JISCMail - PHD-DESIGN Archives

Please, excuse me that I will not address anyone from the previous discussions in particular (you will find some hints to the ongoing debate), except Sanjoy and Charles. And I will not give proper references, because most of what I say has been said several times before by myself or by someone else.

I will mainly refer to the irritation, which Sanjoy introduced into the debate. As Chuck agrees with him in the main part, I will not refer to Chuck any more. Sanjoy's lasagna metaphor / model is very nice, especially the tremendous image at the end of his text, describing how "the layers will not remain distinct but start to seep into one another and hopefully become a part of the subconscious of the designer". Poor designer with a lasagna brain! Right or left hemispere?

Anyway, the lasagna reminds me of my old metaphor of the "swamp" as the groundless ground for design. Nevertheless, the lasagna model still implies a kind of hierarchy of the layers, and, it implies, that a kind of ground might be found at the ground of the container.

To stay with the Italian food metaphors, what about a pizza model (even Ken's pie chart of the 6 domains of design knowledge would somehow fit in here: he emphasizes the 6 nicely separated pieces, whereas I see the colourful patterns of the topping), or, to put it more seriously: a systemic network model of "chunks of ideas", which means a more or less clearly separated whole with more or less related and interconnected elements. On the level of elements we may have formal systemic models with causal internal relations, on the network level we don't.

In design, speaking of the whole, as well as of the interrelated elements presents a non-trivial problem: (1) How to define the border of the whole? How to deal with autonomous / autopoietic wholes which resist external control?, and (2) How to deal with the different kinds of relations (most of them are not of causal nature)? Systems thinking (sometimes dismissed as a rigid, mechanistic tool) can lead to almost opposite consequences: believing in better control of complex arrangements on the one hand (if you choose to emphasize elements and causal relations), or, believing in the un-controllability of most human / social phenomena (if you emphasize the autonomous wholes).

To repeat this: The subject matter of design (and of design research in general) are integral "wholes", consisting of various "elements". Splitting the wholes into subtasks destroys the wholes, but makes them available to be treated by scientific methods. Complex wholes are thus reduced to sets of simple mechanisms. There is no core of ..., and, in my view, we need no core, because the whole is the core. This paradox statement might be backed up using Derrida, or Buddha, or systems thinking (which would be my choice), or by whatever chunk of idea that might fit.

Following this path: Dealing with wholes means that we have a real-world problem (an existing state), which should be transferred into a "solution" (a preferred state). I do not want to enter the discussion whether or not design is problem-solving, therefore I am using quotation marks. In any case, design processes, in contrast to scientific research processes, have much more clearly defined starting points and end points. That means: design is problem-based and design has project form.

Therefore I would argue, that basic problems in design are what science calls applications. Which implies, that the transfer of the basic / applied / clinical distinction from science to design is inappropriate. In my view the conditions are rather the other way round (and by the way: for many scientific problems the distinction of basic / applied does not make sense any more: think of nano technology, for example, where designing a nano-part for some application means basic research).

Back to the network-model of "chunks of ideas": I agree that design, at the level of an academic discipline, lacks a fulcrum, an intellectual driver. I would say it is the lack of a clearly defined function and a unique systemic code, which prevents design from being / becoming a discipline as, for example, medicine. Design(ers) can use many different entry-points to the network, but what seems to be essential is to try to re-connect as many elements as necessary in order to re-create a new artificial complex "whole" in the design process. Which means, trying to integrate the "solution" into the "whole of life" (John Chris Jones) again.

Of course, we need knowledge input from many disciplines (which leads to multi-disciplinarity). Of course we have to inter-relate knowledge from different disciplines (which leads to inter-disciplinarity), but this is not enough, if we want to explore the "grey territory", in order to find or to create the not-existing core. For that, we should even extend the notion of trans-disciplinarity towards the notion of design as an "un-discipline" (a term coined by Michael Erlhoff, Cologne International School of Design, as far as I know).

A short remark regarding the UCI proposal for a new school of design: it is very serious, very impressive, state of the art (if there is something like this in the community) in design education, without any doubt, but it is not very exciting at all (sorry for that). Maybe it is too big, with too much inertia, planned for eternity.

I sometimes wonder (and have no answer), how a new Bauhaus or a new Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm would look like today. Probably not like the school in the UCI proposal. They both existed only some 15 years before they were closed (by the Nazis / by a conservative government) but had and still have an enormous impact. Some people are sad that they have disappeared, but I would agree with Horst Rittel, who was not sad and called Ulm an "experiment with time fuse". So I would prefer smaller and cheaper, more explorative, experimental, and more explosive units of learning and teachingŠ

We need a lot of self-confidence and a strong community to work in this precarious state of homelessness. For some it might seem too uncomfortable, but I think it is the mood we need in order to stay alive and productive. To put this more concrete: I do not preach the dissolution or dispersal of what is already existing in the community. But we have to proceed into unknown territory, as Bauhaus and Ulm did.

There was the proposal (at the beginning of the debate) to put distinguished scholars from very different disciplines + designers together to work on problems / projects of everyday life. Every of the disciplinary perspectives / theories / methods / Š will be challenged, questioned, probably modified during this process. And the scholars involved must be willing and eager to expose themselves to this kind of experience.

The common knowledge, which is created in this kind of processes is highly temporal, in my view. Most of it will be useless for the next project (see the nice concept of knowledge destruction). Although I think that design will never "come up with a universally accepted knowledge base of their own": something will remainŠmaybe the knowledge about designing processes to deal with real-life problems.

Which would be a lot.