Dear Martin,
This is a quick follow-up to my prior post. A crucial typographical error appears in my note. Where I wrote of Frayling's essay: "The lack of experience and expertise in design and design research explains was he was unable to address design research effectively." the sentence should have read:
"His [Frayling's] lack of experience and expertise in design and design research explains WHY he was unable to address design research effectively."
In arguing that Frayling's essay Frayling’s essay was a step backward that took people away from the pioneering work of people such as Buckminster Fuller and Don Norman, I am arguing that Frayling wrote a speculative essay that essentially treated research by artists and research by designers as roughly the same thing. This is because Frayling failed to distinguish between art as a creative personal inquiry in which the artist works for art's sake and design as a creative service-focused enterprise in which the designer solve problems for clients, customers, and end-users. The essay is really a speculative note on art research by an art historian and scholar of spaghetti Westerns that directs attention away from design research by working designers.
It should be noted that Buckminster Fuller's design work and design research began in the 1920s, long predating Frayling's essay. The same is true for much of Don Norman's work, including the seminal book now titled The Design of Everyday Things. This book first appeared in 1988 as The Psychology of Everyday Things. While Norman was at that time a professor of psychology, he was also a practicing designer and engineer, a consultant to industry, and he had long written on user-centered design.
In my view, Frayling did not help the field to advance. The good part of his essay was the notion that designers could engage in research. This notion was not new. The problematic part was equating design with art, while suggesting that Read's method of learning art through practice was also a method of answering research questions in design. As long as design involves solving problems for stakeholders whose problems we help to solve, the methods we use must be defined by the problems that give rise to the questions we must answer.
Yours,
Ken
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