Dear All,
The name on Victor's list and some of the other lists are mostly people in their 60s and 70s.
There are thinkers younger thinkers whose original contributions have grown to the point that an analysis is in order. Examples of design thinkers with a rich enough body of original work to warrant major treatment include Lucy Kimbell, Kees Dorst, Liz Sanders, Pieter Paul Verbeek, Pieter Vermaas, Ilpo Koskinen, Erik Stolterman, Sabine Junginger, … the list could go on.
It seems to me that Victor is saying that we do not take our field seriously enough to read each other or to comment on it. For that matter, the great majority of references to serious thinkers take the form of casual notes suggesting that "Norman (2009)" addresses a topic at some unspecified point in a book or "Sanders (2005)" agrees with whoever has written an article without saying what she agrees on or showing how she agrees, whether this is comprehensive agreement, or whether there are distinctions to be drawn. For a literature review I am now doing, I get the sense that some 80% or 90% of the authors who refer to one article have not bothered to read it — they seem to like the title, or they've heard about the article from colleagues, or they simply assume that the cited author supports their views.
As Victor writes, "What is missing from … design theory is a body of work that studies in depth the work of past theorists. What often occurs is that there is a quest for new universal theories that have no relation to the work that others have done before to consider the same subject. In fields like sociology or anthropology or psychology, the extended writings of the grand theorists have been studied and researchers in the field have come to some understanding of how those theorists approached the challenge of theorizing their field. Thus, new theorists have contended with those who came before them as part of the process of moving their own ideas forward.
"We lack such a tradition in design research, in large part because there have been hardly studies of the extended work of the best thinkers in the field."
If you have never written a proper literature review outside the review chapter of your own thesis, I encourage you to read Jane Webster and Richard Watson's (2002) article, “Analyzing the Past to Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review.” I hope it will inspire more people in our field to do this kind of work.
You will find the Webster and Watson article at this URL:
http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Click on the section for “Teaching Documents.” The article is at the bottom of the section.
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
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