Dear GK,
This is a quick wrap-up from the thread inviting people to participate in your new book.
You first invited list members to participate in the book on 17 November. Between then and 7 December, the thread evolved into a series of 48 posts. These 48 posts represent a ranging series of conversations and comments with just over 20,000 words. Of that total, you wrote 40% -- nearly 8,000 words across 14 posts.
Over the past week, I read the entire series of posts carefully. I never mentioned, commented on, or reacted to your invitation.
Neither did I offer any views on how you should do your book. It’s meretricious to call me a “backseat driver.”
I did not discuss your invitation. I did not discuss Humantific. I did not discuss your work as a professional consultant. I will discuss you comments in two posts (copied below).
You wrote, “I have no problem personally with your cross-over choices Ken. It’s a free country out there, but I do not consider you to be unbiased in the various perspectives that you are serving up on this list.”
This is an ill-considered comment. My views are widely published. All you need to do to demonstrate bias is to quote the biased statement. You haven’t quoted me – you’ve rephrased my words to suit yourself, accusing me of bias based on your words, not mine. You've rewritten my ideas in your own words, words with a very different meaning to my statements. Your profession is facilitating processes and conversations — I expected better of you than this conversation.
As a consultant, your motives are not without bias. If another consultant posted the kinds of comments you have written here, you would probably write what you wrote here: “I do not consider you to be unbiased in the various perspectives that you are serving up on this list.”
You wrote, “You keep talking about this list. We keep talking with the marketplace.” You do keep talking with the marketplace. But you also talk with this list and about it.
With nearly 8,000 words in 14 posts over the past three weeks, you are an active list member. With over 160 posts over the past ten years, you are more active than most. You have been active long enough to know that there are no “officially designated change leaders on this list.” People put ideas forward. Some people agree and others disagree. That is the nature of a discussion list.
No one is worried about you “pro-actively organizing such an initiative.” All list members are free to post calls and invitations. You have been a list regular for ten years now, and you are free to post calls and invitations. You also know perfectly well that I have encouraged your publications and suggested that others read them. My one modest complaint about your Issuu books is that they are problematic for scholarly purposes or for research. The side show page-by-page format makes it difficult to read them carefully and it is impossible to print them to permit readers to annotate the pages.
Even so, I wrote nothing about your initiative or your invitation.
The comments I made involved disagreements with specific comments and questions about others.
If you wish to review what I wrote – or what anyone wrote – in the thread, I posted an attachment to the list with a complete transcript from November 17 to December 9. If you missed it, you can find a copy in the “teaching documents” section of my Academia page.
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
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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GK VanPatter wrote:
[November 28, 2013]
--snip--
Ken: Happy to read your list properties defining text however that was not the focus of Mauricio Mejía’s question to me. Nor was it the focus of my reply.
First asking about my post on the subject of The OTHER Design Thinking Call for Participants, Mauricio was commenting on the nature of who gets asked to do what in the marketplace today from his personal perspective. I respect that view and was not disagreeing with Mauricio’s observation but rather commenting on the shifting nature of public perception among professionals that often plays into who gets asked to do what today.
In this regard I was inviting Mauricio to consider the shifting nature of public perception on the subjects of design and design thinking by contemplating which of the two discussion groups is likely to be impacting perception among professionals more, the most populated Design Thinking group on LinkedIn that presently has 24,000+ members or the PhD Design group with 2,500 subscribers. Don’t take it personally Ken but in terms of impact on public perception among other professionals inclined to engage with the design community there seems to be not much of a contest there.
It was not clear 2 years ago or even 18 months ago but it has been clear for some time that LinkedIn has captured much of the professional discussion group business. I need not go into here how they have done that.
If you think a new generation of professional folks around the world, organizational leaders, etc. who are engaged with and or hire design firms get their perceptions today from the weekend section of the New York Times more so then from the global social networks I cannot help you there Ken. As I pointed out in my post, “whether everyone likes it or not” this change is occurring. You personally not recognizing or liking the change does not make it any less relevant.
Now if I was a senior leader based in an institutional design education setting that seeks to continue being relevant and seeks to continue generating revenue by charging fees to design students and I knew there was an active and growing global conversation occurring every day and every week with a listening attendance of 24,000 leaders and wanna-be leaders from various disciplines that were constantly being told that design education has become not only irrelevant but a determent to the understanding and practice of design thinking, that the knowledge of one is not relevant to the other, I would, on behalf of my school and my students do a little listen-up there. I would not only do a listen-up I would put my brain to work on understanding what was really going on there, what forces were at work, what was the agenda behind that kind of messaging, who was driving it and what might be done about it. I would do that understanding that such an agenda constantly being pitched to 24,000 business folks around the world by characters with competitive interests would very likely directly impact not only the near future in which my present students will find themselves, but also on how future students will view my schools offerings, indeed all design school offerings.
I would not bother myself with the defensive posturing of various detractors suggesting that it is not relevant. I would instead reach out and figure out how to connect up with others who, for what ever reasons, see what’s going on as important enough to give some consideration. At the very least I would do that much, for my students and my school, for my community and I would probably do even more.
What baffled me most about your long rationalization was the presumption that entangling your own interests, your personal capacity limitations and what you have chosen as your personal focus as a leader was not only relevant but central to considerations. From my perspective that logic stream had no place in the conversation and made no sense at all.
At any given moment the various challenges facing the design community are not and cannot be viewed or evaluated through the personal interests and capacity limitations of one individual’s comfort zone. These are collective challenges so the lens in terms of whether they are relevant or not is one of collectives. I cannot speak to what might be occurring in the design education community or the design research community but I can certainly tell you that the practice community would not be considering notions of what the challenges are or what the forward motion possibilities are based on your personal interests, on your personal capacity and or on your interest in Don Norman’s product design work. If you think the practice community is going to be bounded by the thinking of Don Norman you really should get out more Ken. With all respect to Don it seems highly unlikely that would ever happen.
If you have personally chosen a path or an interpretation of leadership that is focused around this list as an expression of your own comfort zone, lets not get that confused with the many challenges facing the strategic design community. If you see no need for any leadership beyond this list that is your choice to make Ken. That does not mean others have to have the same narrow interpretation of leadership, its possibilities, opportunities and or its responsibilities.
I will save my comments on your speculations regarding how product design logic projects into organizational change logic (it doesn’t) for another day. As I recall I spoke at some length on this subject at Swinburne so I am surprised to see you still making such assumptions and projections here.
--snip--
and GK VanPatter wrote:
[December 6, 2013]
--snip--
Ken: I am puzzled by your rather forceful reaction to this relatively simple invitation to participants. For some unknown reason you seem to be intent on projecting your personal interests onto this relatively straight-forward invite. I really have no interest in having this good-faith call for participation become entangled in the politics of this list.
To reconfirm: The OTHER Design Thinking Call for Participants was simply posted on this list, along with numerous other locations to signal launch of the initial gathering stage. The project is not being designed around your personal interests or the interests of this list group.
The book is intended to be part of a larger conversation with the broader marketplace. It is a relatively simple giving voice project. Since we are in practice and not academia it is possible that we have a different understanding of what the marketplace dynamics are than you might have. That’s ok.
You keep talking about this list. We keep talking with the marketplace.
I would be surprised if you did not know that the design as magic thinking school in its various permutations remains deeply entrenched in that marketplace. I am guessing that you would recall encountering that school of thought at your own design thinking conference held several years ago at Swinburne. Certainly that conference was clear evidence that the dynamics of the real world are considerably different from the dynamics of any particular list. As an attendee at that conference I was certainly well aware that various magic thinking advocates were present in full force.
To restate: This call for participants, is directed at practice leaders engaged in the marketplace for at least 5 years without the previously stated presumptions embedded in their approach regarding product, service and experience design outcomes. The invitation has never had anything to do with undergraduate education.
For us this initiative is a natural extension of the research and findings work that went into the book; Innovation Methods Mapping / Demystifying 80+ Years of Innovation Process Design.
http://www.humantific.com/the-other-design-thinking/
Yes, as I have already pointed out to you on numerous occasions most leading practices have multiple streams of on going research. You keep on insisting otherwise as if research is exclusive to list members here, which of course is absurd.
Since this call for participants is open to practices that are engaged in the marketplace, presumably there will be diverse approaches. We are not particularly concerned if the practices work with CEOs, middle management folks or regular type humans on the street. The key criteria is that they do not begin with assumed outcome paths. Again the notion that there are some methodologies that assume solution paths upfront and some that do not is part of the findings in the Methods Mapping work. Both approaches exist in the marketplace and have for numerous years.
Being in the initial stages of this next virtual book project, it is unknown at this moment what the outcome of this call for participants might turn out to be. That’s part of what we would like to determine.
Understanding that this initiative signals diversity of approaches I am well aware that it might generate numerous forms of reaction in various parts of the design community and in the broader marketplace. No big news there.
We are certainly not the officially designated change leaders of this or any other list. It might not sit well with some that relative outsiders are pro-actively organizing such an initiative. This is a pattern that is often seen around change in general. Expect the unexpected from the unofficial is a commonly understood principle of the marketplace much more so than in the land of academia.
In addition I certainly have no expectations that any of the senior design education leaders operating from any of the universities that have in recent years, made significant investments in Design 2: product, service and or experience graduate design programs will be particularly enthusiastic about this sense-making initiative, especially since such programs are now often being pitched in the marketplace as organizational and social innovation programs. I am well aware that included in those universities that have recently heralded the arrival of product and service design graduate programs as the furthest most advanced reach of design are Aalto University, Parsons, SVA, Swinburne and others. We are well aware that some of the leaders affiliated with these schools will likely encounter The OTHER Design Thinking Call for Participants on various lists.
Since you took it upon yourself to introduce the notion and considerations of science I can confirm that we have chosen not to dwell on the lack of science underneath the various assumptions embedded in the cross-over movement. Clearly there is no common-sense science behind the notion that determining, in organizational and societal contexts, which problems are real problems automatically implies determining which products and services need to be created. Such depictions are well known to be mixtures of good intentions, wishful thinking, old habits, existing skill-sets and marketing spin. There is no science there. In many cases there is barely any awareness that such approaches are downstream in their basic orientation.
Rather than pursuing a hard-ball approach we think it is much more constructive in The OTHER Design Thinking initiative to concentrate on simply presenting alternate approaches that already exist in and around the design community that are not tied into such assumptions.
It is no secret that the Aalto school is one of several graduate design schools that are modeling cross-over assumptions and routinely encourage students to take on massive societal challenges equipping them with product/service creation skills and tools.
Unless I am mistaken, I believe you imported Alto’s cross-over approach to Swinburne when you were Dean of the Design School there. That seems to be something that you decided to do as a design education leader rather than a research scholar as you often depict yourself here. Surely you must have known that no science exists behind many of the assumptions that are embedded in cross-over.
In the scramble to rapidly make some progress on signally adaptation to a changed world many graduate design schools can now be seen boldly suggesting that product and service design has magically been transformed into organizational and societal transformation. Suffice it to say that any determined critic would not have much difficulty suggesting that the cross-over approach is in itself a form of magic thinking.
Nothing personal Ken but any leader who has made significant strategic investments in that direction and is entangled in cross-over logic would hardly make an ideal candidate for unbiased views on this subject.
I have no problem personally with your cross-over choices Ken. It’s a free country out there, but I do not consider you to be unbiased in the various perspectives that you are serving up on this list.
I think you would find that most practice leaders not entangled in cross-over are prepared to be extremely generous and instead of blowing up the cross-over movement consider it simply as a vast experiment in progress. Instead of unconstructive confrontations what I see most often is considerable patience being exhibited in many sectors with the cross-over movement.
Is the cross-over experiment a great success? Is the jury still out on the experiment? or Is the cross-over era drawing to a close. It is to a large degree a matter of perspective. It seems likely that your perspective and my perspective might be significantly different.
It does seem to be a good moment to at least attempt to give some voice to diversity, to alternate approachs, to an alternate circle of practices and their interconnected academies. That is what The OTHER Design Thinking project seeks to do. It is rather simple really.
Again since you brought it I will point out that if you are trying to better understand the tone and sensitivities of client organizations in the Design 3 space the overexposed media profile of Roger Martin is a good opposite direction model. I cannot likely stress enough that media attention is the last thing on the minds of many organizational leaders working on complex internal challenges. To do this work one has to be sensitive and patient as much of it involves highly confidential activities. While I cannot speak for others doing this type of work with organizations, but for us what we focus on is adding value in the eyes of our clients, not in the eyes of the media or in the eyes of academia. That kind of restraint comes with the territory.
If you are as an academic leader having difficulties gaining access to practices operating in various markets you might want to rethink your approach. Many practice leaders would have little interest in appearing on this list. Hanging out over here represents a tiny sliver of what’s going on outside.
Of course if you would prefer a different initiative, more reflective of your own interests and the choices that you have made you should undertake such an initiative yourself Ken. Back seat driving can only get you so far. I’m certain that many here would be delighted to see your initiative.
In any case invitations to submit expressions of interest in The OTHER Design Thinking will happily remain open until the end of 2013.
PS: Regarding your opinion piece that you made reference to in your last post entitled “Models of Design”, I would certainly be delighted if readers digest both your paper as well as the one I posted a link to previously entitled “Occupy Reimagining Design” and decide for themselves which they find useful.
Models of Design
http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Occupy Reimagining Design
http://tinyurl.com/pwplz7k
--snip--
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