Dear Birgit, Thanks for your response. Your post offered a new distinction I had not previously known. This is the term "silent design," covering those "who actually took design decisions in various organizations they captured the non-designers' significant impact on design outcomes and grounded in this they coined 'silent design' in addition to the possible 'seen design' by professional designers." This is a useful term for one group among those various stakeholders and decision-makers who participate in design decisions and networks without themselves engaging in design activity. With the design chasm thread moving off in other directions, I will respond briefly and return to the issue of definitions, terminology and design domains another time. In speaking of professional actors in the different design domains that render the design process central to the world today, I did not intend to exclude silent designers and other stakeholders, but I was not referring to them. Instead, I was referring to professionals of different kinds who engage actively in design without bearing the professional label "designer." We have examples of this in many programs at the Norwegian School of Management. We have courses that cover the design process applied to organization design, corporate strategy, marketing strategy, logistical systems, financial systems planning, management information systems, and other kinds of entities, systems, or processes. The professionals who design these entities, systems, and processes do more than make decisions in the sense of silent design. While there are silent designers involved in significant decisions in most of these domains, the purpose of the programs and courses we offer is to teach students how to design such entities, systems, and processes well. The people who exercise these design skills as primary responsible designers are designated by such titles as manager, marketing manager, strategist, CEO, CIO, CFO, operations manager, plant manager, software engineer, systems planner, programmer, and other titles. While I understand the interesting distinction between "silent design," and "seen design," these categories fail to cover at least 80% of the design processes covered by the large-scale definitions taken from Simon, Fuller, Merriam-Webster, or the Oxford English Dictionary. The reason Terry Love and I have been working on a comprehensive map of the multiple domains of design process is to understand these issues and develop a sense of the large domain and the design process. This large domain includes, the many fields and subfields of design, but it is not limited to any one of these. While I am not suggesting that everyone ought to be interested in this particular issue, I do believe it serves valuable purposes. The ultimate result should be useful for many kinds of inquiry into design and design process. It should help researchers to clarify several kinds of ontological and epistemological questions. It should also help researchers to establish context and frame for different kinds of research programs, such as Ben Matthews's search for accounts of designing. One reason for this kind of careful, painstaking work is precisely that we must one day move beyond the circular debates that have so often characterized design research. The issue is not that we must all use the same definitions. Rather it is helpful to be aware that there are different kinds of definitions by understanding them and knowing what they mean. The ability to draw on and choose from among a rich set of definitions carries with it a far deeper conceptual power than simply agreeing that other definitions exist than those we use. It is my sense that productive fields of inquiry establish rich ranges of definitions and terms on which to draw. Even though some of the definitions effectively contradict other definitions or function in different ways, access to a rich vocabulary of content and distinction permits careful development of ideas and rich process descriptions. You wrote that "Design research is young and what we mean by 'design' and design talent we all agree are highly ambiguous. In research, I've learnt that there are no right or wrong definitions per se, rather more or less useful ones because what we need is a working definition to enable zooming in on whatever the research question and the phenomena of interest are. "Given this, I guess too broad or alternatively too narrow definitions are often not so useful because the broad ones may water out the phenomenon of interest and the narrow ones may make too early closure of what might be unfolding in practice." This makes good sense to me. I would enlarge on these notes with a few distinctions. There are at least two forms of ambiguity in a research field such as ours. The first kind of ambiguity is inherently difficult to overcome. Some forms of ambiguity arise in defining or describing processes, domains, and entities that are essentially fuzzy or ambiguous. This ambiguity is a consequence of the attempt to work with and understand that which is in itself ambiguous or fuzzy. The second kind of ambiguity is far more tractable. This ambiguity arises from the failure to define, articulate, or describe processes, domains, and entities that are open to better descriptions than we have given them. This ambiguity is a consequence of the fact that fields develop slowly. Teasing out and clarifying issues requires us to establish distinctions, and each distinction is usually based on the prior work held in the information base of the field. It also requires the stock of knowledge embodied - and held in the minds and discourse - of the professional practitioners and researchers in the field. A field develops its foundation of prior work over years, sometimes over centuries. Overcoming this second kind of ambiguity takes work - often years of work. This is the work of research and scholarship. Developing and articulating rich descriptions and definitions often gives fields a far richer conceptual power than they had before the articulation of processes, domains, and entities. In some cases, the description or articulation frames a new approach or gives rise to entire fields of inquiry. This has much to do with your second note on overly broad - and overly narrow - definitions. You wrote, "too broad or alternatively too narrow definitions are often not so useful because the broad ones may water out the phenomenon of interest and the narrow ones may make too early closure of what might be unfolding in practice." Clear, articulate definitions help us to avoid the problems of overly broad or overly narrow definitions. One aspect of clear definition is an understanding of what we are defining. Another is appropriate delimitation. Some argue that Simon's (1982: 129, 1998: 112) definition of design as the process by which we "[devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones" is too broad. The argument is that the definition is so broad that it can include nearly any purposive human process. This is a false problem based on the failure to understand what Simon is defining. Design involves creating something new or reshaping something that exists for a purpose. Planning to meet needs or solve problems are also courses of action toward a preferred situation. This definition covers most forms of design and many other design processes. Simon is defining design qua design. He defines all forms and domains of design process without limiting them by field, subfield, practice, or practitioner. If we wish to understand the activity and nature of the design process, we require conceptual tools to examine design qua design regardless the field of application. A common problem in the repeated and frequently circular attempts to understand design qua design is the failure to distinguish between the design process and its specific applications. Many queries that begin by asking, "what are the essential features of design process?" go astray when by limiting the investigation and possible answers to a specific instantiation of design activity. Thus, a graphic designer who explains the design process by describing the activities of graphic design offers an answer that seems unsatisfactory to a product designer, a software engineer, or an operations manager. The same problem arises in each instance where we attempt to answer a broad process question - "What is design?" -- by describing the activities of a narrow field or subfield. A logical translation of this query and answer reveals the problem immediately. The design domain is a full range of several hundred fields and subfields. Any one field or subfield shares SOME properties in common with all other fields and subfields of design, but no field or subfield constitutes more than a small percentage of the entire domain. The logical translation can be described in an Euler diagram in which the design domain is a large circle - A. Any given field or subfield of the comprehensive design domain is a small circle - b - within the larger circle. The larger circle contains many of these smaller circles, b1, b2, b3, etc. Some of these circles may overlap ach other, form clusters, or otherwise create networks within the domain. Given the problem of indicating complex visual relations in an email note, I will set aside the possible relations among b-class entities to focus on the relation between the large A-class entity and the many b-class entities within it. Draw the diagram, in which the question "What is design?" is a query about the large circle, A. Consider an answer in which the answer describes the contents of a small circle, b8, covering 6% of the surface areas of A. If the question asks: "What is A?", the answer "b8" is not satisfactory. Since the large question, "What is design?" remains a legitimate and important question, this leads to an ongoing problem. We see this recurring problem in otherwise useful debates that fail to generate deeper understanding because poor definitions lead to a poor conceptual structure. Poor conceptual structures often lead to a second problem, since poor conceptual structure makes it difficult to learn from the debates that good questions inspire. Thus, we see some individuals asking the same questions in a repetitive sequence without learning from the answers. We saw an example of this earlier this year. One list member asked, "What is designing, really?" this provoked another list member to point out the fact that the same person had posted the exact same question on several past occasions, without apparently learning anything from the lengthy discussions that followed the question. Returning to central questions can be important and useful in any field. The value of these questions increases when we conceptualize them well and restate what has been learned in earlier cycles of inquiry. Some inquiries fail because those who ask them fail to bring Generating useful inquiry requires a rich conceptual structure. The frequent tendency to answer broad-scale questions about general design process with narrow scale answers located in a specific subfield of practice is on case of a clear problem. While the problem resembles the old story of "the blind men and the elephant," there is no need to assert ambiguity or pluralism of practice. This particular problem demonstrates the need for broad definitions where they are appropriate and narrow definitions where they are appropriate. In this particular case, the problem is readily solved. The answer lies within current designations for the many fields and subfields of the larger design domain. Such terms as "graphic design," product design," "naval architecture," or "software engineering" limit here design domain when we need to draw the appropriate boundaries of a field. When we need to move down into subfields, we simply add limits as appropriate. There are important things to be described and understood about most narrow design processes, and the fields and subfields that practice these processes have a range of terms and definitions that serve them. We can use these. Simon's broad definition - the large A-class entity in our Euler diagram - describes the large-scale design process in a powerful, elegant way. The very properties that make it an ideal definition for the entire domain make it far too blunt an instrument to tease out the vital distinctions of subfield activity systems. Rather than subsuming everything under a definition as broad and generally useful as Simon's, therefore, we also need specific definitions - the b-class entities in the Euler diagram. Within each b-class entity, there will also be a structure of terms for important entities, systems, or processes. A specific professional structure of distinctions and definitions described the entities, systems, and processes used to create type fonts in the Seventeenth century. These involved cutting dies, pouring hot lead into molds, and handling type in processes linked to the arts of calligraphy, jewelry, metallurgy, carpentry, and even winemaking. A different structure of entities, systems, and processes translates the same type fonts into digital fonts. These are linked to the arts of computer programming, visual representation, electrical engineering, electromechanical engineering, and mechatronics. Yet another series of terms and definitions describe the entities, systems, and processes used to transmit pages of digital type to a printing firm that works directly from the designer's coded instructions without mediating physical technology or photographic plates. Fortunately, the design domain and its many fields and subfields posses a rich structure of definitions and terms for the entities, systems, and processes that function on nearly all scales and levels of analysis. These range from the large-scale generic processes of design to the most specific technical activity systems of a subfield skill set. Establishing basic definitions and parameters affords us important conceptual tools. While these tools enable scholarship and research, these are far more than abstract tools. They also grant conceptual access to realms of active design practice at the professional, technical, and vocational levels. No definition can be complete or all-inclusive. Rather, a definition serves to establish terms as used in a specific context. Clarity is important for understanding theory. Theoretical sensitivity and methodological sophistication rest on understanding the concepts we use. None of us is obliged to accept any specific definition. Many of us find that no single definition suits us, and we are often obliged to restate or reshape definitions to the task. Precisely because there is no need for adherence to a single definition, using clear definitions helps to make our usage clear in each case. Here I am in the middle of a warm summer afternoon polishing what started this morning as a brief response to your excellent note. I suppose we tend to focus on the issues in any research field that fascinate us. For me, this fascinating topic holds great value for the field. There are many similarly valuable topics. The rich ecology of a growing field affords us the opportunity to explore issues that interest us, sharing our results and learning from others on the issues that interest them. That is what I plan to do with your other comments in the design chasm thread, and with the comments from Karen, Rob, Glenn, Lubomir, and the others. Best regards, Ken References Simon, Herbert. 1982. The Sciences of the Artificial. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Simon, Herbert. 1998. The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Leadership and Organization Norwegian School of Management School +47 22.98.50.00 Home office +46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax email: [log in to unmask]