Dear Terry,
Your post on predictive models or theories is worth a quick note. It contradicts your description of mathematical theory based only on analysis and reasoning.
You write, “The real challenge is to look at possible approaches to creating design theories that predict design outcomes as the consequences of design in the world.”
Your approach has nothing to do with the world.
In the recent thread on colour, you used a question to bait the hook. The question was not a search for information. Your replies show that you had already reached a conclusion. You used the responses to your query to announce already-formed opinions. Through the entire thread, you paid no attention to anything people had to say. Rather than attend to the issues or arguments, you seize on a phrase here or there to launch into your next disquisition.
It is a form of misplaced Platonism to believe that you can create a mathematically accurate predictive model of anything in the absence of data on one side of the modelling process and testing on the other.
If you believe that “The real challenge is to look at possible approaches to creating design theories that predict design outcomes as the consequences of design in the world,” you should not neglect the significant issues that people raise.
In your replies to Klaus, you ducked out of your claims on colour to argue that you thought it would be useful to work with ideas on colour as a test case for “possible approaches to creating design theories that predict design outcomes as the consequences of design in the world.” But you’re not interested in looking at the world. You are looking at “the realms of non-linear n-order calculus, which on one hand offers potential benefits in identifying optimal positions in m-dimensional design space.”
You have never demonstrated a single case to show that you have working mathematical models “that predict design outcomes as the consequences of design in the world.” These posts reminds me of theoretical descriptions of perpetual motion machines — such a machine may be possible in a perfectly isolated system, a pure Platonic world of forms disconnected from the real world. A working model is impossible in the real world subject to thermodynamics. Most design works on the scale of human interaction. On this scale, your approach is equally problematic.
It would be refreshing if you were to demonstrate your approach by publishing some working results.
If all the rest of us were equally content with describing imaginary outcomes, we could end world hunger, cure cancer, and reverse catastrophic climate change by “identifying optimal positions in m-dimensional design space.”
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
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
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