Dear Birger and Don,
Thanks for your elegant, concise comments. These answer all five of my questions. You’ve answered the questions about needs directly. You’ve answered the questions about resources and teaching indirectly. Since different kinds of designers and researchers need an education tailored to meet specific needs, resource allocation is affordable with proper planning.
Thanks as well to Lars Albinsson, M. P. Ranjan, and Charlotte Magnusson. Each usefully addressed the issue of what designers need with respect to mathematics.
I have also argued that design education should include mathematics **at an appropriate level** for individual needs (see, f.ex.: Friedman 1992; 2000: 11; 2012: 144). Designers need to know many things. What each designer needs to know depends on the fields in which he or she works. The amount and level of what each must know also depends on individual circumstances.
As Birger notes, very few designers need the kind of fluent, expressive mathematics required for physics. Or, for that matter, ethnography, academic writing, systems theory, or other skills that may be useful to researchers. And even then, some need to know some things, but not all need to know everything.
Thanks, Birger and Don.
The 2000 and 2012 articles are available on my Academia page:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Yours,
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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References
Friedman, Ken. 1992. Strategic Design Taxonomy. Oslo: Oslo Business
School.
Friedman, Ken. 2000. “Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into Practice.” In IDATER 2000: International Conference on Design and Technology Educational Research and Development. P. H. Roberts and E. W. L. Norman, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, 5-32. Available at URL:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Friedman, Ken. 2012. “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future for Design Education.” Visible Language, Vol. 46, No. 1/2, pp. 128-151. Available at URL:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
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Don Norman wrote:
—snip—
My great thanks to Birger Sevaldson.
Although I care deeply about the training of designers, I have grown weary of the ongoing debate, so weary that whenever a new item about design and maths arrives, I simply delete it without reading.
Birger’s note, however (critical parts below), is an excellent example of a constructive commentary on education.
The one major item I would add is that we need to distinguish among the many different means of the word “designer.” Birger’s suggestion is an excellent first pass, but it could perhaps be enhanced by segregating designers a bit more. Then, the classification of “All,” “most,” “a majority of,” and “a minority” of designers would differ among the classes. What are the categories? Well, one way of categorizing might be specialty, such as graphic, industrial, service, ... Or perhaps product from service. Or physical from virtual. Or systems. I can imagine the discussion about categories becoming incredibly complex, argumentative, and tedious. Another might be simply to distinguish academic from practice, or perhaps researchers from practitioners. Obviously too simple a set of categories.
Note that many engineers are trained in math, rather substantially, usually including advanced calculus, probability theory, matrices, tensors, ...), but then as they go on to practice their engineering craft, find that they almost never use anything beyond algebra. (I’m an example.) So even in engineering, the research community makes use of very advanced analytical methods, but the practitioners seldom do. (Many of their advanced tools make the task of applying the maths invisible and simple.)
For the moment, we might distinguish PhD training of academic scholars in design from MA level training of practitioners. Their requirements are dramatically different.
As an analogy, consider the training of a PhD student in Business with the training of an MBA student at the same university and even by the same professors. The MBA is akin to terminal training of designers: a lot of very practical skills, little in the way of theory. PhDs get a lot of theory, but very little practical knowledge (in both fields, I might add).
The article that Scott Klemmer and i wrote about design training never mentioned mathematics: we were arguing for a broader education and knowledge of the world. Yet another way to categorize things. We also neglected to distinguish among categories of designers.
But we agreed strongly that the wonderful craft skill of designers, the role of thinking through drawing, sketching, and making, must not be lost.
http://goo.gl/K0Z0R5
Thank you, Birger.
—snip—
Birger Sevaldsen wrote:
—snip—
All designers need (almost all designers): Composition skills, synthesizing skills, ethics, ….
Most designers need: Creativity, flow etc (as described in cognitive creativity research), intuition (as an expert feature described by Dreyfus and Dreyfus Skill Acquisition model), sustainability, design thinking, esthetic skills, some media knowledge, skills in tools and design media, drawing, sketching, computer graphics …..
A majority of designers need: Social skills, empathy, cultural knowledge, cross-cultural understanding, communication skills, business understanding, innovation, systems practice and understanding, product service systems, visual thinking, some spatial understanding, co-designing, facilitation ….
A minority of designers need: political knowledge, society, statistics, academic writing, management skills, lower level mathematics, coping with thrownness, artistic skills, engineering skills, marketing, advanced understanding of space, ability to redefine and open new fields for design, some basic systems theories ….
Some few designers need: High level mathematics, ethnography, systems theories, information visualization skills,
—snip—
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