Dear Francois,
Thanks for your reply.
While I agree with you in a general sense, the issue I raised is a matter for background understanding rather than an invitation to specify the proportions in a ratio of creation to assembling.
Professional designers solve problems for the stakeholders and problem owners that hire them. The solution to each problem is to some degree embedded within the problem. (See, f.ex., the discussion in Friedman 1997.) The problem comes first – from this, and from client needs, comes the solution.
Some solutions can be readily managed through assembling applied in following a careful diagnosis. Other solutions require grappling with the problem through a major series of heuristic attacks, problem definitions, problem redefinitions, and finally a great deal of creativity to yield a solution. (See, f.ex., Aczel 1996 or Singh 1997.) Most cases of medicine require a physician to diagnose and design a treatment for easily understood, well defined problems. Some medical problems yield only to years of inquiry and study. The same is true for a great deal of ordinary design practice where clients bring well-defined, well understood problems to a designer or design team, as against the cases where designers invent or create something innovative, radical, or possibly new. Even then, the very newest innovation will generally include some forms of information and understanding from what has one before. (See, f.ex., Fuller 1981 for a big-picture view of radical innovation and the timelines from creation to implementation in daily diagnostic solutions.)
Anyhow, we’re essentially agreeing on the issue. Given that most design solutions are case-based problems for specific clients, customers, stakeholders or end-users, it is never possible to know how muchinnovation a case requires against assembly, with different proportions of diagnosis, heuristics, and mastery used in each phase. Therefore, I don’t think it is generally possible or useful to specify the proportions of creation we use as against the degree of assembly – we don’t know until we’ve solved the problem. What the problem pays professional designers for is expertise, experience, and mastery – the degree of the new that each solution may entail is not as important as whether the solution meets the needs in solving problems or creating new and desired opportunities.
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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References
Aczel, Amir D. 1996. Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem. London: Penguin Books.
Friedman, Ken. 1997. “Design Science and Design Education.” In The Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, ed. Helsinki: University of Art and Design Helsinki, 54-72. Available at URL:
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/189707
Fuller, Buckminster. 1981. Critical Path. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Singh, Simon. 1997. Fermat’s Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World’s Greatest Minds for 358 Years. London: , Fourth Estate.
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Francois Nsenga wrote:
—snip—
I too am another of those who think our profession badly needs to engage in ‘greater depth and nuance’ of the language we regularly use to announce or comment on what we do as ‘Designers’.
If then “nearly all innovations involve some elements of assembling as well as elements of creation”, our expertise pertains more to ‘creating’ artefacts? Or more to ‘assembling’ components into ‘things’ (2)? And if our expertise, as innovators, pertains to both, shouldn’t we specify, for ourselves and for our interlocutors, in which proportions of each we exercise our profession (3)?
—snip—
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