Thank you, Thomas. This was an informative - and provocative -
response. I look forward to the questions and challenges!
The floor will soon be open for comments and questions. I will
introduce the three invited commentators in about an hour. This will
be John Feland, a doctoral student at Stanford University, Prof.
Silvia Pizzocaro of Politecnico di Milano, and Prof. Chris Rust of
Sheffield-Hallam University.
These three commentators will join Dick Taylor and Thomas Rasmussen
as the expert panel in our first session.
Because we move across time zones - and because it is a weekend -
questions and comments are going to overlap. If you are asking
questions of a specific speaker - or commenting on his or her
presentation - please be sure to address the speaker by name.
This session will run through Thursday, November 20, when we start session 2.
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Thomas mentioned the work I have been doing to identify and enumerate
fields and sub-fields of design. The number hovers now at roughly
650. This project began in 1992 as a taxonomy of the design field.
Recently, I learned that Terry Love had taken the taxonomy as a
starting point, expanding it into a larger and more rigorous
catalogue. Now, we are working together to identify as many fields
and sub-fields of design practice and design disciplines as we can.
We are at 650 fields and sub-fields and the number continues to grow.
As Thomas notes, it is not so much the number that matters as the
fact that all of these fields and sub-fields have issues in common as
well as distinctions that differentiate them. Design education and
design research must take both the common aspects and the distinct
attributes into account if we are to develop and contribute to the
larger world around us.
Thomas played with numbers for literary effect, but there probably
are not 60,000,000 design disciplines. Nevertheless, that number is
surprisingly close to another number that DOES identify specific
design projects in one field of design. By adding up the known number
of web sites (over 43 million), and the likely number of intranets
(22 million), Jakob Nielsen points out that there are now over 65
million individual design projects in the world today in this one
field alone. This 65,000,000 is no literary device. It is a
quantitative measure. If we look across all the many fields and
subfields of design - from packaging to logistics, from
transportation to typography, from haptic design to textiles - the
number of specific design projects grows huge, and the fields and
disciplines they engage is far larger than the subject fields of any
design school.
We have entered an era in which much of the world that human beings
experience is designed, and design has become both a critical path
and a central intellectual discipline.
Two great designers developed the term "design science" to cover the
many fields and disciplines of design. Buckminster Fuller was the
first. Herbert Simon was the second. Today, as Victor Margolin notes,
the prevalence of design activity means that we must consider the
politics of design as well.
This convergence of factors makes university-level design education
and design research vitally important.
As Dick noted, he just attended a National Science Foundation
workshop, Science of Design: Software-Intensive Systems. The
conference web site offers a rich array of papers. Rajeev Alur wrote
a paper on the shift from hybrid systems to embedded software and
Corliss Baldwin wrote on what the social sciences can gain from the
science of design. Insup Lee wrote on the importance of elevating
design as a first class activity in developing software-intensive
systems and Dick Taylor wrote with Michael Clark on the relevance of
the new design school to the National Science Foundation. Altogether,
there are some sixty papers accessible on the web (NSF 2003).
This is not the only such conference. The Web also hosts the papers
of the recent conference at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU
2002) on managing as designing. Stanford University Press will soon
publish a book based on this conference. At the same time that NSF
was meeting in Virginia, another important conference was taking
place in Ivrea, Italy (Ivrea 2003) "to promote and initiate a
discussion on the theoretical foundations of interaction design," and
they, too, support a web site. These three projects - and many more
like them - demonstrate that something important is taking place in
design, and design education must expand and grow to keep up.
Terry Winograd (2003: 1) summed the situation up nicely, writing,
"Design is an orientation we bring to the activity of creating
technological artifacts and embedding them in people's lives.
Although we can label fields of design by the kind of artifact
('product design,' 'software design,' 'systems design', etc.) every
successful design is more. It is an intervention in the individual
and social lives of the people who encounter it."
Intervening successfully to serve people requires a richer approach
than has been common in most design schools. Indeed, it requires a
richer approach than has been common in any one of the fields or
subfields of design. It is for this reason that we are now seeing a
growth of interdisciplinary studies and a willingness to reach across
the boundaries of fields and disciplines.
In one sense, we may speak of "design science" as Fuller did in one
way or Simon did in another. Nigel Cross and Victor Margolin approach
the same range of issues from a different frame, and Dick Taylor's
view or my own are distinct yet again. What we each seem to have in
common is an awareness of distinctions among positions and a
willingness to learn from those distinctions, to speak across the
boundaries of disciplines seeking common understandings as well as
specific topics and approaches. John Warfield (in Francois 1997:100)
uses the phrase "science of generic design" to identify what he sees
as "that part of the process of design that is indifferent to what is
being designed, being applicable whatever the target may be." He
contrasts this with the specific aspect of design, "that part of the
design process that is particular to the target class." Warfield's
(1994) generic science involves six major taxa that we often study -
and teach - in different schools today: the human being, language,
reasoning through relationships, archival representation, the design
situation, and the design process. Dick Taylor's presentation on the
UCI proposal and Thomas Rasmussen's response share an important
emphasis on design process without regard to home disciplines and
fields.
Supporting this inquiry at the highest level requires the broad scope
and deep resources of a large research community, the kind that forms
the core of an excellent university. The pragmatic realities of the
field mean that there will be few such universities.
One important aspect of this on-line conference is exploring how we -
in our many separate schools and universities - can work together as
a field to generate and share the information and knowledge that so
few of us can afford to create in one, well-funded location. When
even the University of California faces financial difficulties, this
is an increasingly important theme for growing the field.
In a short while, I will introduce the three commentators and open
the floor to discussion.
To quote the Governator, "I'll be back."
-- Ken Friedman
References
CWRU. 2002. Managing as Designing: Creating a Vocabulary for
Management Education and Research. Case Western Reserve University,
Cleveland, Ohio. June 14-15, 2002. Available at URL:
<http://design.cwru.edu/positions.html>. Date accessed 2002 August 10.
Francois, Charles. 1997. International encyclopedia of systems and
cybernetics. Munich: K. G. Saur.
Ivrea. 2003. Symposium on Foundations of Interaction Design, 12-13
November 2003. Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. URL:
http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en/news/press/releases/2003/symposium/index.asp
Date accessed 2003 November 15.
NSF. 2003. "A New School of Design with implications for the National
Science Foundation." Science of Design: Software-Intensive Systems.
National Science Foundation Invitational Workshop, November 12-14,
2003, Airlie Center, Virginia. URL:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~sullivan/sodsis.html Accessed 2003
November 15.
Warfield, John N. 1994. A science of generic design: managing
complexity through systems design. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University
Press.
Winograd, Terry. 2003. "Position Paper."Science of Design:
Software-Intensive Systems A National Science Foundation Invitational
Workshop November 12-14, 2003, Airlie Center, Virginia. URL:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~sullivan/sodsis.html Accessed 2003
November 15.
--
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
Faculty of Art, Media, and Design
Staffordshire University
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