Dear Colleagues,

This brings us to the end of the on-line conference on "Design in the
University."


Introducing Ken Friedman

To close the conference, Russell's paradox - that's Bertrand, not
Keith - requires me to introduce a scholar, designer, and artist who
has neither introduced himself nor been introduced by the convener.

These days, I focus on theory and research as associate professor of
design theory at Denmark's Design School, and associate professor of
leadership and strategic design at the Norwegian School of
Management. I am also visiting professor at Staffordshire University.

My enthusiasm for the University of California Irvine School of
Design proposal emerges from my experience as a working designer and
artist. My work in art and design began in 1966 when I became active
in Fluxus, an international laboratory for experimental art, design,
and architecture. People sometimes ask me whether I am related to the
Ken Friedman who was an experimental artist and designer in the
1960s. I sometimes say that he is the black sheep of my family but
the truth is that I was Ken Friedman when I was young. My current
activities continue the inquiries that I began four decades ago.

If you saw the end-of-the-century show at the Whitney Museum or the
opening exhibition at the Tate Modern, you may have seen some of my
art and design projects. In 2000, the University of Iowa Museum of
Art mounted an exhibition of my work based on the university
collections. They maintain an online version of the exhibition
catalogue at

http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/atca/subjugated/five_front.htm

Fluxus and intermedia erased the boundaries between art and life by
engaging design for social change. Owen Smith's (1999) catalogue
quoted an essay I published during the 1972 UK Fluxus tour. It still
rings true today: "In every possible way we have tried to bring the
entire range of human understanding and experience to bear upon art:
psychology, design, environmental design, the behavioral sciences,
social sciences, learning theory, theology and others named and to be
named . . . we deal with human concerns." (Friedman 1972: 51)

To give meaning to this statement, I had to learn more about how
things work than I imagined as a young artist and designer. That is
how I became a scholar and researcher.

As an undergraduate, I planned to become a minister. I studied
psychology, social science, and education. Along the way, I met Dick
Higgins, George Maciunas, and Christo, and shifted my interest to
art. The work I did as an artist and designer led me to my doctoral
work. Despite the frequent claims for the success of design and art,
anyone who works in industrial settings and cultural organizations
recognizes that our failure rate is high. I did not understand why
this should be so. I pursued a PhD in leadership and human behavior
to learn more about the high failure rate of design projects and the
difficulty of creating effective cultural change. (I will explain my
larger interest in leadership and the knowledge economy another time.)

In the 1970s and 1980s, I worked with information products when
information products took the form of reference books, newsletters,
publishing, and consulting rather than software and web sites. I also
worked with artifacts. In 1987, I went to Finland as visiting artist
and designer at the Arabia. I remained in Scandinavia, and in 1990, I
developed one of the first courses in strategic design - design as a
strategic resource for creating products and services. After
delivering several successful workshops and courses at different
business schools, I was hired by the Norwegian School of Management.

Since 1994, the Norwegian School of Management and (now) Denmark's
Design School have given me the opportunity to look backward for
understanding, linking experience and empirical data with research
and theory. My life today is focused on research, writing, and
occasional design projects.


Building design cultures

My enthusiasm for the proposal for the UCI proposal is based on the
integrated vision offered for design education and research for
improved understanding and better practice. One of the genuine
problems in our field is the high failure rate of designed products
and services. I have detailed some of these problems elsewhere along
with empirical evidence from long-term studies (see, f.ex., Lukas
1998; Mansfield, Rapaport, Schnee, Wagner and Hamburger 1971; McMath
1998).

While many designed products and services do succeed, most do so
through iterative evolutionary processes. Petroski (1994b) describes
this nicely. (See also Friedman 1997: 57.) One common pathway to
success involves recovering from costly failures. It is better to
recover from failure than not to recover. It is better still to learn
from failure for better design process. The relation of failure to
evolution explains Petroski's (1992, 1994a) interest in both areas.

The only way to claim general success for the design profession is by
conflating the work of all human actors in the design process to the
work of professional designers while confusing the work of
professional designers with the larger process in which they play a
part.

Designers play an important role in many processes. Even so, the
claims made for successful professional design activity outstrip the
reality. These claims are only made possible by forms of
epistemological equivocation that attribute successful outcomes to
designers who play some part in success while overlooking significant
failure rates for the same processes by designers who fail. A second
problem is attributing the successful design outcomes of large
project teams to the professional designers on those teams while
overlooking the contribution of other team members.

If I had been an active participant in the conference, I would have
entered the dialogue with information, evidence, and comments on
these issues. Here, I simply state my views before explaining why I
believe that this proposal is one step among many that may help us to
understand and solve some of the problems we face.

In my view, design has not yet attained the development that physics
achieved at the end of the nineteenth century. On good days, I think
we are almost there. In contrast, design education is in much the
same state that medical education was at the beginning of the
twentieth century.

The design field is important, and much good work is done. At the
same time, there are serious problems. Understanding and solving
these problems is the mission of the design disciplines that have
grown to support and serve the field.

Far too many actors in the field see efforts to describe and overcome
problems as an attack on the field and its practitioners. In my view,
describing problems and moving to solve them is an effort to improve
the field and support practitioners. It is important to remember that
design research and design education are not about single successes.
They are about improving the field and training practitioners.

A single successful project is the success of a specific team or a
specific designer. Unless that success contributes to the larger
field, it is not a contribution to design research. Helping team
members or designers to develop skills only contributes to design
education when a learning cycle permits others to understand and
practice the cognitive, behavioral, and cultural traits that led to
success.

The past century has seen many improvements and successes in design
process. We have a long way to go. The UCI proposal is a major step
in one of the directions I hope the field will take. There are other
directions and other schools have chosen them. UCI is one of the few
schools to generate a new model that is distinctly different than the
vast majority of design schools have developed. That is what makes
this proposal promising, challenging, and difficult. I will return to
the question of general problems and solutions, describing them more
comprehensively in my introduction to the conference proceedings. In
these closing words, I want to focus on why I believe the UCI
proposal to be a major contribution to design education and design
research.


Thanks and a conference summary

First, let me offer some thanks and acknowledgements. Let us start
with a round of applause for the professors of the University of
California at Irvine who wrote this report.

Richard Taylor, Sanjoy Mazumdar, Alladi Venkatesh, and Michael Clark
gave generously of their time to share their experiences and
insights. Lorraine Justice - a consultant to the committee - filled
in as a speaker who saw the process from inside and out. This group
includes three professional designers from different fields -
software design, architectural design and urban planning, and
industrial design. It also includes two scholars in management
studies and literature who have made design a primary concern for the
three years that they have been actively involved in this process.

Our respondents read the report thoroughly and offered their views
based on experience of many kinds. These include many different roles
in professional design education, university management, research,
and professional design practice. Our respondents were Charles
Burnette, David Durling, Christene Nippert-Eng, Thomas Rasmussen, and
Keith Russell.

We invited a wonderful and equally diverse group of commentators.
Thanks go to Michael Biggs, Maria Camacho, John Feland, Carma Gorman,
Susan Hagan, Chris Heape, Wolfgang Jonas, Harold Nelson, Silvia
Pizzocaro, Chris Rust, M P Ranjan, Liz Sanders, Al Selvin, Ricardo
Sosa, and GK Van Patter.

Altogether, 94 members of the PhD-Design list took part in the
conference. These 94 contributors produced nearly 500 contributions.
Material gathered for the proceedings totals over 700 A4 pages of
clean manuscript set in 12-point Times.

Each of the 94 contributors deserves my thanks. Let me save that
pleasure for the proceedings. For now, an alphabetical roster of
conference participants will follow in the next email, along with an
email address for every participant. Thanks to you all for making
this a fine event. Many of the participants are longtime members of
this list.

Please let me offer my special appreciation to new list members who
joined specifically to take part in this conference. I am sure that I
speak for list owners David Durling and Keith Russell in welcoming
you. We also welcome former subscribers who have returned.

Since the second international conference on doctoral education in
design at La Clusaz in 2000, we have grown from just over 100
subscribers to over 1,200. This list was established to be a forum of
high quality discourse. Not all discourse is formal. Our
conversations range from casual dialogue to organized conferences and
threads on a wide range of topics. What distinguishes us from other
lists is that we specifically welcome and encourage robust,
well-formed notes and reasoned argument from evidence. There is room
here for all forms of interaction.

David Durling will have more to say on these issues in the future,
and I will, too. Many subscribers - new and old - have noticed that
this list is larger and more active than any other design list on the
net, and it has a far wider spectrum of active participants than
other lists. In my opinion, this can be attributed to the quality of
the discourse. Other lists serve other purposes, and we need them
all. The unique qualities of this list - and the unique policies that
generate those qualities - make this list unusual compared to the
others.

Thanks go here to list owners David Durling and Keith Russell, and to
a core of active participants who include many of our La Clusaz
organizers and session chairs, as well as new contributors.


Themes and issues

The conference involved a wide variety of themes and issues. Some of
these are old conversations. While these debates have not yet been
resolved, I believe that we learn something by exploring them again
from time to time. New perspectives and added insight help us to
develop the field - and they help us to develop as professionals
within the field.

Reading the conference transcript, I identified at least a dozen
interesting debates on the nature of design, the design profession,
design education, and design research. I will attempt to identity
these in my introduction to the proceedings and bring forward useful
contrasting perspectives.

Two issues that recurred frequently during this conference are worth
noting now.

One issue involves an important series of dialectical challenges that
establish the boundaries of all fields of professional practice.
These boundaries determine some of the challenges that we face.

An intriguing dilemma constrains and enlivens any field of
professional practice. All professional fields are lodged in the
realm of clinical practice. Every profession involves service. This
service is undertaken by and embodied in the work of professional
practitioners. This is so by definition. In this respect, the field
of design resembles all fields of professional practice, including
medicine, law, ministry, and management.

All professions involve service. Practice is embedded in a flow of
activities that can never be fully described or articulated. Since
the first professions known to us, practitioners have educated
successive generations by transferring much of their knowledge
through educational training and experience based on modeling.

The ancient, medieval, and modern guilds were established to preserve
and transmit knowledge in this way. Today's guild-like professions
still work this way. This is true of craft professions such as
typography or architecture. This is true of artistic professions such
as drama and music. This is even true of many aspects of training for
professions supported by such scientific disciplines as medicine or
engineering.

The culture of guild training for professional practice has valuable
features and serious drawbacks. The marvelous features of guild
training have enabled us to preserve skills and knowledge, carrying
them forward across generations and even across millennia. There is a
price. Preserving traditions by modeling behavior is a conservative
form of education. The price of guild education is a dramatically
conservative culture.

Donald Schon's concept of reflective practice is a critique of the
conservative guild culture of architecture and design training. It
respects the achievement of the guilds, but it does not simply
celebrate them. To the contrary, Schon contributes to professional
education by criticizing the process of professional education as it
has been conducted for the past few thousand years.

Reflective practice requires articulation. This involves surfacing
and articulating issues and practices, drawing them from the realm of
tacit knowledge to the realm of explicit knowledge. Reflective
practice is not research, but many of the issues that we surface in
reflective practice permit research. Both depend on mindful,
articulate inquiry.

Designers often speak of the difference between "knowing that" and
"knowing how." This discussion is often a facile way of avoiding a
key issue.

We may know HOW to do something, but only when we can articulate it
and describe it to others can we teach and coach skills rather than
leave them to modeling. Knowing how is the first step in being able
to practice our professional arts. Knowing THAT and being able to
DESCRIBE HOW is where teaching begins.

The physicist Richard Feynman (12-16) used to tell a great story
about the difference between knowing the names of things and knowing
something about how and why those things work. Feynman understood as
Shakespeare did (Romeo and Juliet, II, i, l. 85-6) that product and
process counts for more than names.

How are product and process situated in the world? How are they
embedded in the flow of life? How do they affect the world around
them? How do they respond to the world in which they are embedded?

Here lies a paradox between knowing that and knowing how. Human
beings understand the world through language. To know how, therefore,
and to reflect on how, we must also know that and be able to describe
it. This requires words, approaches, methods, and the disciplines
that generate them. I have stated a deep and rich range of issues
that I can only hint at in a short closing note. I raise it to point
beyond the issues to the way they were reflected in some of debates
raised here.

Several strong arguments and position statements among the conference
debates reduce to a primary question: how shall we learn design
process? Shall we place words on things or shall we model behavior as
our ancestors have done for the past five millennia? In Schon's
terms, the question asks whether we shall reflect on practice by
articulating issues or pursue the unreflected practice of behavioral
modeling.

If we are to find new ways to understand and practice design - and if
we are to generate the original contributions to knowledge that we
seek through research - we require new approaches to design in the
university. The UCI School of Design proposal is such an approach.

Over 10,000 different schools, programs, and programs teach design
(or art and design) in the world today. There are well over 4,000
accredited institutions in the tertiary sector in North America
alone, and most of them have at least one such department or program.
Some have several. Several thousand unaccredited programs may be
added to these. The rest of the world provides at least as many
again. The vast majority of these are based on the old guild methods
that have been used in professional education for the past five
thousand years. This includes education for designers, and for the
artisans, craftsmen, artists, and technicians who practice the design
skills.

Along with serious and reasoned queries and challenges from a
pluralist position, several challenges to the proposal came from a
guild position. These challenges were voiced in two ways. One
articulation was thoughtful and responsible. This position suggested
that the UCI School of Design would benefit by adding or
incorporating processes, programs, and methods typical of guild
training in addition to the processes, programs, and methods already
covered. The other guild position seemed to me to challenge the right
of the university to enter the field of design education at all.
Several speakers commented on this attempt to stake out territorial
boundaries in divisive rather constructive language. This effort was
part of a second debate, related to the first, but distinct in tone.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the conference has been a grumpy
drumbeat of complaints that the UCI proposal is the work of ivory
tower theorists without an active career in design practice. Similar
suggestions were also pointed at some of the speakers in the
conference. It interested me at several points to observe that some
of the speakers identified with ivory tower theorizing have had more
extensive and successful design careers than those who grumbled about
them.

To me, the conference was strengthened by the challenges and
questions of serious and articulate professional practitioners. Some
of them are also academics. Responsible challenges involve issues and
themes, gaps and ways to fill them. The problem to which I point
involves turf wars by those who seem to take the position that they
speak for the design field and for designers. This was not helpful.
It seems to me that divisive polemics impeded the conference at
several points. As rich and productive as this conference was, it
could have been a still richer and more productive.

This kind of problem has come up on this list before. It constitutes
an ad hominem argument. When ad hominem argument wrongly excludes
practicing design professionals from our company by incorrectly
denying their status as practitioners, it is worse yet.

The rhetorical form of this ad hominem argument is fascinating. It
generally involves two appeals. The first appeal is ad hominem
argument against the person whose position is to be discredited. The
second appeal is argumentum ad verecundiam, appeal to authority, or
argumentum ad populum, appeal to popular assent.

The appeal of argumentum ad hominem is, "Do not listen to him. He is
not a designer." The appeal of argumentum ad verecundiam is, "You may
trust me because I am a designer," or "You should listen to me
because I am a professor." The appeal of argumentum ad populum is,
"You should trust me because I speak for designers."

There is a second paradox in this note. This is not Russell's
paradox, but the paradoxical case in which ad hominem argument is
required rather than rejected. The ancient rhetor and the modern
scholar of rhetoric note one specific instance in which argumentum ad
hominem is permitted or even required. This is the case of evaluating
an authority.

This is common in legal proceedings. When a witness is presented as
an expert in forensic medicine, both sides in the case question the
personal qualifications of the expert to determine whether he may
speak from a position of authority. As an expert witness (not in
forensics, but the economics of art), I have seen this process from
both sides. To evaluate an authority, one must ask, "Who speaks? What
is his background? What are his credentials? Do the credentials he
presents tally with the expertise he claims?"

Had I been a participant in this conference, I would have questioned
those challenges to the proposal that were based on argumentum ad
hominem.

There are gaps and flaws in the proposal. It is impossible to build a
major new professional school using a new model without making
mistakes. Mistakes are not the mistakes of amateurs, or mistakes made
because the school is remote from the necessities of professional
design. Quite the contrary. These are the mistakes of serious
scholars and professional designers who are working through the
challenges of building a school that will differ from most of the
other 10,000 or so design schools.

Professional designers played the central role in developing this
proposal, but these professionals did not represent all design
fields. The fact that important fields of design practice were not
represented in the UCI committee represents a gap. If the design
school is approved and built, UCI will fill the gap in the next level
of work. That level of work involves moving from proposal to
implementation.

The report would have been better had the UC committee included
professionals in product design, interaction design, and transport
design. The UCI committee did not include such professional because
UCI does not yet have a design school with teaching and research in
these fields. Since UCI does not yet have these kinds of professors,
the committee made up for the deficiency by using experienced senior
consultants and undertaking extensive, thorough research.

The school will not be built overnight. A foundation dean must be
hired and then senior faculty must begin to fill in the proposal at
the level of curriculum planning and course content. This is where
gaps can be remedied.

In my view, we should challenge - and learn from - innovative
proposals such as this on the merits of the case, not on the
professional identity of the authors. Many of these authors - like
most of our list members - are designers. In a world where we take
participatory design seriously, it is also useful to consider the
fact that a great university is obliged to represent many
stakeholders in planning a professional school. This means that the
profession must be represented along with representatives of other
cultures - including people who know how to build a great university.


What is a great university?

The notes I posted on the UCI proposal at the start of the conference
discuss some of the dialectical tensions of professional education in
the university. Some characteristics of university education have
held true since the first predecessors of the modern university were
established in the fifth century BC. They continued through the
Humboldt university reform of the early 1800s and the great public
universities of the twentieth century. The traditions of professional
education go back even farther, starring one or even two millennia
earlier, depending on how we consider professional education. If you
missed the opening comments, you these notes in the list archives at

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/phd-design.html

(Go to November. Organize by date. See message 41, "University of
California Irvine School of Design.")

Today, we measure great universities on several standards. These
include research, teaching, and service to society. On some levels,
the greatest service to society that a university performs involves
the research it generates. The testament in which Alfred Nobel
established the Nobel Prize awards stated that they would be awarded
to those who "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."
The first faculty member at the University of California to receive
the Nobel Prize was physicist E. O. Lawrence in 1939. Since then,
forty-five professors at the University of California have received
the Nobel Prize. The University of California at Irvine has two of
these. Both won the prize in 1995. F. Sherwood Rowland, who holds a
Bren Chair at UCI, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for
explaining how chlorofluorocarbons destroy ozone in the atmosphere.
Frederick Reines received the Nobel Prize in Physics for work done in
the 1950s to experimentally demonstrate the existence of the electron
antineutrino. Prof. Reines died recently. Prof. Rowland is retired,
but remains active as a researcher, working with graduate students,
and occasionally teaching an undergraduate course.

Twenty Nobel laureates now serve on the faculty of the University of
California. There are 300 members of National Academy of Sciences, 17
of them at UCI. There are 400 members of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, 29 of them at UCI. The figures are roughly similar for
the academy of engineering, the institute of medicine, and the medal
of science, along with the Guggenheim, the Pulitzer Prize, and
similar honors in all the arts and sciences.

The number of Nobel Prizes rises significantly if you add in
graduates of the university who teach elsewhere, not to mention the
other awards and honors. For example, three graduates of the writing
program in Mike Clark's department have won the Pulitzer Prize for
novels and poetry, and a graduate of the school of the arts won the
Pulitzer for political cartooning.

These comparisons do not mean that every faculty member at UCI will
win the Nobel or hold an academy membership. This is especially true
of a school in a discipline such as design without comparable
academies and without a designated Nobel field. Nevertheless, these
statistics reveal the excellence of the university culture within
which the new design school will be expected to hold its own. Nobel
laureates and academy fellows set the standard at the University of
California. In his or her own way, each professor is expected to work
toward the benchmark of excellence established by these standards.

This answers a question that came up on the list during the
conference. This was an inability to discern the "intellectual
drivers" of the new design school. There are six such "drivers."

First is the explicit model of the school described in the proposal
as a whole. This model is visible in the several parts pf the
proposal and in the sum of those many parts. If one merely dips into
the proposal looking for gaps or easy targets, one will find gaps and
targets. What one may miss is the pattern established by the proposal
as a whole.

Second is the explicit location of a school embedded in the corporate
body of a great research university. Those who have neither studied
nor taught at such a university simply do not know what this means.
They may have no idea of how the interplay of departments and
programs outside the school affects and influences as school. This is
a key issue. Even conference participants who lament the inability of
other UC campuses to develop a design school - see Harold Nelson's
notes - recognize the driving force that the university itself plays
as a location of inquiry.

Third is the explicit role that UCI plays as an interdisciplinary
campus in the UC system. The University of California at Irvine is
organized around the concept of interdisciplinarity. If UCI is able
to build the School of Design, this fact will function as important
force linking design school activities to other activities on the
campus - including teaching and research in other fields,
disciplines, departments, and programs.

Fourth, the specific fields of research and teaching stated in the
proposal will drive the intellectual development of the school. This
is the reason for planning the programs and lines stated in the
proposal, and the implementation plan with resources and budgets will
bring these fields and issues to life in the work of faculty,
research staff, and graduate students.

Fifth, the research and teaching program of each individual professor
serves the central "intellectual driver" for that member of the
staff. This is where the standards and academic culture of the
university make an immense difference. In many universities, the
faculty members of art and design schools are not expected to be
research scholars or scientists. In others, some are designated as
research scholars while the majority are not. This is especially the
case at an increasing number of European schools, where resources
make it practical to designate a small number of faculty positions
for research while designating the great majority for teaching and
studio practice. At the University of California, all members of the
faculty are expected to excel in research or research equivalent
activities as well as to excel in teaching. Junior faculty members
must demonstrate excellence in research, teaching, and service to
move from junior positions to tenured, senior status. Professors
hired with tenure have demonstrated these skills elsewhere. The
quality and character of staff members is a key "intellectual driver"
of the program at any great research university. UCI is such a
university. If UCI builds a design school, the school will be
expected to meet these standards as a condition of being built.

Sixth, and especially important, will be the quality and character of
students. If this school is comparable with other schools at Irvine -
or in the University of California system - many extraordinarily good
students will compete for every available place. These students will
engage and enliven the faculty members, and they will shape an
academic culture that prizes inquiry and excellence. If other
professional schools are a measure, many of these students will focus
on professional practice rather than on research. Their location in a
great research university will be important to them. They will learn
about research, they will learn how to conduct diagnostic and
clinical research, they will learn how to apply research findings to
professional practice, and they will engage in reflective practice.
The research students will meet the standards of all research
students at the University of California. This requires a high level
of attention, focus, and mindfulness on their own research programs,
and these interests and programs will help to direct and drive the
school forward.

One reason for the careful budgeting process and the prolonged debate
and decision process required to build this school involves ensuring
that the conditions are in place for engaging this kind of
intellectual drive.

This, in turn, answers two more questions that came up at different points.

One involves engagement with industry and business. At different
points, some speakers lamented the lack of engagement with business
and industry and with the working design profession. At other points,
speakers worried that the connection was too tight. One speaker even
took both positions, lamenting the engagement with the design
profession when complaining about theorists while overlooking the
fact that design takes place in industry when complaining about
business support.

As I see it, the proposal encourages deep engagement with industry
and the design profession at many levels, from individual research to
student activities to the Design Academy. This academy will be a
meeting point between industry and the research community. Business
will support this academy and its programs.

However, the school does not depend on business and industry for
support. The general university budget will support the UCI School of
Design. This is the basis of support for all schools in the
University of California. The general budget is mandated in the state
budget and the general university budget covers staff salaries,
research and teaching, support services, and much of the rest of what
it takes to run a great university. Additional funding from public
sector research funds and private sector support play an important
role in any great university, but these are not the core budget. Most
universities in the world would be delighted to have a fraction of
the core budget that supports the University of California at Irvine.

Anyone who follows trends in academic governance and management is
right to worry about growing reliance on external funding for some
programs and research activities. No one who knows this field will
confuse core budget allocations with additional funds and industry
support. If the University of California builds a design school at
UCI, the university will guarantee the necessary funds for all core
activities.

As I see it, there are many models of design education. Most of them
exist today. Some have not done well, others have done reasonably
well, and some have done well indeed.

In my view, only a great university provides the context for
embedding top quality design education in a context that ALSO
supports high level design research. That, in turn, flavors the
curriculum and tunes the educational model for results that cannot be
achieved elsewhere.

This is the unique potential of UCI. Other schools do other things.
Some of those 10,000 schools do those other things very well. My hope
is that UCI will generate new ideas and new learning, and I hope that
the field can grow and learn from what UCI can achieve with a new
model of design education located in a context that few others can
match.

Far heavier resources are required to do something the first time.
The substance and weight of the UC system is another virtue of the
UCI School of Design, and the resources on which such a school will
draw will generate resources for all of us. All design schools, large
and small, can benefit from the model at UCI, adapting aspects and
parts of the proposal for other purposes in different circumstances.

In that sense, locating a new kind of design school in a great
university promises to serve the entire field. Schools with unique
opportunities and advantages have always pioneered developments on
which other schools can draw. This has been the case for the Royal
College of Art, Carnegie Mellon, the Illinois Institute of
Technology, and Ivrea. I expect the same from UCI.


Threads I would have enjoyed

As convener, I did not participate in any thread. Other than
providing occasional resources and shepherding the process, I have
not taken the floor until now.

As mentioned, I will offer an analysis of some debates and threads in
the introduction to the proceedings. I will mention four threads that
I would have liked to enter.

The thread on the philosophy of design captured my interest. It would
have been fun to enter that debate at several points. I have been
active in philosophy of design for much of the decade. I am not a
professional philosopher. However, I have worked with philosophy of
science and I have taught the subject at the doctoral level for
interuniversity courses. Philosophy is closely linked to my research
field in theory, and I maintain my interest as a participant in
CEPHAD.

One of the areas that I would have enjoyed debating involves the
nature and distinctions of philosophical argument and philosophical
explanation. One of the difficulties of a field that gathers people
from so many disciplines is the tendency to speak from different
backgrounds without considering the way that the disciplines and
fields give voice to specific issues.

In philosophy - as other fields - one must work to read one's way
into the field. I suggested that action-oriented designers generally
prefer to act rather than to read. Relatively few designers are
willing to master the skills required for philosophical inquiry. Any
intelligent designer CAN master these skills. Few seem to wish to do
so. I was irked by the claim that I told designers to "get back in
your box." I said no such thing.

I am a designer. I work with philosophy. So do Per Galle, Anders
Ekdahl, Erik Stolterman, Harold Nelson, and others, often at a
serious level.

What I said is that one must be willing to work to practice the craft
of philosophical inquiry.

One colleague wrote me a private note with an interesting idea. One
of the great complaints of designers in recent years has been the
fact that desktop publishing enables ordinary individuals to
undertake activities once restricted to professional graphic
designers.

Imagine, my friend wrote, that a professional philosopher cobbled
together a pamphlet using a desktop publishing program. Imagine that
the pamphlet were the usual kind of DTP project - credible, but
betraying the obvious kinds of flaws that demonstrate failure to
master even a DTP program.

Now, imagine that this philosopher came to a design conference and
said to a designer, "Look at this. Am I a designer?"

Most people would think it reasonable for a designer to say, "No. You
are a philosopher who has carried out some design activities."
Imagine that the designer were to say, "must do some work to become a
designer. In my experience, philosophers would rather read and write
than to do the work required to master design skills." no one would
mistake that for a command that the philosopher "get back in your
box."

Some of us live fully in the two worlds of design and philosophy.
Susan Hagan, a professional design who holds a PhD in rhetoric, is a
good example. Dick Buchanan, a professional philosopher who works
with large-scale design projects is another.

Others of us have mastered some of the skills of philosophy. I count
myself among these. Nevertheless, I distinguish myself from
professional philosophers. It would have been entertaining to wrestle
with some of those issues.

Another thread I would have enjoyed would be a thread at the
intersection of some themes linking design research, design process,
empirical research, and the play of invention.

Another would have been some of the debates on the nature of the university.

The most interesting thread I would have enjoyed is a thread that
never came up here.

This would have been a thread on evidence-based practice.

In recent years, medical practice and nursing practice have developed
an important new approach to professional practice known as
"evidence-based medicine."

According to Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, and Richardson (1996),
"Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious
use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of
individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means
integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available
external clinical evidence from systematic research."

To me, this approach would serve well in the professional practice of
design. The implications become clear when we read the description of
what evidence-based medicine means in clinical practice:

"By individual clinical expertise we mean the proficiency and
judgment that individual clinicians acquire through clinical
experience and clinical practice. Increased expertise is reflected in
many ways, but especially in more effective and efficient diagnosis
and in the more thoughtful identification and compassionate use of
individual patients' predicaments, rights, and preferences in making
clinical decisions about their care. By best available external
clinical evidence, we mean clinically relevant research, often from
the basic sciences of medicine, but especially from patient centered
clinical research into the accuracy and precision of diagnostic tests
(including the clinical examination), the power of prognostic
markers, and the efficacy and safety of therapeutic, rehabilitative,
and preventive regimens. External clinical evidence both invalidates
previously accepted diagnostic tests and treatments and replaces them
with new ones that are more powerful, more accurate, more
efficacious, and safer."

That thread that never emerged here, and I would have liked to see
it. One promise of locating a design school in a great university is
developing a program that can support the field by training designers
in the practice of "evidence-based design."

Over the river and through the woods

This post is much longer than the note I started to write. I've been
thinking and reflecting on your words and comments for the past six
weeks and working with this conference for nearly six months.
Preparing and reading over 700 pages of conference transcript have
given me much to think on. I hope you don't mind that my closing
words became an essay on the topics that interest me most.

Now, the closing words:

Thanks to you all for your participation and interaction. Christmas
is nearly here. Ditte and I have been have been planning the
Christmas menu and yesterday saw the first real snow of the year.

Now, I will follow the example of Chris Rust by setting PhD-Design to
daily digest format. I have much reading to catch up on, and some
long-promised writing to deliver.

The season's best to you, and my wishes for a happy new year in 2004.

-- Ken Friedman



References

Feynman, Richard P. 1992. What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Further Adventures of a Curious Character. London: HarperCollins.

Friedman, Ken. 1972. "Fluxus and Concept Art." Art and Artists
(London), Vol. 7, No. 7, (Oct. 1972): 50-53. [Special issue devoted
to Fluxus]

Friedman, Ken. 1997.  "Design Science and Design Education." The
Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, ed. Helsinki: University of
Art and Design Helsinki UIAH. 54-72.

Lukas, Paul. 1998. "The Ghastliest Product Launches." Fortune, 16
March 1998, 44.

Mansfield, Edwin, J. Rapaport, J. Schnee, S. Wagner and M. Hamburger.
1971. Research and Innovation in Modern Corporations. New York:
Norton.

McMath, Robert. 1998. What Were They Thinking? Marketing Lessons I've
Learned from Over 80,000 New Product Innovations and Idiocies. New
York: Times Business.

Petroski, Henry. 1992. To Engineer is Human. The Role of Failure in
Successful Design. New York: Vintage Books.

Petroski, Henry. 1994a. Design Paradigms. Case Histories of Error and
Judgment in Engineering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Petroski, Henry. 1994b. The Evolution of Useful Things. New York:
Vintage Books.

Sackett, David L, William M C Rosenberg, J A Muir Gray, R Brian
Haynes, and W Scott Richardson. 1996. "Evidence-Based Medicine: What
it is and what it isn't." (Based on an editorial from the British
Medical Journal on 13th January 1996, BMJ 1996, 312: 71-2.) Available
at URL:
http://www.cebm.net/ebm_is_isnt.asp#Authors

Smith, Owen. 1999. "Pilgrim's Progress." In Subjugated Knowledges and
the Balance of Power. Estera Milman, ed. Iowa City, Iowa: University
of Iowa Museum of Art. Available online at URL:
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/atca/subjugated/five_13.htm



--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Design Theory
Design Research Center
Denmark's Design School

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