Dear Charlotte,

Thanks for an interesting post. I have Henrik Gerdenryd's (1998)
dissertation here. It makes interesting reading.

Your note prompts four thoughts. Answering the first three will also
point the way to answering your question on how the number of persons
involved in a firm, organization, or design process influences the
design process.

(1) What we have learned about how designers work.

The first is that there is a strong and useful tradition that studies
the design process. This field is not populated to a great degree by
designers, but rather by people who work in such fields as education,
psychology, cognitive science, and social psychology.

We do not yet know as much as we should about design methods.
Nevertheless, it seems premature to say that design methods do not
and cannot work.

First, what many seem to know about design methods clearly does not
work. Second, what some seem to know about design methods seems to
work in limited or specific settings. This knowledge is frequently
tacit, but it is workable. It is regularly taught and transmitted in
successful design studios. Some of this knowledge also involves
explicit and teachable processes. This means that third, some of the
most successful design methods constitute the intellectual property
of the firms that use them and they are embodied in the social
capital and active members of the organization. These issues are
clarified by some of the themes considered in organizational learning
(see, for example, Argyris 1977, 1990, 1991, 1992; Argyris and Schon
1974, 1978, 1996; Senge 1990, 1996, 1999; Senge, Roberts, Ross,
Smith, and Kleiner, 1994; Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, Roth, and
Smith 1999). The study of professional practice and situated learning
addresses these topics (see Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Byrne and Sands
2002; Chaiklin and Lave 1993; Lave and Wenger 1991; Rogoff and Lave
1999; Schon 1983, 1987; Toulmin and Gustavsen 1996; Wenger 1998).

These few references suggest enough information and well developed
knowledge that it is premature to simply say we do not and cannot
find useful design methods.

Interestingly, Conall O Cathain (2002) just posted a note on widely
used and highly successful design methods on the DRS List. Connall
writes,

"Value Analysis (called Value Engineering in USA) is an open-ended
creative design method. BMW have trained 2000 of their employees to
use it. (Is that their secret? every employee is a designer???)

"TRIZ, developed in the Soviet Union, far exceeds Value Analysis in
its capacity to make creative leaps, and in its philosophical basis.
It even facilitates technological forecasting.

"Both of these methods were developed for engineering design
applications, but have been - and continue to be - extended to other
softer areas."

Many fields of research shed light on specific aspects of the design
process. These include problem solving, heuristics, creativity, and
many more. In an earlier post, for example, Lubomir referred to
Gerald Nadler. Like value analysis and TRIZ, Nadler's work began in
engineering. Like them, it applies directly to design methods (Nadler
1981; Nadler and Hibino 1994; Nadler, and Hibino with Farrell 1995).
The problem solving literature alone is rich and rewarding (see,
f.ex., Sternberg 1994 or Finke, Ward, and Smith 1996). Many of the
classic contributions to problem solving in fields such as
mathematics (Polya 1957, 1990) have been adapted with great success
to design methods.

Participatory design is another field that has developed a rich body
of literature on design methods (see, f.ex., Binder, Gregory, and
Wagner 2002).

What we know about design methods to date is insufficient compared
with what we ought to know. Nevertheless, we know a great deal, and
what we know certainly makes it difficult to argue that we do not and
cannot develop workable methods.

I would suggest the question is open, partly because it is so
difficult to analyze and understand the kinds of processes in which
we have made so much progress. Part of our progress consists of
defining ever more subtle and difficult areas where we continually
learn that we do not always know what we think we know - and we
sometimes find out that we do not yet know what we do not know. At
the same time, we have made huge strides over the past five decades
in expanding the field of what we know, and we have learned enough
about what we do not know to define and open new fields for
investigation.

(2) What we have in the way of workable and effective design methods.

As noted, value analysis and TRIZ are both workable methods being
used successfully in industry today.

There is another strategic problem solving method that some of us
know that is being applied directly to design methods and design
practice with great success. Those who took Anders Skoe's the La
Clusaz conference (and those who have worked with him in educational
programs or design firms) know this work.

During his career as a strategy planner and process consultant in the
telecom industry, Anders Skoe developed a series of problem-solving
techniques that rely on the natural information-structuring
capacities of the human mind. He has now worked with this process for
problem solving in programs with men and women from over 240
different nations and territories.

It is not my purpose here to discuss this technique in detail. The
method is described more fully in Skoe's works (1992; 1994; 1997;
Nordby and Skoe, 1997).

Skoe has had the opportunity to test these methods across so many
cultural groups that the claim of universality can be fairly well
verified on an empirical basis. Between 1990 and 1998, Skoe conducted
programs for SITA, the International Society of Aeronautic
Telecommunications. SITA is one of the world's largest telecom
value-added private networks, serving the airline industry in every
nation and jurisdiction served by the airline industry itself. These
findings were further verified in projects involving another 3,000
people conducted for Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), the
International Air Transport Association (IATA), the Norwegian
national telecom authority now reorganized as Telenor as well as a
host of smaller companies in the telecom, air transport and computer
sectors. He has also taught his method in design schools and worked
with design firms.

Having seen the results of his work, I am willing to argue that I
have seen first-hand evidence of a design method that succeeds in
situated practice. This method can be taught, learned, and mastered
with practice. Like W. Edwards Deming's methods, or any other, it
does require continual attention to practice and improvement until it
becomes situated in the culture of the organization that adopts it.
Only through situated use is the method truly adaptable. only when it
is adapted to the work and practices of a specific organization is it
truly adopted and put into practice. This is a separate issue from
the question of whether the method works as a design method. This
method applies to the process of design rather than to specific
skills that designers in different fields use to implement the design
(i.e., programming and writing code for software design, typesetting
and layout in some forms of graphic design, drawing or fabricating
for product design, etc.)

Back in 1998 and 1999, Skoe taught seminars in his methods to
industrial design students at Lund University. The students found
this a useful and exciting process, and the student evaluations on
Skoe's seminars were outstanding. My colleagues and my students at
the Norwegian School of Management have had the same experience.

(3) What we have learned about teaching design methods

The history of human craft demonstrates a rich progression of
different ways to teach and learn design methods. While there is much
talk of the guild system in designer circles, designers often have
romantic and vague impressions of the way the system worked. It had
great virtues, and significant drawbacks.

While the guild system is no longer suited to the skills and
knowledge required for the modern economy - especially not the skills
and knowledge required in design! - we can nevertheless learn a great
deal from apprenticeship and guild learning. Some of the best
material on this topic is located in discussions of Japanese culture
and martial arts training (see, f.ex., Blomberg 1994; Lowry 1985;
Musashi 1974, 1982a, 1982b; Yagyu 1982).

Bryan Byrne and Ed Sands (2002) consider these issues in terms of the
contemporary design studio.

You will find an extensive discussion of these themes in an article
(Friedman 1996) I wrote on design education, contrasting different
issues in design education in relation to the kinds of design methods
we use or ought to use in practice. [See below if you want a copy.]

The two greatest drawbacks of guild education today are the result of
chancing times, rather than flaws in the system itself. The first is
the fact that true apprentice learning cannot be reproduced in the
short times available for a university degree in design practice. The
second is that designers must know much more than can be taught
through the methods of knowledge transfer used in guild training, of
which modeling is most common.

At the same time, many of the virtues of guild education can be
brought forward into contemporary design teaching and learning if
they are coupled with multiples modes of learning and a rich
knowledge creation cycle. The knowledge creation cycle explicitly
requires a series of exchanges in which tacit knowledge is subject to
articulate inquiry. This knowledge is rendered explicit to the
greatest degree possible. It is then embodied in repeated practice to
become tacit once again. This parallels the learning cycle that moves
from unconscious incompetence through conscious incompetence, and
conscious competence, on to unconscious competence (Friedman 1996:
64-65).

(4) What we know about the effects of population size on design process

This question involves a central issue in knowledge management and
knowledge transfer. This is a huge literature, so I will simply
suggest a few classic titles (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Quinn 1992;
Zuboff 1988).

The related dimensions of organizational size, internal
communication, learning, and transaction costs form a central stream
in the literature of organization theory. In one sense, it even poses
one of the puzzles that Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase partially
addressed in his 1937 article, "The Nature of the Firm" (Coase 1937,
1988). Because size directly affects transaction costs, the question
of size - and the issue of how we deal with the size of organizations
- touches on the very questions of why firms exist at all and why
they succeed or fail.

You can get a nice overview of how size affects most organizational
processes in Daft's (2001) Organization Theory and Design. Chapters
1, 8, and 11 shed useful light on these issues. To understand the
relationship of organizational size to the wide range of challenges
that affect an organization's use of design, however, it is helpful
at least to skim the whole book. That allows you to understand the
general nature of organizations in relation to all the tasks and
processes required. Since all of these ultimate affect the design
process, an overview is helpful.

This is a core book for my management students in organization and
leadership. They go through a deep and serious learning cycle as they
read the book and examine its contents in a process of critical
thinking, reflection, and research. I once adapted that course for a
group of industrial design students. the course succeeded, in that it
gave them a much better sense of the design process in the context of
working organizations than they had before they took the course. At
the same time, we had difficulty adapting the course to a curriculum
that was primarily located in the studio. The problem was cultural.
While the department head wanted a course that helped students to
understand organizational life and strategic design, teachers who did
not encourage reading and writing staffed the program. This made it
difficult to create an appropriate learning environment for a course
that requires critical inquiry and close reading. I suspect that this
course would be a great success in any design school that balances
studio work with the theoretical skills and research skills that are
coming to be important in a balanced design curriculum. At any rate,
the book will help any scholar who wishes to examine the question of
population size on design process.

Most organizations involve many kinds of design process. This
includes both the specific design of products and services, and the
many design processes and decision process that affect the
organization itself. Anyone who designs products or services outside
the craft studio works with design in an organizational setting. This
kind of question is therefore most important.

Peter Drucker (1990) placed many of these issues in a large social
content in his critical masterpiece, The New Realities.

Five books spanning several generations of industrial work
demonstrate different approaches to the problem of organizational
size. Henri Fayol (1949) and Alfred P. Sloan (1986) both discuss the
challenges and struggles they faced as the leaders of large
industrial organizations. While their solutions were not always
effective, the problems they describe offer a rich understanding of
how organizational size and scale affect design.

David Halberstam's (1987) book, The Reckoning, shows how thee forces
often played out in one industry, the automobile industry. Among the
many virtues of this book is its close concentration on exactly how
the parts of an organization so often conflict one another to
adversely affect overall organizational goals and success. He also
shows how (and why) important thinkers such a W. Edwards Deming
brought new clarity and purpose to organizations.

Two remarkable books specifically demonstrate how two industrial
groups meet the challenge of size. Kuniyasu Sakai's (1993)
contribution shows how a Japanese company accounts for size and scale
effects. So does Ricardo Semler's (1993) book, Maverick.

You ask a profound question -- "How does organizational size affect
the design process?" Answering it requires a tour of several fields
and some in-depth study in one.

While there is a large and applicable body of literature on this
topic in a general sense, it seems to me there have been relatively
few empirical studies of how these issues function in specific
contextual settings. Applying the large-scale work to the narrower
context of industrial design would be a great service to our field.
This would pave the way for case studies that would teach us a great
deal about this question.

Best regards,

Ken Friedman



p.s.

If anyone wishes a copy of my 1996 article on design education should
send a note to:

[log in to unmask]

Please the words "Design Science" in the Subject: header, and you
will have a copy of the article by return mail as an email attachment
in Microsoft Word.




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--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University