Dear Harold,
Thank you for the pointer to the article and best wishes for the New Year.
As you wrote, the parallels are there.
I suggest the article is the wrong interpretation of both problem and cure.
Every inquiry into what might be wrong and what might be done has possibility of different paths.
Commonly, one explanation makes this easy and butters up the egos and fills the wallets of those who have a direct interest in the benefits from the outcomes.
Typically, there is also another path of explanation that is harder for the future in work, status, ego and understanding on those that have a direct interest in the benefits, but provides a higher level of benefits to the world more broadly.
Universities offer financial support for those who are in the university system under conditions that are different from other kinds of patronage or employment.
A central role of nationally funded universities is to provide financial benefit for society through the production of unambiguously described knowledge that is of practical and financial benefit and accessible to all.
That is the basis of the shape of research required in universities.
Research in other ways needs funding from different sources outside universities
The NYT article takes the line that is easy and butters up the egos and fills the wallets of those philosophers who have a direct interest in the benefits from the outcomes.
The other path of changing to operate under the research style of universities is harder in work, lower in status, attacks the ego and for philosophers that have a direct interest in the benefits requires a different kind of understanding of their work (and perhaps completely different kinds of theory and theory making) , but provides a higher level of benefits to the world more broadly.
I suggest the same is true if you substitute designer for philosopher.
As an aside, one of the other markers of this situation is the lack of prescriptive technical dictionaries in both philosophy and design.
Of interest is that one of the first things any new discipline does is to create a prescriptive technical dictionary that describes why and how the technical meanings they use for concepts and the interpretation of theories differ from those established by other disciplines. A classic case is the history of the 'physicalists', a new group emerging from natural philosophy who redefined the terms and concepts of natural philosophy into a distinctly different discipline. They did this of course through the establishment over time of a prescriptive technical dictionary of terms and concepts and a body of theory distinct to their philosophical analyses. They followed that disciplinary path to the point where we now know the discipline in its short form as 'Physics'.
One might take the situation described in the NYT as the search for an easier path that less effort, butters the ego more, pays well, and maintains the benefits of being able to use loose thinking on difficult topics: whether for philosophers or designers.
The alternative is to do the hard work and define practically usable concepts and theories that are testable and align with the theories of other disciplines.
As an aside and hint, as I've written before... the noun version of the definition of design does this for design researchers... .
Best wishes,
Terence
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Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, PMACM, MISI
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
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www.loveservices.com.au
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Harold Nelson
Sent: Wednesday, 13 January 2016 3:53 AM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [SPAM] NYT article
DRS
Good new article from the NYT.
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>> <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/11/when-philosophy-lost
>> -its-way/?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&modu
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When the term ‘philosophy’ is replaced by the term ‘design’ in this article, a similar story (not a literal mapping one to one of events but similar in plot) of what is happening to academic design as it is being scientized by academics and practitioners emerges—e.g. design science, design research etc. Hopefully design will not be sidelined from the real world in the way that academic philosophy has been sidelined in this cautionary tale. It has too much to offer and is too valuable to be lost.
Harold
TheDesignWay.net <http://www.thedesignway.net/>
AccidentalVagrant.blogspot.com <http://accidentalvagrant.blogspot.com/>
AdvancedDesignInstitute.blogspot.com/ <http://advanceddesigninstitute.blogspot.com/>
OrganizationalDesignCompetence.com/ <http://organizationaldesigncompetence.com/>
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