Dear All,

This discussion has been rushing forward so swiftly that it’s been
hard to keep up. Three quick thoughts:

1) Robin Hodge wrote:

“Nice to see that theory v practice is raising its ugly head again.
Mind you - that ‘ugly’ is only in relative terms. To paraphrase de
Bono - ‘Martin is right, the theorists are wrong’ - those who hold
up ‘usability’ studies as the way forward are mired in logical - and
therefore prohibitive analysis. Martin uses that wonderful word
‘empathy’, I would add ‘understanding’, but then as a
practitioner what would I know? All of my packaging designs are
‘wrong’ if one follows usability rules. However they do tend to
be successful for some very strange reason. And I do know that
martin’s bookjackets etc are quite successful. Please tell us where
we have gone wrong.”

I take Robin’s point and partly agree, but I don’t see this as
theory versus practice. This is a case of two theories of practice. At
some point, this deserves a deeper conversation. As it is, Robin and
Martin aren’t wrong. There are several kinds of theories that apply --
Terry is looking for something universal and causal, and that’s a long
way off. I applaud the search recognizing that any scientific search
gets more things wrong than right for the first few decades -- sometimes
the first few centuries.

2) Martin Salisbury wrote:

“I was particularly interested to hear you explain to me about the
design of a book jacket. Have you ever designed a book jacket,
Terry?”

It may be talking out of school, but I have seen some books that Terry
designed and they were not easy to read. The type was too small to e
legible, and the pages were cluttered. It was a bit like my experience
of the unreadable paper edition of Design Science by Vladimir Hubka and
Ernst Eder. Great book, but only accessible to normal eyes once Fil
Salustri made a web edition available at URL: 

    http://deseng.ryerson.ca/DesignScience/

And I am going to disagree with Terry here -- Martin’s work with
books is not “art and design” in the sense of an art form that one
practices for art’s sake. Rather, it is an art in the sense that the
professional practice of medicine is an art or the professional practice
of engineering is an art. (Martin’s illustrations are also art works,
of course.) But book design is a professional skill based on
understandable and manageable principles that do not simply boil down to
computers selecting among possible factorial combinations. 

For the record, I note that many young designers cannot manage a
readable page, either. The fashion for too-small type and unreadable
page layouts makes many design magazines superficially pretty and
utterly useless. What Martin does -- and what good book designers do in
general -- is to design a readable page or text. In my view, there is a
rigorous application of principles involved. We can express some of
these in scientific terms -- others by rules of thumb. But this skill
cannot be axiomatized any more than the practice of medicine. The
practice of medicine requires judgment, skill, and experience together
with reasoned heuristics, as well as an understanding of what we humans
have learned through scientific inquiry.

3) Eduardo Corte-Real wrote:

“Again the particularity of English tend to blur your arguments. The
fact that design designates both a common human activity and a
discipline allows you (and others) to do it. What you surreptitiously
designate as technical design is nothing but engineering and as such
should stay.”

As I see it, design is indeed a common human activity, but it is not a
single discipline. Rather, design is a series of disciplines that meet
in the frame of planning purposeful change toward a desired future.

Without making the full argument here, I will point to a paper,
“Creating Design Knowledge.” In it, I discuss these issues:

    http://hdl.handle.net/2134/1360

In the current issue of Visible Language, I also consider some aspects
of the multiple design disciplines. Since there is wide agreement on the
fact that much design is created by interdisciplinary teams, it makes
sense that these are all potentially design disciplines. 

Friedman, Ken. 2012. “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future for
Design Education.” Visible Language, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 128-151. 

 
http://visiblelanguagejournal.com/web/abstracts/abstract/models_of_design_envisioning_a_future_design_education

As Terry noted, when we did the Wonderground conference in Lisbon,
people self-selected 500 or so different fields as their expert areas
for reviewing. Fewer than 5% of these represent fields classified as art
and design. It remains the case that many questions remain open about
the commonalities and differences of these many design fields and the
appropriate forms of practice and research appropriate to each or to
groups and clusters among them.

Warm wishes,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 |
Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design