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Jurgen, Reading your previous post, I would add one a few other thoughts, in no particular order: 1. There is tremendous value in moving from the "seeker" position on design (i.e. what is it?) to a leadership role (i.e. I have defined it, for the purposes of this study, as …). The only way real progress can be made in a social science is when a phenomenon for investigation is explained to the reader, then employed usefully in a study. In this way, for example, one can indeed study "happiness" or something else potentially complex and even undefinable definitively. Simply state what it is about design, designers, or designing that concerns you, then get move forward. You WILL get abuse for this, but in my experience, 90% of it can be ignored because people have terrible backgrounds in social research and are complaining about the wrong things. Of the 10% useful feedback you get, some of it will address your actual study and its value, and possible means to A) improve it or B) move on from here, now having your shoulders to stand on. 2. As a first pass, it strikes me that the decisionmaking literature could be helpful here, if indeed you're interested in how designers (as people with "design" jobs) impact systems. In this sense, you're interested in measuring the resources allocated to designers, and then weighing the strategic impact of designers on the system. The latter can be handled in many, many ways, but a simple first pass is to do a good organizational history and find out A) whether the system considered the input of designers as essential for making strategic decisions (you can measure this by saying, of X, Y actually waited for designer impact and represented it to the decisionmakers, etc.) and B) whether the system changed course on the basis of the direction provided by designers. This requires a counter-factual (i.e. they would have done A, but with the advice of designers, did B instead), but often interviews of senior managers can lock that down well enough for such purposes. Many other ways to frame all this and build a research design. Such studies are always, very tricky. But also very worthwhile if we want to make any real claims that design matters, and move beyond fads and rhetoric and into the empirical realities of systems. There is a parallel thread about whether "design thinking" is dead. I have never encountered such a thread on whether "regression analysis" is dead, or "multi-factor analysis" is dead, or "discourse analysis" is dead. But these are actual methods reposed on theories. That design thinking can be living or dead strikes me as admission that it was a place-holder concept to begin with. d. _____________ Derek B. Miller Director The Policy Lab 321 Columbus Ave. Seventh Floor of the Electric Carriage House Boston, MA 02116 United States of America Phone +1 617 440 4409 Twitter @Policylabtweets Web www.thepolicylab.org (http://www.thepolicylab.org) On Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 8:59 PM, Jurgen Faust wrote: > Hi Filippo, > > > thanks for your time and thought. It is interesting to compare design with what happened before the Big Bang. > But if enterprises spend money, at a certain point they are going to evaluate what design will contribute. Since I was many times involved in University decisions, I sometimes asked similar questions. Can we verify an investment, can we justify when we spend money and resources? > > The same I am doing when I am reading such posts, even if not quantitatively justified, I will stop reading and posting if I don't see a value anymore. The reason: I have limits, timewise, therefore limited ressources. > > It is a valuable statement that we should as well look outside our discipline, in adjacent practise. Many interesting models, theories about design, I didn't find in 'narrow design' research. The body of knowledge is still not big enough and substantial reflecting on designing is often found in adjacent fields, I do agree. > > But finding models of measuring in other disciplines and fields, we need to ask always are these models transferable? > > Clearifying or getting closer to what happens when we involve design, when we are designing, and whether we can differentiate it from other activities like management isn't an easy task, or might be impossible, or it might not be appropriate, since we have to do with what Buchanan called fourth order design. > > Existing in-vivo is another interesting question? The question of exist(ing) might be even oposed to the question of in-vivo, since existing might reduce design to a partial entity and therefore is creates a contradiction to an in-vivo situation. > > But all these framing and reframings will help, so I hope, making a decision, whether it is valuable to spend some time researching whether we can measure the impact and value of design. > > > > Jurgen