Can Life be Better without Reality?
An “off the top” Response
Unfortunately, I will always have to start at the beginning:
Design has its intellectual roots in science and art and the daily human encounter with nature (and its physical/social environment/ecology). Otherwise, design is an empty vessel. It has no specific hold on knowledge because it gleans whatever necessary for its existence from either nature or the concepts yielded by disciplines in arts and science.
Design can evolve into an academic or professional specialty (discipline)
a
when it clearly defines the specific territory it embodies (a defined field of investigation, within which the discipline’s expertise evolves. However, when its borders are expanded beyond the discipline’s capabilities and knowledge, it becomes multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and cross-disciplinary). Knowing fractions of philosophy, psychology, sociology, or anthropology, means to stay half pregnant, unable to birth an expert.
As designers perceive their field as extremely broad, and encompassing a range of more specialized areas—each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of technology and types of application—then it would behoove the design discipline to at least present a taxonomy of what is or is not included.
b
every human activity, from shaping tools to communicating with others, or applying concepts to community building, is a problem-solving activity in a conflict resolution and re-valuation process. Most of these activities proceed out of consciousness in every human; therefore designers cannot claim a “unique” skill or ability. They do what everyone does, what everyone in any discipline does, or at least should do—namely, further human existence and progress (physically, intellectually, emotionally).
c
the evolution of disciplinary methodologies (with the understanding that a methodology does not set out to provide solutions but offers the theoretical underpinning for understanding which method or set of methods or “best practices” can be applied to a specific case): systematic, theoretical analysis of the methods applied to the field of design; theoretical analysis of the body of methods and principles associated with a branch of knowledge (paradigms, theoretical models, phases and quantitative or qualitative techniques) and the analysis of the principles of methods, rules, and postulates employed by the design discipline; the systematic study of methods that are, can be, or have been applied within the design discipline; the study or description of design methods
I see no specific difference between a designer or engineer, although designers will become angry at my insistence: Engineering/Design is the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design (what follows is directly from engineering: to build and maintain structures, machines, devices, systems, materials, and processes. It may encompass using insights to conceive, model and scale an appropriate solution to a problem or objective.) If designers don’t want to be like engineers, well, then they have to admit to their roots in the arts.
On one hand, it is my hope, that the new emphasis on design research is not “Going Meta,” like Douglas Hofstadter’s revival of an old rhetorical trick, namely of taking a debate or analysis to “another level” of abstraction, as in “This debate isn’t going anywhere.” On the other, however, I believe in Peter Storkerson’s attempt to synthesize his lifetime of investigating, reading, mulling over, and learning a functional and pragmatic viewpoint on the communication design process and his assertion that before theory, there is “real” life.
Why do designers want to be more than they can be? What is the measure? Chafing from what misconception to escape? Is it the way designers want to see themselves socially elevated in relationship to aristocrats or leaders of finance, industry, and art? Or can they not also see themselves as facilitators in the service of something much more important…for example, where the typographer sees the function of type as “to be seriously read, words understood and concepts comprehended,” not to be seen (at an award ceremony). Are designers more than bakers? Do bakers come together every year to hand out awards for the most freshly tasting loaf of bread? They don’t have to! They function exquisitely, when every morning satisfied customers buy the fresh, steaming loaves.
Has Design Research become now the science about what lies beyond the tangible, physical, pragmatic, thereby trying to prove Design as an “Existential Deity” standing ready to cure all evils? Does the world truly benefit from design research? Or is it just another bogus stretching exercise of reality for design studios (or in fact, educational design programs) that are too small for research and too meagerly staffed for research with design functions—now expanded to include research?
Over the last fifty years, designers have claimed all kinds of specific knowledge and expertise, when in fact, their claims were marketing tools for their businesses. I claim that the majority of Jay Doblin’s lectures were work-ups for client presentations and clever argumentations to reinforce his view of design, and at the same time a way of reshuffling the status of his business. By adding “theory,” he put ample distance between himself and other studios.
From my experience, most consultants are invited only to justify and fortify the positions of management. They give support to specific arguments for approaches to managing people, R+D, and product development, even though, when the rubber meets the road, consultants have removed themselves from the implementation stage. They usually just provide the initial advice, leaving the implementation to management, and so, failure is always the clients’ fault. Design consultants are just like lobbyists.
What are the specific goals of design research?
Is it going to be like art criticism in Artforum, in which criticism is about criticism, removed from object, audience, and maker, but a discussion between the specific worldviews of authors?
When talking about “emotional design,” I would never trust the researchers, unless they are certified experts in the study of human behavior, not just avid readers of Sunday-book supplements or the present best sellers in psychol ogy and sociology. “Emotional Design,” the venus flytrap, consciously set by marketers. From my perspective, right now, there is not enough expertise going around in the whole design community to deal with this volatile subject matter. “Human Factor-Related Design” was already pretty thin.
Why do designers believe that they can, with minimum effort, become experts in some of the most complex scientific subjects and still function as pragmatic designers? Can there be a design philosophy? If there is, then isn’t there a serious deflation and trivialization of the term “philosophy,” and we may as well begin to talk also about philosophies of cooking, embroidery, and horti culture. What is the reason for connecting the large humanistic umbrella of philosophy to a rather isolated, self-serving, often noxious and often destructive, practical process, especially when the conveyor is unaware of the fine distinctions between the different schools of philosophy (analytical, rational, idealistic, relative, realistic, existential, and any of the other 1,500 accepted world-philosophies at the academy)? Is it not very much like inventing “mathematics and statistics for designers” because of all kinds of shortcuts would be deemed “mathematics for dummies” by the expert.
If it is what it is, then design journals, design schools, and design educators could face the same kind of criticism about their advanced disciplinary research, as was discussed at a Harvard Business School symposium, which claimed that same must be faced by key American business schools.
Advanced business education is not at all challenged from the outside, but it is seriously challenged from within—for example, as by Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University, who claims that business programs train the “wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences.”
His criticism is heightened and sharpened even further by Warren Bennis of the Marshall School of Business and Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. Bennis points to the fact that programs have begun to “institutionalize their own irrelevance” by becoming too focused on “scientific research that has little connection to business reality”—the same could be translated into our case of “design reality”—for which design faculty members are not properly prepared and therefore begin to select for and cultivate traits and skills, tied to preferred specific disciplinary knowledge, that are “increasingly vacuous and superfluous,” having drifted too far into theory with relatively little relevance to design practice—maybe that is what Walter Gropius foresaw as “design dilettantism”?
There should be some serious concerns about the use of the most modish terms in research papers: “emotional design,” “sustainability,” “human-cen tered service design,” “design thinking,” “demedicalization,” etc., as if “design thinking” can be anything else but the most critical thought, applied.
Logic applied to the process of finding robust and lasting problem resolutions. Is “sustainability” attainable when the argument is generalized and specific pragmatic constraints are not presented, directives not defined, goals not semantically framed, specific strategies and tactics not selected or processes and terms for evaluation not defined? There is no “general” design! All design is “specific.” When seen as general, design becomes severely trivialized, falling into the same trap as business schools, which see little difference between managing a military unit, a hospital or an educational institution, or a widget factory.
Will “research” become a pursuit of notoriety in the marketing efforts of competitive design schools. Examples: schools have, in the struggle to modern ize, eliminated the term “graphic” from their design programs, substituting the term “communication.” However, few program catalogues carry courses in communication or communication theory and practice. Marketing has slipped into the curricula of all design schools, even though few faculty are experts in the marketing end of “branding.” The same is true of “human factors.” While the headlines sound smartly, the depth of expertise is usually very thin.
There is also no clear translation from lofty theory to pragmatic, working reality. Most of research papers identify problems without a serious resolution through the application of specific theory.
The 2009 lexicon of the Centre for Policy Studies on “contemporary new-speak” identified “sustainability” as the worst of the irritating buzzwords. Bill Jamieson prefaces: Few words have become more heavily used or abused in government or corporate affairs than “sustainable.” It is commonplace today to stick the word “sustainable” in front of almost anything: “sustainable” development, “sustainable” transport, “sustainable” housing, “sustainable” communities, even though the concept of “sustainable” is ambiguous. It can only become meaningful when paired with a problematic hinterland or context, which demands a clearer definition, then maybe sustainability will relate to specific times of duration, the plus or minus of consequences in the use or waste of materials, the design of meaningful and useful products and design rationales that do not just address the issues of the industrial complex and commerce, but those that support, enhance, and foster culture.
“Culture” is another term that has been seriously crippled by designers and marketers. Designers seriously talk about the “design culture” or “chang ing and enhancing the culture.” It is quite fascistic. The Harvard Business School is proud to announce its plans to change the “business culture.” By using the definition of “culture” so haphazardly, they prove that they don’t understand the concept of culture at all and have no clue about the complexity they are trying to address. Very much like the ways in which Semiotics becomes negligible, namely when it is used as a predictive, prescriptive tool — before the fact, to assure fidelity, rather than an evaluative tool, after the fact—to find fidelity or not—both groups, designers and marketers, show a very low level of understanding of anthropology and sociology. In most of the design efforts, the question of the effect on culture can only be attained after enough time has passed to allow for an evaluation.
The true crux of the problem of advanced education is that the complexity that wants to be addressed has to do with the truly productive span in a human lifetime. There is just not enough time for explorations of the full spectrum of possibilities as suggested by Don Norman. Even he has limitations—not necessarily in talents and vision—but in time. I am sure he has set his own priorities in a correct order. Even the school that he would like to set up could not fulfill his every wish and neither can any other institution, no matter how affluent in financial and intellectual resources.
Only a well-constructed Design Research “Consortium” can overcome these obvious institutional deficiencies. Only a consortium can offer the specificity that Don Norman seems to require. Each member institution then must seriously consider and determine its commitment to “design research,” because a true research program cannot exist within the narrow confinement of a design department or college even. It can only exist with the support of all other institutional disciplines. The institution then must define the specific areas in which research is possible by depth of expertise and available resources. The consortium would also change the present institutional emphasis on “my” student to a claim that knowledge does not belong to anybody but to he/ she who has invested thought, energy, and time.
Designers constantly complain, especially Katherine McCoy, that their discipline—as tiny as it is—is not understood by others. Meanwhile designers don’t read and engineers don’t see. The RISD bookstore, once a place of choice, because of the large disciplinary inventory, has been reduced to one shelf (literally), making room for food and other bric-a-brac concessions. That does explain a great portion of the basic problem in the US educational system. For example, most designers have to admit that their total knowledge of psychology rests on a distribution survey course during their college days and the three books on child psychology or human sexual behavior left behind.
One never hears contemporary composers, playwrights, or poets complain that their discipline is misunderstood by all others. They make damn sure to be understood. Being educated is not a one-way street.
All of the human activities, like observing, perceiving, framing of concepts, application of concepts to a pragmatic problems…can only result in the understanding of contexts, processes, and methodologies on the intellectual side and translations in products and services on the practical side. To be more than a design practitioner, let’s say, to become simultaneously a design theorist (a meta-designer) is difficult and time consuming, so in reality sides will have to adjust to favor one way or the other, to the advantage either of the theorist (nowadays, mostly design educators who talk design are rarely able to implement what they preach) or the practitioner (who has to implement the research, stay above the economic waterline in extreme competition, and stay awareness of advanced design thinking). In addition, design educators become totally bogged down, side-tracked by their need to fortify their academic positions and assure upward mobility, while design practitioners usually rise up to the lowest levels of sophistication as required by their clientele.
To cut out the nonsense, which I predict will permeate the further development of design research in the institutional competition, instead of the term “design research,” I would favor “the testing, synthesis and application of research developed in ‘disciplines outside of design,’” in relationship to the emerging design needs, because that can be achieved…and even that not easily…as there will be a lot of chicanery.
So, can one advocate for a true “conceptual research revolution” without recognizing the amazing intellectual problems (undergraduate/graduate), limitations of true disciplinary expertise among staff, design-professional disinterest, etc., etc., etc. I don’t think so.