Dear Colleagues,

Every now and then, we seem to enter a time warp, repeating old conversations and rebuilding boundaries or divisions that make little sense. I was astonished to read Francois’s assertion that “we obviously don't belong to the domain of the Social Sciences.” I don’t see why this should be the case. Francois himself contradicts this in the rest of the sentence, where he writes: “is there then a method or methods that would be more specifically useful to dealing with the phenomenon of humans - and some non-human entities - devising and interacting with artifacts?”

The study of how human beings interact with anything is a social science. Many aspects of devising artifacts do not involve the social sciences — but studying how human beings interact with artifacts does fall within the domain of the social sciences. It is the nature of design to cross the boundaries of disciplines — for this reason, design research must also cross the boundaries of disciplines.

It may not be necessary to understand the social sciences to learn and master typography or automobile design. If we want to understand how people perceive and understand the printed page, how they digest information and develop that information into knowledge, however, we move into such fields as communication, psychology, and education. These are social sciences. To understand why one steering system might work better than another, we need to understand something about ergonomics, and if we want to know whether (or why) one dashboard and instrument panel layout works better than another, we need to consider many issues, some physical or physiological, some psychological, and some social.

Richard Buchanan’s 2001 article “Design Research and the New Learning” considers some of these issues and demonstrates the relationship between different kinds of design and the domains they involve. If we design a tax system or a customer service system, we work in applied social science. That is precisely why some nations and businesses now involve designers from different fields in designing the systems they use to interact with their citizens, clients, and customers.

You can find a copy of the Buchanan article here:

https://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/hcs/ixs/material/DesResMeth09/Theory/01-buchanan.pdf

In the early 1990s, I began to work on a taxonomy of design knowledge domains (Friedman 2012:144). This is not a perfect scheme — it probably says as much about what I don’t know as it says about the design field. Even so, the taxonomy and its later iterations also demonstrate how the kinds of things that we work with and design cross the boundaries of disciplines. Some designers do not engage with the social sciences. Other designers must.

You can find the article containing the “Strategic Design Taxonomy: Design Knowledge Domains” here:

https://www.academia.edu/2508775/Friedman._2012._Models_of_Design

The different kinds of things that we design and the different kinds of design we practice to design them involve the human professions and services, the creative and applied arts, and technology and engineering. The research that informs these different fields therefore may draw on the natural sciences, the humanities and liberal arts, or the social and behavioral sciences in different configurations (see Friedman 2012: 148-149).

The challenges of design and design research in a complex era mean that different kinds of designers require different ranges of skill and expertise. On a research list dedicated to doctoral education, I’m uncomfortable with assertions that we have no need for expertise in domains that we need if we are to understand the challenges we face.

Yours,

Ken

References

Buchanan, Richard. 2001. “Design Research and the New Learning.” Design Issues, Volume 17, Number 4 (Autumn 2001), pp. 3-23.

Friedman, Ken. 2012. “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future for Design Education.” Visible Language, Vol. 46, No. 1/2, pp. 128-151.

Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (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 ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn


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