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Re: The OTHER Design Thinking / Call For Participants Dear GK, Thanks for your note. I'm not disagreeing with you except in one respect: different lists, different purposes. Your earlier post seemed to speak of three kinds of perceptions on design and design thinking, those of 1) the design profession, 2) business leaders, and 3) the general public. The LinkedIn list influences some segments of the design profession. Harvard Business Review, HB Press and MIT Press influence high-level business leaders in a way that the LinkedIn list does not. The New York Times influences the general public. LinkedIn only marginally affects high-level business leaders, and it has no influence on the general public. My current work involves issues of interest to high-level business leaders, governmental policy makers, and the research community. As a result, LinkedIn is only valuable to me with respect to learning what some design professionals think and do. What I did NOT say is that “a new generation of professional folks around the world, organizational leaders, etc. who are engaged with and or hire design firms get their perceptions today from the weekend section of the New York Times.” I said that the NYT influences the general public perception of design. Your reply offered a lengthy critique of my person and my views. It may clarify things to explain in different terms what I said, and to explain why LinkedIn is less relevant to me than PhD-Design. I did not say that LinkedIn is bad – simply that it is a different kind of list than this one is, and it has different goals. For all the time I’ve known you, you’ve been impatient with research and researchers, and you’ve insisted that there is some part of the world that is far more advanced and forward thinking. This may be true – but it’s always difficult to know in a universe of competing claims which range of claims actually represent advanced practice and forward thinking. To the degree that I was defending this list as a center for one specific kind of thinking, I was defending it as a purpose-built forum for something nearly no one else in the design community does, not even Humantific or NextD. That is to offer a forum in which one can address research issues and debate research claims. My background was in behavioral and social science with leadership and human behavior as my doctoral field. I understand the issues you are talking about. I simply have a different view than you do as to the skills one needs for the kinds of organizational and strategic work you are discussing. As I said, there is a natural tension between professional practitioners and consultants. This may account for some of the differences in our view. Your comments on Don Norman’s work are misplaced. As a psychologist and cognitive scientist who works in applied social science, Don is as skilled in these issues as in product design. Don’s Core77 blog “Why Design Education Must Change” explicitly describes why product design offers an insufficient foundation for applied social science of the kinds you describe. I still have views on how design schools ought to change. I state these in the article, “Models of Design.” You can read it on my Academia page at http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman You are right to note that I did not fully address your earlier post or Mauricio’s. I was writing a reply on some of these issues when that one post on the lists caught my eye. In the first paragraph of my note, I acknowledged that my post did not address these but that I’d be commenting soon. The specific post that I wrote only explained why the LinkedIn list and the PhD-Design list are different. Yours, Ken Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------