Dear Terry, Joao, and Tim,

Thanks to all for your comments on the issue of defining design.

Terry, while I understand the argument you’ve made to Kari-Hans, it doesn’t yet persuade me.

If we’re talking about a human activity, something that people do, then a verb works better than a noun. It may be that I’m missing something, but sometimes when you post your definition, you speak of it as though you havedefined a verb, other times as though you have defined a noun. If I’m mistaken, then I’d welcome a short, concise restatement. This is your definition, so you’re the source and I’m not asking for references.

What sometimes seems to me to be the case, however, is that your definition wiggles grammatically between one state or another – Simon’s definition, the definitions from Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, and mine may all lack something, but their form is clear.

Joao, design as a process is a generalized human capacity and activity, at least as Simon sees it, and as I do. This generalized capacity has specific skill sets with respect to the targets of our intention. These targets – the preferred states, objects, or services toward which we design – are the subjects of specific design practices. We use adjectives to define the specific kinds of practices involved in different kinds of design.

In medicine, we recognize that medicine is a large field. We nevertheless understand that we speak of medicine as a large range of practices, and we define the different kinds of medicine by specific terms – oncology, psychiatry, public medicine, surgery, thoracic surgery, heart surgery, opthamology, anesthesiology, otolaryngology, and so on. Medicine dives itself a different way and expresses itself a different way, so it has a different language with different kinds of definitions. When we speak of design practices, we distinguish the objects of the common process by the adjectives of specialty practice. We distinguish designing chairs from designing birthday parties by different terms – furniture design and party design, a specialized form of service design, though, in fact, a rather large industry. Incidentally, organizing the party may or may not include party design. If organizing theparty includes planning to meet client needs, it is a design process. If organizing the party is a subsidiary service function for a party specified by a service design organization, it isn’t a design process. Common design specialties include graphic design, information design, service design, industrial design, interior design, product design, product design engineering, engineering design, and so on.

Tim, I understand your view on definitions, but I disagree for three reasons. First, in any specific research project, I think it helpful to define, stipulate, or postulate what it is we are talking about. This doesn’t mean we must use the definition for all of time and all of space. It’s not physics! It’s a definition of what we mean by the term for the purposes of a specific conversation. Second, I find it useful – or at least I have done – to define design in a specific way when I write about design. My definition has covering power across a general and broad human process, and I use adjectives to sort through the specific applications at the pointy end of the many ways in which design instantiates. Third, it seems to me that this kind of consideration actually does help us to clarify and sort things through.

Design practice for an older generation of designers was a tacit practice lodged in the artisan crafty guild tradition. When I first moved to Norway in the late 1980s, I often visited and worked with a design firm that was finding their way through to new approaches to design under the rubric strategic design. One partner was convinced that designers sketched things, and that all this new-fangled strategic design talk would be the death of the firm. “Industrial design?” he’d ask, “Consumer research and marketing? Test things? Bah! Humbug!” Well, he didn’t say “Humbug.” He used some colorful Norwegian words that I won’t translate.

The great moment in an ongoing acrimonious debate was the day he stormed out of the partners’ meeting, returning to his desk to work on some sketches. As the other partners walked into the studio, he suddenly stood up and held his pencil aloft like a flaming torch as he shouted, “A real designer thinks with this!”

He later went off to a firm of his own, where he and his employees accumulated a wall full of awards for terrific CD covers and fancy-looking products. Some of the products did not work well for the consumers that bought them, but they won awards from other designers.

The definition of design for this fellow would be wordless, and it would include no research at all.

Other examples – case by case – are just as telling.

The examination and demarcation of issues, disciplines, and fields seems to be part of the development of any field, so this seems to me a necessary and – in my view – useful kind of conversation, even at the risk of some difficulties. If you think about the evolution of medicine, there passed fifteen hundred years between the school of Hippocrates at kos and the medical schools of the first universities. For the next eight centuries or so, there was a major division between physicians trained at university and barber-surgeons who did much of the physical work of medical practice. It took another century or so to make the shift from a kind of guild-based practicewith gentlemen physicians doing surgery in street clothes while smoking cigars to hygienic surgery, from craft guild education to research-based training. The major shift came in the wake of the educational reforms that followed the Flexner Report in North America – British medical education and continental medical education followed the same model. We are slowly now moving into evidence-based medicine and a deeper understanding of research-based practice. All along the way, definitional and demarcation debates were an aspect of the shift. I’m hoping it does not take us 2,500 years, but I see some value in taking the time to debate these issues.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design>

Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China




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