Dear Ken,

Thank you very much for a very thoughtful response!

As a designer and researcher working in a design university, I can and do appreciate the specialist designers' special role in the world, and within the phenomenon of design. As I see it, based on this background and this kind of knowledge, design research is uniquely equipped to possibly develop very interesting and useful understanding about design that takes place also outside of the boundaries of this specialist group and its cultures. 

However, I have found that the ways of defining "what design is" (especially to restrict it to intentional and specialist design activities and their results) tend to erect walls in the wrong places, thus making it hard for design researchers to operate outside of their local turf, and to be able to usefully utilize the knowledge they have about design, and consequently, this means they are constrained in the capacity of their work to engage the challenges of the rest of the world. These boundaries, helpful as they are for defining a disciplinary area where certain characteristics of certain phenomena are known to apply, can become a handicap for the development of wider knowledge and expertise, if they are taken as boundaries that restrict the applicability of some wider phenomena only to that disciplinary area. 

[Similar but in a way opposite reasons operate on the other side: people who are not familiar with the field of design may avoid using the word "design" in their work, not only because they do not think that it could be used, but because they may not want to step outside of the vocabulary of their own field, and risk having arguments with design oriented people, unless they are absolutely convinced that this is exactly the word to be employed. Thus its absence from e.g. evolution-related scholarship is in my opinion not a very conclusive argument against its applicability.]

I think that these restrictions (intention, specialism) are harmful in many cases and should not be applied universally without some reasonable justification, but it is very useful to hear the arguments for why they should be upheld.

I also enjoyed very much your description of Jacob's design activities, thanks for sharing that!

Here is another story about animal tool use: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/parrot-in-captivity-manufactures-tools-something-not-seen-in-the-wild/  - In this example a parrot apparently exercises problem solving skills and intentionally prepares a tool that matches and solves the problem. So apparently animals do design, to some extent. One crucial difference between humans and other animals in their design is that humans have an efficient way to preserve the design they are able to generate through language and efficient transgenerational teaching and learning, and to build on it in the future, thus evolving and accumulating cultural design much faster than other species. You see, here I am using the word "design" to denote a resource, something that can be accumulated, much in the same way as Dennett.

I appreciate the description you give of all the kinds of things someone needs to wade through if one wants to learn about evolution. This is the same problem in all transdisciplinary research, and an efficient cause for making it so rare. However, I think we should not expect some current day scientific hero to emerge and take charge and show the way with appropriate authority, incontestable expertise in all these areas you mention, and a record of years of impeccable scholarship in this kind of a novel topic, before we venture to explore such directions. Instead, after some people start moving in some direction, with some early efforts and modest, maybe even not so well founded beginnings, it is possible that some interest is sparked, inspiration sets in, and a community of people can emerge who are able to turn a weak sprout into an interesting and meaningful field of study that attracts others, who can help to make the studies more comprehensive. Definitely, and unfortunately, the academic system does not encourage anyone to pursue these kinds of uncertain and messy directions.


About the two questions:

1) I think I understood what you say here, but I may have gotten it wrong, if so, please bear with me....

But in your response to question about why intentionality is a prerequisite for something to be considered design, I did not really see a clear explanation for a "why" this should be the case. You talk about something I agree with: that (according to dictionary definitions and discussions by Herbert Simon etc) people think that intentional design is "design"; but you do not explain the opposite: why unintentional design should not be called (or awarded the status of) design (and should be called something else instead). It is this latter part that I do not see a reason for. Even though many people do not think about it or do it, why is it a bad idea for someone do it? Would you have any references for good arguments about that?

You continue that terms should be used consistently, and there I agree. But we disagree on what creates consistency. We seem to both think that some kind of similarity in qualities and avoidance of differences is important for consistency, but we return back to question 1 - you think the key quality to follow is intention, while I think that things such as structure, functionality and consequence should be followed.

It seems to be that your stance means that design was born with the intention to design, and before that there was no design? And as you describe design by Jacob, you seem to think that this happened already sometime before human beings entered the evolutionary stage? Or do you think that Jacob's ability and intention to design was dependent on his ability to observe your wife's activities and to learn from a design presented by her as an example?

Compared to yours, my stance is that design started in the Big Bang (we don't know what was before that...), and was amplified and accelerated in various steps on the way, but definitely so when intention stepped in as a way to guide design work and selection.


In your response to 2) you propose "structure" as a word to be used in place of "design" to discuss the outcomes of what I call non-intentional design processes. I think the word structure describes one important aspect of designs, but lacks e.g. the dimension and qualities of function, so I find "design" much more useful.


All in all, thank you for taking the time to write the response, it is very helpful as an explanation of your thoughts and gives me good issues to think about, and please accept my apologies for any misunderstandings.

cheers, Kari-Hans


On Apr 6, 2013, at 8:27 AM, Ken Friedman wrote:

> Dear Kari-Hans and All,
> 
> Thanks for your note. This is a long post, and I hope to answer your question carefully in all its dimensions. I’ve been thinking in response to your posts and in response to the other interesting posts in the thread.
> 
> Jukka’s note captures an important issue:
> 
> “All in all, it is an old research strategy in natural sciences to look at systems as if they were well-designed, and then use design aesthetics like simplicity or elegance to guide hypotheses of what and why.”
> 
> The issue is not that we believe anything to be designed, but to look at systems AS IF they were designed to learn from the outcomes.
> 
> Before answering your two questions, I want to state that I agree with you, Klaus, Ranjan – and I’m sure a great many more – on the case that design involves many more kinds of human activity than we include in professional design.
> 
> Given the use of intentional action to achieve preferred future states over present states, I believe that there is evidence to show that many primates design, as do some higher vertebrates, including reported cases in which dogs and horses design to achieve goals. Mary Catherine Bateson (1972) describes an interesting account about a horse in Our Own Metaphor.
> 
> I have also seen several incidents of dogs that design. On another thread, I told the story of how our old poodle, Jacob, learned to harvest raspberries.
> 
> When we moved from Sweden to Norway, we discovered raspberry bushes at the bottom our garden. At dinner, Jacob learned about raspberries and found that he liked them. Watching my wife pick raspberries one day, he realized that these were a food he enjoyed. The next day, Jacob set about learning how to pick raspberries for himself. He did it carefully, using his teeth to avoid touching the stem with his lips. From that time on, all the raspberries up to knee height were Jacob’s. Or, better put, there were no raspberries below knee height left for us to pick. He still insisted on his share at dinner. He never learned how to open the refrigerator to get the crème fraiche topping he preferred, so he had to demand a share of our dessert.
> 
> During raspberry season, Jacob learned that new raspberries ripened when the sun was up. He also found that they did not ripen when it was overcast or rainy. Weh raspberry season began, therefore, Jacob would check the sky as soon as he went out in the morning. On sunny days, he would run to the bottom of the garden before he did anything else. On overcast days, he would go about other activities.
> 
> I propose that Jacob designed the equivalent of a pre-agricultural gathering process. He might even have thought of this as an agricultural system based on division of labor in which he did the harvesting for below-the-the-knee raspberries, while we harvested above-the-knee raspberries and prepared them for dessert after dinner. Jacob may have had an economic argument for this system, since he also controlled consumption. We never talked over the fine points.
> 
> What’s evident is that Jacob observed that we had raspberries, watched a human pick them, and reasoned the process through in some way. I can’t say what this reasoning process involved, but it involved more than simple imitation. Jacob had first to recognize what it was that my wife was picking. Then he had to develop a way to harvest the berries while avoiding the prickles, and he did it without fingers or opposable thumbs.
> 
> Many years ago, I had another dog – Eleanor – who learned to cover things up when she wished to hide the evidence of the minor misdemeanors that dogs commit. She was able to follow complex verbal instructions with pointing cues to navigate buildings and construction sites when I was several floors away and wanted her to go from one part of the building to another. She also developed a theory-in-use for opening closed doors, but that’s another story and fairly long, so I’ll save it.
> 
> Intending creatures can plan and carry out acts. In my view, they design. The difference between these other creatures and humans is that we can report our activities and intentions, and we can describe and analyze the results of our design activity.
> 
> There is some kind of gray zone between purposeful but inarticulate design of non-humans, the purposeful and articulate design of design professionals, and the somewhat chaotic but nevertheless purposeful emergent design instantiated in the human actions that result in cultural flow.
> 
> Arjun Appadurai is an anthropologist. In describing ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and mediascapes, he is not describing emergent design that arises from an unpurposeful evolutionary framework. He describes that which emerges from human action and interaction.
> 
> In my view, you’re reading Dennett is a way that mixes metaphors. Dennett himself may hold this view – it’s hard for me to say – but I see this as a position contrary to the Great Watchmaker metaphor used to argue for the existence of a purposeful God acting in time and history from a divine position outside time and history. Today, Biblical fundamentalists use this approach to argue for a divine agency rather than evolution theory in the concept mislabeled “intelligent design”. I’d say that any God responsible for creation has evidently chosen to act through the natural processes of physics, chemistry, and biology, so I’m not sure what the fuss would be about. To my mind, the notion of treating the results of evolution as design stem from problematic arguments. I’ll say more about this below.
> 
> On one point, though, I’ll say that Dennett is quite wrong. You quote Dennett as writing that “Darwin saw was that in principle the same work could be done by a different sort of process that distributed that work over huge amounts of time, by thriftily conserving the design work that had been accomplished at each stage, so that it didn’t have to be done over again.”
> 
> Thrift suggests frugality, and this passage may be read as praise for an efficient process. Evolution is an immensely wasteful process, quite inefficient in the amount and number of false starts we see. Estimates among experts in evolution suggest that somewhere between 99% and 99.99% of all species that have every existed have gone extinct. This is not a thrifty process. Depending on how you understand the process, nature may not be thrifty at all in “conserving the design work that had been accomplished at each stage, so that it didn’t have to be done over again.” In the sense that evolved life forms fill a niche in a fitness landscape, there is some kind of conservation of energy, in that evolved life forms achieve a peak position in the fitness landscape while conserving evolutionary advantage.
> 
> But the apparent conservation of energy leads to a problem when the nature of the fitness landscape changes. This becomes clear in extinction events, evolutionary dead ends, and the inability of unfitted life forms to shift positions to new peaks in an altered environment.
> 
> Studying these issues is useful and information for those with the technical skills to study them. Very few designers have those skills, not even the people who get a PhD.
> 
> Keith Russell posted a link to an excellent article on “How Not to Write a PhD Thesis” (Brabazon 2010). [The full text of the Brabazon article follows.] Reading it, I found myself both laughing and crying over the extraordinary number of accepted PhD theses in design fields that do not meet these standards. Many supervisors do not help their students measure up to the minimum standards we expect in other fields – and incompetent examiners pass them!
> 
> We’re talking about simple issues here, not the advanced research methods and technical skills needed to learn from evolution theory, biology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, or other such fields.
> 
> Based on a couple dozen articles and conference papers I’ve reviewed over the past two or three weeks, 80% of the researchers in the design field lack the skills and competencies Brabazon requires of a PhD. There is no way to know how many of the papers are written by people who graduated with a PhD, but internal evidence suggests that the majority of these are teaching academics with a completed PhD. Internal evidence in one problematic paper suggested that the author could not even manage to cite his own work properly!
> 
> Now let’s move beyond the simple nuts and bolts research issues to examine methods and methodology. To work with evolutionary theory in its many forms, a researcher would have to have a reasonable knowledge of the natural sciences. Fewer than 5% of the people working in the design research fields have studied the natural sciences to the level of an undergraduate degree, and only a handful have earned a PhD in any of the natural sciences. To work with this material properly in applying it to design, one needs a reasonable understanding of statistics and some advanced mathematics. No design program known to me offers statistics or mathematics at the undergraduate level, and few require them for the PhD. It is the case that many designers master the mathematics required for programming and some kinds of mathematics for industrial design, industrial design engineering, product design engineering, and so on, this is not the same as statistics or mathematics for research.
> 
> My question, then, is how designers can hope to engage in research on evolution without the appropriate conceptual and intellectual tools?
> 
> With respect to cultural evolution and other such issues, the situation is somewhat better. More people have studied the social sciences in a serious way. Nevertheless, design remains a research field in which many people believe they can apply ethnographic or anthropology after taking a two-hour seminar.
> 
> The situation in North America is different. Most universities have processes in place that ensure students have the Brabazon minimum criteria for thesis projects. Even there, few PhD students in design have the skills or methods to work with evolution in serious research.
> 
> My view is that we can learn from evolution in a metaphorical sense, but unless I am quite wrong, most people in the design field lack the technical skills and research methods to engage in the kind of research you are proposing.
> 
> It’s my view that those who can do such research – and Daniel Dennett is not one of them – would not describe the outcome of evolution as “design,” except in metaphorical terms.
> 
> After a rather long introduction, I’ll try to answer your two questions. The answers here are fairly short.
> 
> Kari-Hans: 1) Why do you think that design must be intentional? Why is it a bad idea to think about a process that produces organization and functionality without intention, as “design”? Is it just because it has always been that way, or is there a more justified or important reason?
> 
> KF: A few issues apply here. I’m certainly not asserting the intentionality of design because it has always been that way. In professional design education with its reliance on craft guild traditions, there has been relatively little attention to words or what they mean, so I’d argue that it has not always been that way for designers.
> 
> This kind of reflection on the meaning of the word “design,” with an emphasis on intention seems to begin in the 1960s, with the most notable discussion being Herbert Simon’s (1969) Sciences of the Artificial. I haven’t made a thorough literature search on the concept, so I don’t know the first usage among designers or people in design research. Quite possibly, someone may have offered such reflections earlier, using the kinds of definitions found in the dictionary as a starting point. I discuss these issues extensively in “Design Science and Design Education” (Friedman 1997) and in “Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into Practice” (Friedman 2001). Both are available at URL:
> 
> http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman/Papers
> 
> There is a purpose to using terms consistently. If we use the verb “to design” to signal intentionality, it seems to me useful to speak of “a design” or “designs” as the products of the intentional design process. It seems inconsistent and problematic to use the noun “a design” in two completely different ways – one as the outcome of an intentional process, and the other as the outcome of a random and unintended process parallel to natural selection. The concept of emergent design as a result of human action also falls within the parameters of intentional actions, even if some properties of the outcome are emergent, chaotic, and unexpected.
> 
> In contrast, one can speak of the outcomes of other processes using different words.
> 
> Kari-Hans: 2) As you suggest that these outcomes should not be called designs, what should they be called instead? Is there any common, generic word/concept comparable to “a design”, or should each of these things be called by some specific category name?
> 
> KF: There is a common generic word that refers to the outcome of any process instantiated in a physical form, and it also covers the outcome of any process instantiated in social or cultural forms, or even in other processes. The word is “structure.” There may be other words that work in a generic way, and there are many specific terms for outcomes in specific categories.
> 
> When human beings map the structure, it can be called a plan or a design in metaphorical terms, but it is not a design in an accurate sense unless it is the outcome of a planned process. Thus, Crick and Watson’s map of DNA is not “a design,” whereas a genetic engineers who develops the plan for a new kind of DNA does indeed create “a design.”
> 
> Gregor Mendel mapped the genetic structure of peas. One can say that he designed the experiments that yielded his results, but he did not design peas in the sense that we might speak of designing genetic forms today. Burbank purposely developed and hybridized hundreds of kinds of plants, and it can be said that Luther designed genetic forms. In Burbank’s time, many scientists criticized Burbank for his failure to keep the good records that would have made him a major scientist in the field – he was instead a skilled practitioner interested specifically in design outcomes. Today, we can design the specific genetic foundation of many kinds of organisms. This is design in the explicit sense of the intentional verb, and the models or plans for these plants may be spoken of as “a design” in he singular form, or “designs” in the plural form.
> 
> The outcomes of natural process are not “designs” as I see them. They are structures, and within the large generic category of structures, there are structures of many kinds, all with more specific labels – bees, galaxies, elements, trees, waves.
> 
> Designers with a rich skill set have a great deal to learn from many of these kinds of structures. If we treat these structures AS IF they were purposeful designs, we may well learn a great deal from the ways in which they arise and behave. What we learn from these structures often informs good design process and elegant design outcomes – the Swinburne design student who won the Dyson Prize in 2011 (Chancellery 2011) used biomimicry for a revolutionary irrigation system based on the way that some desert creatures harvest and retain water. An engineer and physicist I know once explained to me several intriguing systems that use ocean waves or ocean temperature differentials as renewable sources of energy.
> 
> To do this, our grasp of techniques and methods must move beyond metaphor. The metaphor of evolution suggests. To transform what we observe in the structures of the world around us into useful design – intentional goal-oriented design process to solve problems – requires a great deal of work.
> 
> In my view, this requires understanding the issue of intentionality. We must recognize the difference between structures or more specifically labeled entities or phenomena arising without purpose in nature and the purpose-driven designs we generate or derive, whether with full intentionality or through emergence.
> 
> 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>    Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
> 
> Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
> 
> References
> 
> Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1972. Our own metaphor. A personal account of a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
> 
> Brabazon, Tara. 2010. “How not to write a PhD thesis.” Times Higher Education. 28 JANUARY 2010. URL:
> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/410208.article
> Accessed 2013 April 5.
> 
> Chancellery. 2011. Dyson Prize Presented at Swinburne. 2011 December 14. URL:
> http://www.swinburne.edu.au/chancellery/mediacentre/alumni/news/2011/12/dyson-prize-presented-at-swinburne
> Accessed 2013 April 6.
> 
> Friedman, Ken. 1997. “Design Science and Design Education.” In The Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, ed. Helsinki: University of Art and Design Helsinki, 54-72. Available at URL: http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman/Papers
> Accessed 2013 April 6.
> 
> Friedman, Ken. 2001. “Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into Practice.” In Design and Technology Educational Research and Development: The Emerging International Research Agenda. E. W. L. Norman and P. H. Roberts, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, 31-69. Available at URL:
> http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman/Papers
> Accessed 2013 April 6.
> 
> Simon, Herbert. 1969. The Sciences of the Artificial. First edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.


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