Hi, Nigel,
Thank you for your message.
Yes, I can see now through your comments that the picture of design research promulgated by DRS at that time was as you described.
I had understood the language and discussions of the DRS in those early years differently.
The problem then if that was the real situation with the DRS, is that the DRS was somewhat behind the times compared to the actual state and focus of design research in the world at that time and the practical in-house practices of design research in companies..
There is larger picture of design research internationally that appears to have been somewhat overlooked in the parochiality of the DRS' UK picture.
From my experience (going back to the mid-1960s in the UK) systematic design emerged out of a variety of methods such as systems thinking, morphological analysis, synectics, 'design of design', design philosophy and other problem framing and problem solving design methods developed since the 1920s that promised automation of generation of optimised design solutions.
The above approaches are documented in engineering design texts and papers from the 1940s onwards including the reports of the US Design Methods Group (started formally in 1966 some 5 years before DRS) and the German engineering design research group around Vladimir Hubka and Ernst Eder that led to Design Science movement, and classic design research texts from the 1950s such as Matousek, as well as the research documents on computer graphics and software of that era.
Initially, these approaches to automating design generation and optimisation were operationalised at drawing-board level in a similar manner to the classic techniques of doing complex engineering calculations using precision drawing techniques and slide-rule calculations.
At the time, there was a specific constellation of difficulties that was being addressed everywhere in the industrial world in relation to design activities:
1. The need to address ever more complex design problems, particularly in aerospace, oil and gas, warfare, vehicle design and socio-technical systems.
2. Addressing the Coasian transaction cost inefficiencies of having hundreds of designers working on developing different yet interlinked aspects of the same design
3. The slow speed of design activity (faster design speed = more competitiveness)
4. The need to avoid design failures and to optimise design outcomes.
Systematic design was one element of this much bigger international picture of design research that focused on the automation of generation and optimisation of design solutions as a means of addressing the above problem.
This international picture of design research was both bigger than the UK academic DRS picture and avoided its limitations which seemed then and now to be due to the restrictive influence of Art-related design education organisations.
As evidence of this picture, a more comprehensive history of the early years of design research and its drive to automation of generation and optimisation of design solutions was undertaken by W Ernst Eder
(2012) COMPARISONS OF SEVERAL DESIGN THEORIES AND METHODS WITH THE LEGACY OF VLADIMIR HUBKA. Royal Military College of Canada. Available: https://www.designsociety.org/download-publication/33288/comparison_of_several_design_theories_and_methods_with_the_legacy_of_vladimir_hubka
Some more of my own practical memories of the history of design research:
1. Discussions in the late 1960s with designers in Metropolitan Vickers, Ferranti, ICL, AEI and other companies showed they were working towards and looking forward to computer automation of design generation and optimisation - especially as the new ICL mainframe computers and DEC's PDP computers were becoming more easily available and easily programmed using Algol and Fortran. This followed the availability of cheap computer logic chips via Ferranti and others.
2. My academic mentor at Lancaster University (Prof Michael French) was towards the cutting edge of automation of design generation and optimisation and published a book detailing mathematical methods for the same in 1971 (Design: The Conceptual Stage)
3. Myself and many others were by 1972 producing automated design generation and optimisation software programs and sharing them with researchers at UMIST and other design research staff on the JANET system (written in Algol and then Fortran).
4. A close colleague in 1973-74 created the CAD system that was a basis of the UK Building Design Partnership's (BDP) rapid development that enabled massive automation of design solution generation.
I could go on with many more examples of practical design research in that era relating to automation of the generation and optimisation of design solutions.
If the Council at DRS and the editorial team at Design Studies was not onboard at that time with the understanding that the primary purpose of design methods was the automated generation and/or optimisation of design, or had a different view of design research, then this implies they may have been behind rather than in front of the game.
Thank you for bringing this insight.
Regards,
Terence
==
Dr Terence Love
MICA, MORS, PMACM, MAISA, AMIMechE,
NSW Safer By Design Cert. 51230252,
Security Agent Lic 61252. Security Consultant Lic. 61238
CEO
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
[log in to unmask]
www.designoutcrime.org
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Nigel Cross
Sent: Saturday, 4 July 2020 10:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Looking for design examples
Once again, Terence Love has high-jacked and diverted a topic onto his own particular views and opinions, using a rhetorical device of suggesting "a different way of thinking about design and design research" - i.e. "let me move this onto my preferred topic and views". He then goes on to make statements that are naive, or simply and sometimes absurdly not true.
Terence Love wrote:
"the majority of design is now no longer done by humans . . . computers and mathematically automated decisions undertake most design activity."
That is a naive view of technology. It ignores that computer programs and algorithms are designed and written and implemented by people, with explicit or implicit intentions. Sometimes the programs and algorithms may include self-adapting routines that can produce results that their designer did not expect or intend. But to attribute the results to the automated systems themselves is to ignore the human agency underlying them.
Terence Love wrote:
"Historically, from the 1950s and earlier, the primary focus of design research has been the improving design by the automation and optimisation of design processes and outcomes."
That is simply not true. The early history was based in systematic design methods, which might have included some attempts at automation but was much broader, including the development of methods for both individual designers and teams. Some reliable sources on the history of the development of design research are listed below.
Terence Love wrote:
"Automation and optimisation of design was the primary reason for the establishment of the field of design research and the reason for the existence of the Design Research Society."
That is absurdly not true. The Design Research Society was established in 1966 as a learned society "to promote the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields”. Its formation arose from the 1962 Conference on Design Methods - on "Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications".
The first international conference of the DRS (1971) was on 'Design Participation', which did include examples of CAD being used to make design processes more open to participation of users and other stakeholders, alongside bodies of work on political and social implications of architectural and product design. The following series of international DRS conferences through the 1970s and into the 1980s had topics such as 'The Design Activity', ‘Changing Design’, ‘Design:Science:Method’, ‘The Role of the Designer’, and all had a strong emphasis on understanding and developing individual and collective design processes. None of them were premised on ‘automation and optimisation’.
Although the development of computer applications featured frequently in those years they could not be said at any time to have been be the primary focus of design research. The current rich diversity of the DRS can be seen on its website: https://www.designresearchsociety.org/cpages/home
Some reliable sources:
Bayazit, N. (2004) ‘Investigating Design: A review of forty years of design research’, Design Issues, 20(1), 16-29.
Cross, N. (1993) ‘Science and Design Methodology: A review’, Research in Engineering Design, 5(2), 63-69.
Cross, N. (2006) ‘Forty Years of Design Research’, Design Studies, 28(1), 1-4.
Nigel Cross
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
