Dear GK,
The thread titled “the other design thinking” has been occupying my thoughts since it started. I’ll respond with a few thoughts before long. One specific post caught my eye this morning – your comment on the LinkedIn Design Thinking list as contrasted with the PhD-Design list on JISCMAIL.
These are two different lists, with different purposes. The LinkedIn list with its 23,000 subscribers is a broad, diffuse list that seems to function as a general chat room. It has many more subscribers than we do, but I don’t think that it influences public opinion on design thinking or design in any great way. It offers too much information, undigested, and of variable quality. I browse LinkedIn groups because I learn something and get a sampler of opinions, but I do not often interact – there is no point taking the time to offer an informed opinion in a crowded hall with thousands of voices and no durable interaction.
It is not the purpose of PhD-Design to shape public opinion on design thinking, the future of design, or any other topic. The list has roughly 2,500 subscribers. They share a common interest in doctoral education in design, research training, design research, and a variety of research issues that may be important to members of the community at any given moment. Our goal is to share information and ideas that influence each other and influence the field.
2,500 subscribers make us the second largest serious design research community on the net. The largest is the Anthropology & Design group on Yahoo Groups.
While we are far smaller than the LinkedIn Design Research Group with more than 29,000 members, our purpose is quite different. The LinkedIn group is a large group of people with a loose interest in design research.
We are a small group of people with a focused interest. List owners David Durling and Keith Russell established PhD-Design for those of us who have responsibility for doctoral programs and research training. As an open list, it grew to include doctoral students, recent PhD graduates and new researchers, and design professionals with a serious enough interest in research to value the kinds of conversations that take place in a research community. Conversations range from deep and informative, to annoying and occasionally silly.
It is a research list, and as such, we offer a conversation forum for a relatively small community. This is not the entire design community, or the entire design profession, but a far more narrow community of professional researchers and people who plan to enter the research profession. If we were a research community for physicists or physicians, we’d be many times larger than anything in design research. If our focus was Etruscan epigraphs or Hanseatic trade fairs, we’d be much smaller than we are.
The point of a research community is to advance the knowledge of the field in which its members participate. Research tends to be far slower and more painstaking than the professions to which research findings contribute. Professionals tend to believe that they form the cutting edge, while researchers are a kind of fussy mop-up crew. This is, to some degree, true.
Look at the history of medicine. It took medicine over 2,000 years to move from Hippocrates to the beginnings of modern medical science in the 1900s. Research-based medical education only began a century ago, in the wake of the Flexner Report.
The debates between professional physicians medical researchers – a group that included physicians – demonstrates the kind of impatience that typically appears in debates between traditional professionals and people who do research in the same field.
19th-century physicians practiced surgery in street cloths, complete with frock coats and ties. They smoked cigars during an operation. The leading physicians and surgeons of their day were impatient with the nonsense about hygienic practice, antiseptic surgery, and washing hands between each patient and the next. That load of silly rubbish from researchers such as Joseph Lister, Ignaz Semmelweiss, and Louis Pasteur was an insult to professional surgeons and physicians – why would they pay any attention to it? There were massive fights between professional physicians and such leaders as Florence Nightingale, William Alexander Hammond, and Joseph Barnes. You can measure the advancing debate in each case by a major reduction in mortality rates, whether in civilian hospitals, or in 19th century armies – where more soldiers died in camp of infectious disease than died on the battlefield.
If no one were willing to ask difficult questions, work their way through difficult debates, read articles, gather data, check data, learn to sort fact from the appearance of fact, no profession would advance. That keeps people busy – those of us engaged in this universe generally have a range of responsibilities that means we must choose carefully how and where to invest our time.
Following your post, I subscribed to the LinkedIn design thinking group. From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think that the LinkedIn influences public perception on design thinking.
What does influence public ideas on design thinking? An article read by 250,000 Harvard Business Review subscribers exerts genuine influence. A best-selling book from Harvard Business Press or MIT Press exerts major influence.
What influences broader public opinion about design and what different audiences think the word means? Everything from the New York Times art and design section to home decorating magazines to Lady Gaga and MTV.
In recent months, I’ve had far too little time to do much more than lurk in most discussions here. Today, I made the horrifying discovery of a note I should have sent months ago – I wrote it on paper on a plane, and never sent it. It’s tough enough to keep up with the things I’ve got to do.
With respect to design thinking, I am in the start of a two-year project mapping Australian and global design capacity for CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. For this project, Heico Wesselius and I are doing a major literature search – we have gathered 600 items to date, and the inventory is growing. This is one preliminary project among a dozen or so such projects as we gather information and resources to prepare for the main project.
With more than enough on my plate, I must leave the debate on LinkedIn to those who have the time and capacity. It has always been my belief that solid research made accessible in a durable public form will influence the future of design. Historical evidence shows that this takes time in professions anchored in a craft guild culture. Guild culture governed the medical profession through the early 20th century, and plays a crucial role in medical practice even today. So it is that research, even advanced medical research, takes time, exerting influence through careful work, demonstrable evidence, and debates that take far longer than we expect when the debates begin. Since the design profession began as a guild culture and maintains many guild culture traditions, there is no reason to believe that we will change to a research culture more swiftly than the medical profession did. We began the transition over a century later, so the debates will take time. At this point in my life, that is where I want to invest my time.
The good news here is that there is more than one kind of discussion list. The LinkedIn group exists for those who find it useful, and lists such as PhD-Design and Anthrodesign exist for researchers.
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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GK VanPatter wrote:
—snip—
Regarding the changing mechanics of impacting public perception on the subjects of design and design thinking I will add one thing here. It has become important to recognize...whether we all like it or not...that where many professional folks get their perceptions from is changing...has changed significantly just in the last few years. Where are other folks hanging out?
Among the best (worst) examples is to point out that the primary “Design Thinking” discussion list on LinkedIn now has 22,670 members and is easy to access while this PhD Design list has guessing 1,500 members and is widely considered to be difficult to access. Take a wild guess which is having greater impact on public perception of what design thinking and design are today and will be tomorrow? An entire universe now exists over on LinkedIn and as far as I can tell few leaders from this PhD Design list ever wade into conversations over there, let alone lead any.
I can tell you that the dynamics of that list, who is driving the train, towards what and why are certainly worthy of understanding for anyone interested in the present and future of public perception on this topic.
Suffice it to say that the logics and values of the PhD list are a very different universe from what is going on in that public list where the moderator, along with a significant percentage of the members have never set foot in any kind of design school but now see themselves not as learners but rather as definers and teachers.
As far as I can tell the design education leadership community is completely unprepared for the public perception altering phenomenon already well underway over there.
Take it for what it is worth. If we never show up for the battles don’t complain about the outcomes.
—snip—
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