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Dear Carlos, Thank you for your message. My apologies if what I wrote wasn't as clear as it might be. I'll try again. On this list, we've discussed whether particular ideas from other fields are any good, and whether it's important from a designerly point of view to be looking out for good ideas in other fields. As you wrote, there a very few who would argue against this. Both seem like good ways forward. I was suggesting something different - that Beer's work gives a different kind of insight into how to improve Design. This is at the level of IASDR and international strategic planning about design practices, research and education, rather than concerns of individual designers, but it has potential implications through the professional design network Beer's work indicates there are specific cultural and organisational failings or organisational illnesses that emerge over time for eco-systems such as Design if they do not appropriately contain all the elements of the Beerian Viable Systems Model. The VSM is considered a well established approach in organisational systems field, with Beer himself having a substantial reputation in that area (https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Anthony_Stafford_Beer.html) Beer's VSM seems useful in developing the Design field as a whole as it offers a sort of checklist of what might be missing, how to check whether the missing bits cause the problems, and what to do to fix the situation. You might ask why use the VSM? On one hand, Design and design fields have historically had many difficulties that seem to fit the Beerian VSM analysis. On the other hand, the relatively low level of interest in Design in gathering and analysing work going on in other fields (and other issues) seem to offer a possible explanation , using the VSM lens, of how and why some of those difficulties occur and what to do about them. On that basis, the VSM seems to me useful in terms of helicopter level planning for the future to create better design fields, education, research, design outputs and outcomes. In essence, Beer's VSM offers a more formal basis for addressing some problematic issues in design at levels of analysis that are not often attempted, except through ad-hoc discussions I'd be interested in why you feel that using the VSM to explore issues across design and its infrastructures is not likely to be useful. Finally, my apologies for the links, which I guess did not work in the form received. They were checked before posting. The problem seems to be caused by email clients splitting them across lines. Pasting them back together seems to resolve the problem. Best wishes, Terry ======== Carlos wrote> Dear Terry, I don't think anyone will argue against the importance of keeping an eye on developments in other fields, regardless of how "small" they might be classified. I would however think it a requisite to ensure that those are actually "developments" and not just another use-case of statistics or whatever. And I'm afraid your latest comment, though very lengthy, doesn't add anything useful to the discussion. It made for a very frustrating read. PS: It would also be advisable to check that any links included in your posts actually work. Best, Carlos ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------