Dear Ranjan,
Thanks. As with Arjun, I agree in great part with you.
There are some subtle distinctions here that deserve reflection.
The first point is that we can never “know” or “understand” any human social process in full. As you note, human social action is contextual. It is embedded in a web of actions and interactions, and all of these evolve in patterns that are only partly available to our inspection and understanding.
Even then, each form of inspection and understanding rests of ways of looking, seeing, and talking about what we see that become bound up in our methods of inquiry and our own experiences.
Over the past few centuries, we have been able to learn increasingly more about the specific factors underlying human action, and we have found ways to understand them better. We have found ways to examine and understand the economic, behavioral, social, and cultural systems, and now the physical and neural systems, that define human beings. Human action is embedded within these systems, none of which define human beings in any complete or final sense.
This leads to a second reflection. Design and design thinking are not sciences and are not likely to become sciences. Nevertheless, we can use an array of scientific and scholarly tools to understand both design and design thinking.
This is one aspect of what design research is about. The tools that enable us to study human action and human behavior in their neural, physical, economic, behavioral, social, and cultural dimensions allow us to study these dimensions in design action and design thinking for action.
In this way, we can learn more about design and design thinking. What we learn may help us to develop a richer set of skills for better design and more effective design thinking.
Three or four decades ago, economics was fairly well dominated by neoclassical theory and the notion of “homo economicus.” The entire structure of economic theory required an artificial “rational human being” who made all economic and behavioral choices based on full knowledge of choices, costs, and consequences.
Today, behavioral economics and related studies in psychology, neuroscience, and even linguistics show a very different picture.
A few decades ago, design was dominated by a culture of artisan craft guild practice. A tiny group of people in enclaves such as the Design Research Society and then the Design Society began to look for different ways to understand design. The Design Research Society will celebrate 50 years at the anniversary conference in 2016. The Design Society dates back to WDK in the 1980s, becoming an organization in 2000. Other efforts are also taking place.
There are really two issues here – one is the challenging, ambiguous, and difficult-to-describe nature of design and the design process. These are not sciences and they cannot be codified in the same way that sciences are codified. We agree on this.
There is a small additional area where I’m not sure that we agree, but we may not disagree, either.
Don Norman has described design as an applied social science. Herbert Simon described design science as something that is partly rigorous and partly heuristic, always embedded in the shifting nature of the problem at hand. I’m interested in modes of inquiry and explanation that allows us to better understand design and design thinking.
This involves our capacity to study design and design thinking, to learn from our studies, and to say something useful from what we learn. This is where the tools of the social and natural sciences come into play. In cases such as the project by Paul Hekker, Alan Whitfield, and Co., it involves neuroscience. In other cases it involves psychology or economics.
Design and design thinking are not sciences.
We can nevertheless use an array of tools from the natural and social sciences to understand them better. My hope is that if we can better understand design and design thinking, we will learn how to do better work with design and design thinking.
Farming is not a science. What science teaches us about agriculture, biology, soil, genetics, and the rest allows us to farm better.
Cooking is not a science, either. But those few kitchens that operate a laboratory approach to cooking learn something about cuisine that makes the art of eating their food an experience to remember. El Bulli was an example of this approach.
I hope this teases out some of the nuances of my understandings of the issues and my understandings of your comments. We’re still in Niels Bohr territory here. I don’t think that any of us disagree, but rather that we are exploring some truly significant areas of different perspectives on a great truth.
Because what you and Arjun wrote are so important, I’ve appended both your comments and my earlier reply in full beneath this post.
Warm wishes,
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
--
MP Ranjan wrote:
—snip—
Great elaboration of our present condition.
However, can we ever know design thinking? Perhaps not, with the filter of science and certainty, ever, it is a moving target that is informed by CONTEXT, time, place etc. Design is not about truth while science is striving for truth and a higher truth all the time.
Here is a quote from Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman from the first edition of their The Design Way pp 29 perhaps an useful guide.
Quote
In the theoretical world of science, we do not think about natural laws or truths as being designed. But, in the real world—the present environment that surrounds all of us—we understand that we ‘create’ as well as ‘discover’ reality. This is because the real world, which is essentially an artificial world, is very much a created design.
We do not talk about our cities as if they were strange findings that popped up out of nowhere, or about our cars and houses as ‘discov- eries’, or about our social organizations as ‘natural artifacts’ suddenly brought to light by careful empiricism. We see them as created. We see them as true, in the sense that they exist. We do not see them as true, in the same way a scientific law is true.
UnQuote
Business and industry use of deign thinking may have a body of practices while development and. Governance practices too are looking at design to build policies and services with a varied set of practices. These may have very different tools and processes but at the heart they may both be shades of design thinking.
—snip—
--
Ken Friedman wrote:
[2]
—snip—
Thanks for this good post. This requires deep thought. In many cases, I find that the general term “design” functions well, while more detailed phrases describe specialties.
So I agree with you in great part, but I also have a sense of hesitation. Three issues occur to me.
First, there is not general consensus on a scholarly or scientific definition of the term “design thinking.” Since there is no consensus, it’s not clear that the public understanding of design thinking differs from a scholarly or scientific understanding.
Everyone is ambiguous in defining design thinking. That includes researchers, professionals, and business people alike.
The term is a rough and somewhat problematic term. We use it to describe a puzzling and ambiguous process. The fuzzy term and the process it describes nevertheless have value.
The second issue is also simple. These concepts do not rest on the market place. They are workable, reasonable, and valuable in their own right.
The processes represented by IDEO; by Bill Moggridge and David Kelley; by Stanford d.school, Hasso Plattner Institute, and the Stanford ME310 program; by Larry Leifer, Christoph Meinel, and Hasso Plattner are all excellent.
No scholarly or scientific definition would be all that wrong if it described precisely and explicitly what these individuals and institutions represent.
The third issue is slightly more complicated. What we sometimes call “design thinking” appears under other designations. The practices associated with these other terms work well. They often map over onto design thinking. Many of the thought leaders associated with these other terms are also associated with design thinking.
This is the case for Helsinki Design Lab and the term strategic design. Marco Steinberg, Bryan Boyer, Justin Cook, and Dan Hill are all exemplary practitioners of design thinking. They label their approach “strategic design.” This is my label, as well, and that’s what I used in Norway from the late 1980s on.
It is also the case for Rotman in Toronto, and Roger Martin – one of the most respected business professors in the world. While Martin is a central figure in design thinking, he uses the label “integrative thinking.”
IDEO involves a professional practice with many skilled practitioners. It also involves affiliated thought leaders. These include the IDEO Fellows such as Don Norman and Barry Katz.
It seems to me that these organizations and these people represent a solid and responsible constellation of issues and processes that probably describe design thinking well. Despite the ambiguity and fuzziness of this heuristic term, I’d argue that all the definitions are equally fuzzy. The term “design thinking” as most scholars or scientists understand it is no more clear or precise than the term as anyone else seems to understand it.
This explains my hesitation in agreeing with you. At the same time, I don’t disagree.
Niels Bohr famously said that the opposite of a small truth is a falsehood, while the opposite of a great truth may be another great truth.
The idea of design thinking is probably not a great truth of the kind that Bohr intended to describe in this concept. Nevertheless, the challenging realm of describing these processes often poses great truths one against the other as we seek appropriate modes of explanation.
—snip—
--
[3]
Arjun Dhillon wrote:
—snip—
This is an interesting conversation. We’ve already had some of the historical and practical context of design thinking outlined in this thread; I post now to supplement this with a phenomenological account of ‘design thinking’ in the United States (plus a semi-formal argument).
In the US, the term ‘design thinking’ is overwhelmingly associated with a process popularized by David Kelly through his firm IDEO and the Stanford d.school. I think most of us are familiar with this process, so I will not go into more detail here (it is easy to google, after all). This is a simplistic but I think, for our purpose, accurate interpretation; the majority of designers, business people, and educators in the US who are familiar with the term understand and define it within the domain of this rough perspective. If you google ‘design thinking’, the majority of the results you will get via web search, image search, blog search, and news search all come from the same perspective.
I agree with Ken when he said in his most recent post that he “[doesn’t] believe that the marketplace ought to determine what we do in a research group”. Yet later in his post, Ken said that “Worrying about the marketplace isn’t our concern.” This is a fair point, taken in its context, but I’d like to take it out of context for just a moment. My disagreement with this miscontextualized quote is based on a working draft of an argument we can formalize as:
P1. The common conception of ‘design thinking’ in the US (and maybe other areas) is substantially and importantly different from scholarly definitions of design thinking.
P2. Design research and scholarship has little ability to intentionally direct design practice and/or the public perception of design, at least not on topics and definitions that have gained the buzz status that popular ‘design thinking’ has achieved.
P3. Design scholars do at least have the ability to change the perceptions and definitions of concepts within the design scholarship and research community.
P4. It is important that design research/scholarship be intelligible and accessible to design practitioners and others, and that these parties be involved in design scholarship in various ways.
C. Design researchers and scholars should concede the term ‘design thinking’ to the popular definition, and instead seek to explain their concepts through another lexicon. I suggest simply ‘design’. The unqualified term ‘design’ is, I believe, surprisingly available as a domain name.
In short, I suggest we flip Stef’s original position and instead understand ‘design thinking’ and every other qualified version of design as simply a variety of design. We can leave the qualifications where they belong: as specialties
—snip—
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
