Hi Victor

I really should be doing something else, but I cannot ignore your post. 

As you know, there have been some attempts/efforts to build a bibilography of design literatures. We can start one more time, but perhaps in a different way: 

My young dedicated colleagues (yes I adore them) have introduced me to Mendeley and they own a group called 

Design Theory Basics, 
http://www.mendeley.com/groups/483191/design-theory-basics/

I would like to invite you and others to join the group and add your reading list. Perhaps through this channel, we can achieve something organically, openly and collectively. 

(Derek: your post requires more time to response so I have to unfortunately delay it to a near future...this PHD List is addictive...so i have to be careful, OK?)

All the best, 
Rosan




-----Original Message-----
From: Victor Margolin [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Montag, 27. Juni 2011 13:43
Subject: literacy

Dear colleagues:

Ken has responded to my post with a lengthy article and Terry has followed that with a post that is quite far from the issue. I originally raised. I would suggest that Terry might want to change the header on his post as it is a new thread rather than a continuation of my original points. Ken has made many points that are relevant to my argument so I would like to draw out a few issues from Ken's post and see whether we can proceed as a group to hold a conversation about a subject that I believe is crucial for our field. Ken discusses the concern of Socrates that writing reifies mental processes and offers the counter argument that writing allows us to hold conversations across years and even centuries and millennia. It is a testament to Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers, for example, that their work still prompts engagement today. Several years ago I read Aristotle's Ethics and found much in the book that was relevant to my own thinking about contemporary life. To take Ken's point further, the existence of written texts helps to build a community and to extend conversations over time and also space by involving large numbers of people.

         Ken also speaks to the importance of design professors being literate; that is, familiar with the literature in their field. I recently visited an internationally renowned design school whose director told me that there was no need for the school's students to read at all. The method they were being taught, he said, would enable them to design anything imaginable. Ken also makes the point that we build on things that do exist even when we set out to design something new. That is not only true for new products but for new thought. In the sciences, the difference between old and new problems for thought is evident as it is in the development of technology. While less evident in the humanities, scholars in literature or history have built up a body of writing that has moved their fields along. No scholar of English literature, for example, could return to the New Criticism as if no one had thought about it before. It is possible to comment on it, critique it, or seek to revive it, but not to introduce it as something new. As scholars in the field have learned about the New Criticism as part of their training and they are aware of its place in the critical tradition. The argument I made in my first post is that we need to develop the equivalent in the fields of design and design studies. I also agree with Ken that literature beyond the field of design is important for design research. In fact, design research has grown through the incorporation of outside literature into design discourse, making it relevant to design. This is equally true of other fields. In the humanities, the philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, for example, have informed art history, literature, and even anthropology.

         Ken amplifies my point that literacy involves mastering and understanding a literature. The consequence of not doing that, as Ken notes, is poor scholarship, which comes first and foremost from poor training. When students are not exposed to the literature of their field and taught to read it, they cannot easily develop the tools to become meaningful scholars. There is much more to say but I would like to open this discussion up to others on the list. There has thus far been a curious silence in response to a topic that I believe is central to the future of design education and research. I don't think it essential at this moment to present a canonical list of texts but only to assert that each professor, scholar, and program director could probably come up with a list. I can suggest the bibliography of postwar design writing that I included in my edited volume, Design Discourse, in 1989. It covers the period 1945-1989 and of course does not take into account the veritable explosion of writing, largely in journals but also in books, that has occurred since then.

         I would like to conclude with a reference to Ken's progressive research program. I am not calling for a linear progression but instead for some directional movement that provides evidence of maturation in the field of design research. We have many examples from other fields and disciplines to choose from - histories of sociology and anthropology, histories of art history and literature - all of which document the way thought has developed respectively. I am hopeful that we can create a wider discussion of this topic on the list. Themes would include: is there a difference between studying design and design studies, what role does literacy play in design education at all levels, which texts are seminal and why. We need to move away from the idea that design literacy is only valuable if it can inform the pragmatic design of a product, service, or anything else and understand that literacy informs consciousness and consciousness informs being and being informs design.