Dear Ranjan and Terry,
Wow! Terry’s comments certainly surprised me. The idea of “seeing design as finding the best solution in solution space, and thus seeing design activity primarily as one of choosing” is indeed important – but it is not new to design.
The problem is that Terry apparently doesn’t know the design field. Or else he does not have an idea of what most of us do as designers or as researchers.
As David Sless wrote earlier, the first thing Terry might need to do is to drop his habit of disdain for design fields other than his own.
Now let’s get to the concepts of solution space and choice.
That is EXACTLY the concept that we worked with in strategic design at the Oslo Business School, the Norwegian School of Marketing, and the Norwegian School Management from the early 1990s.
Our key teaching documents still exist, and I will share them with the list. (Information below.)
These are the publications of Anders Skoe. Anders was a guest lecturer in my courses at all these institutions, and a regular teacher of professional development to Norwegian design firms as well as to firms in the technology industries in Norway and around the world.
The general problem solving method appears in Anders’s (1992) publication from Teknologisk Institutet. A more specific version appears in the manual for Anders’s (Skoe 1997) program on Creating Customer Care for SITA, the global aeronautical telecommunications association. Anders worked with SITA firms and agencies in over 200 different nations. While the manual is focused on customer care, it demonstrates the general problem-solving method including the pedagogical and designerly aspects of the method. (This draws on some of my work as well.)
Terry should remember Anders Skoe. Anders worked with us at La Clusaz, and we made copies of the SITA manual available.
If any subscribers to the list wish either document, I’ve placed both in the “teaching documents” section of my Academia page. They will be available through this Friday, May 16 at 11:59 pm GMT. Available at URL:
http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
If Terry were to read more work by designers, he’d find that many of us have indeed been talking about “seeing design as finding the best solution in solution space, and thus seeing design activity primarily as one of choosing.”
The vocabulary differs slightly from author to author, but many of the key authors who take this positions are listed in the bibliographies of my papers (f.ex., Friedman 1997, 2000).
Buckminster Fuller, Jens Bernsen, Harold Nelson, Erik Stolterman, Per Mollerup, Dick Buchanan … these are just a few who come to mind.
It must seem immodest of me to keep popping up with references to material published twenty and thirty years ago, but I’m posting this note much as Rajan did: to point to a rich literature that Terry doesn’t seem to read.
Terry regularly announces to the list that the rest of us in design and design research do not know this or that – according to Terry, we aren’t aware of these issues, and we have not written on them. The problem is that Terry hasn’t read what we’ve written.
In this case, Terry did not even need to read. This information was live in the room at La Clusaz, speaking wit us all on a daily basis. Terry had the same opportunity to listen and learn as the rest of us.
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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References
Skoe, Anders. 1992. Fra problem til loesning. Hvordan lede grupper i planlegging og problemloesning. [From Problem to Solution. How to Lead Groups in Planning and Problem Solving.] Oslo: TI Forlaget. Available at URL: http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Skoe, Anders. 1997. Creating Customer Care. Sophia Antipolis: SITA Training and Documentation Department. Available at URL: http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Friedman, Ken. 1997. “Design Science and Design Education.” In The Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, ed. Helsinki: University of Art and Design Helsinki, 54-72. Available at URL: http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
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: http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
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MP Ranjan wrote:
—snip—
I am not at all surprised by the advanced understanding of design and the nature of the design problems since he was in a very interesting place during the late 50s, The HfG Ulm, in Germany, as a member of the faculty there. Klaus Krippendorff was a student then and the other faculty were in my view giants of design understanding and in particular in design education and practice, far ahead on many other schools of thought. This is captured in the 21 Journals published between October 1958 and February 1968 which helped change the world of design education in a way that Bauhaus could not do. The visiting faculty at Ulm included Bruce Archer, Charles and Ray Eames, besides the core faculty of Tomas Maldonado, Gui Bonsiepe, Herbert Ohl, Abraham Moles and Hans Gugelot to name only a few stalwarts of the time.
—snip—
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Terence Love wrote:
—snip—
It’s interesting to see how many ideas considered new to designers and design researchers now were seen a normal and everyday design theory by Rittel in 1971. I’m thinking particularly of the idea of seeing design as finding the best solution in solution space, and thus seeing design activity primarily as one of choosing.
—snip—
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