 |
 |
During the discussion of the post: Design Thinking in the Financial Review On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Francois Nsenga <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > We should make it clear that we don't 'think' > > about design, we 'do' design. > Interesting opinion. So I guess I should leave the field? I call myself a designer. And what I do is to think about design. Just as when I was a cognitive scientist: I thought a lot about cognition. (Just as a theoretical physicist thinks a lot about physics.) How do I think? I think with my conscious mind as well as subconsciously. I think with my body, moving around, manipulating things, drawing, sketching, and making. The drawing, sketching, and making are all crude, clumsy and almost immediately thrown away, but drawing helps me think spatially, making adds additional dimensions. And I do a huge amount of observation, sometimes photographing or sketching sometimes not. Most of my thinking comes after i have done all of the above activities. Weeks or months later, my subconscious alerts me -- often at 3AM. I rush to my study and transfer the subconscious notices to my conscious mind via my fingers. That is, I read the computer screen to see what my fingers are writing and say, "that's interesting!", "Yes, that's great!" (or, that's really stupid"). Then, once my subconscious has gotten the conscious mind started, the conscious mind can take over for the next hour or two. Sometimes my fingers draw instead of write, but the result is the same. Design, the profession, suffers from a lack of thinking. I have stopped going to practitioners' conferences (e.g., IDSA) because those talks are completely thoughtless. Here is a typical talk: I did this (pretty picture on the screen) And then I did this (another pretty picture) repeated for the allotted time, and sometimes even longer than the allotted time if the speaker is pompous or famous. What do I learn from these presentations? Nothing. What does the field learn? Nothing. We need more thinking. The world has lots of good designers. But the demands of the 21st century require more than traditional designers can provide. Hence the article i wrote with Scott Klemmer. Hence my cry for more thinking. Not instead of doing, but to make the doing even better, more relevant, more powerful. Don Norman & Klemmer: How design education must change. http://goo.gl/LhVamo Don Norman Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO Fellow [log in to unmask] www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org> "Stupid Smart Things" and other LinkedIn Essays<http://www.linkedin.com/influencer/12181762-Don-Norman> | Core77 Essays <http://www.core77.com/blog/author/don-norman/default.asp> | Essays on my website <http://www.jnd.org/dn.pubs.html> Book: "Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded<http://amzn.to/ZOMyys>" (DOET2). Course: Udacity On-Line course based on DOET2<https://www.udacity.com/course/design101> (free). ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------