Dear Danielle,

Thank you for the pointer to your paper. I enjoyed reading it - useful.

My experience has been  a little different to what you described in your email. I've now seen over 30 years of service design projects mainly  targeted at social development. Many were formally evaluated in terms of a variety of measures  and a large number of the remainder were informally evaluated.

Coincidentally,  many of the projects I've seen or been involved in  were in Lancaster. The earliest I remember were in the mid-70s. There have been  dozens. Some are still around such as 'SingleStep' (started by Mark Walsh, Trudi Cooper and colleagues. Mark was also a founder and designer of the  Lancaster MisfitCity project. Trudi is now the Director of the Social Program Evaluation Research Unit that I work for in Australia. Small world -  yet there are extensive established service design networks in some areas). Jogging my memory writing this, went over similar ground with Bob Jessop ( IAS, Lancaster) in the Sultans around 2005.

The tools of 'Social Impact Assessment' have been a standard for evaluation of service programs  from the late 70s along with Cost-Benefit analysis which can be tweaked to do impact evaluation. One example was the design for the Australian Youth Service to 2015 - the design (undertaken in 2000) used an evaluation based on social impact assessment. .There are a raft of other evaluation tools including some that were developed in Lancaster particularly as a result of its emphasis on Systems, OR, OM, Ecology and Design (then mainly  in Engineering) and the strong Youth and Community Dept at St Martins. . One design I was involved in was for a process for  'real-time evaluation of changes in social capital' which offered a potential basis for ongoing outcomes-based assessment of community development interventions. Other evaluation tools came from  the literatures of  'community participation in planning/decisionmaking', group dynamics, informal education evaluation, consciousness-raising , development, Illich, and training for transformation (Friere). Looking at the work in Australia, the last 20 years has seen a steady shift to design implemented via program logic models with a wide choice of evaluation approaches defined in the logic model.    

I'm at Lancaster for a couple of weeks and interested to learn where you are taking this work in Imagination, particularly in terms of service design in the realm of social program interventions.  

Best wishes,
Terry

===
Dr Terence Love FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
[log in to unmask]  Mob: +61 434 975 848

Dept of Design, 
Researcher, Social Program Evaluation Research Unit
Dept of Psychology and Social Sciences
Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

Dept of Design
Curtin University, Western Australia

Honorary Visiting  Researcher, IEED
Management School, Lancaster University, UK
===



-----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 Daniela Sangiorgi
Sent: 12 October 2011 09:46
To: Dr Terence Love
Subject: Re: Design and PhD

Dear all
I have also been quite impressed how little evaluation of impact there is today on service design projects working in particular within communities and with transformational aims.
I have been working in Service Design research for a bit and am trying to integrate as much as possible knowledge from social and behavioral sciences for my own understanding and for students as well, to fill fill this gap. My recent article on the International Journal of Design is exploring some of these issues http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/940/338

Hope this contributes to the discussion
Best wishes
Daniela

______________________

Daniela Sangiorgi, PhD
Imagination@Lancaster
Lancaster University

tel 0044 (0)1524 510877
www.imagination.lancaster.ac.uk
www.servicedesignresearch.com

Design for Services book out!
http://www.gowerpublishing.com/isbn/9780566089206


On 12 Oct 2011, at 07:05, Ken Friedman wrote:

> Geez, Dori,
> 
> You must have missed the point of Don Norman's two articles, the earlier article on how design education must change and the recent article on brilliance without substance. One problem in our field is that many designers who use design as a social tool are failing to achieve the goals they seek to achieve because they lack the skills they need.
> 
> Design as a social function is an applied social science. To the degree that design is an applied social science, as Don argues, then we actually need to know what our goals ought to be, how to achieve them, and we need to measure whether we have done what we think we have done.
> 
> The reason we discuss education on this list is simple: this is a list about doctoral education in design. The PhD is a research degree. The purpose of earning a PhD is to learn, among other things, to use tools that enable us to find ways actually to do what we think we are doing and to find out whether we have done it.
> 
> The situation of design today is the situation of medicine in the 19th century. Doctors were vocational practitioners. Despite the fact that they took the Hippocratic Oath, medicine generally did more harm than good. It was only after Abraham Flexner reformed medical education that we moved to research as the foundation of medicine that began to cure more people than it harmed. Today, a century on, evidence-based medicine does far more good.
> 
> If you want to argue that the PhD is harming the ability of designers to make beautiful things, I would say that this is debatable but you'd have the right to make the argument. If you argue that research training and a PhD impedes the ability of designers to engage in design as a social function, the evidence suggests you are wrong. 
> 
> To this, I'll refer to Derek Miller's posts -- The Policy Lab actually engages in design as a social function, and they do so by understanding appropriate goals, developing methods to achieve them, and reviewing what they have done to see if they have achieved those goals. This requires research, and it requires evidence-based practice. In applied social science, learning to do this rather than simply aspiring to do good is the purpose of the PhD. 
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Ken
> 
> 
> On Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:25:44 +0200, Halldor Gislason <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> I must admit that this on the whole is a very sad discussion. One: does PhD damage design and Two: does design understand what PhD is!?
>> A discussion about education and processes rather than design itself as a field of activism in society. I must admit that very many are over excited about PhD issues rather than what design is as a social function. This is sad and has nothing to do with how designers are active in developing new horizons for design as a social tool.
>> But great to see it for many to understand better how PhD programs are changing and damaging good design activity and maybe the best result is to stop using the word 'design' for one's work.
>> Dori
>> 
>> 
>> Professor Halld�r G�slason,
>> Oslo National Academy of the Arts