Dear Colleagues,



This mail was written before the last posting maid by Ken. Some of the ideas might be several hours late by now. Also, I touch only a few aspects of the issues discussed, in an impromptu manner. I am fully aware of the need for reconciling some contradictions that come from the very nature of the current situation with the conception of DESIGN.



Here I discuss (1) the concept of design in the light of the main discussion and (2) answer Ken's question about the need of further theorizing the concept of design. 



1.

The concept of design and the term design are used in different ways by different types of professions. Abuse is very common. The most common abuse is the narrow (minded) interpretation that "design is ONLY what I do." I am shocked when I hear how certain professions appropriate the term "design" only for themselves and exclude all other design types. When they say "we, designers,..." they mean only their profession and exclude even the other specialties working on their project. 



The problems come with the insufficient effort to engage in categorization/classification of various design professions/types of design. Also, the problem arises from the reality that in the public consciousness some design disciplines and some professions are strongly related to design. For example, architecture as a discipline is equated with the profession of architecture. However, in that field, it is clear to everybody that not all architectural graduates are designers, depending on their job position. Some are (architectural) designers, and some are on administrative/managerial jobs. And one person, during their life time, can change jobs from design to building code enforcement and back to design.



We rarely use the term material design, although it makes sense. This is the broadest category, an umbrella term for most types of design. Social design is also an umbrella term. Organizational design, program planning, instructional design, and service design are just subcategories of social design. Because social entities exist in a material environment, in most cases we have to design complex sociotechnical systems. If we differentiate between material and social design, it is for classification purposes only. But it is also important to foresee which type of design is leading and setting the overall framework of the project. 



One possible general definition of social design is the organization of social morphology with social means/methods. Because we need to abstract and to focus and to simplify problems in order to solve them, we can assume that in such cases we work only with the social morphology. In reality, we will have to deal with the materiality, which most often is treated as logistics. If you design a new organization, you might need to house it and to design a building for it. The two types of design are intertwined in facilities planning and programming. Yet, they are very different types of design and require different expertise. You should not trust your architect to redesign your organization. And no one is expecting that the management consultant will design their building. So, we came here to the notion of specialization, and then the notion of the disciplinary silos, and then we get lost in the complexity of the World. Of course, there are pretty good solutions of these conundrums, ranging from the universal Renaissance Human (was Man) to the multidisciplinary team. Of course, this is a simplified picture of the design phenomena and there are multiple exceptions and the corresponding caveats. 



When we talk about design we should not forget that there is a complementary activity, often called planning. Design and planning are categories of the same class and level. There is a seminal book by Gerald Nadler (1980) about the planning and design approach. Basically, the book is on the systems approach, but in my interpretation it makes a good case about the common ground and the transitions between design and planning. 



(Sometimes I wonder how it is possible that the humankind cannot live to the level of past landmarks. For forty long years, we cannot get and keep with the ideas of Nadler. For sixty years we cannot repeat the historic landing on the Moon. And maybe we will need twenty more years to land there. Almost a century of time lag between the genii and the good engineers.) 



We don't need a new term for design. We need to read more, understand better, and make sense of what the Others are doing. The Others - I mean the genii. Ken mentioned that it is necessary to put on adjective only -- and the design field is demarcated. Caveat: most fields are hybrid or interdisciplinary, as Terry mentioned. But even they are not that difficult to define if we use the problem-based approach. 



Forty years ago, one of my former bosses started the development of a general theory of artification. It was too much for him and his small team. He narrowed down to a general theory of design. I mean design as a generic concept and an umbrella term, not graphic or interior design. Even this appeared to be a heavy burden. After several mishaps with funding, the whole enterprise went in history. Just like the landing on the Moon. No pun intended, and no comparison intended, but a little fun is rejuvenating.



2.

Do we need to theorize more about design? Although we have a pretty good general vision of design, there is an urgent need for additional theorizing to clarify our conceptualizations and to allow for relating design definitions from different areas of scholarship and practice.



In some paradigms, and in Historical Materialism in particular, the clarification of concepts and terms is an ongoing endeavor, involving many dissertations and treatise at any given time. A colleague of mine had written a 1,000 page treatise on space. It was a three-year project. As I mention above, my former boss presided over a 500 page outline document on artification before coming to the conclusion that this endeavor needs more resources to be completed successfully. 



In historical materialism, concepts are described and defined by discipline. So, design will be conceptualized SOMEWHAT differently in the encyclopedias of philosophy, sociology, general design theory, architecture, electrical engineering, and so on. The core will be the same, but there will be many different clarifying statements. This approach creates some problems for interdisciplinary communication, but allows much better and faster communication within the discipline. This is one of the reasons that I constantly remind that the only common ground of all design fields is at philosophical level. And some designed fields had become so specialized and autonomous, that they are not perceived as design, like poem design, song design, and so forth. These are distinctive human endeavors with a very specialized methodology that differs greatly from the methodologies in any other field. Still, if we look beneath the surface, we will find some common foundation: song composition, music composition, essay composition, etc. Composition, like in architectural composition, composition of the page, etc. And in some fields they do design new methods, but refer that as creating and inventing, rather than design. 



Many of the posts on this list convince me that we need people to engage in developing a general theory of design. We need to conceptualize and define design at several levels and in many aspects. We should not argue if there is social design or it is a hoax. We should not claim that only graphic and interaction design is design, and the rest should take think about naming themselves in other ways. Interior designers should stop thinking that only they are designers and the architects are something else, somewhere in the building trades. 



The design thinking movement might be doing a lot of harm because of their misconceptualization of the design act and the glorification of empathy. But in the long run, the design thinking movement will help the human kind see the design acts in many practice fields. The design of instruction, the design of pole vault and high jump techniques, even painting composition and techniques. We might start looking at the old established activities like painting and fiction writing in a new way, despite of their centuries old specialization and autonomy. The design approach will introduce more rationality and predictability in those activities. Right now I am not sure if this will be for the better or for the worse and would discuss it. But introducing rationality in an activity leads to making the performance of this activity accessible to more people, which is a kind of a democratization. Or populism, plebocratization. It depends how you see the world. 



I realize that some of my ideas might be controversial and even unacceptable for many people. That was the reason to hold my original writing for a couple of day. But the only way to move science forward is to take risks and to go back and forth. Not just strait forward, but back and forth until we find a better approach. This is also related to our recent discussion on truth. If we want to come closer to truth, we need to be able to go back and forth, left and right, and narrow down the circle around the truth.



With kind regards,



Lubomir



Lubomir Popov, PhD, FDRS, IDEC, CSP

Professor, School of Family and Consumer Sciences, Bowling Green State University

American Culture Studies affiliated faculty











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