By Jorge Frascara and Dietmar R. Winkler

 

From Design Research Quarterly
Volume 3, Number 3
July 2008
Design Research Society ISSN 1752-8445
Peter K. Storkerson, Editor

Editor’s Introduction:

Communication design, generally, is an outlier in the larger field of design, by virtue of its non-participation in empirical research and its lack of interest in the kind of accountability to performance that is taken for granted elsewhere. DRQ is presenting articles to examine communication design and its relationship to research and disciplinarity, particularly with regard to education.

The last issue examined design education within the institutional context of university art schools and departments. In this issue, we have an overview of communication design education and research from two senior communication design educators and practitioners: a colloquy that links a vision of the social goals and responsibilities that can give communication design significance with actual and operational requirements of research informed practice and education.

On Design Research

Jorge Frascara discussed elsewhere (Frascara 2007) some of the many ways in which visual communication design practice, education and research fall short of meeting the needs of society. In the following article Dietmar Winkler (DRW) and Jorge Frascara (JF) will further elaborate on the problem, to outline some of the ways in which design research could – or should – develop. In the process, indispensable references to the current state of design education and practice will surface, as ways to recognize the three fronts on which change should happen.

DRW:

An Achievable Social Contract for this Century: One emancipated step for design education and practice…and mankind, because it is much too urgent to postpone till tomorrow.

Vision without action is merely a dream, action without vision is merely passing time, but action with vision can change the world.
—Nelson Mandela

All disciplines go through evolutionary stages. At the end of the last century, design’s conceptual thinking, was still anchored in the knowledge of traditional technical guilds and the aesthetics of the decorative arts. Design is still primarily providing visualization and formatting skills. The assortment of projects has not significantly changed: posters, book jackets, menu and CD covers, reports, pamphlets, books, and now web pages. The only additions over the past decades have been graphic and typographic information explications (useful in newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and exhibitions) and a current interest in the evolution of internet-related communication. The content, even the context of design, is still usually researched, declared, and defined by others. In short, little has changed. Graphic designers provide style but not contents or context.

The electronic communication world of today is impatiently waiting for design to emerge from its technical and vocational cocoon to begin initiating, facilitating, and managing new concepts as intelligent authors, researchers and developers of content. Designers have technical tools for typography, graphics, illustration, movement and sound. Those tools afford the opportunity to construct information environments and to begin to author content related to complex contexts and sociological issues. This gives designers opportunities to bite off projects of larger scope and greater social relevance.

Is it not strange that after fifty years of supposedly outstanding design education taught by graduates from prestigious schools, the contents/quality of design education has not increased or become more sophisticated? Instead, design education has been compacted and condensed, and the Gibbs schools now list preparation for graphic design next to criminal justice, and other social, health, and programmatic careers in hospitals, physician offices, clinics, insurance companies, geriatric and assisted living facilities, including cosmetology, and body massage. Design has come a long way, baby! Unfortunately, down hill.

The American Institute of Graphic Arts was founded as a small, exclusive New York club in 1914, just about the time of the emergence of marketing and business sciences, and about twenty years later than the American Medical Association. Researchers at medical schools and teaching hospitals, represented by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges), have been responsible for many medical breakthroughs. As major centers of medical research, the nation’s medical schools and teaching hospitals conduct more than half of all extramural research, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. From new approaches in prevention and diagnosis to successful treatments and cures, research advances pioneered at AAMC member institutions have dramatically improved the health of our nation. So, what happened to the AIGA and the other “professional associations” of design? Where are the intellectual resources, the holding tanks for research on color, readability/legibility, visual language and visual literacy (beyond Itten, Gerstner, Klee, Kandinsky, Dondis, etc.)? Where is the vision of institutions like the Kansas City Art Institute? Their leadership seems totally out of touch with contemporary reality. At the University of Illinois, I found greater interests and deeper understanding of communication and visual literacy among students in software engineering, robotics, and linguistics than among undergraduate and graduate students majoring in design.

If universities fail to recognize that, even in 2008, design education is being taught at vocational skill levels, nothing will happen. If universities threaten to and finally jettison the anti-intellectual programs in design education, or force them to grow deep connective roots with the other true campus disciplines, then, and only then, will we see movement toward fulfilling design’s potential. By the same token, when accrediting agencies in the U.S. like NASAD (National Association of Schools of Art and Design) and the other professional spokes organizations, like AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) openly express dissatisfaction with the education delivered by the majority of American schools, something will happen and very fast.

JF:

Social relevance

Social relevance is indispensable if the design effort is to make sense and push the development of design research, education and practice. One must find a need to be addressed; it can be an extreme need, such as teaching Africans to avoid AIDS contamination, or a simpler need, like making phone bills easier to understand. Most of the efforts in the design profession are now directed at activating the consumer market; hence this article will not deal with that side of the profession, which is well taken care of. Confronting important human problems would put our best resources to the test. In front of such problems, deficient design responses become immediately visible. Solving complex social problems requires concerted intelligent research and action; one cannot just resort to routine knowledge and methods. One need not go far away and look at tragic settings to find interesting problems. Everyday needs, such as properly laying out scientific communication (i.e., cutting down the time it takes to a medical doctor to consult pharmaceutical information in a document), or designing devices that facilitate older people perform daily tasks (bottle openers and the like), can provide a long list of possibilities for the development of design responses to genuine daily needs of people.

As Dietmar notes, the demand for design intervention is normally determined by the client. If designers want to be socially relevant, we must become active agents in the identification of problems, because clients only see a need for design when that need has become obvious. Corporations and government agencies normally know about only advertising, corporate image, publication design and signage. People at large – from the top to the bottom of education and financial power – do not see the possibilities that design could offer in the management of daily life, or in addressing ills in society.

Unfortunately, good examples of such designs do not abound, nor are they publicly visible; good design is often invisible. Scientific content specialists, such as computer engineers, medical doctors and lawyers are normally the ones who prepare communication documents, leaving the designers out of the picture. To complicate things further, not all designers are good document designers, most are trained as specialists in styling. In addition, people tend in general to accept things as they are, believing – in a quasi fatalistic way – that the way they are is the way they have to be. Karel van der Waarde in Belgium (van der Waarde 2006), Karen Schriver in the USA (Schriver 1997) and David Sless in Australia (Penman & Sless 1994) are good examples of designers who generate useful design work through an effort to demonstrate to clients the difference they can make to the client’s management of activities. They work on the basis of an informed practice, building on existing knowledge through a consistent implementation of research methods in their design processes.

DRW:

An invitation to shape

human existence for the better

We face many development challenges, but it is no good tackling them piecemeal. Each of them affects all the others. We need to tackle them all together, with a common strategy, a clear timetable, and measurable targets.

—UN Secretary General Kofi Annan

Activists do not ask, “why act?” but rather “when?” “where?” and “how?” These dedicated and courageous individuals are important partners in the quest for a better, fairer and safer world.

—Secretary General Kofi Annan

Interdependence is undeniable, and the need to take action to achieve sustainable development more urgent than ever before.

—June Zeitlin, Executive Director, Women’s Environment and Development Organization

Design must be involved in issues more complex than social entertainment. The United Nations Millennium Declaration agreement was adopted by a hundred eighty-nine world leaders, highlighting the following concerns, among others:

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Human values and principles of conduct;
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Peace, security and disarmament;
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Economic development, poverty eradication;
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Environmental preservation, protection and rehabilitation;
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Human rights and participatory governance;
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Protecting the vulnerable sectors of society, such as the young, aged, and underprivileged because of lack of health services, education, economic support, or opportunities;
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Global focusing on the special needs of countries;
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Strengthening the relationships between nations;
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Humanitarian assistance.

In view of the enormously long list of severe and potentially devastating social world problems, including overpopulation, economic melt-downs and famine, it would be of conspicuous importance and urgency that educational institutions, and the design programs they house, join forces, form consortia or other cross-institutional curricular collaborations, and pledge unambiguous commitment to developing pragmatic educational programs that support the urgent timetables, goals, and objectives of the UN Millennium Declaration, which is just about to pass its first decade’s milestone.

Even the brief list above presents enormous opportunities for conceptualizing large information environments through research, which is ideal for communication design, as each of the possibilities relies on communication skills. But most designers have been ill prepared for these tasks by their institutions. There is a distinct difference between graphic design as useless styling and communication design as a way of supporting a social discourse between diverse segments of society. Thus, design programs should:

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develop efficient and supporting communication tools to promote solutions for problems;
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offer federal, state, and local governments their services to facilitate local, regional, national, and international efforts for developing and disseminating innovative plans for achieving the goals within reasonable time frames;
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facilitate the adoption of their plans.

JF:

Professional relevance

In addition to the social relevance we are proposing here as a departure point, the design response to a problem can become professionally relevant. This happens when the process followed and the methods used support the validity and reliability of the solutions proposed. A well-solved design problem becomes a methodological model that can, with some adaptive effort, be transferable to other situations. Given the current lack of education in reliable methods within the Communication Design curricula, research-based professional practice confronting human problems can become an integral source of new information for design to expand its knowledge base.

Defining a purpose

for a design intervention

A design intervention must have a clearly stated purpose: it should be based on the recognition and definition of a reality that needs to be changed. To do this, it is essential to establish the operational objectives of the project, that is, what the project is supposed to do (not how it is supposed to look) (Cross & Roy 1975), and to recognize the intermediate objectives that must be met in order to achieve the final ones. The final objectives of any communication design project focus on the response of the public. This response can be verified in attitudes, knowledge, or behavior.

Here are a couple of examples. At the Master of Medical Design of the University IUAV of Venice students dealt with real problems perceived at the hospital and after the patients go home. One student designed a device to help old people manage the daily taking of multiple drugs. The device was smart, linking visual design, mechanics and electronic communications, but when discussing the proposal with the Director of Geriatrics, the director pointed out that the manual dexterity the device required was above the ability of many potential users. This is the beauty of designing for specific contexts with specific users in mind; it becomes possible to evaluate the quality of the design response. The difficulties are perceived during the development of the product, when they can be fully addressed.

I taught a workshop on user-centered communication design with Guillermina Noël at the invitation of Chris Myers at the Philadelphia University of the Arts. When a team of students showed their first redesign of a pharmaceutical leaflet to the users, the users indicated their preference to the existing one. It took an effort to reposition students and eliminate the aesthetic preferences they had acquired to produce something that was genuinely better than the existing design. Without including user research in the design process, there is little hope that a novel and good design proposal will be created.

When defining the purpose of an intervention, the objectives must be achievable and measurable. There have to be good grounds to believe that what is intended is achievable on the basis of previous experience, or on some other indicator that could support the objectives proposed. The objectives proposed should relate to measurable or verifiable results, making it possible to assess whether the effort was worthwhile, the extent to which the objectives were achieved, and what corrective actions might improve the performance of the design. This might imply an iterative alternation between design and research, certainly involving the user population.

Information gathering

Once the purpose of an intervention has been defined – and possibly, redefined – one has to identify the full scope of intended users of the existing or proposed design device, so as to really understand how the design is or shall be used.

Information gathering requires imagination, insight and tenacity. It also requires sensitivity and an unprejudiced approach. Skills in listening and observing without imposing heavy personal filters are rare. It is always difficult to step into someone else’s shoes. Social anthropology can teach us a great deal about the observation of people’s behaviors. When one designs objects or communications one has to be aware that users do not come empty and naked. People use products in very many ways that are often unrelated to their intended purposes. People come to a product with guesses and expectations derived from their personal experiences and needs. As design researchers, we need to recognize the difficulties we face when trying to get to know “the other”: their histories, expectations, and particular needs.

Method, but not only method

The design process cannot be reduced to a mechanistic set of steps. Method without imagination contributes very little to the design profession and the solution of complex design projects. Having a set of steps to follow helps achieve a reasonable level of performance, but if one seeks a high level of performance, one should remember Niels Bohr, when he said to a colleague: “No, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical.” (Frish 1979, 1)

Defining the purpose of a design project and including a thorough array of intermediate objectives requires an alert mind, flexible strategies, good working memory, and a clear idea of the final goal. Many times, this involves abandoning a strategy that seemed logical but was the result of tunnel vision.

Michael Burke was designing diagrams and pictograms explaining how to assemble a device to illiterate Africans when it became apparent that they could not understand graphic information. Instead of making the information clearer, or larger, or supporting it with verbal explanations, he made a paper model that could be cut out and assembled as a way to demonstrate how the real object should be put together.

Working for a patient with aphasia, Guillermina Noël realized that instead of designing a tool to help the patient communicate verbally, so he could again interact socially, she could better achieve her final objective by designing a board game, so the patient could interact without resorting to his very reduced speech. In research on the effectiveness of different safety messages for the backs of school buses, I found that the best strategy was not to write a new message or to select a new typeface, but to wash the buses.

During World War II, Tom Nelson learned how pilots were able to estimate their altitude without instruments, through the types and scales of surface textures they saw on the ground, and how very simple animals like cats and crocodiles distinguish visual textures from one another, but not shapes. He hypothesized that visual patterns could help teach letters to children whose lack of immediate memory prevented them from learning the shapes of the letters. Working with me, he developed a system for teaching letters to children that capitalized on the ability to distinguish between patterns. The system associated letters to background patterns. Once the patterns were distinguished, the children were able to transfer that ability to the perception of shapes and edges. (Nelson et al 1981, Frascara 1980).

When Ronald Shakespear changed the public name of his client and called “Subte” to “Subterraneos de Buenos Aires” (the underground trains operator), he was taking advantage of popular language to establish a brand that already had deep roots.

This was work done with imagination, open-mindedness, and alertness to a broad field of possibilities: indispensable components of good research, which goes beyond the mechanic application of proven methods.

DRW:

A call for institutional, professional and individual altruism: professional concern for the welfare of others

When Susan Hockfield, President of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) outlined her ambitious agenda for that institution in 2006, her vision was clearly broader and wider than producing mere technologically keen, ingenious gadgets and processes, or notoriety and financial success. She was looking for transformational advances that change society for the better, including advances in education, health, and medicine. In her efforts, she asked for the melding of social and physical sciences with all other technological disciplines to bring about a truly positive revolution with direct benefits for the world citizenry. She envisaged a “great circle” of research disciplines informing a “cauldron of intellectual collaboration.”

The significant shift from simple to complex design thinking

Her address continued a half century of MIT history. It did not actually begin with Robert W. Mann in the late 1960s, but he contributed greatly as engineer, rocket scientist, and developer of the world’s first biomedical prosthetic device. He changed my approach to design at that time. I had worked on the design of the inauguration material for another new MIT president, which he oversaw, and we became good friends. As he freely shared his knowledge and attitudes with University of Massachusetts graduate students, I began to recognize him not just as an engineer, but also as a leader in the field of design, turning design into an intelligent discipline.

Mann was involved in sensory aids evaluation and Braille computer translation systems for the blind: applying his pioneering in computer-aided design and his experience in powering rocket systems to his commitment to helping those with disabilities. From the mid 1960s, his research was focused primarily on the application of technology to human disabilities. Mann’s “Boston Arm” was the first artificial limb to rely on a combination of biology and technology for its control: using the electrical impulses, connecting brain and muscles to “power” biomechanical devices. Mann studied anatomy, skeletal joints, the biomechanical role of cartilage, measurements of skeletal and tissue pressures, and also the behavioral and emotional ramification of his design – a truly multidisciplinary approach to designing.

The public still credits engineering and science almost exclusively for the success of moon explorations, while the scientists involved recognize this amazing human success as collaboration in form of sharing responsibilities, not only across disciplines and expertise, but continents, peoples, and global politics. While listening to why Robert Mann made the switch from “powering rockets to empowering people,” it became very clear, that “design” as it was and still is taught at most art/design schools, is irrelevant. Mann’s chart of disciplinary interactions showed a decision tree of great complexity branching out from the project to very specific areas from the biological, behavioral, social and material sciences; mechanical, electronic and computer engineering; among many others. He said: “Success? You can’t just measure the tip of the iceberg. That part of perception belongs to the public and journalists. They like to focus on the heroic. But the designer needs to look at the whole – lock, stock, and barrel – the major submerged part – and be responsible for the good as well as the ‘warts and all’ of the project.”

Designers are responsible for the entire design process, from beginning to end, not just that part in which they see themselves as experts or which provides them with notoriety. What is the long-term effect of a design solution on a culture, on behavior, relationships? While the designed object may be ephemeral, the negative or positive impact is lasting. It is true that even research directions that result in little, can contribute greatly to better understanding, when information is openly shared.

Looking at the chronology – the progression from Gutenberg’s legacy – communication design started like many fields as a unified field, mostly in the hands of printers serving the state or religion and their constituents, from which the universities and the publishing industry emerged. Then broadsides offering opposing political positions and the opportunities for social dialogue enabled journalism to emerge, while the inclusion of announcements of skills, products, and services ushered in the advertising industry. Then, the emerging technologies of photography, cinema, video, and digital typography, design, and communication further impacted each of the areas, as specialization separated and refined them. The various needs in education, health, welfare, government, industry, and commerce allowed specialized areas of expertise to emerge in the categories of informing, educating, and entertaining, separately, but also in many possible and varied combinations.

The current situation in design education is confusing. On post-graduate levels, institutions are struggling to evolve positions. What is most interesting is that many schools present courses that deal with office and project planning and management or translation of traditional problems through emerging technologies, but very few deal in any depth with the complex, expansive and pervasive field of human communication. Undergraduate education makes great distinctions between visual and technical design subjects and isolates design from the rest of the university. There is little crossover between design projects and the core university education as represented by its “distribution requirement” courses. There is no deep introduction into the evolution of thought, language, and logic; the new generations know little about communication, at least beyond Marshall McLuhan headlines and information bytes – I know, he would be horrified. The result is that those who are asked to reveal the culture to others are not better informed or educated than the general public, sometimes less.

Cannot the demise of true graphic imaging – concentration and endurance of skilled and time consuming interactions between hand and eye, tools and materials, and decisions and choice from a larger range of technologies are tested, rather than the expedience of software packages like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop – be laid directly at the feet of the majority of design educators? Have not they themselves been trained in their graduate programs to abandon their craft and become institutional administrators and politicians, full of talk but totally incapable of crafting an image or letterform? But then, did not this approach to image collage start already with designers like Bradbury Thompson at Yale, who institutionalized the process of blending photographs, type, and appropriated graphics, like cuts of maps and historical images, graphic marks and signets, and who, as stated by Communication Arts, “influenced the design of a generation of art directors?” Only the association with Armin Hofmann, and faculty like Inge Druckery, Philip Burton and others, rounded out the visual design experience at Yale.

The past decade ended on many positive tones. Buckminster Fuller closed out the last century, and left for design a vital legacy of synergy, suggesting a vigorous discourse between disciplines (which has not been realized as of yet by most design programs, especially those housed in art schools or remote from interactions with the other vital disciplines). Fuller asked designers to understand relationships – possible interactions, independence and interdependence between all disciplines – progressing from isolation to synergy, recognizing the discrete advantages of the contributions, revelations, and influences of disciplines upon each other, acting together or sharing knowledge to find solutions for complex problems, and create greater effect than could be produced by the disciplines operating independently or in parallel.

Fuller’s lifelong goal was to initiate the development of a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science in an attempt to foreshadow and solve humanity’s major problems through high technology, by providing more and more life support for everybody, with fewer and fewer resources. Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth” envisaged a positive way of finding answers to his recurring question: “Does humanity have a chance to survive successfully, and if so, how?” He was not alone; many futurists recognized that his time, defined by divisive tendencies to inhibit, separate, and control nations, races, religions, sciences and humanities, synthesis would be the right banner to unify human beliefs. As history seems to attest, the absence of a collective worldview condemns humanity to endless conflicts that inevitably stem from incompatible, partially correct, locally situated systems of justification. Thus, from the perspective of Gregg Henriques, a clinical psychologist and faculty member of the Combined-Integrated Doctoral Program at James Madison University, there are good reasons to have a shared knowledge about humanity; more could be achieved, on higher and greater levels, and to the benefits of more people.

A good example of efforts by other disciplines may make clear the great dynamic paradigm shifts that have transpired in the latter part of the twentieth century altering the knowledge reservoir considerably. Henriques proposed the Tree of Knowledge System (2004), also known as the ToK System, for the theoretical unification of scientific knowledge. It depicts knowledge as consisting of four levels or dimensions of complexity, namely Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture, that correspond to the behavior of four classes of objects: material objects, organisms, animals, and humans; and four classes of science: physical, biological, psychological, and social. Henriques argues that developing such a system for integrating knowledge is not just an academic enterprise in an increasingly complex world. The fragmented state of knowledge can be seen as one of the most pressing social problems of present time.

In many ways design resembles the incoherence that psychology tries to bring into focus through the analogy of the Tree of Knowledge System: recognizing that there is no single agreed upon definition, no agreed upon subject matter; that there is a proliferation of overlapping and redundant concepts, a large number of paradigms with fundamentally different epistemological assumptions, and that specialization continues to be increasingly emphasized at the expense of generalization, thus encouraging further fragmentation. The ToK System offers the opportunity of moving academic knowledge toward the interlocking of fact and theory into a coherent, holistic view of knowledge, by offering new perspectives on how knowledge is obtained because it depicts how science emerges out of culture and that the four dimensions of complexity correspond to four broad classes of science.

In trying to translate the Tree of Knowledge into design, it becomes clear that the education that most designers receive does not prepare them for a world of complexification, which requires the integration of knowledge from various disciplines, or provides the analytical tools to foster informational syntheses. The vocational aspects of design education, traditional and electronic, prevail.

JF:

Identifying the intellectual resources required

A design project is normally interdisciplinary. Very seldom does a designer work on a product to be used by designers. Even in that case, does one know how to approach designers? Does one know how designers perceive, learn, remember, interact with information and use it? Can one refer to “designers” as (if they were) a homogenous group? Although the segmentation of the public is an indispensable strategy when it comes to designing effective communications, every segment is formed by a cluster of profiles: profiles that share many traits but that also differ in many ways from one another. When working on traffic safety communications planning and trying to reach the 18 to 24 year old males who were highly exposed to the risk of collision, I had to go through a long process of fine tuning. Conventional information about the psychological and social profile of the age and gender group was too general. Males 18 to 24 appear overrepresented in the statistics, but looking closer, only 3% of that population was involved in injury collisions. The question was: is this a random occurrence, or are there definable differences between this 3% and the remaining 97?

An important step in any research project is to recognize the personal limitations one has in terms of the knowledge required to confront a problem and to identify who could have the required knowledge and experience. When I began to do research in traffic safety I hired an expert for the first set of focus groups I organized. This expert was used to do research for marketing, and his approach had to be adjusted as we went along, because some practices of marketing research – like deception – are not acceptable in social research, or at least in the kind of dialogue I wanted to establish with the participants. This experience, nevertheless, served me to understand the mechanics of the method.

By my experience, traffic safety research groups are a good case of interdisciplinarity, involving social scientists, road engineers, health personnel, public servants, police officers and law makers, and working with private groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

DRW:

Communication = conflict resolution

All communication, in many ways, deals with conflict resolution, especially if author or sender of the message and receiver inhabit different psychological, behavioral, educational, economic, social, political/ideological, religious or cultural platforms or environments. Philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer believed that a fusion between two or more horizons is always necessary to aid in any communication process. Communication design programs rarely deal with the complex issues encountered in the process of negotiation to level the communication planes for better understanding. Students resolve issues, disconnected from a real and pragmatic context, mostly from their own experience, even though everybody does know that one cannot save whales from an IBM or Microsoft office desk, geared to support the annual company goal declaration, even if the image may be engrossing and commanding attention. These assignments without context teach little about the complexity in intercultural communication.

Depending on the intellectual isolation of the designer, a solution can turn out to be destructive rather than constructive. Designers should remember the responsibility of physicians to the medical oath (“first, do no harm”), even if, on the surface, this seems a preposterous request for the current design vocation. It is not an unreasonable demand for a profession that wishes to be admitted to an association of disciplines. It is true that the ephemeral works

of communication designers rarely inflict lasting physical pain. But it is also clear, that without question, and with great frequency, their work alters to its detriment, the culture for which they are responsible.

Designs alter interactions between segments of society. Because of its institutional and corporate sponsorship, design habitually increases rather than reduces the distance between the privileged and disadvantaged by its one-sidedness and through the careless heightening of anxieties in persons who confront their need to comprehend obtuse, opaque, and dense vernaculars or legalese, in communications produced by institutions, corporations, and religious and federal agencies for their mercantile, banking, investment, marketing and political goals. Communication design often wastes valuable time and resources of learners and citizens who seek information through precise, fast, and reliable modes. The work often obscures and obfuscates instead of easing the comprehension of competing and incongruous issues. Expedient, shallow concepts interfere with logical decision making in the public arena, even though democratic governance requires informative communication, and each citizen’s social contract, at birth, promises equal access to all services as well as free speech and movement. But most importantly, designers, without blinking, willfully estrange and separate rather than bring together, warping social perceptions of human worth, not just for a moment but for decades to come.

JF:

Outlining a method to meet a purpose

There are methods that serve as general structures for the organization of the steps of a design process. At a higher level of detail, there are methods that help in the finding of reliable information and methods that help creating new information. The headings of all design and research methods, however, are empty intentions. Methods help intelligent action be efficient, they do not help incompetent imitators do good research.

Methods in design research need to be adapted to problems, and need to develop as one moves forward in a project. Methods provide good checklists and departure points. They help remember that what should be done, and when. Other methods help define “how” something could be done: helping to chart future moves and permitting the generalization of procedures. But more than taking an off-the-shelf, ready-made structure to meet the purpose of a design project, designers need to depart from existing knowledge, conscious that every design situation benefits from new knowledge, that is, if one wishes to find the best possible response to a design problem, and if one aspires to enriching the collective reservoir of the profession. Note that I say “response” and not “solution.” I do not think design problems can be solved, they can only be reduced. One can conceive responses that are always possible to improve at a future stage, when more information becomes available, or when a more intelligent designer meets the problem.

The general model I tend to use as a departure point for my design process is based on work by Christopher Alexander, Nigel Cross, Robin Roy, John Chris Jones, Bruce Archer, Gregory Bateson, and David Sless, who have specifically discussed design methods, but I also derive my way of working from Ron Easterby, Harm Zwaga, Anthony Wilden, Edward Hall, Ronald Shakespear, Richard Saul Wurman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Herbert Spencer, Jean Piaget, Edgar Morin, Maria Montessori and many others listed in the references below. Method and substance are always intertwined; ways of working are ways of thinking, and they affect not only how we do things, but also what we do. My design process generally involves nine steps:

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Contact with the client (or initiation of project by myself);
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Information gathering;
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Conception of the design strategy, including performance specifications;
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Design development and production;
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Evaluation of the product or parts thereof;
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Refinement;
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Implementation;
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Performance evaluation;
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Feedback to design development.

 

Each one of these steps involves research.

The richest of these steps in variety of possibilities might be “information gathering,” since there we can find literature research, focus groups, anthropological observation, expert interviews, user interviews, role playing (including user trips), and user testing.

However, as I said above, design and research methods only help intelligent action, they do not generate it.

Under the name of the widely spread “participatory design” method, I have seen inadequate objects designed with users, or by following users’ wishes too far. Participatory design when used by a sensitive and experienced designer can be a useful help; in the hands of an inexperienced designer it can provide the mistaken feeling of being right, even when one is not. Participatory design is viewed by many as the Ferrari of the user focused design research methods. A Ferrari, however, would not help a blind person drive. It will not even help an ordinary driver. The priorities of a project involve choices, choices are judgment calls, and judgement involves assigning value to information, an operation that is too complex and varied to be definable by a series of steps.

To make things more complicated, Alexander adds: “We know that we shall never find requirements which are totally independent. If we could, we could satisfy them one after the other, without ever running into conflicts. The very problem of design springs from the fact that this is not possible because of the field character of the form/context interaction.” (Alexander 213) This calls for a discussion of the situations of implementation.

The situation of implementation

Many designers have moved from a concern with objects to a concern with people. The design of an object is only a means to meet a need that affects people. We have to understand people’s needs and wishes, and create the objects that meet them. The objects that we create are embedded in people’s actions and situations. They become contextualized, redefined, and transformed through use. We must be sensitive to the environments where our design products come to life and to the people who use them.

In the education field we should change from designing teaching aids to designing teaching situations. The success of a learning experience cannot be trusted to the design of a teaching aid. The whole activity has to be planned so that the teaching aid contributes its best to the experience. Many details enter this terrain, but certainly the teacher’s actions, the student’s actions and the environment in which the intervention occurs, contribute to the learning event and must be seen as part of the design problem. This problem is not only intellectual, but also emotional. We know that people learn better when they want to learn. We should think not only in cognitive terms when designing teaching aids, but also in motivational terms. The material should both motivate the teacher to teach and the student to learn, and it should become, in a way, theirs.

Something similar affects the working environment. We should move from the design of work stations to the design of work. Despite all we know today about ergonomics, it is not possible to invent and design the perfect chair on which a person could be sitting for eight hours a day, five days a week, without becoming physically fatigued in one way or another. It would be wiser to design a work pattern which, including the design of furniture and tools, would be centered on the design of the activities to be performed, on the efficiency of the person’s work, and also in support of the person’s wellbeing. Henry Ford’s idea of the efficiency of the assembly line has for long been recognized as flawed, based on a misconception of human work. Good design research, aimed at solving a performance problem, often uncovers a social problem. All this of course, defines the design problems as interdisciplinary. Design problems are not only technical, they are above all, human.

Evaluating the design intervention

Every design intervention is a working hypothesis. In order to evaluate the extent to which the objectives of a project have been met, these objectives must have been clearly articulated from the beginning, and criteria for the assessment of the design action must have been spelled out. A design product must respond to a number of concerns; the more the concerns can be articulated before and during the design process, the better the response will be. The evaluation of performance should go beyond comparing different alternatives, because testing alternative solutions only allows us to choose the best option available, not the best option possible.

To close

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The more one knows a problem, the better one can deal with it.
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Existing knowledge is normally insufficient to deal with a new situation: hence the need for research.
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Research is always useful, not only to produce a good design proposal, but also to defend it.
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Every design problem is interdisciplinary, and therefore it requires information and experts from various areas of knowledge.
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Every design project involves the design of how to collect information that is sufficient, precise and reliable.
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The methods used to collect the information must be appropriate, since this determines the reliability of the information collected, that is, its defensibility.
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The frontiers of applicability of the information collected must be clear, since this defines its external validity, that is, the relevance of the conclusions to other situations.
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The interpretation of results should be carefully attended to. This establishes the internal validity of a conclusion, that is, the degree to which the cause-effect relationship affirmed by the conclusions of a research process is defendable.

The purpose of research in design is to orient the practice; it should help make things well. At a higher level of abstraction, it can be oriented toward the development of theories and methods. Design practice can involve research, but in and of itself, design practice is not research. Without research we are left with intuition based on existing knowledge.

Research involves the generation of new knowledge; it is different from information gathering, which is only the organization of existing knowledge. Information gathering could be the first step of a research program. Studies at the Master level in design are oriented at equipping the student with the existing knowledge of a design field: the student becomes a master in a clearly defined terrain, acquiring an experience that can become a methodological model for design and research. Doctoral research must be oriented at the generation of new knowledge.

But without a meaningful problem research is useless, however carefully developed it may be. Meaningful problems are great motivators for intelligent action, they defy people to think well.

Research helps reduce doubts and increase certainty. It helps make informed choices. To conceive the best strategy to confront a complex problem, we need to go beyond existing models and see the wider picture, working interdisciplinarily and with intelligence. Intelligence (from the Latin intuslegere, ‘to read inside’), is the ability to find differences between things that are normally seen only as similar, and find similarities between things that are seen normally as only different (Hofstadter). It is the ability to make distinctions, find connections, particularly between disparate things or apparently isolated events (Bateson).

There are four conditions that must be met to develop useful advanced research in design: the problem should belong in the design discipline, the methods used should be a model for the profession; the topic should be socially relevant; the process should involve the users.

Intelligent research is a way to acquire dependable and useful information. A way to discover answers to meaningful questions by applying scientific procedures to attain reliable new knowledge (Ary et al). Researchers are permanent doubters.

 

 

Jorge Frascara

Professor Emeritus, Department of Art and Design, University of Alberta; Fellow of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada; Member of the Icograda Past-Presidents Forum; Member of the Editorial Boards of Design Issues (Carnegie Mellon University/MIT), and Information Design Journal (John Benjamins); International Fellow, Society for the Science of Design (Japan), Advisor, Doctoral program, University IUAV of Venice, Italy, and contributor to its Master in Medical Design.

He has organized several international conferences and design education projects, has been advisor and reviewer of several design education programs and has lectured and made presentations in twenty-six countries. He was Chairman of Art and Design at the University of Alberta (1981–86), President of Icograda (1985–87), and Convener of the ISO TC145 SC1 WG2, Design Criteria for Public Information Symbols (1977–84).

He is the author of Communication Design (Allworth Press, 2005);

User-Centred Graphic Design, Mass Communication and Social Change (Taylor & Francis, London, 1997); and editor of Designing Effective Communications (Allworth press, 2006); of Design and the Social Sciences, Making Connections (Taylor & Francis, 2002); of Graphic Design, World Views (Kodansha, Japan, 1990); and of the ISO Technical Report 7239, Design and Application of Public Information Symbols (ISO, Geneva, 1983). He has also published three books in Spanish and more than 50 articles internationally.

He has juried many design exhibitions and competitions and has conducted research with the support of various Canadian organizations, has been Board of Directors Member, Communication Research Institute of Australia (CRIA) and Editorial Advisor, Tipográfica, Argentina. His professional experience includes illustration, film animation, advertising and graphic design, and now concentrates on research and development of visual communications for safety and information design.

 

Dietmar R. Winkler

Dietmar R. Winkler, educated in design in Hamburg, Germany, is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the former director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also held the Joyce C. Hall-Chair as director of the Center for the Study of Form, Image, and Text at the Kansas City Art Institute. Prior, for approximately twenty years, he was a senior faculty member of the Design Department, the dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and an adjunct faculty member in the cognitive science program of the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Since 1960, he has been examining professional design practice and the education of design and communication subjects. His interdisciplinary interests have been to expand narrow traditional visual and form/function literacies to include user-based design in behavioral, social, and cultural contexts. He is a member of the editorial board of advisors to Visible Language journal for which he has written on design and educational issues. Other papers have appeared in publications of AIGA, ICOGRADA, and TipoGrafica.

In design practice, he has worked as type and design director, responsible for the development and implementation of various long term publication programs, identity systems, and design and production staffing plans at Brandeis University, Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, as well as the WGBH Educational Foundation. His design work has been awarded, exhibited, and published by art director clubs of Boston, New York, and St. Louis, the Type Directors Club of New York, the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Reviews and visual presentations have also appeared in publications and books of the national and international professional media: Art Direction, Communication Arts, Graphis (Swizerland), Idea Magazine (Japan), Novum Gebrauchsgrafik (Germany), Print, among others.

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