Dear Chuck,

Thanks again for your note. Now that I’ve had a chance to read your working paper (Burnette 2013), I’m happy to offer a few comments as you requested, analyzing the paper with respect to McNeil’s 11 criteria for any general theory.

McNeil (1993: 8) proposes eleven characteristics of any general theory. (1) A theory has a constitutive core of concepts mutually interrelated with one another. (2) A theory has a mutually productive, generative connection between central concepts and the peripheral concepts where theory verges onto practice. (3) The core concepts of a theory are stated in algorithmic compression, parsimonious statements from which the phenomena in the theory can be reproduced. (4) A theory has an irreducible core of concepts, a set of concepts in which no central concept can be removed without altering the scope and productivity of the theory or perhaps destroying it entirely. (5) Two or more of the core concepts in a theory must be complementary to each other. (6) The central concepts of a theory must be well defined and must harmonize as much as possible with similar concepts of enlightened discourse. (7) The central concepts of a theory must be expressed at a uniform level of discourse. Different levels of discourse must be distinguished and used consistently. (8) More general theories (higher-level theories) must relate to less general theories (lower-level theories) and to special cases through a principle of correspondence. This principle confirms and guarantees the consistency of the more particular theories and their applications. (9) Explicitly or implicitly, a theory describes dynamic flows with contours that trace relatively closed loops as well as relatively open links. (10) A theory states invariant entities in its assumptions or formulas that provide standards for measurement. (11) Theories describe phenomena in the context of a conceptual space. This implicitly establishes a relationship between the observer and the phenomena observed.

It seems to me that your paper meets about half of these criteria. Since this seems to be a working paper rather than a fully developed article, I’m not expecting more – I’m interested to see the full theory you propose. At this point, you’ve offered a sketch in outline form that states issues, assumptions, and components. A developed theory makes it possible to understand the value of the assumptions, and it becomes possible to see whether the components work. Until then, I’d be uncomfortable assessing the paper with respect to McNeil’s criteria – there is not enough in the working paper to go on.

With respect to the issue you raised in your post to me – describing how to generate theory situated in the actual framework of practice – the working paper offers little help. The paper describes some aspects of perception and some aspects of design thinking, but it doesn’t describe how theory arises or state how to generate theory in situated practice. There are some suggestive clues, so I’d imagine you’ve thought this through – the working paper doesn’t state this explicitly.

There is another element missing, and that is how to decide among possible theories which theory is correct or not incorrect. In a sense, this working paper is not unlike the speculative comments of early Greek philosophy – it rests on observation and hints at theory, but it doesn’t tell us how to develop theory or to judge between and among theoretical propositions.

The classical Greeks began the first articulate development of theory construction, but much of what the Greeks said had little value as working models.

Three activities allow us to develop robust theory: observation, experimentation, and theory. Harold Morowitz (1993: 161-2) writes, “experimentation was unknown to the classical Greek savants. They worked back and forth between observation and theory and therefore lacked the powerful weapon of falsification to prune wrong theories.” Plato’s theories stood on one leg, Aristotle’s stood on two. In the great age of physics, Galileo, Newton, and Bacon developed the concept of experiment. This made scientific progress possible by stabilizing scientific method with a third leg. Experiment allows us to choose among alternative theories, moving in increasingly better directions.

The challenge in design is that we can’t usually experiment in the same sense that physicists can, or in the sense that biologists can. Rather, we generate, test, and trial. Our difficulty is the serious conceptual problem of building things or processes that work even though our theories about those things or processes may be mistaken.

There are other challenges to situated narratives of theory development in design fields. These challenges involve: appropriate background knowledge; when to foreground background knowledge; confusion between association and causation; failure to understand the value and uses of different forms of inference – that is, understanding the difference between induction, deduction, and abduction, knowing when to apply them and when we cannot use them; understanding and being able to describe process issues; methodological sensitivity; theoretical sensitivity; and, as you noted, the issue of concepts. To this, I would also say that values and perspectives are part of the challenge of theoretical sensitivity.

These issues do not seem to appear in the working paper. Rather, you’ve offered a concise statement of what you’d want to see in a theory: a description of components, as the title states.

There are two issues I find problematic in your paper. You make several claims about mental processes and cognition without providing evidence for these claims. I’m not saying the claims are wrong: I am saying there is no way to judge the value of these claims without evidence.

The second issue that seems to me problematic is your use of George Miller’s work. You wrote, “From a pragmatic point of view, seven divisions are usually adequate to represent a subject (seven wonders of the world, seven habits of highly effective people, seven failures of memory, seven notes on the musical scale, seven basic ways to organize information, and seven primary colors, for example). Seven plus or minus two components are also generally acknowledged to be the limit on ‘immediate memory’ and ‘absolute judgment’.” This is not quite right, at least not as Miller sees it.

George Miller’s (1956) limit on the “magical number seven, plus or minus two” applies to the degree to which we can state things in a memorable way, capture the attention, and shape memorable lists. Any number of data points or entities from five to nine will generally work. Even ten occasionally works, as we observe with commandments, David Letterman’s “top ten” lists, and the like.

Miller did not state that seven plus or minus two is a limit on judgment, especially not judgment when we can study data in visual form. He wrote quite the opposite.

When Edward Tufte (2007) argued that there is no reason to limit visual artifacts to seven data points, stimuli, or information items, a colleague sent him a note stating that Miller himself agreed. Miller wrote, “7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person’s capacity to comprehend printed text” (Miller 2003).

This last point aside, I’d welcome a fully developed paper that states all elements of your theory in an explicit form with a few working examples to show how to generate theory in situated practice and showing how to judge between and among theoretical propositions.

Yours,

Ken

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

Reference

Burnette, Charles. 2013. “Issues, Assumptions, and Components in A Theory of Design Thinking.” Unpublished working paper.

Available at:

http://independent.academia.edu/CharlesBurnette/Papers

Friedman, Ken. 2003. “Theory construction in design research: criteria: approaches, and methods.” Design Studies, 24 (2003), 507–522. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(03)00039-5

Available at:

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

McNeil, D. H. 1993. “Reframing systemic paradigms for the art of learning.” Conference of the American Society for Cybernetics.

Miller, George A. 1956. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.

Available in HTML at:

http://cogprints.org/730/1/miller.html

Miller, George A. 2003. “George Miller on the relevance of +/- Seven.” Quoted on The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press. URL: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000U6&topic_id=1 Accessed 2013 April 1.

Morowitz, Harold J. 1993. Entropy and the Magic Flute. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Tufte, Edward. 2007. “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: not relevant for design.” The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press. URL: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000U6&topic_id=1  Accessed 2013 April 1.




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