Dear Paul Mike Zender

I am writing this note from IIT Gandhinagar conference "Design for a Billion" we are waiting for the sessions to begin. Klaus Kripendorff is the first keynote speaker.

By the way I did read Consilience some time ago but I prefer Jon Kolko's formulation of the process of synthesis, perhaps it is my limitation since I can access his sense more easily. If you insist, I may return to reading Wilson again. There is a difference between science writing and design scholarship that I noticed when I was reading texts on holistic thinking and ecological sustainability. I looked at Fritjof Capra and several books by design related authors and found that these two fields did not overlap in the references that they used to come to the very same conclusions in many cases. Capra does not refer to Bucky Fuller, or Papanek or even Alexander and other design writers.

So what is design knowledge?

I am quoting below my note on this subject that is a reflective note which I included in my booklet of lectures which I provide a link to below.

Quote

 What is Design Knowledge?
How do designers actually use explicit knowledge.

We may have to reflect on the very nature of the design activity and the manner in which it uses knowledge resources and insights to resolve innovations and directions in very particular situations. We always have to fall back on “other sources “ since the knowledge required for design has never (in my view) had any predefined boundary, the context and the vision of the designer is the sole determinant of which field of knowledge is accessed at a particular stage in the design process and this is determined by the factors that govern such access, such as time and money available, ability of the design team to realise the need of a particular discipline, their ability to process the data once it is found etc.

Today the ability to access knowledge has grown exponentially since the internet provides access to almost all of published knowledge as well as access to social networks to current holders of the required information be they experts in a particular field and insights from stake-holders with direct experiences that the designer is seeking to understand. Sometimes it is the product of pure play (exploration and composition - pure chance as stated by John Chris Jones) and not of any specific intention, and in this stage explorative play is legitimate and it does set a new direction for the subsequent stages of design work. Gui Bonsiepe has told us that design draws upon all of human knowledge and therefore there cannot be a separate field called “Design Knowledge”. The particular design context, the ability of the design team and seriousness of the task at hand determine what aspects of human knowledge will be used and how deeply it will be processed to achieve desired results. The early stages of design research helps mitigate risks that are inherent in any process of innovation and change.

However in many cases, from my personal experience, a small hint of possible success is enough to set the designer off in a new direction in pursuit of the knowledge and in his attempts to make it accessible. This may be done by reading up on the subject or by talking to experts (the long route) or by conducting a rough and ready experiment to validate the approach (quick and dirty trial and error experiments) followed by expert interviews, and in this way we move forward in our conviction forming and concept developing approach that also helps clarify the task itself, since the design opportunity in question is a tightly coupled state between “Problem perception” and “Solution insight”, (according to my model of design opportunity described earlier) which is
a product of the designers imagination that is partly confirmed by the new input from the particular knowledge resource that is accessed. This leads to conviction and a judgement call to set a new direction for exploration (making the whole process very iterative)

The book “The Design Way” by Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman, leaves these interpretations to a very open frame and I like this non prescriptive mode of reasoning which is truly in the “Design Spirit” if you can label it as that. It is one of the finest texts that I find that can be used with both students and industry members, who may be uninitiated about the “Design Way” in general. It helps resolve much perplexity in such situations. But is it to be then taken as being prescriptive? I hope not. In design we are not really interested in what the knowledge is, but in what it can do for us in the particular circumstance that we find ourselves in. We therefore use knowledge, rather unceremoniously, and dump it at the stage of finding an adequate answer, and we move on without bothering to document any of the insights, much to the dismay of the design researcher for whom this case would be a valuable tip in their search for the “Design Way”, but designers in the heat of their task resolution process do not seem to care. It is like chewing “Pan” in India. Pan chewing (or for that matter tobacco chewing - a terrible habit) the focus is on getting the critical juices and discarding the residue, if I may use this messy analogy to explain the spirit in which designers seem to use knowledge resources, chew and spit, use and discard, with no remorse whatsoever (and many times without acknowledgements which needs to change). The design researcher and historian is then left to sift the debris and make sense of the designers’ actions. But we all know that innovation once achieved changes the world and there is no going back. Or is there? Perhaps we do tend to forget this sometimes and history repeats itself.

Many researchers are trying to bring legitimacy to a field called design research by taking it up at the PhD level of university education, but the lack of boundary for design knowledge does make the task particularly difficult to fit within the comfortable confines of existing disciplines and departments at the university. We will therefore need to rethink the position of design professions and design studies within the university system and our various efforts at articulating the curriculum structure for the proposed Design Schools at the interested University systems and our attempts to explore the scope of design education within the university has been a very daunting task indeed.

While it is true that design at the strategic level calls upon all of human knowledge, each sub-discipline within design can stake claims to some unique skill or knowledge domain that they have special expertise in due to the very nature of their discipline and the tools that they wield with familiarity and expertise. Therefore it is not enough to have a broad general knowledge but to perform effectively a degree of special skills and knowledge are needed in each domain that they wish to serve. Designers are now increasingly learning and working in teams that bring together disparate skills and knowledge sets and using processes that can manage the huge variety of knowledge that may be needed by a particular design task in close coordination with the stage of work that the planning and execution of the complex design task calls for.

The designers thought processes are not unhindered nor are they uninhibited by his taboos and biases, we are after all human. This is what I tried to depict in the model of the mind-body map that I had developed to explain the process of innovation and design in exploring future possibilities and in addressing known and deeply held beliefs that may need to be processed before we are able to make a break-through that would show new and improved way of acting on our world and to try and improve what and how we do things in our world in the days ahead. Once we are aware of ourselves and our taboos we may be able to see “What if” and “What may be” which are fundamental to making new combinations that can be offered as possible opportunities on the design journey.

UnQuote

I quote this note above from my lecture booklet shown in the links below

Set of eight models on design thinking as slides. That can be projected
https://www.academia.edu/3848991/Design_Thinking_Models_Primer_2013

Lectures on design thinking based on eight models as a pdf booklet where each of these models is explained
https://www.academia.edu/5266541/05_DesignThinking_Lectures_EarthWorkshop_LR_Mstr_2012

So what is design evidence? The matter for another post in my attempt to answer the very interesting questions raised by Ken Friedman on this list.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
From my iPad at Design for a Billion conference at IIT Gandhinagar
7 November 2014 at 9.30 am

PS i look forward to Klaus Krippendorff's keynote which will begin shortly!

Prof M P Ranjan
Independent Academic, Ahmedabad
Adjunct Professor (Design) Ahmedabad University
Author of blog : http://www.designforindia.com
Archive of papers : http://cept.academia.edu/RanjanMP
Sent from my iPad

> On 05-Nov-2014, at 7:41 am, Paul Mike Zender <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> M P Ranjan:
>
> <SNIP>
> You make me sound like some strange "fakir" dancing around a fire in search of strange illicit ideas! Perhaps you should read Jon Kolko on design synthesis, indeed The Magic of Design is the title of one of his books. Kolko is a young researcher who seems to have got it right.
> <SNIP>
>
> I do apologize if I appear to have intended to paint you as a fakir. That's not what I had in mind. It was an honest question. When I wrote it, I had the following E. O Wilson quote in mind:
>
> “Reason and revelation, the two conceivable sources of knowledge.”
> Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998, p. 35)
>
> While noting that Wilson is a scientist, he is also a researcher and theorist. His book Consilience is also about synthesis, per the definition of the word of the title.
>
> Ken’s post captured what I might have said about evidence and designed things that do not exist yet.
>
> Thanks for suggesting Kolko. I do know him and his views personally. He spoke at the “Connecting Dots” AIGA design research conference we hosted at University of Cincinnati last year. As you might guess, I was/am not as enamored by his magic as you are.
>
> And my knees are still fine, thank you for asking.
>
> Best...
>
> Mike Zender
>
>
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