we work. So, let me try to be brief and concise.
Traditional disciplines are being disrupted and transformed as they seek to improve what they do in a world that has become more interconnected, complex, and digitally expressed. The social media, data collection, data mining, intelligent search engines, location based communication, collaboration at a distance, digital production tools and processes, value assessments, and knowledge work that exists now has never existed before. Design thinking is rapidly becoming a major player in almost every field including basic education. Scholarship related to it is also growing rapidly even as education is changing in many ways.
Many lessons have been learned as style books have become theories, elements have become networks, and patterns have become templates for regeneration. Yet habits, hierarchies, beliefs, and behaviors often resist change. Insecurity, entrenched power, and complacency often dampen risk taking necessary for growth and improvement. This is especially true where information, communication, and behavior are concerned and disciplined practices have become established.
Let me give two contrasting examples from my own experience: My wife and I developed "A Directory to Industrial Design in The United States which profiled all the firms, institutions, and graduate theses in the country. It listed everyone in a firm and identified who was a member of the Industrial Society of America with everyone's job title and school, firm's mission, resources, and typical clientele. The intent was to recognize every one and all resources in the field in order to build the community and to get information about it into libraries and businesses throughout the country. Becoming a Director and chair of IDSA's publication committee I suggested that I give the Directory to them thinking that it would allow them to identify non-member stakeholders, gain visibility, and build industrial design. They viewed the directory as a competitor to their annual membership directory, rather as a potential benefit to the field as a whole.
Conversely,a year after getting my PhD, as the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Chapter, American Institute of Architects, I had been able to organize and run the Center for Planning Design and Construction in Philadelphia to bring all professions in the building industry (Contractors, Architects, Landscape Architects, City Planners) together in a shared institution, providing public access to all of them, programs, and computer training of common or particular interest.
I think these different outcomes were largely due to the attitude and self confidence that a long established, licensed profession had over a relatively new, unlicensed one. I hope that everyone concerned with designing recognizes its multidisciplinary nature and the benefits that can result from shared resources.
I also believe that the stars are aligned for tremendous growth, improved education, research and scholarship in this huge field. (Ken tells me that there are over 300 schools offering design related PhD's ) The DRS, PhD list serve, and journal subscribers have identified the community of practice to be served. A data base of personalized, contextualized, well organized, searchable, citation ready bibliographies (not dissertations or annotated bibliographies), linked to authors and their work through academia.edu or perhaps by URL to distributed depositories is, in my view, clearly manageable. As I argued in my last post, content will rise or fall on its own merit. It remains to be seen whether enough of you will recognize, understand, and respond to this opportunity.
Thanks for reading this, and even more for acting on it. Terry offers a pathway.
Chuck
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