Dear Ken
Thanks a lot for this wake-up call, again! Let's hope many among us will
hear it and embark on a immediate self-reorienting process towards a more
less confusing professional path.
Although the overall English term "Design" broadly conveys what we all do
within the over 600 sub-fields, I submit that it is about time that we each
specify, for ourselves first, what we do precisely, in order to be even
more efficient in what we do .
New breed of entrepreneurs, specializing in market business management, may
be now more and more engaged in Design 'thinking', meaning finding and
following the best ways in offering and exchanging material artifacts into
the market place, as revealed and illustrated in Dodd's paper.
The same way new breed of those professionals specializing, in the first
instance, in bringing about those material artifacts ought to make it now
precise that they are not involved in 'thinking' the same way business
oriented professionals do. We should make it clear that we don't 'think'
about design, we 'do' design. Meaning that those among us inclined towards
artifact embellishment do fine-art design; those involved in artifact
tinkering, prototyping, and testing do artisan/craft/technical design;
those involved in physical material mechanics of space shaping do
engineering design; those involved in all kinds of draftsmanship do
drawings of all sorts and for various purposes; those specializing in
scientific research related to material artifacts do, or ought to be
building theory on artifacts ontology and praxeology. Needless to emphasize
that these various expert involvements are all equally needed. And we are
here in these latter cases far away from mere "deep empathy", "ideate a
solution", and "rapid prototyping", related to either just 'thinking' about
or even implementing (marketing or other kinds of) 'thoughts' on artifacts.
To me as well, it makes good sense that other fields of professional
expertise deal with, and excel in those gazing and/or 'thinking' aspects
related to artifacts. However it also makes sense to me that our
'designerly' way both in practice and in teaching is - ought to be -
expertly to physically 'manipulate' (Bruno Latour would say to
'interrogate'), within each design subfield, material artifacts with a view
to bring about some sort of reasoned (i.e. systematic evidence based)
improvement upon them. That is the meaning I, in my current understanding,
impart to 'doing' design, as opposed to 'thinking' design. I submit that
our profession will suffer even more less confusion if we refrain from
contesting other professionals in fields and/or subfields that are not ours
to be involved in.
Francois
Kigali, Rwanda
On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 12:00 AM, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> The Australian Financial Review recently published a feature piece on
> design thinking.
>
>
> http://www.afr.com/p/boss/why_design_thinking_is_the_thing_iINUwTYeU70v4GVO5o6DIK
>
> One of the interesting aspects of this article is the point that business
> schools have become the home of design thinking. This makes good sense to
> me.
>
(...)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|