Dear Michal,
Thanks for your query. I'll give a short answer because I am now
packing to leave for Cape Town to attend the Design Education Forum
of South Africa. I hope the short version is OK.
What I meant by a third way to knowledge is, in essence, what Nigel
Cross has called the designerly way of knowing as distinct from the
sciences and the humanities. This is an important issue -- I will be
reviewing Nigel's (Cross: 2006) book in the November issue of Design
Research News, when Birkhauser brings out a paperback edition. (BTW,
I am behind in my reviews of several important books. I am way behind
on a review of Klaus Krippendorff's book The Semantic Turn: A New
Foundation for Design. This is a terrific book -- my challenge is to
sort out my ideas about Klaus's approach so that I can skillfully
summarize his contribution while assessing my response, as well as
understanding what I've learned.)
What I mean by "if" is this: it seems to me that Nigel, Bruce Archer,
and others are right to say that there is a designerly way of
knowing. This is evident in successful design practices of many
kinds. It seems to me that this approach offers great opportunities
and challenges. If this is to become a third way to knowledge in the
new century, there are questions and issues to be answered before
larger groups in society adopt and make use of this approach. On one
level, many kinds of professionals already use designerly approaches
because they design. On another, they still frame their approaches in
terms of science or occasionally in terms of the humanities.
Some explicit shifts have been taking place. For example, see the
Boland and Collopy (2004) book on Managing as Designing. The question
I ask -- the "if" -- involves what we must learn to generalize this
designerly approach in broader and more effective ways.
Hope that makes sense. Got to run. Still folding shirts.
Yours,
Ken
--
Reference
Boland, Richard, and Fred Collopy. 2004. Managing as Designing. Palo
Alto, California: Stanford Business Press.
Cross, Nigel. 2006. Designerly Ways of Knowing. London: Springer Verlag.
--
Michal Popowsky wrote:
Reading your last mail, I felt called by the following sentence:
"If design really is to become a third way to knowledge for the 21st century"
question 1: what do you mean by " a third knowledge"?
question 2: why "if"?
--
Ken Friedman
Professor
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
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