Dear Ken,
Thank you for your detailed note. I absolutely agree with you about the historical provenance of the verb-based meaning of the term 'design' in English. There is no difficulty there. I respect your analysis.
I suggest, however, you are maybe being a bit obsessed with being historically scholarly in a situation that has to work practically across diversity.
More relevantly, I suggest that pathway of historical scholarship focusing on defining the meaning of the activity of 'design' has not been at all helpful to design professions, design education design theory-making or design research.
History over the last 50 years has shown that focusing on design as an activity doesn't work - otherwise we wouldn't be having the same stupid discussions that started in the 1960s and haven't progressed since.
In contrast, the way I suggested *does work* and does so with the benefit of simplicity and reasonable universality outside that historical scholarly obsessive realm.
In practical terms, if I ask someone in any the countries that I have visited to create a design for something (a saw, a cup, a car, a service, or whatever) they know *exactly* what 'a design' means.
In contrast, if you ask designers to describe the 'activity of design' you get a complete lack of agreement about defining that activity, even from people in the same subfield.
Similarly, if you ask non-designers in countries where the term 'a design' is used from English, there is easy and uniform understanding about what 'a design' is, and that it is different from the object. For example, people are clear that 'the design' for a car is different from a physical car.
Again, in contrast, if you ask non-designers in countries where the term 'a design' is used from English to describe the activity of design, you will either get 'it’s the activity of creating a design' (which makes good sense from my point of view ) or you get a variety of conflicting and contradicting activity descriptions that bear only a remote resemblance to the activities that designers do in all the hundreds of different sub-fields of design..
Ken, you are correct in your analyses. I agree with them. The evidence is that they haven't worked in the practical realms of design practices and design research.
The problem is that, practically, that path of focusing on defining the activity of design is unhelpful, too complex, and too esoteric, and there is wide disagreement on both the main elements and the detail.
In contrast, pretty well everyone knows what the meaning of 'a design' is.
I understand that nothing I write on this is likely to change your position (we've had the discussion many times).
However, in view of the abysmal failure over decades to get widespread traction of any agreement on the meaning of the activity of design (including Simon's definition) it means it is worthwhile exploring alternatives.
The widespread agreement on the meaning of 'a design' offers a strong alternative to explore, particularly as there is widespread agreement on it across design fields and by designers and non-designers alike.
As the Mitsubishi advert from the 80s respectfully asked: 'Please Consider'
Thank you to Don for raising the issue - again.
Regards,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love
MICA, PMACM, MAISA, FDRS, AMIMechE
Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
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www.designoutcrime.org
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==
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Monday, 25 June 2018 3:18 PM
To: PhD-Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Help! Our field needs a new name: "Design" is far too misleading for much of what we do.
Dear All,
In response to Don’s note, Terry repeated an old series of comments on the meaning of the word “design,” claiming — incorrectly — that his preferred usage is “universal.” Terry’s comments are not correct in historical or linguistic terms, and they are mistaken in terms of contemporary usage.
Terry writes, “Things get much easier if the term 'design' is used (as defined in the dictionary) to refer to the drawing, plan or whatever that describes what is to be made.
“This definition of design is both universal and especially useful in many art and design areas such as graphic design, photographic design, and fashion design as it insists on the inclusion in the design of the manufacturing process (e.g. the details of exactly how something is to be printed, or how something will be photographed, or for fashion design, which machines and settings are going to be used for manufacture).”
None of the major dictionaries defines design in this simplistic way. This is generally a subsidiary or secondary definition. Moreover, this is not a “universal” definition. There are roughly 7.6 billion people in the world. Many of those 7,600,000,000 people never use the word “design,” and of those who do, not all use it universally this way. If they did, the New York Times piece on fashion design would have been written in a far different way.
There are some serious problems here, and one reason they are serious is that these problems involve boundary disputes between and among professions, disciplinary perspectives with different academic disciplines that all claim the designation “design,” and even official definitions.
It’s nearly impossible to shift the language in a way that commands agreement when vast numbers of the world’s 14,000 to 22,000 universities treat the word design in so many different ways, often allied to different fields involving fashion, beauty, art, or marketing.
We do not live in a world where it is somehow possible to establish all language usage by a royal language academy of the kind that some kings once attempted to establish for their national languages. For that matter, we do not live in a world where a few central figures in any discipline can control the vocabulary of that discipline. Some disciplines have reasonable consensus on their vocabularies. Others do not. Depending on who is counting, there are somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 universities in the world today, along with professional associations, government agencies, museums, and businesses. Across these, the word design is used in a massive variety of ways — and few of these conform to the supposedly “universal” usage Terry asserts.
In my view, the best we can hope for is that each of us defines the word carefully as we use it when we write. In addition, it is reasonable to hope that some of us can use and share common meanings within a specific context.
If, however, we do claim that a term meets dictionary definitions, this requires more than a bald assertion, especially when the person making the claim is neither a lexicographer nor a linguist. It’s easy to see how most of the major dictionaries define design: these books are accessible in print or online. In one article (Friedman 2003: 507-508), I provided the definitions from a number of standard dictionaries. Here is the relevant passage. You will find the full references at the end of this note:
“Most definitions of design share three attributes. First, the word design refers to a process. Second, the process is goal-oriented. Third, The goal of design is solving problems, meeting needs, improving situations, or creating something new or useful. Herbert Simon [1] (p 129), [2] (p 112) defines design as the process by which we ‘[devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.’ Since this definition covers most forms of design, it is a useful starting point.
“Merriam-Webster’s [3] (p 343) defines design as: ‘1a: to conceive and plan out in the mind, b: to have as a purpose: intend, c: to devise for a specific function or end 2 archaic: to indicate with a distinctive mark, sign or name, 3a: to make a drawing, pattern or sketch of, b: to draw the plans for, c: to create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan: devise, contrive…’ (See also: [4] (pp 397–8); [5] (unpaged); [6] (unpaged); [7] (pp 36–40); [8] (p 319); [9] (unpaged); [10](unpaged); [11] (p 645); [12] (unpaged).)”
Everyone is free to state his or her preferred definition of design. On a research list, however, the assertion that a definition is universal requires evidence. So does the assertion that a specific definition is the primary definition of “the dictionary.” Which dictionary? The dictionaries in greatest use by scientists, scholars, and by the editors at academic and scientific publishing firms do not support the assertion offered here as the lead definition. The discussion on whether it is best to use the word design as a verb or a noun dates back to the early days of this list — Terry prefers nouns. The verb entered the English language first, however, and it would take very careful research to determine which is more widely used. That’s a job for specialists in linguistics and etymology.
What I do say is that there is no evidence for any universal definition or usage of the word design, not in the design profession, not in the research community, and certainly not amongst the world’s 7,600,000,000 inhabitants. (If one wishes to restrict the term “universal” to English speakers, then we're only talking about 1,500,000,000 or so people who speak English, of which roughly 360,000,000 are native speakers. I doubt that this usage is “universal” among them, either.)
The initial post was interesting. It puts forward a genuine problem. Demanding that everyone adhere to a specific definition that nearly no one uses is not the solution.
Yours,
Ken
--
Reference:
Friedman, Ken. 2003. Theory construction in design research: criteria: approaches, and methods.” Design Studies 24 (2003), pp. 507–522.
doi:10.1016/S0142-694X(03)00039-5
References from within article:
1 Simon, H The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd edn MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1982)
2 Simon, H The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edn MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1998)
3 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 10th edn, Merriam-Webster, Inc, Springfield, MA (1993)
4 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (G & C. Merriam Co. 1913, edited by N Porter) ARTFL (Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) Chicago: Divisions of the Humanities, University of Chicago (2002) http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms—unrest/webster.form.html Date accessed: 2002 January 18
5 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary online edition, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago (2002) http://www.britannica.com/ Date accessed: 2002 January 21
6 Cambridge Dictionaries online, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (1999) http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/elt/dictionary/ Date accessed: 1999 November 21
7 Friedman, K ‘Creating design knowledge: from research into practice’ in E W L Norman and P H Roberts (eds) , Design and Technology Educational Research and Development: The Emerging International Research Agenda, Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, Loughborough (2001) pp 31–69
8 Fuller, B Utopia or Oblivion. The Prospects for HumanityBantam Books, New York (1969)
9 Link Lexical FreeNet: Connected thesaurus, The Link Group at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (1999) http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/ Date accessed: 1999 November 21
10 Simpson J A and Weiner E S C (eds) Oxford English Dictionary Online edn 1989, Clarendon Press. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002) http://dictionary.oed.com/ Date accessed: 2002 January 18
11 Brown, L (ed.) The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Clarendon Press and University Press, Oxford, UK (1993)
12 Parks R (Ed) The Wordsmyth Educational Dictionary–Thesaurus [WEDT] Wordsmyth Collaboratory, Chicago (2002) http://www.wordsmyth.net/ Date accessed: 2002 February 2
—
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | 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 ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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