Hi James,
I remember the keynote and, if I remember right, Don was referring to cutting-edge innovation and the use by designers of design research in their thinking, rather than simply ' design research has a limited impact on design practice'. I seem to remember Don was suggesting science and engineering comes first to get innovations and design activity comes later.
Design research over the last 5 decades HAS had significant effects on design practice and design outcomes - but through a different route.
Instead, the outcomes of design research have been mainly embodied in computer-aided-design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator or on the more technical side, Autocad, Solidworks and Revit.
The outcome has been very significant increases in the quality of design outcomes, significant shortening of design cycles, improvements in the reliability of designs, reduction in design failures, and, significant for designers themselves, reductions in numbers of designers needed.
Developments over the last two decades have now reached the point of computerised automation of creative design activity in areas such as such as Graphic Design.
An example of an outcome of design research in this area is 'Gaudii' (C. Glez-Morcillo et al (2010). Gaudii: An Automated Graphic Design Expert System, Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-10), pp. 1775-1780. Available https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/IAAI/IAAI10/paper/view/1550/2354 ) There are many other similar initiatives across the fields of design.
This suggests two significant challenges:
1. What should designers be learning to stay ahead of this radical change?
2. What should design schools be teaching to keep even further ahead of these radical game changing outcomes?
The real challenge is for design educations as design programs need in knowledge terms to be at least 5 years ahead in terms of teaching the new skills designers will need to use - just because of the lag of education systems.
Best wishes,
Terence
==
Dr Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
PhD, B.A. (Hons) Eng, P.G.C.E
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030
[log in to unmask] +61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
-----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 James Self
Sent: Thursday, 9 August 2012 10:28 AM
To: Dr Terence Love
Subject: Relationship Between Design Research & Practice
Dear All,
Building upon Friedman et al's (2011) study - exploring quality perception of design journals - I'm interested in looking at the perceptions practicing designers hold of academic design journals.
Back in 2009 (iasdr09, Seoul) Don Norman stood up and claimed design research has a limited impact on design practice. Could anyone share any references they have which relate to the relationship between design research and practice (generally) and industrial design research and practice specifically?
Many Thanks,
James.
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