Hi Ken,
Good post.
Its missing the design theory work and education history in engineering
design. For example, service design in engineering design education has been
commonplace from 40 years ago ditto user interface design. From 40 years
ago, systems design involving organisation design and service design has
been also taught as part of or as a minor to engineering design, as has
been environmental design and biomimicry design or organisations and
artefacts. The theoretical bases of these areas were already well
established before that point.
Best regards,
Terry
-----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 Ken
Friedman
Sent: Monday, 22 July 2013 4:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Design Thinking
Dear All,
This is a response occasioned by contributions to the thread titled "Re:
Design Thinking Survey 2013 - participants needed." This note is about
design thinking rather than the survey. I have therefore changed the subject
header.
Stephen Allard's reply to GK VanPatter occasions thoughts on the issue of
design thinking. This involves the literature and practice both. These are
my views here. I don't speak for GK or for Stephen, but I address issues
that each of them brought up.
Those who are interesting in GK's thoughts on these issues will find a good
collection of his writings on Academia.edu:
http://nextd.academia.edu/GKVanPatter
After reading GK's book on Issuu, I started to write some notes. I was
thinking about GK's book when Stephen posted, offering an opportunity to
address these issues in a larger context.
As Stephen suggests, the issues in GK's model have a rich history in
literature and in practice. What GK's model does is bring these issues
together into a parsimonious and concise design framework.
As it is, these issues have history in other frameworks. Using a different
vocabulary, I covered the full range of these issues in the courses I
developed on strategic design at Oslo Business School in the early 1990s.
We described the issues using verbal rubrics rather than using numbers.
Numbered rubrics -- Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 -- make design process sound a
bit like software releases, but the analogy doesn't quite work for me.
Almost all of these versions of design process date back several decades, at
least in business schools and social science faculties.
As GK notes, art and design schools teach artefact design. This is a legacy
effect of their history and a legacy of the fields in which art and design
school studio teachers work. While many such schools are trying to develop
further, change is difficult.
Business and management schools teach service design, organization design,
and strategic design. Nearly all business schools teach organization design,
and many have done so for nearly half a century. Service design came in
about a quarter century back, with experience design coming in over the past
decade or so, often as an outgrowth of service design. A few business
schools add strategic design and design thinking. These are schools such as
Rotman School of Management in Toronto, UTS Business School in Sydney, and
the Weatherhead School at Case Western Reserve. At the Norwegian School of
Management, I was professor of leadership and strategic design. I worked in
knowledge management and strategic design as well teaching organization
theory and organization design and some aspects of systems design. These
subjects are labeled Design 3.0 and Design 4.0 in GK's model.
Schools of informatics and some business and management schools teach
systems design and systems thinking. This is also the case for such schools
as the Knowledge School at the Japan Advanced Institute for Science and
Technology, the Haas Business School at University of California,
Hitotsubashi University in Japan, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
ETH Zurich. This was also the case for the department of knowledge
management we had in Norway where at least half a dozen people worked with
advanced areas of systems design.
These fields aren't new. They are simply new to design schools and design
consultancies. That's why many of us have been encouraging design schools to
broaden their horizons and deepen their insights.
GK is right to note that folks from design schools reflect a focus on what
he labels Design 1 and Design 2 when they visit Humantific. People from ETH,
JAIST, or Haas are more likely to visit IDEO, Deloitte, or Alexander
Proudfoot than Humantific. Because Humantific attracts people from design
schools, GK's visitors reflect an older tradition. People from schools of
business or informatics visit other kinds of professional practices.
Consultancies in professional practice have been working with large-scale
systems design for years. McKinsey, IDEO, Alexander Proudfoot, Deloitte, and
dozens more have this kind of practice. Some do it better, some worse, but
they all do it.
Many governmental organizations, quangos, and NGOs also work in this space.
At the large scale, these include such organizations as the United Nations
and the World Bank. Australia has DesignGov, the Australian Centre for
Excellence in Public Sector Design, Denmark has MindLab, and Finland has had
Sitra and Helsinki Design Lab. Other organizations work with government from
outside - Policy Lab in Boston or ThinkSpace in Canberra.
Several management consultancies have been working up and down the full
scale of design frameworks for years - especially management consultancies
that own branding firms and design firms. For example, Burson Marsteller
bought Landor back in the late 1980s, while many design firms have merged
into global consultancies spanning several disciplines that bring them from
designing brands and artefacts into different areas of strategic design -
they may not stretch as far as systems design, but they cover more design
fields than they would have done in the 1970s and 1980s.
Systems design dates back over half a century to the work of people such as
W Edwards Deming, Peter Checkland, Stafford Beer, and West Churchman. With
knowledge management and the work of such thinkers as Ikujiro Nonaka, Georg
von Krogh, or Hirotaka Takeuchi, systems thinking built bridges to
organization design and organizational culture building.
Organization design dates back half a century farther, to such thinkers as
Mary Parker Follett and Henri Fayol in the late 1800s and early 1900s,
followed by such figures as W. Edwards Deming, Peter Drucker, and Herbert
Simon in the 1950s and 1960s.
Richard L Daft's textbook - Organization Theory and Design - provides an
elegant, well-informed overview of the field. Daft gives a robust
theoretical overview, representing the challenges, problems, and trade-offs
to be considered when we design human organizations for purpose-driven
goals. The book is now in its 11th edition. The latest edition of the book
is always expensive, but prices for used copies drop dramatically for
earlier editions with used copies easy to find at Amazon.
Design thinking is distinguished by iterative approaches to design with
prototyping, trialing, and testing. While this is typical of design
thinking, this approach is also visible and explicit in he work of Deming,
Follett, and Drucker. In fact, this approach is central to any system or
process that involves close, iterative contact with the world as the basis
of robust and effective results.
This is also a key aspect for those who apply complexity theory to systems
design. This is clear in the work of such thinkers and practitioners as
Michael Lissack or Robert Axelrod.
In looking at Stephen's note, I'd agree that Frederick Winslow Taylor or
Alfred Sloan designed organizations, but I'd say they took an engineering
design approach rather than a design thinking approach.
The dictators that Stephen mentions designed societies, and their work was
systemic. Nevertheless, the dictators and tyrants in Stephen's list imposed
systems on people by force and terror. There is a difference between this
approach to systems design and the kind of participatory systems design
visible in a design thinking framework. That's where the work of people such
as Follett, Churchman, or Drucker come into play, or the work of
organizations such as MindLab or DesignGov.
I am giving deep thought to such issues for a practical reason. I am
launching a project to map design capacity in organizations across Australia
and around the world. This project is funded by the Flagship Collaborative
Fund of the Future Manufacturing Flagship of the CSIRO, Australia's
Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization. While our
flagship focuses on manufacturing, the project will examine design capacity
of many kinds, including design thinking. We are reflecting on different
models as we prepare.
GK argues that what he calls the "literature" - the ironic quotes are his -
covers the history of Design 1 and Design 2. This is a narrow slice of a
broad literature, and it does not include the literature of the fields I've
mentioned here.
GK and I have argued about the research literature since he interviewed me
in the NextD Journal several years ago. For me, there are better ways to
proceed than to argue that the literature is flawed.
Thinkers in many fields have examined Design 3 and Design 4 for more than a
century now. This began in the era of Mary Parker Follett's work as a
consultant on organization design to President Theodore Roosevelt. In those
days, Max Weber and Georg Simmel were still writing, not to mention such
pragmatist philosophers as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead; the next
generation included Max Lerner, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict; more
recently we have had Mary Catherine Bateson, Warren Bennis, Tom Peters,
Ricardo Semler, and dozens more I have not yet mentioned. These people have
not been writing about Design 3.0 or Design 4.0, but they have been
thinking, writing, and consulting on how human beings design and build
organizations, cultures, and systems.
Rather than complain that the peer-reviewed literature of design journals is
obsolete, I'd like to see GK explicitly describe his models and show us how
they work. For several years now, I've been urging GK to contribute to the
peer-reviewed journal literature with articles and comments that bring his
views into the larger conversation. That's the way to improve the design
practice side of the design thinking literature.
The areas of the design thinking covered in the literatures of organization
design and systems design are in far better shape.
I agree with GK that we don't address these issues well enough in design
schools or art academies. We do, however, address them in research
universities.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor |
Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia |
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462 | Home Page
http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<h
ttp://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page
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Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University |
Shanghai, China
--
Stephen B Allard wrote:
-snip-
At what point do the figures of history that are involved in organizational
design (i.e Ackoff, Drucker, Sloan, Taylor et al) and social design (i.e.
Gallup, Freud, Bernays, Lippman, Goebbels, Goring, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim
et al) enter your Design 3 and Design 4 matrix levels of Design?
In your view, where does the line between professional design
influence/ability on progress and grand social strategy/design lie? Where
do firms like Booz Allen, Mckinsey, Hill and Knowlton, Edelman et al fit
into the Design 3 and Design 4 levels of your matrix? What of Google,
Microsoft, Apple, Sprint, AT&T?
-snip-
GK VanPatter wrote:
-snip-
. the history of design thinking that is reflected in "literature" tends to
be the history of Design 1 and Design 2. The case studies, heroes and values
that are found there also reflect Design 1 and Design 2 logic. A large
percentage of the threads on this list reflect this logic and orientation as
well.
This has not been the furthest reach present of design thinking for at least
10-15 years. Think multiple parallel tracks moving a different speeds rather
than one track. The single track history thing is dead. Design thinking
today is more like a mongrel from the SPCA than a pure bread Labrador or
race horse.
Regardless of that messy movement forward most academies continue to have
and promote deep legacy systems in Design 1 and 2. That tends to be what the
various faculties know how to do and thus many keep presenting this now
narrow retro orientation as what design thinking is today. Much of that is
about design thinking as product, service and experience creation. However
seasoned some PhD students might be it is inherently difficult for most
operating within such systems to suggest that the field is actually in a
different place than where their school is. We hear this often from folks
coming to visit us for conversation and advice.
On line it is not difficult to find many foreshortened Design 1 and 2 views
being presented as, sold as, what design thinking is today. There are now
entire design thinking movies reflective of that narrow Design 1 and 2
orientation. Seeing all of the marketing energy can also be confusing.
Understand that most are seriously oversimplified reductionist pictures. The
world outside is considerably more complex.
The complexity twist is that you can create a picture of design thinking to
meet academic awareness and requirements that would not at all reflect what
is already going on in practice. We see a lot of this kind of work being
produced within the chasm so to speak. Your output can meet all academic
requirements, model all the proper academic protocols and not be reflective
of practice at all.
-snip-
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