Dear Carlos and Ken,
I want to followup on Ken’s post. He states:
<snip>
For example, Robert Amsler — whom I quoted earlier — explains how this happens with respect to writing research: “Research results seem to be incomplete until they are written up, and in the writing come new insights into the work that you didn’t have when you were performing it.
<snip>
Related to Amsler, as part of a class I teach, students have to write proposals. It is a project that I think is very useful for designers (I used to teach designers a version of this course).
Students must identify a problem that seems important to solve, solvable, that they can show has some sense of urgency, and that requires discourse with others in order to move toward a solution. These criteria come from Bitzer (1968). For the students, writing the proposal does reveal holes in their arguments, but just as interesting to me is how the early inventional aspects lead them to use rhetoric as a tool to generate new insights (may I say that they use invention as a tool for reasoning"). The inventional process also tends to increase understanding between groups that would seem to be in opposition. This interesting side-effect happens because their early uncomplicated view of the solution becomes complicated by discourse as they uncover the history of the problem as well its current context.
Uncovering history and context is an important aspect of developing a solution that stands a better chance of success. For example, students learn that a solution that did not work in the past will likely not work in the future unless the current context has dramatically changed from the constraints of the past.
As students conduct research, their persuasive goals shifts from “I think it’s a good idea, so do it” to a nuanced look at the problem leading to a solution that is more likely to succeed because it accounts for complications.
Depending on the proposal, students can become very interested in following through—taking the existing state to the preferred state. And that’s why I think that it’s a good designer’s exercise. One problem that stands out for me was a student in industrial design who wanted to improve on lighting for bikes so that drivers would be able to see the shape of what was coming at them in the dark. His proposal became a student research grant request. It was funded. There are other examples.
Best wishes,
Susan
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