New Design Research: Leading or Following?

Ken Friedman Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University

GK. VanPatter
Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute
Partner & Co-Founder, UnderstandingLab

Download this conversation as PDF file

1
GK VanPatter: I want to first ask you about the PhD-Design list that you seem to appear so often on. I’m guessing that you are the creator and primary “moderator” of the list.... if it is even possible to referee such on-line “discussion”! Can you tell us something about the purpose of that dialogue and who belongs to PhD-Design?

Ken Friedman: The history of PhD-Design is a wonderful example of how a research community develops.

The list was established at the 1998 Ohio conference on doctoral education in design. The list owners of PhD-Design are David Durling, chairman of the Design Research Society, and Keith Russell, the Australian design philosopher.

In 2000, we held the second international conference on doctoral education in design in La Clusaz, France. During the run-up to La Clusaz, there was a major debate on another list titled, “Picasso’s PhD.” When the debate ended, we decided to refocus the PhD Design list as a forum for lengthy and deep dialogue, along with the usual kinds of research requests, conference calls, and short interactions typical of most design lists.

There turned out to be great interest in such a forum. Today, PhD-Design has over 900 subscribers around the world. Most of the subscribers are scholars, researchers, or professors. Many are responsible for design research programs and doctoral programs. We also welcome practicing designers and professional design researchers. Many doctoral students subscribe. PhD-Design is now the largest discussion list dedicated to design research.

Most of our dialogues and debates focus on four general themes:

1 philosophies and theories of design
2 foundations and methods of design research
3 form and structure for the doctorate in design
4 the relationship between practice and research in design

The most important fact is that PhD-Design is open to lengthy, extensive debate. That was one of the ground rules. Every member is free to debate at great length or short, over a few hours or several months. While anyone may challenge, respond, or argue, no one is permitted to curtail the debate or call for any debate to close.

The list is not moderated. It works well without a moderator. We have a serious community of discourse. People put care into thinking and writing. I am an active participant. To me, the list is an important venue and forum of exchange, and a forum grows in value as members take active part. I see participation in PhD-Design as an interesting and useful part of my work in design research.

2
GK VanPatter: Let me switch gears here a little and move us towards some of the more difficult terrain. For the purposes of this NextD exploration I am looking for the story within the story here, Ken. If we take a look at the kinds of issues being identified as significant by this important, mostly academic group, what does that tell us about the state of design leadership today? Let’s assume for a moment that these are design’s finest academic leaders, what does the focus of this dialogue tell us?

Let me try this a slightly different way: I am particularly interested in hearing your thoughts on the relationship or lack thereof between the world of academic thought leadership as represented by this group and that of design practice leadership. I see for instance that often the issues being raised as important by this Ph.D. community are often very different from those being raised in the world of design practice. From your perspective, how do those worlds relate to each other these days if at all?

Ken Friedman: This is a deep series of questions. Each layer of inquiry is embedded in the next. There are three stories within the story.

The first story involves the nature of the PhD-Design list as a group of thought leaders in design and design research.

The second involves the kinds of questions and issues being discussed on the list.

The third involves the relationship between research and practice.

Design leadership involves many constituencies working in many domains. It is difficult to consider design leadership before defining the word design. The word has two levels of meaning.

On one level, the term design covers nearly any planning process.

The word design refers to a process that creates something new or reshapes something for a purpose. The design process serves many kinds of purpose to meet needs or solve problems.

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon defined design as the process by which we devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

The artifacts, systems, and processes we design are not themselves design. They are designed. They are the outcomes of the design process. This leads us to the second level of the term design.

On this level, many design practitioners think of design as BOTH the design process AND the domain-specific outcome of a specific design activity. Here we find software design, systems design, organization design, graphic design, industrial design, interaction design, engineering design, and dozens more.

To speak of design leadership, we must clarify the kinds of design we intend to consider.

PhD-Design is involved with questions and issues. some of the finest academic leaders in design participate in the list - Victor Margolin, Penny Sparke, Richard Buchanan, Lorraine Justice, Christine Nippert-Eng, and more. We also have people who simply wish to read, learn, and interact. There are many working designers and design researchers among these, along with a fair number of doctoral students. Most of us wear more than one hat. Many design researchers and design professors are working designers, or they have been.

PhD-Design is an open forum for thoughtful interaction and dialogue. While nothing is defined or established, any list of more than 900 serious scholars, designers, and design researchers from around the world offers a good forum in which to identify and reflect on urgent themes and important issues.

What makes PhD-Design unique is that we do not focus on one field or discipline within design. We focus on the design process itself. That is what makes the list particularly valuable and useful as a forum.

The kinds of questions and issues being discussed on the list vary from highly specific to fairly abstract. In the past few months, we have considered the role of design in global economic development. This discussion sparked a new list specifically on the topic of design for development. Another thread concerned definitions, and this thread gave birth to a new two-year research project that may eventually lead to a useful dictionary of design research terminology. Other topics have included a query on national design policies, announcements of job openings in industry and academia, and an ongoing series of reflections on design research.

This list is very much to the point of how research and practice relate to each other, or how they ought to.

Today’s knowledge economy places greater demands than ever on every profession. Nowhere is this clearer than in design. The design process generally involves teams working in complex situations determined by linked networks of multiple stakeholders.

One argument for the importance of design is the increasing number of areas that are now subject to human initiative. The vast range of technologies that surround us mediate most of the human world and influence our daily lives. These include the artifacts of information technology, mass media, telecommunication, chemistry, pharmacology, chemical engineering, and mechanical engineering, along with the designed processes of nearly every service industry and public good now available other than public access to nature. Within the next few years, these areas will come to include the artifacts of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and even newer hybrid technologies.

Design plays a role in this evolution, and the design process takes on new meaning. As a result, designers are required to take on increasingly important tasks. These tasks are not important because designers are more visible and prestigious. They are important because design has greater effect and wider scope than ever before.

As the systems and the artifacts we generate become increasingly complex and increasingly linked in development and in effect, design failures are increasingly common. Robust design requires more than artistic insight and ethical concern. It requires robust methods based on systematic and comprehensive understanding. Design professionals today are called on to solve problems that require knowledge and preparation. Even more to the point, they are called on to solve problems that have no answer today, and this means they need good ways to find answers. This is where research and theory play a role.

Two anthropologists - Susan Squires and Bryan Byrne - have just edited a book on the role of research in design and product development. Both have worked in the design industry for many years, and it is interesting that this concern is now coming forward from many perspectives at once. People who want to look more deeply into this issue ought to read their book. The title is Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in the Product Development Industry. Bergin and Garvey publish it.

As I see it, the main reason that the threads you are seeing on PhD-Design are remote from what you hear among working designers is simply that research always has a lead-time on practice. Buckminster Fuller used to estimate the lead-time as up to a quarter century. This lead-time may be shrinking, but I would be more concerned if what you read on PhD-Design was NOT different from what you hear in working studios. If that were the case, it would mean that many of the research issues under consideration do not reflect genuine and unsolved problems.

3
GK VanPatter: I greatly appreciate your clarity and insight here. I can see that the PhD-Design list is developing into an important tool for global design research community discussion. You raise many interesting points that touch on broad issues beyond the PhD list so lets go with that. I know that you are actively involved in the Department of Leadership and Organization, at Norwegian School of Management as well as the Advanced Research Institute at the Staffordshire University School of Art and Design. I believe you have a unique, non American perspective on many issues of interest to NextD. Some of this may be beyond the constraints of this short conversation but lets give it a shot.

In the brief time that we have, I think it would be most useful to try to break down some of this complexity into smaller, more manageable pieces and zero in on a few specific points that you raise as they relate to the immediate focus of NextD and are likely interlinked:

1. the reality that designers face increasing complex problems
2. the challenges for designers working in multi-disciplinary teams
3. the idea of “lead-time”
4. how/where the concept of design leadership fits in
5. the activity of design research

To begin, I believe it might help if I try to quickly flesh out the underlying nature of this series, to set this exploration in a broader context. I will then try to clarify that we may have several constituencies and activities intertwined within this dialogue.

At its core, this Journal is part of an ongoing fact-finding exercise that is connected to a broader “problem finding” process focused on defining challenges and opportunities facing design leadership today. With this in mind the immediate focus of this dialogue is not judgment but rather to gather, surface, and articulate a multiple perspective picture of existing design leadership landscape conditions, whatever they might be.

Needless to say this is a difficult task. As you rightly point out, the state of design leadership is determined by how we choose to define it and by numerous constituencies working across many domains. Undaunted we proceed in our humble way with the goal of assembling diverse pieces of the picture. It is intended to be an ongoing, continuous task that is, in essence, the editorial direction of this Journal series.

To get to that landscape picture we must ask some difficult questions that help reveal the terrain underneath the surface. Our goal is to make that picture more understandable and to raise awareness regarding what that terrain actually is.

Having said that I will mention quickly, as a point of clarity, that NextD is itself a design advocacy initiative with a relatively specific focus and defined objectives.

To be brief, we see huge opportunities in the emerging marketplace for what we call design with a big D but we also recognize that design, as it has been known in the past, is, to a significant degree, a burning platform today. As the importance of design continues to rise, so to do the challenges for the design disciplines and specifically of interest to NextD, the challenges around design leadership.

In the past ten years, particularly in the last five, there have been huge shifts in the marketplace in terms of problem solving mastery and leadership. We know because we have been physically there teaching design leadership process skills in the workplace across numerous disciplines. Rising complexity, compressed time frames, parallel processing and multidisciplinary teams represent a future that has already arrived. Working in that future we understand the implications for traditional design and designers.

On the question of who leads and who follows, who participates at the outset of problem finding/defining and who is brought in later as form-givers, who does the thinking work and who does the hand work, suffice it to say that there are some real challenges for design today. No longer can we take for granted that it will be designers leading complex problem solving/design projects as the future unfolds. The reality is that others with more robust problem solving skills are already moving into to the problem solving leadership void. That train is already on the track and rolling. Frankly speaking, if we as designers are not careful, design will become a series of laborer tasks, far removed from the strategic leadership of complex problem solving projects. That in a nutshell is where NextD is focused.

With the design platform already on fire we are constructing the NextD program. It is an ambitious undertaking, one of those projects that is the equivalent to researching, designing and assembling a new airplane while it is already in flight. Why the platform is burning, who cares and what that means for the future of design is our primary focus here.

With that said I believe it is important to point out that we may have several constituencies and activities being intertwined in our dialogue. Design practice and design education are well known, if not somewhat generalized constituencies. I know them both to be engaged, to various degrees, in the activity of design research which may itself be an emerging community spanning the other two. I believe these are important distinctions as this relates to your suggestion that a lead-time exists. I’m assuming that you were not suggesting that design education is out in front of design practice today. We see no evidence to support that. While there are notable exceptions such as IIT in Chicago, few others are onto the challenges facing design process leadership today. In fact the entire NextD program is based on the reality that unfortunately much of design education is far, far behind many of the actualities unfolding quickly around design leadership issues in the marketplace.

The purpose of NextD Education (one part of the NextD Institute) is to help design schools catch up, or at least help a few leaders around the world who recognize the fire, see the opportunity and want some help. Of course there will always be those who insist there are no flames. Change is difficult. In any case we believe it is critically important that design education catches up. The future of design, what design will become, probably depends on it.

In many ways the NextD initiative grew out of our own design research, taking place everyday on the front lines of multidisciplinary practice so we are keenly aware of the importance of research and its output. NextD is an initiative coming out of practice in the absence of such activity in design education. From our perspective design education today faces a crisis of lag-time not lead-time. Do you disagree?

Ken Friedman: This is a large series of issues, but you have stated them so clearly that several imply answers. I will answer the last question first.

Design education in general does have a lag-time rather than a lead-time. I agree with you on this. However, this involves the challenge of design education as a field, not the issue of the far newer and smaller field of research-based design education. We focus on this area in the Design Research Society.

In the 1930s, the Australian economist Colin Clark classified economies as primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary economies extract wealth from nature, secondary economies transform extracted material through manufacturing, and tertiary economies engage in service. In the 1960s, Daniel Bell built on this to describe three kinds of society. Pre-industrial society extracts, industrial society fabricates, and post-industrial society processes information. Bell argued that a significant change in the character of knowledge was taking place, with new kinds of professionals emerging in response to the changing knowledge environment.

One of the consequences of this shift has been a significant transformation in the nature of professional practice in many fields. The challenge we face is rooted in the fact that most design education is linked to old forms of professional practice rather than to the new challenges anchored in research.

The practicing professions have always conducted clinical research, but this research has not always been labeled as research. This kind of research has generally been a form of work process undertaken in the flow of professional practice.

The findings and understandings of this kind of research have been embedded in practice, rather than generalized. Often, the results of clinical research are treated as proprietary knowledge to a specific professional, or else as restricted knowledge granted only to members of a profession.

This tradition began in the workshops and studios of the early professions. Discoveries and solutions were developed in response to immediate problems in these settings. These findings were rarely abstracted and generalized. Rather, they were adopted and transmitted in numerous ways. The process of transmission generally began at the local level, spreading across the practice group as practitioners moved within the professional environment.

Professions accumulated new information, new kinds of knowledge, and innovations in professional practice in social and cultural systems developed over many centuries. These were often linked to the guild system, or to systems paralleling the guild system.

While the guild system is best known today for its effective and often sophisticated educational programs, most guilds also had methods to promote advanced professional development. These resembled today’s professional educational programs, and they sometimes involved clinical research. These methods rarely required individual masters or studios to share the fruits of what would now be labeled proprietary research and intellectual property.

To the contrary, guild traditions generally forbade publishing professional knowledge as general knowledge. This gave rise to behavioral patterns that are now the source of many kinds of confusion. The problem is not a conflict between the forms of research and the nature of practice. It is a conflict between the internal focus of guild traditions and the academic and scholarly tradition of general knowledge shared freely. The cultural conflicts involve both social patterns, and wide misunderstandings on the nature of research.

This is why you see a lag-time in design education. At the same time – and in the same field – we see a lag between advanced professional practice and studio teaching while we see a lead between research and the profession itself. This is because members of the profession get their first habits of mind from education, learning to build their studios around guild culture.

In contrast, shared information spreads knowledge. A healthy research culture has several effects on the field it supports. First, information shared among researchers increases the lead-time between research and professional practice. At the same time, the research stream that supports professional continually reduces the lead-time as knowledge circulates. Both motions take place at one time.

In fields without a research culture to generate and share information, education generally lags behind practice, and there is little advanced research to push professional practice forward.

Bryan Byrne and Ed Sand explore the problem of guild culture in design studios and design studio education in one of the chapters of Susan and Bryan’s book.

4
GK Van Patter: From the detailed nature of your responses I’m guessing that you do a lot of thinking about design, research and related issues. From your perspective, what are the big challenges facing the professional field of design today?

Ken Friedman: As a professional field, design faces ten major challenges today. There are three performance challenges, four substantive challenges, and three contextual challenges. The performance challenges of design are to:

1. Act on the physical world.

2. Address human needs.

3. Generate the built environment.

These challenges require frameworks of theory and research to address contemporary professional problems and solve individual cases. The professional problems of design involve four substantive challenges:

1. Increasingly ambiguous boundaries between artifact, structure, and process.

2. Increasingly large-scale social, economic, and industrial frames.

3. An increasingly complex environment of needs, requirements, and constraints.

4. Information content that often exceeds the value of physical substance.

In an integrated knowledge economy, design also involves three contextual challenges. These are:

1. A complex environment in which many projects or products cross the boundaries of several organizations, stakeholder, producer, and user groups.

2. Projects or products that must meet the expectations of many organizations, stakeholders, producers, and users.

3. Demands at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control.

These ten challenges require a qualitatively different approach to professional practice than was needed in earlier times. Past environments were simpler. They made simpler demands. Individual experience and personal development were sufficient for depth and substance in professional practice. While experience and development are still necessary, they are no longer sufficient. Most of today’s design challenges require analytic and synthetic planning skills that cannot be developed through the practice of contemporary design professions alone.

This is why design requires research, and it is why designers will increasingly work in multidisciplinary teams.

5
GK Van Patter: I wish we had more time to explore this in more detail. Perhaps you will be kind enough to come back and we can do a Part 2 to this conversation! In the mean time if readers wish to check out the PhD-Design list how might they best do that?

Ken Friedman: Anyone who would like to subscribe to PhD-Design is welcome to join - and anyone who is curious can read the list archives on the Web. To read or join, go to this site:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/phd-design.html

To subscribe, click on the line that reads:

Join or leave the JISCMAIL list (or change settings)

To read the archives, simply click on a month and all the posts published in that month will pop up. Visitors can organizers the archive by date, by topic, or by author.

We also publish a free monthly email newsletter, Design Research News. Design Research News publishes information on projects, exhibitions, conferences, funding, competitions, articles, and books for an international audience of over 7,000 experts in design research, design practice, and design education. DRN covers all areas of design from industrial design, graphic design, and product design, to engineering, systems design, and informatics. It comes nicely edited and only once a month.

To subscribe simply go to this URL:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/design-research.html