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Dear Ken, Chuck, Martin, Amanda, Fiona, MP, Jerry, Pedro, Stephanie, Stephane, Stanislav, and all, Design History can usefully inform our theory understanding of the development of theories and theoretical concepts. The impetus for the UK design research conference of 1963 followed attempts by engineering designers in industry to convince academia that there was theoretical merit in studying and improving design process publicly. This is evident in the trajectory of discussion before and after 1963, as reported in the design research publications by academics after the conference. The trajectory remains evident today, e.g. and c.f, Don's keynote at DRS conference in Korea. The 1963 UK design research conference and the interest in design research was primarily an interest is 'design processes'. The dominant definition of 'design' from 1950 to 2000 is as a 'process'. Design History tells much more. Most, and I absolutely mean *most*, design at that time was done by very large design teams. The most common design practice involved organisations with rooms containing between 100 and 200 designers plus a similar number of tracers. This photo shows part of two rooms each with around 100 designers in a design office comprising several such rooms and designer groups: http://www.motorgraphs.com/heritage/longbridge-drawing-office-1930s_a154917. aspx This massive scale of process of design activity is only one of the significant issues. Each designs for a product typically comprised thousands of drawings. To make a single copy of a single complicated design drawing sheet took a skilled tracer up to a week. Design changes, including the tiniest edits, were meticulously copied and signed off and dated, on every copy of a design drawing. Designers were required to add their name and sign every drawing sheet before they started designing. The purpose was so that if there were any failures or errors, the responsibility could be tracked back to the specific designer. The numbers of copies of drawings was typically very small and in many cases, drawings for prototype designs were limited to the original and one copy of drawings: the originals for the designers and the copy for those manufacturing. If manufacturing required copies for the shop floor then it was their responsibility to trace copies of the copies. For designers to discuss a design required people gathering together over a single drawing board. This physical constraint limited the number of people that could be involved at any time in decisions. These communication difficulties were made more difficult because of the interdependencies and communications needed for the very large numbers of designers involved in each design project, especially where some designers were in other companies and other locations. Changes in design due to product failure or refinement were significant undertakings due to the difficulties in communication and the time needed for editing drawings and creating new drawings. The situation was made more complex by the involvement of stylists, those responsible for the visual appearance of products. It was the problems from this relationship that led to what is now called 'waterfall' or 'over the wall' design methods. For example in car design, stylists produced rough sketches of possible vehicle exteriors and interiors. A selection of these were mocked up in clay and the final vehicle appearance decided and the appearance sent 'over the waterfall/wall' to the engineering designers. Frequently it was difficult, impossible, problematic, or uneconomical to design ways to include suspensions, engines, seats, load bearing structures, or manufacture the vehicle. Similar problems to the above arose in the design of systems such as banking, information flow, transport, decision making logistics etc. All of these were process issues. Making design activity function successfully required it to be dominated by design-related processes and standards and the management of design offices was dominated by successful management of those design processes. Design activity at an individual level was also dominated by following those design processes, right down to the level of individual designers creating new concept designs or undertaking detail design. At this level, standardised design processes were known as design methods and by the late 1950s, there were thousands of well-established design methods used by designers working in the large scale design offices in industry described above. It is in this context that academic design research emerged following industry as a way of hopefully improving design processes. Design thinking was NOT part of this broad mainstream of multi-decade endeavour to improve design activity through large and small scale processes that became the academic design research and design methods movements. The scale of design activity then, as now, was dominated by designers working in engineering traditions. Engineering, in spite of its enthusiastic use of highly complex mathematical methods similar to Graphic Design at the moment, was until recently was regarded as an Art rather than a science. The increasing public awareness of the works of Freud and others in Psychology, and the development of that field in the 1940s integrating psychology with industrial practices as in the Tavistock Clinic in London combined with introspection of some engineering designers. The effect was a focus on this relationship of subconscious thought and will in designing with the large-scale socio-technical design processes that were essential to successful design activity in those times. It was from this, that engineering designers started to focus on 'design thinking' as an element of these large complex 'design processes'. This initiative was followed in the 1960s after the UK 63 conference by academics, originally mostly in engineering design, and then later in Art and Design. In essence, design thinking emerged to fill a gap identified by engineering designers as not being addressed by the improvement of design focused on design processes. The whole of these origins were shaped by the realities of design technologies of those times, huge numbers of designers, drawing boards, tracing and later the use of expensive and toxic ammonia-based plan copiers, which in its early days still required a second traced drawing in Indian black ink. The change in the technologies used by designers has led to changes in design practices including reductions in design team size to a tenth or less of previously; easy fast communication between designers; easy fast editing of drawings; pre-modelling and testing of design solutions, and high levels of computer automated pre-design using mathematical methods (originally in engineering design but now especially in the visual design fields). These changes in the trajectories of technologies used by designers have resulted in parallel trajectories in how we see design and the associated design theories and concepts. To this point (August 2014), however, this understanding has been absent from the realm of design research and understanding design theories and concepts. The study of Design History applied to designer's practices can tell us much about understanding and interpreting design theory. It remains an opportunity for the Design History field to explore and offer a contribution to design research and design theory-making. The above historical perspective on the roles and influences on design theory and understanding design activity of technologies designers use is what informs a better understanding of the previous discussion about the relationship between research into design thinking and design thinking. Best wishes, Terry --- Dr Terence Love PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI Director, Love Services Pty Ltd PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks Western Australia 6030 Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848 Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629 <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask] -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------