Dear All,
Mike Zender's post captures many of the things I’d have said if I had been posting. I’ve been sitting in Kalmar with a couple days of intense jet lag after a month in Shanghai … off to Delft tomorrow, then I'm heading back again to Shanghai until Christmas.
For now, I have been thinking about how to respond to Birger and Ranjan. It is clear that we sometimes design things that don’t exist. We don’t have evidence on what doesn’t yet exist, but we do have partial evidence on many aspects of that which we design. We can also gather evidence as we iterate solutions. Nearly anything that we create, imagine, innovate, or iterate has some footing in the world that exists today — if it did not, we couldn’t design it. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to imagine something that resembles nothing in the world in which we live today.
Evidence arises from many sources. It is physically impossible to create anything that violates the laws of physics, and almost all designed artefacts must fit the evidence available to use through physics, physical chemistry, chemistry, materials science, and several other fields. No matter what we can imagine, we can’t violate the basic laws of energy and entropy. Similarly, any process we design would have to fit within the available bodies of information available to us within cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and so on. Admittedly, our understanding of the human sciences is less secure than our understanding of physical science, partly because the base disciplines are younger — and in great part because we know far less.
Lubomir Popov’s post captured much of what I’d have written had I addressed these issues in depth. Medical research rests on a deep foundation of physical science, and one of the differences that separates medical practice in the late 1800s from medical practice in the 1920s is a growing body of evidence on which medical researchers and physicians relied. This doesn’t mean that we can use the same kind of evidence — we can use many kinds of evidence in design. For one example, Teena Clerke mentioned appreciative inquiry, and that is one way of gathering evidence.
Ranjan offered a series of arguments against Mike with which I don’t entirely agree. Nothing prevents us from drawing on many traditions. But Ranjan and I have also argued about the notion that “fire is designed.” Fire, as a physical fact, occurs in nature. Human beings learned to capture and use fire in different ways. But fire was not designed. The eventual controlled use of fire was a design act — but it was more than a “leap of faith. It was an act based on the physical evidence of fire and its use through iterative attempts to understand fire and the potential it offered. But the controlled use of fire is not 2,000.000 years old. The earliest evidence we have for the controlled use of fire dates back about 60,000 years. There may have been earlier instances, but the gap between 2,000,000 and 60,000 is far too great for the claim of a date as early as 2,000,000 years. Carbon dating tells a different story.
I find it difficult to understand just what objection there might be to evidence. On several occasions, I have pointed to Don Norman’s Core77 blog, “Why Design Education Must Change.”
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.asp
The issue here is exactly the fact that designers often make leaps of faith where they might do better to understand what human beings have already learned, gathering evidence and sharing it.
No one is weak kneed here: it seems to me that we are asking that designers draw on several sources. Inspiration is one of them, but we need more. As I said in the lecture, "Design requires a foundation in theory with concepts and models that support advanced professional practice. This is a serious and challenging problem for design as a professional field with no recognized discipline to advance the development of practice. Design is a process that involves finding, framing, and solving problems for legitimate stakeholders Some aspects of design are general to all design problems. These issues require a general theory of design and broad models. Some aspects of design are embedded in the specific situations we face as designers. These issues require many forms of treatment and representation, from theory and analysis to case studies, and emergent iterative solutions in the context of work flow. As a new and emerging discipline, we have no way of knowing how well we have done. If we have done well, we don’t know why. And we generally don’t know whether we could have done better – or how. In this respect,” I concluded, "We resemble the medical practitioners of 1910, rather than the general and specialist physicians of 2014. The current standard in medicine is evidence-based practice. There is nothing similar in design.”
From this, I went to a further point, and I think the debate in this thread shows that my conclusion is right: "As a field, design is fragmented conceptually and rooted in craft guild traditions. We don’t agree on the nature of evidence. Many don’t agree that evidence is useful, desirable, or even possible.”
At some point, I hope to develop the lecture into a serious, full article. For now, I’ve been following the thread with great interest. I must say that I agree with the arguments of Mike, Lubomir, Luke, and others. Even so, I have a great deal of interest in Birger’s work, and in Ranjan’s work. I’m not disputing their design skills, and I agree with much of what they say on other topics. I simply disagree with them on the issue of evidence-based design and what it can mean for us as a field and as a discipline.
I found a few typos and blank spots in the PDF of the lecture "Evidence-Based Practice in a Changing World Economy.” The corrected version is available at my Academia page, URL:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Yours,
Ken.
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia ||| Visiting Professor | UTS Business School | University of Technology Sydney University | Sydney, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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