Dear Adam,
You raise serious points.
I agree, designers currently work with theories, idea generating, support
and validation tools that are in many areas of design slower than needed to
get product to market.
A crucial problem - as you diagnose - is improving this situation. For the
moment, going by hunches and guesses is the best we've got in terms of
getting things done in a short enough time frame to be economically viable
compared to others doing the same. The compromise for the sponsors is that
at the moment they have to accept paying for services that involve huge
amounts of guesswork.
It's interesting that you can already see how other approaches might be
developed based on 'neuropsychs onto working out strong cognitive
techniques, from a designers' perspective, for enabling consistent pathway
guessing from sporadic and incomplete data'.
This is not a new situation in the history of design field development.
Designers have been in this position before in many other areas of design.
It is less than a century ago that most engineering design was done by
guessing and by engineers maintain that it was the only approach and that
engineering was and could only be an 'art'. Hence, many Engineering
graduates were awarded a Bachelor of Art. It is less than a decade since
designers regarded it as an art to design products involving fluid
dynamics - and argued that it was only possible because of time constraints.
Design research and design methods move on - now fluid dynamics is available
at the push of a button in SolidWorks and AutoCad. The extension of this
kind of design research and design method development into visual design
fields is already very established in graphic design software.
That was not my main point in the earlier post.
Perhaps the most fundamental point was suggesting that designers do things
that appear similar to artists (and long ago were based on things art
practices) but designers activities are different from artists' activities
in very fundamental ways.
I'm suggesting that as designers we can identify differences between design
ways of doing things from the purely Art ways of doing things.
For example, I'm suggesting that:
1) when we look very carefully at the activity of (say) when a designer
sketches, they do it in a fundamentally different way from an artist
sketching.
2) when a designer is generating ideas, this is a fundamentally different
activity from an artist generating ideas
3) Appropriate theories, techniques and research methods that are of most
use to designers are fundamentally different to those of artists - even
when designers and artists superficially appear to be doing the same kinds
of activity.
4) That for historical and political reasons designers have been encouraged
to believe that design activity and art activity are identical when
designers and artists appear superficially to be working in the same arena -
e.g. aesthetics, visual communication etc.
I appreciate your message and I'd be delighted to explore ways of improving
game design.
Thank you!
Best wishes,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Adam
Parker
Sent: Wednesday, 9 June 2010 4:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Design - the problem of Art
Hi,
So, I read this in my mail today from Terry that provoked me into action:
It is reasonable to expect a design field to have:
>
> * theories that accurately predict the behaviour of outcomes of a
> design
> * testable theories that accurately predict how particular design
> elements influence outcomes
> * theories and methods for accurately evaluating whether a design
> fulfilled its purposes
>
> These theory foundations are essential to Design becoming a discipline and
> a professional practice rather than an amateur guessing game.
>
Fine, I can see this viewpoint as being *rational*. So, Design with a Big D
is about verification and assessment.
One thing I don't get is this, Terry. Tell me, how do you verify and assess
the unreasonable and irrational wicked problem, in all its nebulous and
branching majesty, from a rational problem structuring perspective?
The reason being - I did a lot of guessing in my very professional practice.
I got paid a lot of money to guess well before I became an academic. My
skill was in getting it right *much* more often than not.
As a practitioner, I remember that my whole mind is more effective than the
"me" of my conscious awareness, so sure, I engage theory - a lot of it - to
feed this guessing beast. I learn new techniques to generate possible
solutions. I learn new ways of explaining why things will work.
But I am always relying on my own awareness to judge where to go, even when
using reams of user stats. Using this hunch-sense in general sure works
better in a lot of cases for wickeds than structured planning does. Also,
budget and time issues can really matter in the professions, and this
approach can help us move quick. Sure, there are dangers, and structure
helps to minimise these - but structure should support our practice, not
chain it.
Our problems in games design are pretty neat. We have to plan game titles so
that they hit multicultural target markets that are nebulous in their
definition, ever changing in their relationships, and who play games on a
variety of hardware that needs to be specified anywhere up to two years in
the future.
We are subject to vectors, like the shift to Facebook games that occurred
over the last year or two, that force us to shift our entire practice model
to cope. And don't get me started on those aspects of our practice, such as
so-called "serious games", that need to do all this* and* deliver from a
pedagogical perspective!
Finally, we have to be cool for some of the most demanding teen audiences in
media-dom, while at the same time providing depth for that
significantly-sized crew aged over 35 who began their play adventure with
Pong.
In other words - who moved my goalposts?
If this sounds flaky, you could grab a few mates and try making a design
validation device that can work with all the incomplete data that is
generated on these real and shifting problems. I'd use it, and my innate
sense tells me you'd make a packet. Development time frame might blow out,
though... ;^)
If you're serious about helping make our practice more rigorous, and I am
sure you are, then help get some neuropsychs onto working out strong
cognitive techniques, from a designers' perspective, for enabling consistent
pathway guessing from sporadic and incomplete data. Or point me to such
research!
That would be FAR more useful to me and my game design undergraduates,
rather than belaboring us to follow design science notions of rational
validation that died with Herbert Simon, or by creating Artificial
Dichotomies through Capitalisation of Key Terms Like Art and Design. Design
science might work for engineers, but, peace, we're building dreamscapes
instead.
Interested in your thoughts, and of those on the list,
Regards,
Adam
--
Adam Parker
Senior Lecturer (Melbourne)
Qantm College Pty Ltd (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne)
235 Normanby Road
South Melbourne VIC 3205
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://melbourne.qantm.com
CRICOS Numbers: 02689A (QLD), 02852F (NSW), 02837E (VIC)
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