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Hi Richard,
A quick question, you wrote:
"There isn´t a mysterious quality to designers in my view - it´s that they
want to make things that would look noticeably appealing when drawn. That
brings me to the visual. The designer draws a shape that is aesthetically
rich and then tries to make a physical thing that reflects that design
intent."
There are many many objects (I am limiting my argument to 3D objects),
which are horrible in terms of their visual "appeal", designed by
well-meaning designers who have serious degrees from serious design
schools. In my humble view, these things are abundant (and I suspect they
are more numerous than the good looking things--whatever that means--from a
statistical viewpoint). And there are many engineers, who have no formal
education in design, and do not even have a manifest goal of designing
"beautiful" things, who end up designing unarguably "appealing" 3D objects.
So where do we draw the line? Who is going to decide who is a designer and
who is not? What if a designer draws a shape that is not aesthetically
rich? Is it not a design then? Are intentions enough? Where do we locate
the agency of the designer, then? There are multiple sources of variation
in a design process--design is a relational and networked activity--so is
it really easy to pinpoint ownership in a design process? In other words,
if my design ended up very differently on the market because of some
engineering constraints and some other marketing issues, am I still the
designer?
Warm wishes,
ali
On 26 June 2018 at 12:26, Ali Ilhan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I am hoping to publish multiple papers from this dataset, only one is
> almost ready for submitting to a journal, and when I submit that, I will
> share it with you. In terms of variance, I don’t want to spoil the suprises
> now :)
>
> Ali
>
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 12:19 Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Wow, Ali,
>>
>> You mapped 15000 items on product design. That is great!
>> Please post when you publish your analysis.
>> Please can you say more about the variance?
>>
>> (My own searches have been via Z39.50 library protocol across major
>> libraries, and their library databases, targeting the word 'design' in
>> their titles and descriptions in decades from 1900.)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Terry
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>> On Behalf Of Ali Ilhan
>> Sent: Tuesday, 26 June 2018 4:58 PM
>> To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
>> research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: Help! Our field needs a new name:
>>
>> Terry,
>>
>> A quick note to support you: I am doing a mid scale bibliometric analysis
>> of product design literature, between 2000-2015. There are more than 15000
>> articles in the database I created, and as you said only a small portion
>> comes from non-engineering designers, proportionately. Again not saying
>> anything about the importance or impact. And you will be suprised about the
>> variance.
>>
>> My two cents,
>>
>> Ali
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 11:31 Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi Richard,
>> >
>> > If you look at the history of the design research movement you will
>> > find that it was started by engineering designers and to date the
>> > majority of design research (by a very large proportion) is
>> > undertaken in engineering design.
>> >
>> > Other design fields started to be included in design research after
>> > about
>> > 20 years (by the early 1980s). For the first 10 years, this mainly
>> > involved architecture and planning, later (in the 1990s) the other Art
>> > and Design fields began to be included more.
>> >
>> > The Art and Design fields, particularly the visual arts (as taught in
>> > Art and Design courses in universities and in Art and Design schools)
>> > remain the minor parties in design research as a whole.
>> >
>> > What you are seeing is that if you do not look beyond the publications
>> > and organisations of the art and design fields, you do not see the
>> > massive amount of work that happens in design research in other fields
>> > (and my much of which visual art designers benefit).
>> >
>> > This is not to say that design research does not happen in art and
>> > design fields, only to say that it is a very small part of design
>> > research as a whole.
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> > Terry
>> >
>> > ==
>> > Dr Terence Love
>> > MICA, PMACM, MAISA, FDRS, AMIMechE
>> > CEO
>> > Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
>> > Perth, Western Australia
>> > [log in to unmask]
>> > www.designoutcrime.org
>> > +61 (0)4 3497 5848
>> > ==
>> > ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: [log in to unmask]
>> > <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Richard Herriott
>> > Sent: Tuesday, 26 June 2018 4:02 PM
>> > To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
>> > related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
>> > Subject: RE: Help! Our field needs a new name:
>> >
>> > Dear Ken:
>> >
>> > (I have attached the original message so others can follow the
>> > argument)
>> >
>> > Thanks for your message. As always, you ask good questions which I
>> > shall try to do justice to.
>> >
>> > Dealing with the "invisible" things: they are the result of
>> > engineering and problem solving. At best some of the apparent bits
>> > like the medical equipment you mentioned involve shaping and the doing
>> > of what David Pye calls useless work. This satisfies my very lowest
>> > criteria of design (in my strict usage) of eliminating visual noise.
>> > An engineer who lays out a tidy engine bay or an okay-looking electric
>> > plug does this sort of thing out of what one might call courtesy to
>> > the user even if it doesn´t affect performance. A waiter in a
>> > restaurant puts down the service quietly in front of the guest for the
>> > same reason even if it won´t affect the nutritional content of the food.
>> >
>> > " Is it necessary that designers engage with the visual to design
>> > invisible processes or system that work well?", you asked. I am trying
>> > to argue that designers are the ones who engage with the visible.
>> > Others are planners or engineers though a designer can do some of that
>> > too. If designers worked with planners our infrastructure and city
>> > layouts would not be so horrible. They don´t often do this though.
>> > This is because in the allocation of work such tasks go to
>> > professionals who see the aesthetic as outside their purview, as
>> > somehow extraneous. Their work lacks the courtesy of the waiter.
>> >
>> > "What do you mean by the aesthetic dimension?" By this I mean the
>> > sensory, chiefly visible and tactile but extending to sound and
>> > haptics. A tax systems might be easy to engage with and efficient. It
>> > is a bit of a stretch to call it beautiful unless one is referring to
>> > the elegance of the system (a maths sense of elegant) of the moral
>> > acceptability of the outcome. I would not call that design work but
>> > planning with courtesy and ethics.
>> >
>> > When I was talking of the engineer regarding the breeze block wall and
>> > the Baroque façade, I was thinking that they are seen as functionally
>> > equivalent. I didn´t mean the engineer as a person would not see
>> > differencs (though to judge by the monstrous crudity of Irish civil
>> > engineering - I am Irish - one might wonder) but only that both
>> > objects hold up the roof and keep the rain out. From that engineering
>> > point of view a lump of concrete and a fine church are equivalent.
>> >
>> > I have indeed read Buchanan´s article and have lectured upon its
>> contents.
>> > If people haven´t read it, it´s worth a close read. Influential as it
>> > is, I seem to recall concluding Buchanan over-reached a bit with what
>> > design was when it got to the fourth order.
>> >
>> > There isn´t a mysterious quality to designers in my view - it´s that
>> > they want to make things that would look noticeably appealing when
>> > drawn. That brings me to the visual. The designer draws a shape that
>> > is aesthetically rich and then tries to make a physical thing that
>> > reflects that design intent. "Would I draw it that way?" is the test
>> > of the 3D artefact from an aesthetic point of view. I have expanded
>> > on this in my essay " What is like to see a bat?"
>> >
>> > http://www.svid.se/en/Research/Design-Research-Journal/Research-articl
>> > es/Research-articles-2017/What-is-it-like-to-see-a-bat/
>> > where this visual sense is discussed.
>> >
>> > Design research deals with what these designers do.
>> >
>> > I hope this goes some way to answering your questions.
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> >
>> > Richard
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
>> > related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>> > Behalf Of Ken Friedman
>> > Sent: Monday, June 25, 2018 10:34 PM
>> > To: [log in to unmask]
>> > Subject: Re: Help! Our field needs a new name:
>> >
>> > Dear Richard,
>> >
>> > You wrote, “However, from within design we should be alert to what
>> > design is and is not. Simon’s famous definition is way too broad. If
>> > we add the visual and aesthetic to it we arrive at a reasonably
>> > defensible definition.”
>> >
>> > This leaves me with two questions. The first question involves the
>> visual.
>> > Many of things that we now design are invisible. They constitute
>> > processes, services, or hidden structures that enable other things to
>> > work. Other things that we design involve visible parts — but we do
>> > not measure the success of the visible parts based on visual qualities.
>> >
>> > Last month, I spent ten days in the hospital, with a week in an
>> isolation.
>> > I found myself thinking often of how many of the processes that I
>> > required were purposefully and carefully designed, often quite well,
>> > despite the fact that I only saw a tiny part of the process where it
>> > specifically affected me. I only learned about some aspects of the
>> > systems inadvertently when physicians explained to me how they arrived
>> at one decision or another.
>> >
>> > Other things were quite important and entirely visible, but the
>> > qualities they represented had little to do with how they looked. For
>> > example, for blood tests, many systems now permit medical specialists
>> > to use only one needle and a special device rather than multiple
>> > needles: the device is such that the person taking blood uses a series
>> > of different devices resembling test tubes with a rubber seal on one
>> > end, placing one after the next within the single device and its one
>> > needle. When you are being tested for blood four or five times a day,
>> > you don’t care how the thing looks: if it works so you are only
>> > pierced once each time, you are grateful for the change from earlier
>> systems.
>> >
>> > Is it necessary that designers engage with the visual to design
>> > invisible processes or system that work well?
>> >
>> > The second question involves the word “aesthetic.” This word makes
>> > sense in one way, but it remains quite vague. What do you mean by the
>> > aesthetic dimension? Depending on the definitions you use, a tax
>> > system may have aesthetic dimensions — or it may not. The same applies
>> > to many of the kinds of things that meet Simon’s admittedly broad
>> definition.
>> >
>> > Much of the problem in these recurring debates involves attempting to
>> > demarcate boundaries that may not exist in the real world. If we want
>> > to argue that people are not designers who design systems, artifacts,
>> > and processes without visual or aesthetic dimensions, then we’re
>> > excluding from the practice of design many people who we might
>> > otherwise think of as designers.
>> >
>> > People really do design breeze block walls. Some of those people are
>> > engineers, some are architects, some are construction managers. These
>> > artifacts are definitely different from a Baroque church exterior.
>> > I’ve never met anyone who designs a blunt functional wall who would
>> > say that this wall is the same to them as a Baroque church exterior.
>> > People recognize the differences between different kinds of designed
>> things.
>> > People who design functional things all day may appreciate the beauty
>> > of something designed for prayer and glorification just as much as you
>> > or I might do.
>> >
>> > Again, I recommend Richard Buchanan’s article, "Design Research and
>> > the New Learning.” The four orders of design offers a useful way to
>> > think about design.
>> >
>> >
>> > https://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/hcs/ixs/material/DesResMeth09/Theory/
>> > 01-buchanan.pdf
>> >
>> > It seems to me odd to say that one may fulfill Simon’s definition yet
>> > not be a designer — perhaps I am wrong, but then it would help to have
>> > better and more clear definitions of design and designers. Without
>> > that, there would have to be some mysterious quality that designers
>> > possess, a quality that others do not possess, that renders them
>> > “designers” as contrasted with people who would otherwise be designers.
>> >
>> > This may be the case. If it is, defining and explaining it clearly is
>> > the purpose of research on these issues.
>> >
>> > I’d be interested in a clear answer to my two questions.
>> >
>> > Yours,
>> >
>> > Ken
>> >
>> > 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-economic
>> > s-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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