Ken & all: I am delighted to support your side-door suggestion that when it comes to this design thinking thing new viewing lenses are useful and needed.
Your post reminded me of something that Richard Wurman used to say often when we worked with him years ago, well he probably still says it…”the reorganizing of information creates new information.” Some might say new insights. Richard typically would go on to talk about the vast amount of incoming information [the tsunami] and the relative few ways in which it can be organized, LATCH. Over the years Richard and many others have done a lot of work to make those relatively simple ordering system ways more publically known. We still teach LATCH in our workshops.
What Richard does not say, does not trouble himself with and what your post reminded me of is that some of those reordered depictions might in some contexts be more palatable, more politically acceptable than others. We might even suggest that depictions of various sorts could be placed on a sliding scale from very politically correct/acceptable to very politically incorrect/unacceptable depending on the lens, the audience and or even the lens-maker.
In his 1989 book; Information Anxiety, Richard was of course talking about dogs, how to view them, reorganize them, understand them from various perspectives. Organizing them by size, by breed, etc. the dogs did not change but the viewer’s perception of them likely did. As far as we know dogs are not too concerned with the politics of pictures. Not so true of humans.
In your post you are referring to design thinker humans but it seems to me that the premise of ordering systems or lenses, some well-worn, others not so, remains the same. In our corner of the sense-making business we inevitably construct many viewing lenses.
With this in mind I would build on your observation and suggest an even wider set of possibilities for renewed viewing in addition to just the consideration of generation when it comes to making more sense of design thinking and design thinkers inclusive of the literature that they create.
Of course it seems likely that some in the audience might view your suggested generational lens and the pictures that it brings into view to be on the politically correct/acceptable side of the scale while for others the same pictures would swing towards the opposite, unacceptable direction.
Magic-generation advocates might prefer the existing more fuzzy undifferentiated picture as it might better serve their interests. Others might prefer the generational lens picture for the same reasons. Some might even pull out all the stops to suggest that the generation viewing lens is imperfect, flawed and should therefore not be taken seriously. Some might suggest that you have no business suggesting such a lens until you have documented each and every occupant of the picture to ensure relevance. Some might suggest that you are the wrong person to bring such a lens into view and into practice, or that they have other lens creators and lenses in mind that better serve their interests. Such are the politics of sense-making, lens making, picture making. So be it.
I share this because we know from our NextD experience that introducing alternative viewing lenses on this subject can be incredibly constructive in intent and taken as incredibly disruptive by some within the picture. The same ordering lens can be viewed by some as not only perfectly acceptable, but extremely necessary, while others find it to be threatening to the current state perceptions in which they and their institutions, are significantly invested.
As in the dog reordering exercise, the design thinkers inside the system do not change but the perception of them and the system do change depending on which lens is being utilized. Perception of what exists and does not exist within the system might also change. For example: One lens might indicate that hundreds or thousands of literature documents exist while a different lens might suggest that the vast percentage of existing docs are oriented in a particular subdirection. Historical and present heroes might look quite different depending on which lens is being used. Not everyone is going to be happy with all of what is learned from new lens pictures. So be it.
In our business we know full well that making some things more understandable is not always welcomed with open arms. Politics can be debilitating. Politics can block and slow forward motion for decades. Many fuzzy pictures exist for a reason. Ah, for the innocence of dogs!
Certainly from our perspective the present and emerging states of design thinking can be and should be viewed through multiple viewing lenses, not just the old lenses in which design education has vast invested interests. Lets put a few outsider lenses on the table and see what can be seen. Surely most would want this viewing to be part of a newer design way.
Yes Ken, in this instance, I am totally on board with your suggestion.
In addition I am always happy to connect with others working on lens research and lens creation.
Have a good weekend all.
GK.
Related:
ReAppreciating Richard Saul Wurman
http://www.humantific.com/starving-for-understanding/
When [Old Design Thinking] Love is Not Enough
http://issuu.com/nextd/docs/whenolddesignthinkingloveisnotenough
Occupy ReImagining Design (On academia.edu)
http://tinyurl.com/qjtfhff
...
GK VanPatter
Co-Founder
Humantific
SenseMaking for ChangeMaking
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6 West 18th Street, 9th Floor
New York City, NY 10011
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On Aug 12, 2013, at 2:09 AM, Ken Friedman wrote:
> 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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