Hello Birger & Lubomir: I hesitate to wade into this thread but hey it's a hot summer Friday here in NYC…Perhaps someone might find this useful.
As a practice leader working with organizational leaders building multi-disciplinary changemaking capacity I am rather puzzled by this thread.
With interest I read Birger’s comments regarding: "Nurturing pluralism",..."bridging those different cultures"...design stands partly besides and slightly in the middle of the Two Cultures Conflict”…“ design cannot afford this conflict because we are bridging those different cultures”… “we should cultivate our pluralism”… celebrate the wonderful cross section"…the "ecology" of design and design research benefits from diversity.”
I also noted what seemed to be Birger’s more list specific comments:.. “exchange and dialogue between different perspectives is critical and lacking”… "many alternative voices are scared away"…"make the list more welcoming".
With interest I also read Gordon Rowland’s comment: “I’m interested in how forms of inquiry might be integrated without privilege.”
A few brief Friday afternoon observations:
1. Not sure exactly how to say this delicately but presently there is not much of a connection between the state of this thread so far and the state of what is already going on in practice today…what is already known in practice regarding how to bridge across not just one or two but rather many many disciplines in constructive ways in the context of purposeful, knowledge sharing, integration, synchronization, collaboration. This is not mission impossible, a new frontier just discovered or an arena that practice leaders are just now starting to think about. The practice community is decades into this knowledge. Puzzling why this would not be reflected here. To some it might be a distant aspiration. That is not the state of practice today.
Some simple field research among practice leaders already operating in this bridging arena would certainly help to begin clarifying that practice is in a rather different place. Puzzled why this realization does not surface here on this research oriented list. If financial constraints are a concern I have no doubt that a simple round of 40 minute Skype conversations with 8-10 practice leaders involved in bridging work, capacity building work would radically inform conversations on this subject and bring it out into the 2015 world, more aligned with what knowledge already exists. To get away from false frontiering this kind of basic research would certainly inform any conversation in this direction.
2. The 1959 “Two Cultures” lecture by CP Snow is an interesting historical artifact. In practice we don't assume that is where organizational leaders are today. We are interested in the similarities and differences between his logic in 1959 and what goes on today, where organizational leaders are, where we are. The contemporary version of the dynamics that Snow talks about in quite frankly overly abundant detail is that every discipline at the table today believes that they offer unique value. No big news there. Today these are givens in all multi-disciplinary contexts. Of course today most organizations are not organized around “two cultures” but are rather embodied in the form of many, many disciplines, depts, units, etc, all kinds of tribal vertical divisions. Our role in practice is now and has been for more than a decade to bridge such verticals.
To be fair to CP Snow he was in his 1959 lecture speaking in the context of broad cross community discussions as in informal coffee-chat type settings and not the more deliberate, purposeful settings of organizations. How various other professional folks were already working in the context of the later seemed to be not on his radar in 1959.
Not so unusual Snow can be seen operating from what we know as the navigation by content knowledge school of changemaking. This part is still often seen today in numerous disciplines. Interested in bridging he was evidently unaware that others in a parallel universe were at work on the bridging question simultaneously from very different angles. (This discipline verticality too remains quite common even in the social media era of today.) Where CP Snow was in 1959 is not where they were. Around the same time in innovation methodology history a group of American applied creativity pioneers had solidified a methodology innovation that CP Snow was evidently not aware of in his quest. That was the notion of separating content knowledge from process knowledge…the understanding that one is not the other.
Since the 1959 time period this logic underpins methodology development in much of the applied creativity methods movement. It's an orientation that revolutionized how applied creativity practitioners think about bridging possibilities. This notion remains central to much of applied creativity methodology to this day. It has behavioral implications. In methodology land we know this orientation as Split Language Mode. It is not a notion or orientation found in the traditional design methods movement but is front and center in many hybrid, design oriented transformation practices today. It is an orientation not well understood in traditionally oriented design academia. It is an orientation that requires different skills.
3. No need to debate whether John Maeda is an artist or a scientist as he does not operate/practice in this arena. His well-known orientation has been Design 2, (product/service/experience creation) where methods are quite different. In practice he is known as a rather high profile often in the media spokesperson for Design 2 logic, now being widely respun as design thinking. With all due respect, he does not appear to have the methodology knowledge to get at the notion of privileging…also known in practice as think-balance. In typical Design 2 logic the designers central role is a mixture of content (subject matter) expertise intertwined with downstream situational process knowledge. In methodology land we know this orientation as Mixed Language Mode. This is not the operational orientation required at larger scale and or the context of bridging many disciplines. Evidently unbeknownst to John, today the folks operating in this arena beyond product creation do a lot more in the direction of process than pointing to the asking of “big” questions.
4. I assume it is understood that the primary dialogue type of this list "debate" is not the dialogue type being used in leading practices to bridge across disciplines, to work on highly complex challenges at the scale of organizations and societies in a co-created manner. These are two fundamentally different dialogue methodology approaches.
The not often talked about difficult news is that in practice today high aptitude for debate does not translate to high aptitude for either co-creation basic participation or more advanced co-creation leadership. This is a turn of events and a realization that is not well integrated into academia where debate skills remain not only popular but are often positioned by its leaders as central. In practice we do see many students exiting such programs with expectations that their debating skills will be front and center in real world methodology and in most strategic design practice situations that is just not the case today.
In the context of teams working in real world organizations in activities related to driving innovation, changemaking we do considerable unlearning around debate dynamics with work session participants as basic level co-creation skill-building.
Apart from having an engaging and entertaining chit-chat if the desire is to integrate knowledge across diverse disciplines debate is not an ideal dialogue type. It is often true that many operating from traditional academic platforms have a high degree of preference in this direction. In practice we are focused in a completely different direction.
5. There is perhaps an interconnected misunderstanding regarding the role of content (subject matter) knowledge in the context of what is being referred to under a number of different banners including: design at scale, organizational transformation, societal innovation, wicked problems, bridging disciplines, etc.
The method orientation seen in this thread including the referred to Don Norman essay entitled “why design education must change” is not the orientation of larger scale challenge interventions across industries but rather the orientation and logic of Design 2 (product/service/experience creation). Much of design education remains focused in that direction. In practice today we view the underlying orientations of Design 2 and that of Design 3 (organizational transformation) – Design 4 (societal transformation) quite differently.
This shift has thrown a huge wrench into the traditional logic of design methods, where the designer considers herself/himself both the process and content expert (Mixed Language Mode). At the scale of diverse complexity beyond product, service and experience design Mixed Language Mode is considerably less useful. (Don't ask the graduate schools selling Design 2 as organizational and societal transformation.)
More than a decade into the shift the ramifications in terms of skill-shift and methods-shift has not yet been well absorbed into most design education programs positioning themselves as advanced. As practice leaders we still find that few graduates seem to be emerging from the advanced design academies with such skills in place.
Programs that teach debate as a primary dialogue type interconnected with Mixed Language Mode and downstream methods don't have much to do with what is going on in leading strategic design practices today.
This hiccup places significant deskilling and reskilling on the shoulders of strategic design practices. With all due respect to Don’s essay what multi-disciplinary capacity building practice leaders are looking for today is a shift in design education significantly beyond the scale logic and methods logic of Design 2. We are looking for next generation strategic design leaders.
Hope this is helpful to some.
Have a good weekend all.
GK VanPatter
Humantific
SenseMaking for ChangeMaking
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Related for those interested:
Making Sense of “Why Design Thinking Will Fail”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-sense-why-design-thinking-fail-gk-vanpatter
Making Sense of “Building Better Brainstorms”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-sense-building-better-brainstorms-gk-vanpatter
On Jul 30, 2015, at 1:15 PM, Gordon Rowland <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Birger,
>
>
> My sense is that your own work on systems-oriented or systemic design relates here. We find that individual ways of knowing are insufficient in seeking answers to big questions (or meeting great challenges, however one wishes to say this). So, integrations of multiple ways of knowing—systemic inquiries—might help. But all the attempts to integrate that I know of don’t truly integrate. Rather they privilege one way over others based on the project leads’ worldview (and, as Ken points out, lack of knowledge of alternatives). For example, in my own field design-based research (DBR) is quite popular. In nearly every instance I’ve seen it involves researchers trying to do research through designing—with little design expertise included. Another example is scientists attempting policy work and thinking that such work is (or rather should be) merely an application of scientific knowledge, hence their efforts boil down mostly to matters of technical communication (and frustration – if only those non-scientists would listen to us!).
>
> I’m interested in how forms of inquiry might be integrated without privilege. For example, I’ve been playing with methods that might bring together science/ scientific research (what is), design (what might be), philosophy (what should be), and politics (what will be). If you or anyone else knows of precedents for this, I’m all ears.
>
> Gordon
>
>
>
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