Dear Francois,
Thanks for your reply. While I understand your position and know that many share it. I do not. As I read your reply, you seem to be saying that our research field should specifically focus on conceiving and using the artefacts that we design. It may be that I misunderstood your second paragraph, but it seems that you also say that we should focus on developing and proposing satisficing artefacts, and knowledge about these artefacts.
Addressing these issues properly took a longer post than I planned to write. Unfortunately, some of the best questions are easy to ask — and difficult to answer. I’m announcing at the start that this post is long. It will be my last contribution to this thread.
You wrote, "Yes, there is 'general' knowledge related to a PhD in Natural Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, ect.), in Humanities and in Social Sciences (Psychology, Anthropology, ect.). And as you so well reminded us, there also is knowledge generated in cases of 'professional’ practice Doctorates: Medicine, Engineering, Law, Design, ect.
"However my point is that we, in Design, should perhaps focus more our PhD research - aside of, or eventually leading to and enriching the professional Doctorate in Design!! - on generating knowledge but specifically related to conceiving and use of artefacts: not general 'useless' but rather directly focused and 'useful' knowledge. After all, our field isn't exclusively about developing and proposing ‘satisficing' artefacts and knowledge about these??"
I disagree with this position for several reasons.
First, and most important, our research field is not exclusively about the immediately useful knowledge that informs the design of artefacts, neither how they are made nor how they are used.
Second, and nearly as important, our research field is already in sad shape because our doctoral programs have been turning out graduates who lack many of the essential research skills that enable them to answer research questions or to train the next generation of research.
Let me start with my first objection. I will demonstrate the case with one simple example.
To understand how artefacts are used requires the research skills that people generally acquire in any of several disciplines. These include anthropology, ethnography, consumer behaviour, physiology, and ergonomics. The choice of methods and the frame in which a researcher applies these methods depends on the research question. To understand the questions one may ask and determine the methods best used requires serious knowledge of those other fields, along with at least a basic knowledge of the other fields and some awareness of its methods.
Many design schools now offer courses in what they believe is a form of design ethnography, as though anyone can learn some passable form of ethnography in a course lasting one semester. This is not the case. For someone to become a competent ethnographer require extensive education and training, generally followed by deep engagement in the field. This is why corporations that want real ethnographic insight into how their products are used generally hire anthropologists and ethnographers with a PhD. They don’t hire designers to do ethnography — few design schools offer deep enough programs for design graduates to understand how artefacts are used at a deep enough level to be competent.
For that matter, issues in how people use artefacts or how artefacts change human behaviour in cultures and societies require the skills that people gain in many fields. The smart phone has brought about immense social change in the relatively short time since the first of these phone came on the market. Major chip manufacturers study the ways that people will live and work in the context of the devices that their chips make possible. Even relatively simple devices like the new camera-based doorbell that allow people to see who is at their door no matter where they are create major opportunities for social disruption. Simply designing these artefacts with some sort of loose, intuitive notion of how people will use them is not good enough. We often complain about the unintended consequences that occur when corporations and governments require people to use new systems. The problem of unintended consequences is just as great when a designer creates an artefact without thinking enough issues through, or when the designer thinks about the issues while being ignorant of the research methods required for serious understanding.
To a great degree, a PhD in design is useless for many kinds of research in real industry contexts. That’s because so few design schools teach the broader range of skills and issues required for a solid foundation in research. These are also the skills and issues that designers need if they are to communicate effectively with people who approach product development using the skills acquired in other fields and disciplines.
At the same time that corporations are making more intensive use of design, design methods, and designers, they hire relatively few people who take a PhD to a design school to help them conduct the research they need. It’s one thing to hire and use designers as members of a comprehensive design team. It’s another to trust them with the research mission that informs product development.
To get a sense of the complex challenges at play in industry today, just read an article by Gjoko Muratovski titled “Paradigm Shift: Report on the New Role of Design in Business and Society.” You can get it here.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.11.002
Other challenges face designers who work in social settings to design services and systems that one can place under the rubric of social design. Consider one article by Nynke Tromp, Paul Hekkert, and Peter-Paul Verbeek titled “Design for Socially Responsible Behavior: A Classificationof Influence Based on Intended User Experience.” It appeared in Design Issues, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 3-19. Two of these authors teach design at Technological University of Delft, and the third teaches philosophy. They come from three different PhD fields — industrial design engineering (Tromp), psychology (Hekkert), and philosophy (Verbeek).
Tromp and Hekkert also published an important book from Bloomsbury titled Designing for Society
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/designing-for-society-9781472567987/
Tromp also heads a project titled Redesigning Psychiatry
https://www.redesigningpsychiatry.org
Clearly, these topics — article, book, project — lie within design. Even so, we can’t address of understand it based on design alone. They require deeper knowledge, general knowledge, and knowledge outside the narrow frame of conceiving and using the artefacts that we design.
What makes the TUDelft Faculty of Design Engineering one of the world’s leading design schools is that it draws its faculty from designers and design experts with backgrounds in multiple disciplines. I’m not saying this based on strong reputation that the faculty has within our disciplines. I’ve had a chance to look deep. Several years ago, I served as one member of a review committee to study and assess the faculty and faculty research on behalf of the university and the Dutch government. What I saw was simply superb. If you want to know what a good doctoral program looks like in the context of EU norms and standards, look at TUDelft.
Take another matter that has become increasingly important. It is a topic that I’ve heard designers and design professors raise frequently over the past few years. This topic lies the intersection of design and economics. Some people describe it as designing a post-capitalist economy. Others frame the discussion of designing for sustainability in terms of designing economic systems — we can’t shape sustainable societies without reforming the economic context in which we manage an unsustainable world.
Few people in the design field have the requisite skills to do this. We have had a few people like John Heskett who can work with useful ideas at the intersection of design and economics, but very few people in the design field have a large enough sense of the challenges in political economics to tackle the challenges of designing a post-capitalist economy with an economic *system* that works for everyone who lives in it.
To do this requires a range of skill and knowledge across economics, industrial economics, political economics, policy studies, finance, environmental policy, and a dozen more fields. Most of what we see done on topics such as this involves worthy goals with no workable path from our current situation to the realisation of those goals. In this context, people in design research tend to be acclaimed for worthy aspirations with no consideration to the actual consequences of their proposals.
When people who lack the requisite skills attempt to design full economies, the people who live inside those economies are forced to live with the deficiencies of the people who design the systems within which they must live. The result tends to be reruns of the 20th century. Consider the way that colonial India was reborn as the License Raj and born again in the chaos of contemporary India. Consider the way that Gilded Age America was reborn as an America redesigned first by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, then by McConnell and Donald Trump.
While I lack the skill to work on a project of this kind, I have enough knowledge as a former professor at a business school to know when I am looking at proposals that do not fit together with empirical evidence from the fields that would be involved.
One of the great challenges we face, for example, is how to make the necessary systems fit together in a way that preserves individual freedom while addressing the large-scale challenges of social cooperation based on common rules. We can barely manage this kind of challenge in dealing with the Covid19 pandemic. We haven’t yet been able to deal with the fallout from 6,000,000 people displaced by the civil war in Syria. The problem of sustainability and addressing catastrophic climate change on a global basis demands that billions of individuals accede to new rules that will completely overturn the lives and systems to which they are now accustomed. To make this happen, the changes we need will limit individual freedom in surprising and often uncomfortable ways.
If we don’t deal with these problems, the situation will be worse. What’s coming is a massive threat to people young enough now to be here after 2050. Climate problems will lead to massive migration on a level never before seen in human history. Europe and the Middle East barely managed to cope with the 6.6 million refugees who fled the conflict in Syria. Imagine the difficulties of working with the massive flow of climate refugees. A common estimate is 200 million refugees by 2050. This number will likely rise to 2 billion climate refugees by 2100, 20% of all humanity (Geisler and Currens 2017). Water shortages, food shortages, an increase in contagious diseases, civil unrest, armed conflict, species extinctions, ocean changes leading to collapsed fisheries.
For more information, see this article, also attached: Geisler, Charles, and Ben Currens. 2017. “Impediments to Inland Resettlement Under Conditions of Accelerated Sea Level Rise.” Land Use Policy, Vol. 66 (2017), pp. 322–330. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.03.029
Much of the work I read on sustainability by designers simply overlooks the magnitude of the problems.
Where it comes to economics, design people tend to neglect two of the crucial fields that one must understand. These are the social sciences and philosophy. In these, their reading is limited. Generally, I find PhD theses with a handful of authors in the social sciences, usually general texts. In philosophy, designers tend to read Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault, but they only seem to read one work by Michael Polanyi. They often ignore John Dewey and they don’t read Karl Polanyi at all. Karl Polanyi was the great economist who helped to define what we now understand as the market society — and an insightful critic of capitalism.
From what I see of designers or design thinkers who attempt to write on political economics, I see few references to the work in economic history that sheds light on what happens when making certain kinds of political economic choices. It is rare when I see references to Harold Innis, Joel Mokyr, or Thomas Piketty — and it is equally rare even to see references to Nobel laureates such as Douglass North, Amartya Sen, or Elin Ostrom — and all of them have done work specifically relevant to this challenge.
Designing an economy is never simply a matter of designing “an econ0my.” It always entails designing the social and political systems within which an economy is embedded, and the political and administrative systems that implement the design. To this day, I remain astonished at how much of the New Deal economic design was solid and workable, and I am puzzled at how a group of politicians persuaded so many Americans to vote against their own interests by dismantling the useful structures painstakingly developed during the Depression years.
Anyhow — I’d welcome a serious effort to design an economy by someone with the skill and scope to work across the several disciplines that might make it work. I only know a few people with that necessary scope and the high level cross-disciplinary skills needed to engage with the issues. We’re not graduating them from PhD programs that focus only on designing artefacts and how people use those artefacts.
To get from here to there requires a better approach to doctoral education than we typically see in design schools. There is, of course, a slightly different solution — we could simply tell people to stop working on design projects such as the medical pathways being studied at the University of California DesignLab or the initiatives on design for public health that Patrick Whitney and Andre Nogueira are working on at Harvard University together with Carlos Teixeira at the Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design. Of course we should not do so. These are legitimate design problems. But then, we can't tell people at other universities to stop working on these problems from a design perspective. This makes it important to encourage people to undertake doctoral work that prepares them for the kinds of research that this requires.
If we limit the PhD in design to topics only suitable to people who design specific artefacts, the only designers who graduate with a PhD will be unable to work on most of the issues in which people at many design schools are interested. So we are back to the assessment criteria and the concepts of originality that appeared in the lists I posted the other day.
However, I will stop here … I’ve read through this post to polish and edit several times, and I keep finding gaps that I should address. It’s not a journal article, though. It’s a post and this is as good a time as any to stop writing ….
That’s it for this thread.
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-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Visiting Professor | Faculty of Engineering | Lund University ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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