Dear Victor,
Thanks for your comment — I agree with you. Even so, I think it unlikely for the field to move from a culture that neglects literature reviews and bibliographic essays to a rich intellectual tradition of in-depth studies on single authors.
Along the way, it will advance the field for people to grapple with the literature in many ways. The book by Clifford Geertz (1989) is somewhat closer to what you want to see, but the model for this kind of work is generally found in fields that study the intellectual development and influence of major thinkers. In sociology and philosophy, for example, George Herbert Mead’s work has been gaining a new and sympathetic audience with the kinds of studies you suggest for Maldonado or Papanek. The kinds of studies you’d like to see for Papanek, Maldonado, Fuller, and others exist for Mead (see, f.ex., Aboulafia 1991, 2001; Burke and Skowronski 2013; Cook 1993; Joas 1997).
There are three major issues that lead to this kind of attention. First, a field must be old enough to develop these traditions. It is possible to locate Mead in the well-established modern field of sociology that dates back nearly two centuries now, longer still if we consider sociology under the broad banner of the human sciences. But Mead is also a philosopher, rooted in a field that has a published literature dating back over 2,500 years. Design is not old enough as a research field to support this kind of culture yet.
Second, a thinker must have been demonstrably influential enough to merit attention – recent book-length attention to Mead’s work follows hundreds of articles, essays, and PhD thesis projects. There is also an historical frame – Mead lived from 1863 to 1931. Along with John Dewey, Charles Saunders Peirce, and William James, Mead was one of the four seminal figures who created the pragmatist tradition. Further, Mead worked with Dewey at two universities and influenced several generations of thinkers in each of three fields. Of all the names you mentioned, it seems to me that only Buckminster Fuller would meet this kind of standard – and Fuller’s work is indeed beginning to attract this kind of interest.
Third, a field must itself have a tradition of this kind of literature. Our field pretty well lacks this kind of writing and thinking. A few studies of the kind you advocate are beginning to appear – for example, books on Fuller or Protzen and Harris’s (2010) recent study on Horst Rittel’s theories.
So I agree with you. What I tried to suggest is ways to develop a tradition of the kind of research culture that produces these kinds of deep studies.
This leaves an open question. From where we now, what should do to develop a research culture that produces in-depth studies on the thought and writing of significant thinkers in our field?
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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References
Aboulafia, Mitchell, ed. 1991. Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead (SUNY Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Aboulafia, Mitchell. 2001. The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Burke, F. Thomas, and Krzysztof Skowronski, eds. 2013. George Herbert Mead in the Twenty-First Century. London: Lexington Books.
Cook, Gary A. 1993. George Herbert Mead. The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1989. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press.
Joas, Hans. 1997. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Protzen, Jean-Pierre, and David J Harris. 2010. The Universe of Design: Horst Rittel's Theories of Design and Planning. New York: Routledge.
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Victor Margolin wrote:
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First; I was not calling for lit reviews. My comment refers to thorough studies of major thinkers in the field in order to understand how their thinking about design developed. The purpose of such studies is to learn more about how they evolved their understanding of design rather than to see whether or not their ideas contributed to a theory of design.
--snip--
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