Dear Ken, Erik and all

Indeed design needs to cope with ever more complex issues and therefore needs to in one or the other way involve with other fields of knowledge production. The question is how. Ideally a designer should be an artist, engineer sociologist, anthropologist, social economist, politician, manager, biologist, ecologist, etc etc. Pragmatically it is not possible to become all this. And it is not even possible to become some of this and remaining being a designer. 

(Should an economist become a sociologist, engineer, politician ecologist, biologist, humanist, artist etc? )

So what is needed is to operate in networks of knowledges represented by collaborative networks. Still designers need firsthand knowledge to pose the right questions. How to achieve this and how to scale it and judge it is the problem. We have for years worked with rapid learning processes and how to plug into complex systems through co-design processes. We have some concepts but more and others are needed.

What is called design thinking used to be one of the specialties of the designer working with complex issues. The ability to draw things together, to see the wholes, to find new synergies and to design unexpected creative responses, to visualize visions of what is possible and how things could be different, to give those visions form so that they get desirable and attractive and create enthusiasm evoking the social systems involved, to combine it with functionality and reliability and resilience. These are all central and important skills and competences for designers. 

It is not possible to replace these skills and competences with other skills and competences e.g. the scientific method. Doing so would be a cardinal mistake. 

Some designers produce faulty solutions. This is also the case for some sociologists, biologists, mathematicians, anthropologists, politicians, economists (just take a close look at the Troika) and for all others. There will always be bad and good designers. We have places like this list where things can be discussed and criticized. In addition if a design is faulty or not depends on the perspective. A new car design can be successful according to some criteria for the turnover of the company but a failure in reducing CO2 footprint. 

The situation that makes it more risky is the movement of design into other fields. When designers move into fields that are more complex involving human activity systems and society they need to gear up. I don’t think they do worse or better than many other groups. We have done several organization design master projects where the managers had done much worse than our students. It is actually a pattern. Designers have very similar problems like any other group. They are locked into their own perspective and they are convinced they have the best answer. Sounds familiar to me when talking to economists, sociologist, engineers etc. But designers have their own challenges and problems to face and maybe also some advantages. Design is a very wide discipline where looking sideward is almost naturally integrated. Designers, I would say, are therefore less narrow-minded than more specialized fields. They are very curious about sociology, economy technology biology and they find themselves entangled in trying to understand all this. Unfortunately their understanding naturally has to be superficial at times. 

(Do economists entangle in the same way? Maybe, economy is an equally wide field but many of them behave really narrow minded) 

So we need to cope better with these mixed-up knowledge networks. We need somehow to find ways to gear up to that challenge. It is this gearing up that is the problem, and needs to be addressed by the design educations. Where I intensely disagree with Ken (if I understand you correctly) is when he proposes that this gearing up is found at the university, in other fields and sciences. That I think is truly a big error. The university traditions does not have the designerly approach in their learning nor their world view. The design studio based education trains the students continuously to draw together the threads. The university education is fragmented and does not provide the years of training in synthesizing given by the design schools. This is one of the things you have to be a designer to understand. If you haven’t experienced it you can’t appreciate it. I’ve seen it just recently when teaching master students at a technical university with some design component. The students were totally incapable of putting elements together in a sensible way. They had no intuition for doing even simplest technical design. Was it Don who pointed at this not long ago? Engineering today is reduced to a university education where facts, rules, mathematics, regulations and ISO standards is what they learn. They get very good at this but engineering as a creative activity is long gone. Is this were you want design education to go? This is steering towards destruction. There are some ok examples of design schools integrated in universities, but in all those cases the design schools where left fairly autonomous and if you ask there is rarely a close integration with other sciences. (Correct me…)

I think collaborating with other knowledge producing fields is essential but to lift design to the geared up level can only be done by us. And this is what we should discuss: we cannot become economists etc so how can we create strategies to embed and integrate? This is what we have been working with for some years now: looking at design as operating in networks of dynamic knowledge fields where it is the designer’s task to design the synergy between the fields. If this is not understood by some sociologist so may be. But it is a bit un-resting that it is not understood by many of the people on this DESIGN-list and that it is proposed to make design into a university education with the following and unavoidable fragmentation, unless it is allowed to remain as separate schools within the universities. Then we are back to the how to gear up question.

About design thinking: It is stolen away from us. It is taken by business people and distorted and turned into something that we hardly recognize. This does not mean that the core abilities of the designer are not of great value. So we need to take it back. Design thinking without design practice is not design thinking. You cannot detach the reflections of the designer from designing.

And: Ken the problem does not always come first. Most often engaging in complex issues requires open-ended rapid learning processes to even learn to know the problem. But talking of singular problems is futile. Most often one is confronted with dynamic problem fields (problematiques or Norwegian: “problemfelt”) that are like flocks of interrelated complex moving targets. Talking of “the problem comes first” is really a way of thinking that belongs to a time in design history when things were reduced to fragments and contexts were regarded as cumbersome. Today, being honest there rarely is a clear problem in the outset. If there is a singular problem in the outset, the advanced design process tends to re-interpret, expand and reformulate the problem. Designing is actually a mode of learning the problems and their behavior. Through designing one would imagine, speculate and learn how a problem field would react and respond to an intervention. This goes for advanced design, but there is a simpler level of design where you as well can’t really talk of problems either but more about desires and dreams. So limiting designerly approaches to be problem oriented is dated and to my mind faulty.

In the end I can’t help saying that I’m a bit tired of some of the argumentation. To my knowledge I don’t know anybody who would solve the piracy problem through empathy. That’s really weird. Piracy has structural causes that need to be resolved. Arguing like this is arguing against positions that are not real and suggesting that designers are utterly stupid. Another example I hear sometimes people who have a need for power-talking down on designers saying things like designers not being aware of consequences and that real lives are at stake etc. (this I heard from some sociologist working in conflict areas.) There is a long tradition in design that is about saving life, and awareness of our actions and embedded fear of fu%&¤#up. That’s why I had a multi-million NOK insurance when I was working as a designer. Do the sociologist have insurances? If economists were as responsible as designers many lives would be saved. I don’t know why some people feel the need to portray designers as idiots. Well I know some idiotic designers but not all of them? 


Birger Sevaldson (PhD)
Professor at Institute of Design
Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Norway
Phone (0047) 9118 9544
www.birger-sevaldson.no
www.systemsorienteddesign.net
www.ocean-designresearch.net



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