dear terry,

first of all, what a designer IS always has an institutional and a political dimension. i'd rather like to ask what practices, skills, obligations and responsibilities do we want the label "designer" to embrace and what do we need to teach them to undertake these responsibilities in practice.

i know that for you designers include numerous professions, but these inclusions occur in your conception. if you look at curricula in universities and professional schools of the 40 or so professions you categorize as designers, rather radical differences become apparent. and if you ask the people you categorize as designers what label they prefer to present themselves to others, you get again a different picture. architects are proud to be architects, not designers. graphic artists tend to be proud to call themselves that way. for them designers are a different kettle of fish.

just to appease you, filippo, and jon, i am a graduated mechanical engineer and have worked for several years in industry and engineering consulting and quit that profession to study design. so for me there is a difference in practice, in mentality, and in the awareness of social and cultural consequences.

to me, one of the crucial differences is the definition of a problem to be solved and the criteria to be achieved. simon is very clear on this. he starts with a problem, hopes to enumerate all possible solutions and then selects the best. because it is rarely possible to enumerate all solutions and evaluate them in real time, he speaks of satisficing. filippo speaks of balance.

i would never say that technological factors are irrelevant to design, as you, terry, read me. if you look at the history of facebook, the idea was to enable people to stay in touch with friends (incidentally, this was not a problem to be solved rather an idea to improve an essential social practice. it became a technical problem only after it was given to programmers and hardware engineers). Here engineering is secondary to the socially beneficial idea.

you couldn't come to facebook, twitter, search engines, the iphone by looking up ethical codes of conduct for engineers. it is nice that such codes exists, but they do not drive what i call design.

we know much about the development of apple, the iphone, etc. steve jobs had ideas of what would inspire people and a knack for sensing which perceptions, habits, and cultural practices could be drawn upon when giving engineers the task to find suitable mechanisms for realize them. to him engineers were secondary to the social processes he wanted to selectively support with a product that changed a lot in fact.

it all boils down to what skills we expect designers to have to make a contribution to material culture, individuals, and society as opposed to what you expect an engineers can deliver. in my opinion, a good deal of this skills has to do with professional methods. my kind of designer would have to be able to collaborate with stakeholders on have a good sense of their various situations, to propose something they would not have come to on their own but are eager to embrace conceptually and in their practices of living, enhancing the well being of one community of stakeholders without or only minimally disadvantaging other communities.

engineering, the way i have seen it taught, does not provide culturally sensitive education. playing with categories of engineering professions does not change this basic fact.

klaus    







-----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 Terence Love
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 11:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Herbert Simon

Dear Klaus,

Thank you for your message. Somewhere in the exchange there appears to be a difference of opinion between us about who is a designer, and about ethical practices relating to social and environmental issues. I'll try to clarify where I was coming from 

For me, when I read the terms 'professional designers' or 'designers', these include engineering designers from all the hundreds of engineering fields, designers from the forty or so Art and Design fields, technical designers from fields such as Information Systems design,  and designers from the built environment design fields of architecture, Urban Design and related design fields, and all the other newer design fields such as learning systems design,  business strategy design,  and policy design.

Designed objects such as the iPhone from the above perspective  are designed predominately by engineering and technical designers with them undertaking perhaps as much as 95% of the overall design activity. What is seen on the surface of the products, of course,  is designed by those specialising with interfaces, visually-based interactions emotions and communication,  but these kinds of  products could not exist without the design work of the more technical realms of designers who are  also aware of and shape what is possible in the social interaction and communication realm.

You seemed in your previous post to be suggesting that designers who work more with social factors and communication are ethically superior to engineering designers in these issues. When I thought of the same situation, what came to mind was the design outcomes that were unhelpful in the social realm such as the was the work of visual designers on anti-smoking packaging that at a deep level appeared to be encouraging people to smoke. Then I remembered other examples of graphic and advertising design that encouraged people into less than helpful behaviours of imbibing things, undertaking activities, buying products, following political doctrines or adopting particular attitudes  that would lead to ill health, social problems, environmental problems or, more generally,  result in less than positive outcomes.  So, I explored the ethical  professional codes of conduct  of some of the major Art and Design professional institutions for designers (AGDA, ICOGRADA.ICSID, IFI, CSD and sundry architects boards)  and found that none of them have anything like the same depth of detail and regulation on social, environmental and ethical issues that engineering designers must satisfy - including in their personal life. None of the codes of conduct I read insists, as the engineering codes of  conduct do , that designers must professionally have an activist role in which if necessary they must act against their clients and employers to ensure positive social, environmental and ethical outcomes else they will be banned from practicing as engineering designers.  This difference extends into differences in everyday design practices. For example, how many graphic, advertising, or communication designers must submit social and environmental impact assessments for their day to day work? This is something relatively common for more technical design fields.  

Hence, my comment in my previous email, which I accept may be irrelevant to you if you see 'designers' as not including the more technical design fields.

In your follow up email, you asked several questions (below) about who I would employ,  and I think we are perhaps on different trains at the same station on this. I'd certainly prefer to employ designers who were experts in the  fields that aligned with particular tasks. I'm also aware, taking a wider view, that all of the tasks you listed depend at heart heavily on technical designers. Also, I'd prefer if all the designers were operating under appropriate professional codes of conduct that included and  gave priority to social and environmental and ethical factors over and above the financial arrangements with clients. 

Not sure what else I can say that would be helpful. And this is a long way off 'Herbert Simon'.

Best wishes,
Terry

---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI

Honorary Fellow
IEED, Management School
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
--

-----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 Klaus Krippendorff
Sent: Monday, 9 September 2013 11:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Herbert Simon

terry,

would you hire an engineer to design a compelling website?
would you hire an engineer to design the interface of a content analysis software for social scientists?
would you hire an engineer to restructure a corporation to save it from bankruptcy?
would you hire an engineer to design a political campaign?
would you hire an engineer to design a financial product that a bank can offer to its clients?
would you hire an engineer to design legislation that improves the ecology of a lake? .........................

in my experiences, engineers solve individual and social problems by proposing technological solutions. most of the time they either don't work out or once implemented, they soon set in motion other problems in need of a solution. left to engineers, such problems tend to create never ending chains of solutions and problems -- unless a sensible person realizes that these are not engineering problems, crying for solutions that allow people to live with them. 

klaus  


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