Dear Klaus,
While I agree with you on the nature of design, I don’t agree on the nature of research. This is a conversation in the philosophy of science that is far too intricate to address in a short post. The short of it is that I disagree with the sweeping statement that the entire range of concepts in your paragraph on science has been debunked as epistemologically questionable.
But I am not saying you are wrong. Rather, I say that there are so many layers to this, that a serious response requires me to sort through the layers and issues with far greater care than I can do here.
My view on research is clearer and more simple. It is my view that design research must be interested in understanding how things work and how the universe works if we are to make things and to change the universe in an effective human-centered way.
I don’t ask that you agree with me. I’m simply saying that I differ from you on this, and that I see research as one way of informing wise choices for design.
Warm wishes,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | University email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Private email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia
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Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
—snip—
i have been writing a lot about human-centered design, trying to get the design community away from the narrow perspective of user-centered design. in my experiences there are a lot of people involved in bringing a design to fruition. end users are the least difficult people to satisfy. looking at stakeholder networks is realistic and as general as one should get.
i’d argue that universe-centered design is what human centered design has to overcome.
the universe does not talk, people do.
the universe has no desire, people have.
the universe is not creative, people are.
the universe has no story to tell, people tell stories including of the universe. what people say may not be experiential.
if your aim is to improve the universe then you assert religious hopes. priests claim privileged access to realities (a universe). denying that access to their followers is a way for priests to make themselves indispensable. the call for universal design sounds important but on closer examination it becomes questionable to say the least.
if i may put a slightly positive reading to your, terry’s, written conceptions, i could read it as, ken, may have suggested, as a plea for generalizing human-centered design to everyone. well we have been there. the claim to do something of use to everyone, satisfying generalized and hence, abstract needs that everyone should have (or not be a normal human being) was the project of the enlightenment. it fuelled industrial mass production, which had to deny culture as backward and inferior to western technological progress. human cultures had to be eradicated whenever possible, just in the service of universalizing the markets for industrial products.
celebrating engineering functionalities and marketability over the criterion of understandability, individual usefulness, community benefits, and emancipation from unnecessary burdens, reflects this a-human universalism -- not that i am opposed to engineering, quite the contrary, but even engineers are human beings
yes there are larger and there are smaller projects one may be able to tackle, i shouldn’t have said "one" but "we" because larger projects usually call for many people to work together in stakeholder networks.
ken, you say that research is universal by describing how things are and why. i do not see this as universal. all research focuses on something very specific and ask very specific questions that derive from conversation. as heisenberg said, we do not study nature, only nature as exposed to out questions. i do not deny that some theorists, such as in physics, use a depersonalized language that gives the impression of the absence of a position from which something is viewed. the history of the natural sciences are full of efforts to constantly reconstruct “pieces of a universe,” without being willing to see that this universe is a human-centered construction. the claim to make closer and closer approximations to what is has been debunked as an epistemologically questionable claim.
coming back to design. i think research that merely studies what is and why things are the way they are is of no use to design.
if design means imagining futures in which people are eager to live and develop realistic proposals that encourages people to pave their way to that future then design research cannot be interested in understanding how the universe works but how to change it with the help of others. In this sense design and design research can hardly avoid being human centered.
—snip—
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