Hello everyone,
Our discussion goes and goes on because we come from different fields of design. Our common ground is at the philosophical level. After that, we start to diverge and at practical level we are very different. Our disciplines are different, and they makes us different.
My problem is that graphic and industrial designers talk as if all design in the world is graphic. Of course it is not. Let's hear from Philippo. The engineers are quiet. What intuition? We moved to the post-post-industrial era with academic education, science, and the use of knowledge produced according to particular rules.
We can't quantify everything. We have to explain that to the engineers. And we cannot go all the way to our goal guided by intuition only. We have to explain this to the fine artists.
If you look back in the history of some design disciplines, you will see that after the industrial revolution there is a tendency the role of intuition to shrink and the role of academic/scholarly knowledge to expand. For example, Medieval master builders have relied on their experience. Call it intuition. Now we have civil engineers. Aren't they designers? (I mean, when they design, not when they function as construction managers.) Would you tell me that there is no need for research? It is obvious that in some areas we can research successfully, and we can use this research in our practice. Now, for those of you who are civil engineers, just don't tell me that there is a lot of intuition in civil engineering and that many theories are accepted, used, and later discarded. I know that. For example, civil engineers in the former Soviet Union and in the U.S.A. were using different theories and formulas for calculations. But the trend is to work with scholarly knowledge. Metaphorically speaking, the intuition "core" in the design process is shrinking and its periphery is slowly but gradually overtaken by rational methods of design. Look at JCJ's first book, Design Methods: Seeds of Human Future. It was an attempt to give designers tools that will make their work more efficient, more predictable, and more successful. The whole Design Methods Group movement was predicated on the believe that successful thinking can be methodologized by understanding, explanation, and explication. Once explicated, design methods can be thought. However, I don't say that everything can be explicated and thought. But at least we can try to do something in this direction.
This process has different dynamics in different design fields. The engineering fields are leading; the arts are resisting. I am not saying that everything can be quantified and I am not appealing to do that. I already argued with Terry about that. But this sudden gust of ideas against EBD puzzles me. With all of its shortcomings, EBD is OUR way to go forward. After all, we on the DESIGN RESEARCH list. It is assumed that we do design research because we belief in some level of ability to predict, to calculate, to estimate, and to make educated guesses.
Best wishes,
Lubomir
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|