Dear all,
There were two (related) things in Don Normanıs recent contributions that
resonated (with this engineer, at least). The first was
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On 3/10/09 3:38 PM, "Don Norman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> And the realm of engineering design tried to define the design process. As
> one course syllabus I just read stated "grades will be based upon adherence
> to formal methods. Intuitive design will not be permitted."
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From my own experience with design methods and design curricula, I suspect
that this requirement merely ensures that students accountably justify their
process and results in terms of the formal methods, rather than it working
to enforce students to generate their results in that way. One
(underappreciated) use of methods is to account for the rationality of the
design outcome (not necessarily as a means of generating it); from memory
Graham Button and Wes Sharrock have a paper that touches on this in Social
Studies of Science on the accountability of technological work. But this use
of methods indexes a whole other set of concerns than simply ³how to
design², such as looking professional, being able to immediately give
reasons for design decisions, being able to present a well-consideredı
argument as a constituent part of presenting a design solution, etc.
The second thing Don had said that struck a chord was
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On 3/10/09 6:19 PM, "Don Norman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Mind you, even engineers reason emotionally. First their emotion tells
> them the solution, then they invent a logical explanation and
> rationalization. So they pretend it was all done with equations. Hah.
> It's much more like we all do budgets. We know what answers we want, so
> we twiddle the numbers until it comes out right. That's how scientific
> design is done. Twiddle the weights on the matrix rows until the answer
> comes out right. Hypocrisy rules, even if it is subconscious, fooling
> even the person who does it that way.
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While I have some doubts about the concept of emotion being used in this way
(not everything a- or non-rational is thereby emotional, and I am suspicious
of either emotion or Reason functioning as a causal account of behaviour),
there is a bit of data a former colleague of mine (Ben McGarry) had in his
possession where some mechanical engineers were trying to design a
cantilever support for a motor carrying a torque. I donıt remember the
details precisely, but the engineers ran through the equations several times
to determine the stress in a particular compression weld, and kept getting a
figure that was 'too small' - i.e. they seemed to know in advance what kind
of answer they should get. They tried a number of different ways to check
the mathematics (scaling up the forces, scaling up the dimensions,
re-building the model from scratch etc.), without getting an answer that
seemed right to them.
Funnily enough, in the end their mathematics was right, but so were they -
it was just that the majority of the load was being taken by a tension weld
that they hadn't yet run the calculations on. When they got that figure,
they stopped checking the model.
While Iım also aware of times when engineers have simply had to trust the
mathematics (for instance, when working on very new problem domains that
they didnıt have much of a feel for), I think there is a lot of potential
for design research to really articulate the practical use of formal
techniques. Iıd be very interested in other studies list members are aware
of that detail this kind of use of methods in design. Bucciarelli is one,
but I donıt know of many others.
Anyway, itıs clear to me that methods and design activity do not stand in
anything like the same relation to each other as computer programs stand in
relation to their execution. Which brings us back to the idea of a formal
design scienceı, I guess.
All the best,
Ben
--
Ben Matthews
Associate Professor
Mads Clausen Institute
University of Southern Denmark
+45 6550 1675
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