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Dear Terry This is wonderful news! Thank you for sharing it and Praise the Lord! There is no longer any need for unpredictable, intuitive human input into the design of a children's book illustration, a dress, a tea pot, a chair or a car. All we need to design now is a reliable suicide rate monitor (can we put you in charge of that bit?). Best regards Martin Professor Martin Salisbury Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration 0845 196 2351 [log in to unmask] http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/microsites/ccbs.html ________________________________________ From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Terence Love [[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 11:13 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Are PhDs a threat to design education? Hello, The whole of the discussions on current thread can be viewed differently through reference to a single unacknowledged fact - the massive change in the role of information in design. All past design practices, methods and approaches were based on designers being able to produce designs in situations characterised by lack of information. The situation has changed. Enormous amounts of relevant information and theory are now available for creating any design, and the generation of and access to this information and theory is exponentially increasing. This is the dominant defining feature of all current and future design activity. There are three implications: 1. There is no need to teach designers with the assumption of designers having an information shortage 2. There is no need for design research, particularly PhDs in Design, that assume that design practices are typified by information shortage. 3. The two new important directions in Design are teaching designers how to understand and use the large amounts of available relevant information; and, undertaking research that assumes that, in future, designers will have access to all relevant information needed to create any design. Discussion: A parallel understanding, central to the past of design, relates to the role of creativity. From observation, the following and its implications are hard to see if one has spent too long in practices with poor access to useful information. They are even more difficult to see if one has strong personal investment in those practices. 'Creativity and intuition are the primary tools for creating solutions when relevant information is short' The corollary, which is what defines design in the future (and currently except it hasn't been widely perceived) is: 'Where information is available, creativity and intuition are significantly less relevant in design activity and in many cases not needed.' Current contexts of design are marked by availability of enormous amounts of relevant information for designers - from every discipline This latter present a paradigmic shift in perspective for understanding design education, PhDs in design and future design practices. The discussion on the current threads look very different in the light of access to information and reduced relevance of creative abilities to create something in situations marked by lack of information and understanding. For example, discussions about the roles of PhDs in design education in the current threads have, as described above, have followed the path of assuming designers have little access to information and instead mostly rely on creativity and intuition. Evidence (in both design education and PhDs) is the unusually high level of attention that has been given to improving design via 'reflection' on designers and users' creative and intuitive activities. This can be seen as a bias against using the large amount of relevant research-derived information that is readily available from other fields that applies directly. Awareness that the situation viz-a-viz design and information has changed the game defines two groups in this discussion. It is at the heart of Don's initial post, and 'avoiding addressing it' is the defining gestalt of the responses to it and the ensuing discussion. Some have already understood that the replacement by information-based design is not only happening, it has already radically changed design activity over the last 50 years. Others however, hold tight to the idea that design activity must be based as in the past on 'creativity' and 'intuition' and that as such designers do not need to be educated to use the enormous amount of information and theory that is useful and relevant to design and is now easily accessible. The uncritically adopted assumption that 'creativity' and 'intuition' must always be central to design has been a seductive and well-reinforced habituated conditioning for anyone associated with design activity. The consequence has been an unconscious habit and blinkered way of thinking that excludes the possibility that design and human functioning in general changes. It has resulted in discussions being predicated unthinkingly on the false assumption that the old past way of designing, when information was short, is relevant now. Design activity and the context of design practice have changed. Access to enormous amounts of relevant information and theory is now the defining factor in understanding and practicing design. This has moved aside the need for, and relevance of, the previous obsession with designers' skills in creativity and intuition. Instead what is required is improvement in designers' skills in using information. This paradigmic shift is very difficult to address because of the nature of competence in design , which fully understood involves a very large number of areas of human action, information and knowing. This may be why the design field shows strong signs of avoiding addressing it. It requires that designers' are able to use the research-derived information from a very large number of disciplines. Thus far, the response that has evolved has had two parts: 1) the emergence of large numbers of specialised sub-fields of designers each tied to their field; and 2) the Art and Design response to ignore the new availability of information and focus on creativity alone. The better solution is to identify and implement new forms of design-related research and practices in which design activity is characterised by the skills and understanding for extensive and rapidly increasing access and use of relevant information and theory across all fields of human endeavour. This will require very different forms of PhDs in Design. The expectation that designers will use the information that is available requires them to understand it. This in turn, requires a major paradigmic shift in design education. Currently, PhDs in design are leading this change. Best wishes, Terry === Dr Terence Love FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI [log in to unmask] Mob: +61 434 975 848 Dept of Design Social Program Evaluation Research Unit Edith Cowan University, Western Australia Dept of Design Curtin University, Western Australia Hon Researcher, IEED Management School, Lancaster University, UK === -- Email has been scanned for viruses by Altman Technologies' email management service - www.altman.co.uk/emailsystems -- EMERGING EXCELLENCE: In the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, more than 30% of our submissions were rated as 'Internationally Excellent' or 'World-leading'. 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