Dear All,
The recent thread on design thinking that began as a call for participation in a book on design thinking led to a conversation with three sets of questions. The first involved design thinking, the second involved curriculum development at design schools and what design schools ought to be today, and the third involved the skills required for effective design thinking practice.
While I’ve been working on some reflections, it’s been taking me time. At this point, though, I may wait a while. I’ve been in lurk mode to avoid lengthy threads and to avoid dust-ups. Gunnar’s post alerts me to the fact that this is perhaps becoming more argumentative than I would have liked.
Gunnar caught an issue to which I did not perhaps give enough attention. If “product design logic” somehow prevents me from understanding “organizational change logic,” I must be a sleepwalker. I began in social science, psychology, and education with some theology and philosophy, followed by a PhD in leadership and human behavior. Before I took on a dean’s role at a design school, I was professor of leadership and strategic design at a business school where I also worked in organization design, information science, and knowledge management. Unless I was working in my sleep, it is hard for me to understand how “product design logic” overcame all those years of work in social and behavioral science.
It seems best to withdraw from this thread. I enjoyed Elizabeth Pastor’s conference presentation. The note I’ve been writing reflects on her ten points (Pastor 2013: 77-96) with respect to supporting material in the research literature. At some point, I may return to this.
It would possibly have been useful to discuss the design school curriculum with a specific focus on design thinking. Since I am working on an article about this topic, I’ll wait. For now, I’ve given my big-picture thoughts on design school curriculum in “Models of Design.” It’s available on my Academia page:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
While this article might have elaborated more on design thinking with respect to current debates, the context was different so I focused on larger macroeconomic and macrohistorical issues.
Fig. 2 on page 144 does address the key skills and issues in design thinking and organization design. This figure is titled “Strategic Design Taxonomy: Design Knowledge Domains.” I published the model in 1992, shortly after creating the first European course in strategic design for the Oslo Business School. In Scandinavian terms, many of us embrace the design thinking process within the framework of what we call strategic design.
In this model, I account for the human sciences and organization design before artifacts because they are more fundamental. This is one reason I have problems with the software release model of design – 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. One succeeds the next in historical terms, and all began in earlier processes and activities. Even so, the human world comes first as the context and framework of all design activities and processes. A range of learning skills, leadership skills, and research skills underpin what we need to be able to do to work in any design field. The model describes these issues, giving priority to the most fundamental. Human issues are fundamental. What we need to know when we design products or services rest on these fundamental issues. Since organizations deliver nearly all professional products and services in the market today, understanding organizations is a fundamental skill for design professionals.
This is where Mauricio’s questions come in. In my view at least, starting with “design 1” is both necessary and mistaken. Conceptual skills and habits of mind come first. Even so, governments and students both require universities to equip students with vocational skills and professional skills. The solution as I see it is a curriculum in which conceptual skills and habits of mind begin in the first year, working in tandem with studio courses on a parallel track. There is an need for scaffolded learning if students are to master conceptual skills and habits of mind, so we can’t begin with “design 4” either. Rather, it’s necessary to shape a form of education that offers a broad framework – a scaffold – together with conceptual skills and understanding. There are always elements to fill in as information becomes obsolete, and no one ever has the education for all they need to know in today’s professional environment. As a result, we'll never get it quite right — any good design school is a work in progress.
That’s a broad outline of what I would have considered in posts on the three related issues of design thinking, what design schools ought to be today, and the skills of effective design thinking practice. My sense now is that I’d rather step back and let the thread move on. I’ll address these issues another time.
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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References
Friedman, Ken. 2012. “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future for Design Education.” Visible Language, Vol. 46, No. 1/2, pp. 128-151. URL:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Pastor, Elizabeth. 2013. The Other Design Thinking. Journey Learnings. Toronto: Design Thinking 2013 Conference. URL: http://issuu.com/humantific/docs/theotherdesignthinking
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