Dear GK,

Thanks for your thoughts. While I agree with some of the ideas in your note, I want to reframe them slightly to describe them from my perspective.



In many of your posts, you speak as a professional and a consultant. Without describing you as a spokesperson for the design profession or sensemaking consultancies, I acknowledge your perspective. It seems to me that you are reading my notes without recognizing my perspective.



The problem in my view is that you seem to see all design schools as the same kind of school, and all focused solely on teaching people how to design artifacts. This is not the case, and given the massive differences across more than 30,000 design schools around the world, I am not a “spokesperson for institutional design academia.”



There are roughly 14,000 universities in the world today, and most of them teach design in some way. Many have design education in three or four faculties –design, engineering, informatics, and now business. In addition to the universities, there are even more independent art and design schools, vocational design schools, polytechnics, TAFEs, community colleges, and specialized design schools. That means nearly 30,000 or so programs and institutions comprise “institutional design academia.”



My part of this world is quite specific. Of the world’s 14,000 universities, 500 or so are research intensive. Another 500 or so aspire to research intensity. These are the universities that award a PhD, the research doctorate. I work in this sector. I engage in the debates that matter for research-intensive universities.



While the rest of what you describe as institutional design academia interests me in terms of the design education and capacity building requirements, the research-intensive sector accounts for less than 2% of the total higher education design sector. Without calling myself a spokesperson, I can say that the concerns I speak to involve that 2% and not the remaining 25,500 or so design schools and programs.



Research is the difference between these two sectors. The point of research is testing claims to improve process and method, to understand which claims are reasonable and which are not, to determine which among several options is preferable. There are many other legitimate questions involved in research. What distinguishes them all – and what distinguishes researchers from working professionals – is that we seek answers, and we take the time to get them.



Practitioners are often impatient with those of us whose job it is to test claims. They say that we don’t move fast enough. When we test claims to build a chain of evidence that don’t seem immediately useful, they say we are not relevant. And when we work on problems that do not meet immediate practitioner needs, they lose interest. Fair enough. This kind of transition has happened several times in history as professions advance.



That’s what happened when medical schools shifted from practice-oriented vocational schools to research-based professional schools. Several changes occurred at around the same time. Gentleman surgeons – they were all men – stopped operating in street clothes while smoking cigars. Where they refused to wash their hands before operating on the premise that gentlemen were clean, they began to scrub up in antiseptic operating rooms. Physicians moved from dispensing patent remedies and laudanum to prescribe medicines tested in large-scale clinical trials.



As medical research made the shift that supported these changes, there was a lot of criticism for the slow process required for any kind of reasonable research.



Perhaps that is inevitable. It’s the job of practice to be swift. It’s the job of the research university to sweep up behind the parade. Sweeping up generally involves asking which among the swift and apparently effective practices actually delivers on the claims made for them.



In consulting and in design, as in medicine, those who make the claims of swift, effective practice as contrasted with slow, rigorous research generally profit from selling professional services.



Society pays for university research precisely because carefully checking claims and sweeping up behind practitioners is unprofitable. It is also far too slow and costly to work in an industrial setting.



But there is more to the conflict between universities and professions than time and speed. That conflict involves the potential for profit.



Four challenges have been at the core of higher education for the past five thousand years. These are:



1)    Creating new knowledge,

2)   Preserving existing knowledge,

3)   Training specialists, and

4)   Educating citizens


These four challenges involve an inherent dialectical tension.



New knowledge and innovation demands a foundation in earlier knowledge. It must also push the boundaries of what is known. This requires building on the past to create the future, and this requires preserving past knowledge, where the need for preservation emphasizes the past. For some, the need to preserve the past is greater than the need for development, at least among those whose job it is to understand what the past has been. At other times, the need for new knowledge overwhelms the past. Those who move forward sometimes care little for what we have known as societies and who we are as individuals.



The tension between these two forces has been a pendulum driving the growth and spread of research, innovation, and education for five thousand years. It was the case in the observatories of Assyria and the temple schools of Egypt. It was present in the academies of Greece and the Arabic research institutions of the ninth and tenth centuries. It shaped debates and arguments in the first Western universities that echo in our own time.



Along with the tension between kinds of knowledge, another tension exists between the requirements of professions and professionals against the virtues of citizenship and the common good. These, too, involve opposing and cooperating tendencies.



Professions require specialization and demand a coherent body of knowledge. This body of knowledge cements professional engagement and permits the management of professional practice. At the same time, all professions require new knowledge if they are to improve and grow. This demands research and a challenge to what is known. This challenge weakens professional solidarity even as it strengthens a profession in the long term.



All professions involve two motives. In one sense, they serve the larger community by providing vital services to individuals and to society. Most societies and cultures grant control of professional affairs to professional bodies. They do this because the professions are the locus of the expertise required to govern professional issues. But societies also grant this control to the professions on the principle that professionals serve the larger community.



With this comes a problem. Expertise and professional self-governance brings with it high social status. The privileges and opportunities that attend this status drive professional ambition and set professional practitioners at odds with fellow citizens outside the professional group. Even though professionals are citizens who presumably act on behalf of the larger society, high social status and power engender forms of corruption that are not always measured in vice and venality, but may be measured in rent-seeking and self-serving behavior. The argument of professional conspiracy appears in Adam Smith (1976: 144). It appears again as one aspect of the corrosion of character in Richard Sennett (1998).



Any diagram of the relationships among the four challenges will reveal a series of conflicting and communicating forces that operate in an energizing dialectic. Each step demonstrates tensions between specialization and generalization, between theory and practice, between research and repetition, between hierarchy and democracy, between the pull of the past and the press of the future.



Designers are paid to provide professional services to clients on a swift, timely basis. Many do it well. More sell more than they deliver. At the end of the day, all consulting firms make a living by selling hours, and consultancies seem to worry more about billable hours than delivering effective service. As a result, they do not welcome anything that slows the process – and they avoid any process that drains the budget without immediate payback. Professionals also resent those who challenge their expertise – guild cultures have always done so on the principle that only guild masters are qualified to judge or govern work within the guild and its results. Testing claims is a challenge to the authority of the guild.



Researchers are paid to go slow. We are paid to test claims, and we are paid to think deeply about the design profession and what it should become.



Entangled with all this is a new and significant tension. This is the professional tension between the culture and background that enable design firms to work with products and services as contrasted with the culture and background that enable design firms to work with organizations and systems.



Many of today’s design skills cannot be taught or learned in artisan guilds or the guild tradition that governs many design schools. Many forms of design required in today’s world are already too complex for the design education that was suitable as recently as the 1970s. Designers must become increasingly skilled to perform the professional services that the world requires of them.



Where we seem to disagree is on what we need to do to develop these skills.



You’re saying that no one moves fast enough. I agree. But you’re not quite ready to accept the challenge or the time that it takes to build a proper university-level design education or the culture that research-intensive universities require.



For these reasons and more, I welcome the fact that business schools have entered the design field. Before coming to Swinburne, I spent two decades working with design at business schools. I worked in business schools because Norwegian design schools in the 1990s were inhospitable to research and to the strategic design agenda. Business schools welcomed me.



Nevertheless, I am not prepared to say that “no institution based graduate or post graduate design program … is presently capable of getting in the ring with … more rapidly adapting graduate business schools.”



That kind of statement requires evidence.



Fortunately, I have started a project to gather the evidence that would affirm or contradict this claim.



We are about to undertake a capacity mapping study on design integration capacity for CSIRO – Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Once we do some serious research on this, I expect to know more about the capacity of different organizations to work in this domain.


Warm wishes,

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

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References

Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton.

Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited and with an introduction, notes, marginal summary, and index by Edwin Cannan. With a new preface by George Stigler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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GK VanPatter wrote:

—snip—

You make an excellent scholarly spokesperson for institutional design academia.

—snip—

the simple fact is that still today in 2013 there really is no institution based graduate or post graduate design program that is presently capable of getting in the ring with the very late arriving, but now more rapidly adapting graduate business schools to offer a believable alternative approach to Design 3 or Design 4. If you can point out such a design school I would gladly welcome all such suggestions.

—snip—






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