Design Integrations: Research and Collaboration - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841502405 ISBN 13: 9781841502403

Publisher: Intellect Ltd, 2009

Synopsis

Design Integrations calls for an innovative rethinking of design education, one that recognizes the changing modes of design and the shifting forms of user experience. The contributors urge new methods of approach that focus on interdisciplinary collaboration between the academic and business worlds. These essays, among the first to focus on the future of design, often in-depth explorations of inter-institutional projects, cross-cultural learning experiences, and a multinational healthcare project. Design Integrations will be of interest to design teachers and practitioners alike.

About this title

About the Author

Sharon Poggenpohl has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is also the editor and publisher of the interdisciplinary journal Visual Language. Keiichi Sato teaches design theory and methodology, human-centered system integration, and interactive systems design in addition to coordinating the PhD program at the Institute of Design at IIT.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Design Integrations: Research and Collaboration

By Sharon Poggenpohl, Keiichi Sato

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-240-3

Contents

INTRODUCTION, 
1. TIME FOR CHANGE: BUILDING A DESIGN DISCIPLINE Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, 
DESIGN RESEARCH, 
2. PERSPECTIVES ON DESIGN RESEARCH Keiichi Sato, 
3. DESIGN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN PRACTICES Tetsuo Tomiyama, 
4. ARTIFACTS, ACTIVITIES, AND DESIGN KNOWLEDGE Kari Kuutti, 
5. MEDIATING IN-BETWEEN: HOW INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ADVANCES BUSINESS AND USER INNOVATION Birgit Helene Jevnaker, 
6. THE SYNTHESIS OF DESIGN, TECHNOLOGY, AND BUSINESS GOALS Tom MacTavish, 
DESIGN COLLABORATION, 
7. PRACTICING COLLABORATIVE ACTION IN DESIGN Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, 
8. COLLABORATIVE INFILTRATION IN A MEDIA ORGANIZATION: WGBH Toby Bottorf, 
9. LIGHT AND LIVELY: RUNNING A VIRTUAL DESIGN STUDIO Aaron Marcus, 
10. LOOKING BACK AT THE NATIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHIVE COLLABORATION R. Roger Remington, 
11. INNOVATIVE COLLABORATIVE DESIGN IN INTERNATIONAL INTERACTION DESIGN SUMMER SCHOOLS Nicole Schadewitz, 
12. A COMPLEX MODEL FOR INTERNATIONAL AND INTERCULTURAL COLLABORATION IN HEALTH INFORMATION SYSTEMS Judith Gregory, 
CONCLUSION, 
13. DESIGN INTELLIGENCE Kees Dorst, 
INDEX, 
NAME INDEX, 
AUTHOR NOTES, 

CHAPTER 1

TIME FOR CHANGE: BUILDING A DESIGN DISCIPLINE

Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl

Design is reaching a transitional moment that requires a critical look at its current and future states. The look that will unfold in these pages is not from the standpoint of design as an object, but from the standpoint of design as process or action — a look from the inside of design by international teachers and practitioners who support a change from craft to discipline. Design's craft origins cannot support the evolving context of design action needed now. This is not a new or unique call to action (Krippendorff, 1995; Owen, 1998; Buchanan, 2001); nevertheless, it is timely. Transformations from a status quo do not happen suddenly, and do not evolve because one or a few people believe it is necessary, but because the idea of change resonates with many individuals and institutions worldwide, especially those who practice a new version of design and who teach the next generation of designers to build on the past rather than replicate it. Such transformations also respond to cultural change in the broadest sense. In this case, it also depends on design faculty that understands academic structure from a broader perspective and use institutional supports like research offices, peer-reviewed journals, interdisciplinary opportunities, and conferences to their advantage. What unfolds in this book is a fairly specific argument: that design practice and education are changing, particularly in relation to the two themes this book addresses, research and collaboration. If design is to develop as a discipline, it must necessarily develop further based on these themes.

The first and last chapters of this book frame the focus on design integration; the first chapter argues for a necessary change in design education and practice, while the last chapter looks to the future of design. Between these chapters are two sections, research and collaboration, each of which starts with an examination of its theme and ends by introducing the next chapters in its section. Let's now explore the argument for change.

Craft or Discipline?

Both crafts and disciplines have methods to support their work, but how these methods are learned and applied is different. Crafts often have traditional, stable methods learned by observation and trial and error during an apprenticeship. Disciplines have an array of methods as well as ongoing inquiry into new or improved ones, introduced with theoretical perspectives and used in practical situations on a variety of problems. Craft methods are often not transferable to situations beyond the craft's immediate domain, while disciplinary methods are frequently empty of content or context and are transferable or adaptable to other situations. Another way to look at the difference between craft and discipline is to examine their outcomes. Crafts lead to trade organizations and disciplines lead to professions. Research is intimately tied to disciplinary evolution in its development of grounding knowledge for professional work.

Disciplines do not have to be invented; scaffolding for their growth exists organizationally within the university. Other disciplinary histories and evolutions can inform an immature domain like design. Lee Shulman, former president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, observed in The Wisdom of Practice (2004b, 456), "... we recognize that the communities that matter most are strongly identified with the disciplines of our scholarship. 'Discipline' is in fact a powerful pun because it not only denotes a domain but also suggests a process: a community that disciplines is one that exercises quality, control, judgment, evaluation, and paradigmatic definition." Others (Weingart and Stehr, 2000, 51) have suggested that disciplines are like cartels — they organize the marketplace for the employment of their students to the exclusion of those lacking such credentials. Arguably, design in its craft configuration lacks the processes just mentioned as its singularity or idiosyncrasy has limited reach and authority among practitioners and marketplace.

What is Tacit or Explicit?

Among others, Jürgen Habermas (1998, 33) has drawn a useful distinction between "know-how" and "know-that." Know-how is the understanding of a competent practitioner to understand how to produce or accomplish something — a craftsperson or one with habituated skills. Know-that is the explicit knowledge of how one is able to know-how; for example, a teacher who abstracts principles for or from application exhibits know-that. To illustrate the difference even more specifically, compare adesign practitioner who can intuitively select, size, and position type for legibility to an educator who knows why the type is better perceptually and how the typographic variables interact with page or screen space, reading ease, and comprehension.

Another way to draw this distinction is to discuss what is tacit and what is explicit. Tacit knowledge, according to Michael Polanyi (1983, 166), is what we know that we cannot tell. He offers the example of how we can identify a particular human face, yet be unable to describe exactly how we recognize it in a crowd. He compares this to the police system that facilitates the selection of facial elements (eyes, noses, mouths, etc.) to form a composite face from an array of possibilities. We can use this method by matching the features to our remembrance, yet we are unable to tell exactly how we do this. Our remembrance and its realization through building a composite face are tacit; the method for building the facial representation is explicit.

Much of the forming activity of design is tacit, developed through interaction with representations or prototypes that we manipulate, observe differences in, react to and change until a desired (imagined, discovered, appropriate) form is achieved. It is difficult to talk about the action of making something a little smaller (how small?) or shifting something to a more remote place (how remote?) — we sense the need and perform the action much before we can articulate the reason why. In a fluid situation of forming something, such moves are left unspoken and unanalyzed; one simply sees the improvement — it is experiential. (Massimo Vignelli is reported to have said much design is about getting the scale right — a little bigger or smaller or moving something a little.) This is the shortcoming that makes design appear elusive, special, inarticulate, and even unknowable. As long as designers consider themselves to be first and foremost aesthetic finishers of ideas that are well advanced in the development process, they will be trapped by the tacit and unable to provide a clear explanation.

Much has been made of the tacit nature of design, yet other disciplines have emerged from tacit understanding — medicine, engineering, and marketing, for example. Tacit approaches to design maintain a sense of mystery, where intuition is the foundation, and learning is based on a master-apprentice model involving close observation and imitation. Craft is absorbed and sensibility is slowly acquired, but the assumptions of the craft are often obscure and not open to question. Some aspects of undergraduate education may never transcend the tacit. Tacit skills developed over time by practicing designers are valuable experiential guides that mark their competence and sensibility; they are not without value.

Complex design projects, those with dense contextual relationships, those requiring an extensive system, or those that are highly customized, require a foundation in explicit theory, principle, or method to provide a grounding for design and its consistent and thoughtful development, especially if developed by an interdisciplinary, collaborative team. This does not rule out tacit moves or aesthetics; it is not an either/or situation, but an intelligent understanding and integration of the two. Design practice can be characterized as a dance that moves between the tacit and explicit.

Two well-known examples can clarify the tacit-explicit dimensions of knowing. Josef Albers, through understanding the relational effects of color and through phenomenal experimentation, developed a theory of color relations, Interaction of Color (1963). The initial observations were no doubt tacit, but after some number of them, he probably began to actively investigate and identify principles observed through his color experiments. From these qualitative and rather extensive (but personal) color actions, a pattern emerged from which a theory was developed as an explicit set of understandings that could be shared. Karl Gerstner, in his Compendium for Literates (1974), exemplifies 124 dimensions of writing. Writing included for him all forms of visible language — handwriting, typography, color, spatial organization, and methods of reproduction (see figures 1.1 – 1.3). He began these experiments to discover basic aspects of writing based on his own curiosity:

The deeper I delved into the subject the more surprised I was that, although there is any amount of literature on "writing" — histories of development, textbooks, collections of examples, studies of function — there was virtually nothing so basic as a system analysis. Was this because writing refuses to fit into a rigid system? And perhaps also because — in spite of the risks involved — a start had to be made ... (1974, 4).

Using Fritz Zwicky's (1969) morphological method, he transformed his writing explorations into a system. What began for both Albers and Gerstner as a kind of tacit experience at a specific level of engagement, through analysis yielded an explicit understanding of the phenomenon of color interaction for Albers, and for Gerstner, a more systematic understanding of the extensive structural dimensions of writing. Both moved from phenomenal particulars that were largely tacit to a higher level of abstraction and analysis, which revealed explicit structural characteristics leading to principles, theories, or systems understanding.

Theory emerges from an analytical perspective that seeks to identify patterns found in an activity or phenomenon. It may be bottom-up, like the aforementioned examples, or it can be an adaptive approach, taking a theory from one domain for use in design interface and interaction, such as J.J. Gibson's theory of affordance (1979) in psychology. Theory, in this case, is a shortcut or reminder of the relationship between possible action and the form characteristics that signal and support the action. For example, in literature, the playwright Jean Genet (1962) writes of a man's necktie as a tool with which to strangle the wearer; the tie affords the act of strangling. Seeing the form-action relationship can be ordinary or extraordinary. In this way, theory becomes a new filter through which to see and interpret the world.

While much design education is tacit and directed to developing sensibilities of visual, material, cultural, and historical contexts, what can be made explicit — theory, method, or tool — is often either ignored or looked upon with suspicion. Theory has an undeservedly bad reputation ("Oh, that's just theory!"). Theory is a generalized explanation; yes, it is abstract, but it helps us to remember the salient issues of whatever we are trying to do or think about. Method, contrary to pervasive belief, is not a straightjacket the designer blindly submits to or a guarantee of a superior outcome, but a way of classifying and understanding actions appropriate to a category of problem. Methods are like tools and we are toolmakers and users, in many forms, both digital and physical. We can blindly use the tools in predictable ways, creative ways, or we can develop new ones, but the tools themselves are inescapable. But the identification or generation of theory, the development and testing of method, or the creation of a tool is an explicit activity based on critical analysis and trial and error. These more formal elements emerge from an analytical look at design's actions and challenges — yet they may be initially grounded in the tacit just as Albers' and Gerstner's explorations were. The theory, methods, and tools that result are evolutionary; they are the building blocks from which better editions emerge. Not everything can make the transition from tacit to explicit; some actions and sensibilities may be inherently tacit. But making some now tacit activities explicit, developing formalisms and methods with which to learn and do design, enhances design performance. This is a difficult task, but a task that must be addressed if design is to become a discipline.

Where is Design Located in a Development Process?

Notions of the scope of design action have changed. Some designers have moved from the aesthetic configuration that typically happens near the end of a project to the beginning where what may develop is unknown. Here another kind of process unfolds, one initially divorced from physical making and more deeply engaged with processing information and understanding the context through the generation of frameworks or conceptual diagrams, defining the problem to be addressed, asking questions, accessing research, constructing new research, and entertaining possibilities. We are reminded of Herbert Simon's (1969, 55) definition of design as "changing existing situations into preferred ones." This newer situation wants disciplinary resources, something beyond style magazines and latest trends, as it goes beneath the surface to the core of design-driven development. It wants ideas about design process and method, research data and its analysis, knowledge of the past for the purpose of building something appropriate to the present or future, and such resources and their integration and use can be or are explicit.

While design's newer contribution shifts to earlier stages, it is at such stages where the practice of design exhibits the most "complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict," to use Donald Schön's (1983) terms. Design is a situated activity with all the messiness that its reputation implies. Taking these terms individually, how is design handling complexity — does it have research to develop methods that do so? How does design deal with uncertainty? Does it ask pertinent questions that can be answered through research, thereby reducing uncertainty? Does it access existing research? Or does it use its best judgment, and what is this based on? What about instability? Is the context of development so dynamic that particular strategies are called for? And if so, can we identify them? Is uniqueness true or a cover-up for lack of historical knowledge or investigation of the state-of-the-art? Certainly not all aspects of a design problem are unique. Finally, consider value conflict — are stakeholders identified and their values acknowledged? How are value conflicts explored and resolved? These few derivative questions, drawn from the changing context of practice, indicate the scope and intensity of the work ahead if design is to become a discipline.

What is a Discipline?

A distillation of aspects of discipline, drawn from several dictionaries, reveals the following: it is training to act in accordance with rules, activity, expertise, or a regimen that develops or improves a skill; it is a branch of instruction or learning. It also refers to punishment or consequences resulting from failure to follow the rules. Here, discipline refers to a branch of learning or instruction directed to the development of processes and sensibilities that result in skillful performance; this is the outcome of studying the discipline. These notions require further explanation.

Beginning from the discipline itself, there are systems of classification or taxonomies that reveal similarities or differences and that enhance identification of aspects of the discipline. Theories are developed, and confirmed or denied, based on study and evidence. Research develops questions of importance to disciplinary development or professional practice. Such research also depends on evidence based on an assembly of cases and their analyses, textual analyses, comparison of methods, quantitative or qualitative results. Histories examine the trajectory of disciplinary evolution, changes in technology or social/cultural need, the impact of large cultural systems, cross-cultural idea transfer — the list could go on and on. Processes and methods to improve performance change as they are developed and put into play. Useful methods evolve, and the others fade away.

Further, the discipline reveals itself through its discourse. Publishing and using research results in practice, and scaffolding new research on previous work provides a lively criticism that demonstrates that involvement in domain development is important and worthy of comment. In this way, the growing body of disciplinary knowledge is disseminated and becomes available for further action whether through research, criticism, application, or reflection.

Formal structure for a discipline is parsed at the university level by domain and degree: the bachelor's degree prepares for entry into professional practice; the master's prepares for advanced professional practice or disciplinary development and dissemination through teaching; and the doctoral degree prepares for research and teaching. These degrees differentiate what is studied, with each providing the scaffolding for the next higher level. Increasingly there is an expectation of continuing education — lifelong learning — as the discipline, its related technologies, and social/cultural context continue to evolve.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect Ltd
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1841502405
• ISBN 13: 9781841502403
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Poggenpohl Sharon, Sato Keiichi