Hello everyone,
I also am a bit frustrated with the phrase Rule of Thumb. Subconsciously, I made an association with the illiterate craftsman. And often I have to use it in the context of contemporary design, which is a phenomenon different from the crafts.
What term you would suggest to denote the same concept that is currently communicated with the phrase Rule of Thumb?
Thank you very much,
Lubomir
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From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Milena Radzikowska
Sent: Sunday, August 18, 2019 11:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: On Principles and Paradigms
Dear all
Thank you for this stimulating discussion.
I’d like to offer a few foods for thought...
At the last DRS conference (the one in Ankara), we had the privilege to see two, very different presentations that were both under the heading of “design for the non-human”. The first described a designing solutions for unhappy cats. While the paper was positioned as design for cats it was, in fact, looking to solve problems people had with cats not problems the cats had themselves. The second was a project with squirrels. This one, in contrast, asked design students to observe the behavior of squirrels and determine what, if anything, would make the squirrel lives more pleasant.
This, two different kinds of problems: design to solve some problem of the non-human and design for the non-human.
This also reminded me of a beautiful project by Pablo Hermansen and Martin Tironi of design for gibbons at the Chilean Zoo (our book, forthcoming ;), where the students did, literally, design play structure for the enrichment and happiness of the animals (though still constrained by the human).
How we name things does matter. Attaching the word “human” or “people” to all design that’s, for clarity’s sake, “user” centered is problematic. It makes invisible the fact that we should be designing for “things” outside of ourselves: animals, the environment, micro-organisms, etc. and that the design where people are the focus, is often destructive to those others.
Also, there’s some great work in feminist design that points out that “people”, “user”, and “human” while attempting to be inclusive, actually ends up representing only the interests of the dominant group (white, male, hetero, cis, middle and upper middle class). Transparency matters.
Finally, let’s stop using the phrase “rule of thumb”. While the English law origin has been debunked, the myth has so saturated our popular culture, that it might as well be true.
All the best
Milena
Milena Radzikowska, MDes, PhD
Professor of Information Design
Faculty of Business and Communication Studies Mount Royal University
She/Her
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“I guess this is what we’re doing now...”
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> On Aug 17, 2019, at 11:53 PM, David Sless <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Ken, François and all,
>
> Just to clarify. My preference for rule-of-thumb is that it links us back to and places a value on our craft origins which are often lost in the contemporary grand visions of design and the normative imperatives of the academic world. In my own field of information design we would be lost without the accumulated rules of thumb derived from centuries of typography and graphic design know-how.
>
> 'People' is the common denominator social plural of all types of 'human' animals. It carries the fewest assumptions about their nature or social relationship to designs or artefacts. whereas terms like 'users' or 'audience', or even worse, 'target audience', customers etc. presuppose ongoing relationships which can at times be grossly misleading. Of course, no term describing 'people 'is free of historical and contemporary usages, like accumulated barnacles on a ship, but the term leaves it largely open to consider the relationship between people and artefacts as distinct from the simply being human.
>
> David
>
>
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