Dear all posting on the uniqueness of design thinking,
First let me thank Ranjan's post for his kind words. But also for his attempt to read all of the Sciences of the artificial. Who have read it all knows what I mean by sudoku. Someone who read it also is Kari andhis paper exposes politely what are the frailties in adopting Simon's stance when studying design.
Let me also say that I agree with Don when he reports his desmay about his second reading. By building himself as a designer and design scientist, he came back to find somthing that is not about design because through his working life he understood better what design is and was.
Still, I know that Don and I disagree on what design might be or is not, just for having a conversation in a museum a couple of years ago. Still we agree that the sciences of the artificial is not a book on design.
However, Simon's argument that not only engineers design but, I would dare to say, even designers do, and that, devising courses of action to change existing situations into preferred ones, migth be a good definition of design, but is not. because it is not a definition, and if it were, it would be useless because precisely describes an existencial situation common to all humans refined in professions.
For that matter I could offer Di Lampedusa definition of design: "something got to change so that everything stays the same", as a follow up.
Back to the uniqueness of design thinking, what is really interesting are the courses of action that designers devise discrete from the others. for that matter we should base our studies having in mind a social ontology that includes:
higher education on design; objecs labelled as design objects; self proclaimed design museums and publications on design, professional organisations of designers and, why not, what government Laws define as Design (and not what lawyers do while "designing").
All of this looking for consistency and not exceptions. We should not be interested in one obscure university department that call itself "pharmaceutical design" or study "designer drugs". For consistency we need history. Both history and History.
Again, that,s why 6 years in university studying design may contribute for the uniqueness of design thinking (hardly wouldn't). Otherwise you won't have contact with design history, design stories and what each school calls design theory or design studies. All this when you are constructing yourself as a designer while others are constructing themselves as engineers or lawyers.
I hope to adress other interesting matters such as some of Jude' s soon.
Just a quick note for Ken: when you were mentioning Simon's erudition you were already responding to my rephrasing of Ford's sentence about American and European writers. You assumed that when I mentioned self-proclaimed design scientists I was thinking of Simon. But then, alas, these were my own words inside Ford's.
I must resume my vacations
Best,
Eduardo
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|