Dear Ken, Chuck, Martin, Amanda, Fiona, MP, Jerry, Pedro, Stephanie,
Stephane, Stanislav, and all,
Design History can usefully inform our theory understanding of the
development of theories and theoretical concepts.
The impetus for the UK design research conference of 1963 followed attempts
by engineering designers in industry to convince academia that there was
theoretical merit in studying and improving design process publicly. This is
evident in the trajectory of discussion before and after 1963, as reported
in the design research publications by academics after the conference. The
trajectory remains evident today, e.g. and c.f, Don's keynote at DRS
conference in Korea.
The 1963 UK design research conference and the interest in design research
was primarily an interest is 'design processes'. The dominant definition of
'design' from 1950 to 2000 is as a 'process'.
Design History tells much more.
Most, and I absolutely mean *most*, design at that time was done by very
large design teams.
The most common design practice involved organisations with rooms containing
between 100 and 200 designers plus a similar number of tracers. This photo
shows part of two rooms each with around 100 designers in a design office
comprising several such rooms and designer groups:
http://www.motorgraphs.com/heritage/longbridge-drawing-office-1930s_a154917.
aspx
This massive scale of process of design activity is only one of the
significant issues.
Each designs for a product typically comprised thousands of drawings.
To make a single copy of a single complicated design drawing sheet took a
skilled tracer up to a week.
Design changes, including the tiniest edits, were meticulously copied and
signed off and dated, on every copy of a design drawing.
Designers were required to add their name and sign every drawing sheet
before they started designing. The purpose was so that if there were any
failures or errors, the responsibility could be tracked back to the specific
designer.
The numbers of copies of drawings was typically very small and in many
cases, drawings for prototype designs were limited to the original and one
copy of drawings: the originals for the designers and the copy for those
manufacturing. If manufacturing required copies for the shop floor then it
was their responsibility to trace copies of the copies.
For designers to discuss a design required people gathering together over a
single drawing board. This physical constraint limited the number of people
that could be involved at any time in decisions.
These communication difficulties were made more difficult because of the
interdependencies and communications needed for the very large numbers of
designers involved in each design project, especially where some designers
were in other companies and other locations.
Changes in design due to product failure or refinement were significant
undertakings due to the difficulties in communication and the time needed
for editing drawings and creating new drawings.
The situation was made more complex by the involvement of stylists, those
responsible for the visual appearance of products. It was the problems from
this relationship that led to what is now called 'waterfall' or 'over the
wall' design methods. For example in car design, stylists produced rough
sketches of possible vehicle exteriors and interiors. A selection of these
were mocked up in clay and the final vehicle appearance decided and the
appearance sent 'over the waterfall/wall' to the engineering designers.
Frequently it was difficult, impossible, problematic, or uneconomical to
design ways to include suspensions, engines, seats, load bearing structures,
or manufacture the vehicle.
Similar problems to the above arose in the design of systems such as
banking, information flow, transport, decision making logistics etc.
All of these were process issues.
Making design activity function successfully required it to be dominated by
design-related processes and standards and the management of design offices
was dominated by successful management of those design processes.
Design activity at an individual level was also dominated by following those
design processes, right down to the level of individual designers creating
new concept designs or undertaking detail design. At this level,
standardised design processes were known as design methods and by the late
1950s, there were thousands of well-established design methods used by
designers working in the large scale design offices in industry described
above.
It is in this context that academic design research emerged following
industry as a way of hopefully improving design processes.
Design thinking was NOT part of this broad mainstream of multi-decade
endeavour to improve design activity through large and small scale processes
that became the academic design research and design methods movements.
The scale of design activity then, as now, was dominated by designers
working in engineering traditions. Engineering, in spite of its enthusiastic
use of highly complex mathematical methods similar to Graphic Design at the
moment, was until recently was regarded as an Art rather than a science.
The increasing public awareness of the works of Freud and others in
Psychology, and the development of that field in the 1940s integrating
psychology with industrial practices as in the Tavistock Clinic in London
combined with introspection of some engineering designers. The effect was a
focus on this relationship of subconscious thought and will in designing
with the large-scale socio-technical design processes that were essential to
successful design activity in those times.
It was from this, that engineering designers started to focus on 'design
thinking' as an element of these large complex 'design processes'. This
initiative was followed in the 1960s after the UK 63 conference by
academics, originally mostly in engineering design, and then later in Art
and Design.
In essence, design thinking emerged to fill a gap identified by engineering
designers as not being addressed by the improvement of design focused on
design processes.
The whole of these origins were shaped by the realities of design
technologies of those times, huge numbers of designers, drawing boards,
tracing and later the use of expensive and toxic ammonia-based plan copiers,
which in its early days still required a second traced drawing in Indian
black ink.
The change in the technologies used by designers has led to changes in
design practices including reductions in design team size to a tenth or less
of previously; easy fast communication between designers; easy fast editing
of drawings; pre-modelling and testing of design solutions, and high levels
of computer automated pre-design using mathematical methods (originally in
engineering design but now especially in the visual design fields).
These changes in the trajectories of technologies used by designers have
resulted in parallel trajectories in how we see design and the associated
design theories and concepts.
To this point (August 2014), however, this understanding has been absent
from the realm of design research and understanding design theories and
concepts.
The study of Design History applied to designer's practices can tell us much
about understanding and interpreting design theory. It remains an
opportunity for the Design History field to explore and offer a contribution
to design research and design theory-making.
The above historical perspective on the roles and influences on design
theory and understanding design activity of technologies designers use is
what informs a better understanding of the previous discussion about the
relationship between research into design thinking and design thinking.
Best wishes,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
<mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
