I would like to echo the comments of the other commentators and acknowledge
the contributions of our two opening speakers.

I appreciate the situation that Dick is facing now in California.  Stanford
is experiencing related issues with our own effort to stand up a school of
design.  Though shifts of this sort do not require the extensive
coordination the UC system demands, we are also engaged in efforts to win
the "hearts and minds" of our colleagues within the university.  There is a
slim hope that the recent change in administration in the state of
California will bring the support necessary for UCI's proposal to become
reality.  Afterall, consider the assistance that several of Thomas's
60,000,000 blooming flowers of design disciplines had in bringing our
current governor to life on the silver screen.  Without the help of many
practicing designers, both engineering and otherwise (to Chris's point),
Arnold's roles would have been limited.

This session seems to be shifting into a discussion of the role of design
research and design science as legitimizing the place of Design within it's
own school within the university construct.  Chris's comments about
engineering becoming equal to science within the ivory towers of academe
are interesting but for my own experience, not necessarily true.  It is
interesting to note that a shift in engineering research and the
organizations that support them, at least within the United States,
occurred around the launch of Sputnik.  There was a call to shift the
curriculum and research of the entire field of engineering to empower
practicing engineers with the tools of science.  Prior to Sputnik,
engineering education was similar to that of designers, very focused on
practice, using methods borrowed and scaled from apprenticeship models to
make that work.  The new emphasis was on achieving dominance  through the
application of engineering science, seen then as a weak point of American
engineering.  With this shift came the creation of the National Science
Foundation support of engineering research, the creation of the National
Academy of Engineering within the National Academy of Science.  Most
importantly engineering education shifted to the tools and methods of
engineering science, while shunning the methods of practice, instead of
embracing both.  If you examine the denizens of the ivory towers of
engineering and science, you will see little difference other than what
labels they choose to go by.  Engineering education continues to be
divorced from practice but now industry is screaming for change.  The needs
of industry point towards engineers that embrace the tools of science with
those of practice while curriculums are more focused on producing students
worthy of being PhD candidates within the basement of the ivory
tower.  This has created an environment where engineering has, as Chris put
it in his past post, " having made the same journey ahead of us," by
BECOMING science rather than surviving as engineering.  There is no
National Engineering Foundation in the United States to support the efforts
of engineering research in the direct support of practice.

To bring this back to the discussion at hand, I am a member of the
engineering design community that dabbles in some of the other
domains.  Engineering design has been fighting for recognition by the rest
of the engineering and science communities for decades now.  Part of these
fights have been through the development of various theories of Design
Science, the most widely known and used was authored by Ernst Eder and
Vladmir Hubka.  (The entire text is available online at
http://deed.megan.ryerson.ca/DesignScience/)  The unfortunate truth is that
these battles have not been that successful as the community has played the
academic recognition game according to those that hold the power, the
scientists.  The entire recognition and support infrastructure in the
United States is based on peer review, with funding coming from a few
notable national level funding agencies whose charter is to support efforts
far enough upstream from actual market implementation so as to avoid any
views of favoritism.  The domain of design is similar to that of
engineering is that performance is viewed best through the eyes of our
clients than relying on peer review.  This is fundamentally incompatible
with the current structure of academic reward structures.  As such, we can
not rely on the "sciencing" of design to bring recognition.  Unfortunately
we cannot rely on the infrastructure of the art community either.  The art
world (while no direct experience myself as a practicing artist, my mother
is a practising sculptor) is similar to the science community through it's
reliance on patrons for funding and recognition more than the design community.

The challenge before the design community is the design of our own system
of recognition and support that understands and accounts for the unique
nature of design in the delivery of a service to a client rather than the
reliance on a patron, such as occurs in science and art.  Unfortunately I
have no quick solutions for this dilemma.  I do believe that with such a
system in place, the stagnation in the advancement of design research and
design science that Thomas described will be extended far into the next
century.  Moving into the Ivory Towers of the other disciplines will not
accomplish the goals as design will always have to fight for recognition
from the current tenants.  Though I do agree with Thomas that forming a
"design colony" from these other domains will assist in designing our own
home within the academic space.  But in recruiting these hardy colonists to
assist with our crusade, we must be careful not to duplicate all the
characteristics of their origins, but to understand how they bring rigor
and reflection to their own pursuit of knowledge so that we might profit
from their experience.

Stanford has been struggling with the dual nature of design research, as it
exists in academe and practice.  How close to the "client" do we become in
our efforts?  Should we focus on the design of designers and research the
cognitive processes involved in design?  How should we strike the balance
between theory and practice?  David Kelley is fond of telling a story of
one of his academic colleagues asking for an introduction to Silicon Valley
financiers in order to pursue commercialization of some of their
research.  The financiers typically respond by saying, "great idea but lose
the professor."  How are the faculty and researchers entrenched enough in
practice to serve that community but objective enough to advance the field
in yet unknown methods.  I feel that UCI's efforts are leaps and bounds
ahead of Stanford in this respect and are appropriately designed for the
context of UCI.  I wish them luck moving forward and have hopes of more of
my tax money going towards a School of Design so that we can start living
in our own Ivory Tower rather than renting space from art and science.

Thank you for your attention!

John Feland
Doctoral Candidate
Center for Design Research
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~gohogs
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