Dear Klaus,
Thanks for this elegant summary of the design profession. I appreciate your emphasis on stakeholders and your description of how the professional design process emerges through dialog with the people who engage us as professionals to help them solve problems.
The concept of "professing" is a concept of language. To enter the ancient professions -- medicine, law, and the priesthood -- candidates took an oath or vow of service. This engages the two core concepts of any profession, service and speech. The three ancient professions also formed the "higher faculties" of the old universities, the professional schools of medicine, law, and theology.
At some point, I might return to this intriguing thread -- lots of valuable ideas here, and many important distinctions to be drawn between different aspects of design and design research, the many kinds of designer we number in our community, and the appropriate studies embracing and supporting them.
For now, I want to thank you for a lovely summary.
Warm wishes,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
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i said that professional designers distinguish themselves from non-professional designers by working within a particular design discourse.
it starts with the word profession. members of a profession profess to belong to a community that is marked by some - however loose but nevertheless satisfactory - agreement about what they profess to. when you say you are a designer, and other professed designers don't object to that, you are one. it requires language to establish who you are and to consider what you do as design. on the side you may notice a slight objection from many participants to your approach, that you see almost everything as an engineering problem for which you search for a solution. engineers tend not to be concerned with how their language defines them.
i would count as non-professional designers all those who act to change the world or small pieces of it to the better without saying what they do is design. politicians who discuss a bill for their social implications are designers from which i think we can learn a lot about the complexities they are dealing with, but the do not call themselves designers. how someone is
buying furniture for her house and arranging it for living comfortable in it, is something we may want to study and understand, but unless that person has other ambitions, she is not likely to consider what she does as design.
the difference between professional designers and non-professional designer or ordinary stakeholders is that we professional designers have some methods, criteria, and processes to talk about, teach each other, and practice, that non-designers do not have, or at least may have difficulties articulating.
also, professional designers usually design for others and need to understand how these others understand what designers are proposing. this may not be a requirement for physicists designing an experiment, (incidentally they assume that the object of their experiment, nature, doesn't understand how it is being studied). designers cannot avoid building on (a) understanding others understanding (second-order understanding), (b) collaborating with stakeholders (co-designing) for lack of knowing exactly how they think, what they values, and what would be useful to them, and (c) delegating part of design to non-professional designers, providing mere possibilities that stakeholders can make sense of in their own way.
finally, while designers have many ways to become professionals, at least one is that they go thought education during which their talk becomes fine-tuned, their methods become articulated, and justifications for what they do are taught. all of this occurs in talk while practicing what the design discourse means.
--snip--
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