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Re your interesting point/quote One of the problems with system design for networked businesses runs parallel to this. The technical 'architecture' has to be aligned with/built around the human architecture of business systems (cognitive, social,organisational, cultural etc) The design secret would seem to be the ability to map and then align these coupled systems in ways that create synergy. *Finding the problem* is central to this, and requires the ability to explore the 'grammar' of other systems, the critical objectives, and the points of interface where synergy or conflict will arise in use Design in a business context is often done to meet techical criteria of excellence - robust design, on time, within cost etc without the wish to uncover the conflicts and the gaps in knowledge that are implicit in being *open-ended* and identifying the real problems inherent in designing one system to meet the conflicting needs of diverse communities. Re Lorraine's point about the design curriculum - an increasing amount of design is done by people who have a technical rather than a design training, and their choices are also shaped by criteria and rewards of a single discipline, rather than a project brief. ............... Plug all the numbers in and you should be able to get to some sort of optimal 'design'. Easy to assess for the teacher, and easy to do for the student (once you've learnt the trick). This is how many problems are taught in engineering curriculums worldwide. Bucciarelli suggested that resetting the problem to be open-ended, that is letting the students go their own way with the problem - who is the user group? what colour should it be? which companies make diving boards? - proved much more stimulating and satisfactory. The students, in actual fact, have to 'find' what the problem is. ............... -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of peter lloyd Sent: 08 December 2003 17:03 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Response to Christena Nippert-Eng Hi Christena and everyone, Re: One dimensional bridge-building problems... Christina writes: "I discovered that [the] civil engineering department hosts a bridge-building contest each year. Having experienced, read, thought and written about bridges for some time, I was quite interested in this event. Well, it wasn’t as interesting as I thought. They build these models and then a prize is awarded to the bridge builders whose model holds the most weight before collapsing." At a conference we held at TU Delft in 2001 MIT Professor Larry Bucciarelli presented a paper describing how engineering design education could be transformed if engineers were able to look at problems in a more open-ended fashion. Bucciarelli used an example of a diving board. As a traditional engineering problem it is all about dimensions, moments, spring tension, materials, and forces. Plug all the numbers in and you should be able to get to some sort of optimal 'design'. Easy to assess for the teacher, and easy to do for the student (once you've learnt the trick). This is how many problems are taught in engineering curriculums worldwide. Bucciarelli suggested that resetting the problem to be open-ended, that is letting the students go their own way with the problem - who is the user group? what colour should it be? which companies make diving boards? - proved much more stimulating and satisfactory. The students, in actual fact, have to 'find' what the problem is. The teacher is available to guide the inquiry and make suggestions rather than to say 'right' or 'wrong'. Time-consuming but satisfying work as nascent engineers find out that there are more to problems than numbers. This is all well and good, but nothing new for industrial designers and architects where such problems are the norm. Richard Coyne, professor of Architecture at Edinburgh University was invited to respond to the paper, and took Bucciareli's thinking in another direction. I quote: "One of the definitions of education that I like is: ‘a process that makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange’. For some philosophies of education it is the negotiation within that space, between the familiar and the strange, that learning is able to take place. Looking at what you’ve said in terms of strangeness and familiarity… perhaps we could see a teenagers experience of a diving board; something between terror and delight, something about the smell of chlorine and response to movement; that is a familiar experience with which a student comes to an engineering degree. And then that somehow is rendered strange, so that the diving board becomes an object of calculation, something that appears in diagrams as strange symbols, subjected to algebraic calculations with variables under notions of constraint. Then of course you suggested that learning does take place in that rendering of something strange, but then you were going another step and suggesting another level of strangeness perhaps, where the object under study becomes something to do with mass production ? not the way you’d normally think of diving boards. There are issues to do with variation and negotiation and discussion, that a diving board could be the subject of a journal and so on. I was just wondering, in this trajectory of strangeness, how an architecture course might treat a diving board, not all architecture schools are the same of course, but thinking about some of my colleagues, what they might do with the problematic of the diving board ? they might see it as a diving board for very very fat people, or maybe a diving board for lemmings, or maybe an object for diving into freshly picked cotton, or perhaps one can imagine a line-up of formation swimming Phillipe Starck lemon squeezers, or perhaps design researchers queuing up for their just desserts. So I only have one question and that is: why are engineers so serious? " A nice response, I thought, that opens up a world of designing behind a supposedly simple object. The paper and discussion was published in Design Studies Volume 24, number 3 pp 295-311. Videos of the Bucciarelli's presentation and Coynes discussion can be found at http://www.io.tudelft.nl/research/dic/virtual%20symposium.html Keep up the good discussion, Peter Lloyd ************************************** Dr Peter Lloyd Associate Professor in Design Theory and Methodology School of Industrial Design Engineering TU Delft Landbergstraat 15 2628 CE Delft The Netherlands Tel: +31 15 278 9054 Fax: +31 15 278 7662 **************************************