Dear Ranjan,

Here is a partial answer to your question: “how does Evidence Based Design deal with these kinds of situations where there is no prior art?”

The example of fire demonstrates the answer quite well.

It is not the case that pre-humans used controlled fire as long ago as two million years. There are serious debates among archeologists and anthropologists on this issue. So far, the evidence makes is impossible to rule out wildfire and the opportunistic use of natural fire. The controlled use of fire comes much later. Controlled use also means capturing and saving fire for re-use, just as someone might bank the coals in a wood-burning stove for a quick start on cold winter mornings. 

Purposely designed fires came far later in human history. 

There is some evidence for pre-human purposeful use of fire dating back to one million years, but this is not yet widely accepted. The generally accepted date for the controlled use of fire has been 400,000 years.  

The hypothesised date of two million years doesn’t involve evidence of fire use. It involves the idea that growth of the pre-human brain must have involved some source of caloric energy. The hypothesis suggests that pre-humans must have begun cooking food to acquire the energy needed to grow and maintain larger brains. This hypothesis may be correct, or it may not. There is no direct evidence for the controlled use of fire two million years ago.

Now to answer your question: how does evidence-based design deal with situations where there is no prior art?

Any process that works over evolutionary time scales involves opportunities for random mutation and invention both, and these offer opportunities for experience. Daniel Bell’s model for pre-industrial era explains it: experience, trial and error, and common sense. The prehistorical experience of learning to deal with fire would have involved massive amounts of injury, pain, and death. We see this when humans in recorded history learned to deal with many kinds of situations.

These experiences, good and bad, constitute prior art.   

In Bell’s model, this leads over many years to the approaches that typify the industrial age: empiricism and experimentation. Finally, they lead to our current models: simulations, decision theory, systems thinking.

Experience offers the foundation for a sensible taxonomy such as the one that Don posted here yesterday: rising levels of expertise, moving upward from first to last: 1) craft-based, sharply honed intuition, 2) rules of thumb: heuristics, 3) best practices (case-based), 4) Design patterns (modified to account for the current problem), 5. qualitative rules of practice, 6) quantitative rules, 7) computer models, 8) mathematical models.

Design must rely in some measure on all of these. Experience precedes them all. Careful observers learn from experience. In any population of modern humans, pre-humans, or animals, some will be careful observers. (Anyone who lives with a smart dog knows that dogs learn to adapt human skills through observation. Some dogs even combine learned skills to make hypothetical leaps to skills they have not observed.) 

Some pre-humans must have observed aspects of fire from which they gained experience. We do not know how or when it happened, or why, but we know that it must have happened. Over an extensive evolutionary period, this led to the controlled use of fire, and later to even more sophisticated uses.

Your comment suggests that you use the word design mean a planned, intentional, inventive act of some kind, or perhaps the explicit decision to seize an opportunity and build it. That is what we normally means by such words as “offerings” or breakthrough.” You wrote:

—snip—

The prehuman use of fire 2 million years ago is still my case in point. This was an act of design. What will be our next breakthroughs? Will we even recognise these when we are presented with these offerings by long haired and strangely behaving "designers" sitting and working at the periphery of our society. I now understand why design is so undervalued in terms of funding here in India. There is no evidence that it us truly useful or even critical!

—snip—

There is no basis on which any human being can say that pre-humans used and purposely controlled fire as long ago as two million years. This claim is based on an informed but unsubstantiated hypothesis. Whenever pre-humans did learn to control design, it is problematic to leap from this to declaring the pre-human use of fire as an act of design —  a planned, intentional, inventive act of some kind, or the explicit decision to seize an opportunity and build it.

Experience and evolution create prior art.

Ranjan, I believe that you are a great designer and a serious researcher. I frequently cite your work on bamboo and craft, and your work in other design fields. In this instance of fire, however, I think you are moving beyond your expertise in design to make assertions and claims that have no basis in fact. The failure to recognise the experiential and evolutionary nature of prior art in such cases is a conceptual gap in the model you propose. The evolutionary time scale operates at a different pace. 

The historical record on the evolution of such designed and manufactured artifacts as wheels, forks, or paper clips shows a time span of centuries with experiential learning, opportunism, and problems followed by solutions. The idea that a pre-human designer purposely and consciously designed fire or even designed the controlled use of fire is implausible. The idea that pre-humans undertook the wide range of experiential processes, learning and developing their skills along the way, makes good sense. Experiential processes provide evidence for future decisions and form what is at each time a kind of prior art. At some point, this evolutionary process would have led to the controlled use of fire and finally the creation of fire. A full account of the process offers a better understanding of human design activity. It also describes the role of experience and evidence in design.  

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia

—

M P Ranjan wrote:

—snip—

My question is, how does Evidence Based Design deal with these kinds of situations where there is no prior art? The prehuman use of fire 2 million years ago is still my case in point. This was an act of design. What will be our next breakthroughs? Will we even recognise these when we are presented with these offerings by long haired and strangely behaving "designers" sitting and working at the periphery of our society. I now understand why design is so undervalued in terms of funding here in India. There is no evidence that it us truly useful or even critical!

—snip—


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