Dear Terry,
Before responding to the issue of mathematical skill for designers, I can explain something about your guidelines.
Your guidelines (Love 2010) use the title “design thinking.” The term design thinking, despite its ambiguities, refers to a specific range of issues. Design thinking involves iterative problem solving for human beings. Some of the common features of the term involve working in interdisciplinary teams, working with stakeholders, and using frequent and rapid iterative prototypes or mapping exercises. There is a massive peer-reviewed literature on design thinking, along with an extensive professional literature. (If you’d like access to a digital collection of more than 600 such items, drop me a note off-list.) If you read a good cross-section of the literature, you will see that you are using the term “design thinking” in a different way to wide current usage. Design thinking refers to design with and for the human beings who will benefit from the design solution. It does not refer to machine design, technical design, or engineering design.
Your explanation of the guidelines (Love 2014, below) makes the difference clear. You write about what most people label “design methods.” You are right to state that many people in technical design fields and engineering work this way. But this is not the process designated by the term "design thinking."
The term “design thinking” has come to mean something quite different. I’d suggest considering a new title.
Yours,
Ken
p.s. It is unreasonable to suggest that everyone who uses graphic design software uses these methods simply because some of the engineers, programmers, and designers of graphic design software use these methods. While some methods may in a sense be embedded in the software, that does not mean that everyone who uses the software uses the methods. If that were so, you could argue that everyone who uses a computer uses the methods of physics and mathematics because fundamental research contributions by Albert Einstein and Alan Turing are embedded in every computer. We use products to which these methods contribute – we do not ourselves use the methods.
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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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References
Love, T. 2010. Guidelines for Design Thinking. Love Design and Research. URL: http://www.love.com.au/index.php/thoughts/20-guidelines-for-design-thinking
Date accessed 2014 May 4.
Love, Terence. 2014. “Re: Ten Thousand Hours for Expertise” PhD-Design List. Monday 5 May, 2014.
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Terry Love wrote:
--snip—
Incidentally, I was surprised about your comment about the guidelines for design thinking I listed. The guidelines I gave for design thinking are in common use in many areas of technical design (the largest group of design fields) and used by all who use graphic design software as they are embedded in e.g. Adobe products. They were earlier described by authors such as John Chris Jones, Christopher Alexander, Nam Suh, Henri Petroski, Michael French, Archer, Asimow, Nigel Cross, Dasgupta, W Gordon, and many others and are explicit in codes such as VDI 2221. Hardly just my way of designing?
—snip—
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