Dear David,
Thanks for your reply, but I said nothing about a "cut-off point" in 1964. I said that most of the material we have found comes from the past fifty years. There is a difference.
Let me add two notes.
First, we are not funded to do a massive study in the history of ideas, the history of design, or the history of thinking about design. I sometimes find designers a grumpy bunch – perhaps it’s because there is always the next, perfect iteration lurking in the mind.
At times, though, it’s as though you’re sitting around at home and hear your cousin say, “I’d love a nice chocolate cake.” And then your favorite aunt walks in and says, “This is your lucky day. I’m just about to bake a cake, and you’ll get a slice – with ice cream.” It’s a very ungrateful cousin who says, “No. I want the whole chocolate cake.”
You’ve asked for a thesis on the history of ideas of design thinking back to the 19th century. A wonderful wish! And I’ve just wandered in from the kitchen to say, “David, this is your lucky day. I’m going to give you a slice that covers the past fifty years. Oh – you get ice cream, too. We’ll be publishing reports and bibliographies, along with a literature review!”
If I could give you the whole cake, I would. This is a project for the Future Manufacturing Flagship of CSIRO, the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization. We are focused on a specific range of concerns. I believe that there has been little progress in forwarding some of these concerns because there has been too little understanding of our pathway to this point – and that includes the literature of the field and the concepts on which current activities and research depend. But this does not legitimately stretch back to the 19th century in a complete sense, at least not with respect to our current work.
I’ll make an offer though – if you can contribute $75,000 over three years to fund a tax-free, doctoral research fellowship, I’ll match it. We’ll advertise for a PhD student who wants to write a complete thesis on “The History of Ideas about Design Thinking” all the way back to the start.
We've already funded a CSIRO research fellow and two doctoral research fellows. If it’s too much to ask you for another $75,000 for half the cost of a third doctoral research fellow, there is a part-way point between your free slice of cake and the larger portion you want.
Please send us the specific suggestions and references you feel we ought to include. Right now, we are looking for documents that are accessible in digital form – that is, it may be fine to read Moholy-Nagy, but we are not in a position to locate and use paper books or articles. That’s work for an historian. One of the reasons we are working within the past fifty years is that this is pretty much what’s on offer in digital resource collections. There are some – but very few – necessary resources we’ll need that exist only on paper.
If you – or any members of the list – have documents or references to accessible documents, we welcome suggestions.
Please send your suggestions off-list to Heico Wesselius at:
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As I stated earlier, we are still in the early phases of our different compilations. Now is the time that suggestions will help the most.
And in terms of ice cream, we’ll be publishing bibliographies and reports on our milestone work – including a bibliography on design thinking.
Those who actively collaborate with us by participating and by providing full documents in digital form have the added advantage of sharing the full collection of resources. Our Design Thinking Collection now includes over 600 full-text documents.
Off-list suggestions to Heico will help us to do a better job.
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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David Sless wrote:
—snip—
I welcome this initiative but the arbitrary cutoff point of 1964 seems odd. I can think of many seminal contributors going back to earlier work.
—snip—
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