Hi Everyone,
Thanks to Erik for starting this thread and to the many others who have added their thoughts. I have two follow-up questions:
1. Would it be fair to use the term "popular design books" to talk about Erik's 3rd school? I mean this in the sense that we might refer to Erik Reis' The Lean Startup as a popular business book or Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point as popular psychology. I'm very happy to acknowledge that communicating science to a more general public (including researchers in fields that do not have a tradition of design scholarship) is a meaningful contribution. I also have worked with many serious, skilled designers who have read Change By Design but haven't read Schon's or Rittel's work--that's probably okay for a practitioner. The problem arises when researchers in fields that don't have a tradition of design (personally I confront this mainly in public health and medicine) write articles about design and cite the recent popular design books in lieu of peer-reviewed primary literature.
2. Would anyone care to share citations for peer-reviewed articles that discuss this problem--that popular design writing is being confused for primary literature? This comes up so often as corridor-talk among design researchers that I would think there would be more published opinion on the matter. While I come across a sentence here and there (see below) I haven't yet read a peer-reviewed account that argues the point at any length.
cheers,
Isaac
Relevant quotes: "What is striking about this business rhetoric is how so many of its elements have been foreshadowed in earlier Participatory Design projects" [1]. "To us this perspective sounds like good old Participatory Design, although we have to admit it has a better articulated and more appealing rhetoric" [2]. "As we have now experienced, design thinking unfortunately devolved into what Ezio Manzini, in his new book, pejoratively calls “post-it” versions of ideation for ailing corporations and do-gooders (66). Books were produced, but these were weak, self-promoting case studies and/or lists of decontextualized methods" [3]. "Several recent studies (Badke-Schaub et al. 2010; Cross 2010; Dorst 2010; Tonkinwise 2010) highlight how recent popular accounts of design thinking ignore the extensive research on designers’ ways of working over previous decades since the first Design Thinking Research Symposium in 1991 (Cross et al. 1992), let alone earlier events such as the Conference on Design Methods of 1962 (Jones and Thornley 1963). Although much of the recent public presentation of design thinking is tied to one design consultancy, IDEO (Brown 2008; Brown 2009; Brown and Wyatt 2010), the history of design thinking is more complex" [4].
1. Liam Bannon and Pelle Ehn. 2013. Design: Design Matters in Participatory Design. In Jesper Simonsen and Toni Robertson (eds.). Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, 37–63.
2. Erling Bjögvinsson, Pelle Ehn, and Per-Anders Hillgren. 2012. Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary ParticipatoryDesign ChallengesErling Bjögvinsson, Pelle Ehn, Per-Anders Hillgren. Design Issues 28, 3: 101–116.
3. Cameron Tonkinwise. 2016. Committing to the Political Values of Post-Thing-Centered Designing (Teaching Designers How to Design How to Live Collaboratively). Design and Culture 8, 1: 139–154. http://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2016.1142355
4. Lucy Kimbell. 2011. Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I. Design and Culture 3, 3: 285–306. http://doi.org/10.2752/175470811X13071166525216
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