Design: Necessity or Desire (original) (raw)
Related papers
Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective. Part 1
She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 2019
Understanding and cognition are traditionally viewed as philosophical and scientific issues where there is little room for contribution from the design community. This article proposes a radically different approach based on the observation that we live in a world that is more complex than our minds/brains possess the ability to process in its entirety. Our limited equipment forces us to deal with only selected aspects of any given piece of that complex world at each instant. Selection-be it conscious or unconscious-involves agency and choice. Design and design thinking scholars have much to say about how agency and choice can be impacted by still other choices-context, symbols, movement, audience, and so on. Suppose cognition and meaning making were re-cast as design processes? This would highlight the role played by cybernetics-the science of how we learn how to steer-in shaping how we cognitively deal with the world. Together design and cybernetics have much to offer the cognitive sciences.
Introduction to This Special Issue on Understanding Design Thinking
The design of artifacts and how designers make them have garnered renewed societal interest as interactive technologies create new opportunities and challenges. The world we experience has never before been as diverse, socially and materially, or as malleable as it now. Increased computation and interactivity are changing the appearance, evolution, and interactions of the personal and collective artifacts that shape our everyday experiences, family and community life, and learning and work activity. These digital artifacts increasingly leverage sensing and physical interaction to provide information at our fingertips and connect us to people around the globe. This new generation of digital technologies gives people a great deal of discretion as to what artifacts and services they use and how they use them (Grudin, 2005). Adoption and appropriation of new digital artifacts is increasingly part of everyday life, and this change draws our attention-and sense of curiosity-to how these artifacts are designed. When we talk about designing, we share Herbert Simon's (1969) broad view that ''everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones'' (p. 129). The articles in this special issue can usefully be read with that broad view of design. That said, we and the authors focus on design professionals, students, and researchers as canonical instances. As computational artifacts take on new shapes and play new roles, so do designers (Moggridge, 2007). Designers of digital artifacts face more complex constraints than, say, furniture designers a century ago. Their work must integrate diverse considerations, physical and mechanical engineering, software engineering, user interface design and user experience, and aesthetics, as well as diverse culture and human values (Dreyfuss, 1955). The position of design and designers at the nexus of so many complex
She Ji, 2019
Understanding and cognition are traditionally viewed as philosophical and scientific issues where there is little room for contribution from the design community. This article proposes a radically different approach based on the observation that we live in a world that is more complex than our minds/brains possess the ability to process in its entirety. Our limited equipment forces us to deal with only selected aspects of any given piece of that complex world at each instant. Selection-be it conscious or unconscious-involves agency and choice. Design and design thinking scholars have much to say about how agency and choice can be impacted by still other choices-context, symbols, movement, audience, and so on. Suppose cognition and meaning making were re-cast as design processes? This would highlight the role played by cybernetics-the science of how we learn how to steer-in shaping how we cognitively deal with the world. Together design and cybernetics have much to offer the cognitive sciences.
Explanations in Design Thinking: New Directions for an Obfuscated Field
2019
Design plays an integral role in the functions of modern society. Yet the abstract process by which designers carry out their work is not obvious. The study of design thinking has grown in recent years into a major area of academic research, yet it presently lacks a clear theoretical basis; and as a discipline, its methodologies are disparate. Here, we outline and clarify the framework of the scholarly study of design thinking, introducing the major ideas and concepts upon which the field is based. We then discuss in detail the various methodological issues of the field, and argue that, in its current state, the field of design thinking cannot sustain itself as an independent area of academic research. We suggest that design thinking may best be studied from a sociological or science, technology, and society (STS) studies perspective.
Designing: insights from weaving theories of cognition and design theories
2011
This paper addresses the issue of 'What is designing?' from an unconventional perspective and aims to advance our understanding of what design really is. Designing has been studied from different perspectives but the underlying theoretical basis of studying the act has often been dispersed and not clear. To address these shortcomings, the paper proposes a new topological structure that consists of two 3-dimensional spaces: Product-space and Social-space. The P-space is constructed by the complexity of the artifact, the number of disciplines involved and the availability of knowledge. The S-space consists of the number of disciplinary languages, number of different perspectives and the amount of openness and closeness of the social system that encapsulates the design activity. The two spaces are connected by means of theories on cognition, like: individual and distributed cognition, socio-linguistics, situated cognition, etc. Two examples serve to illustrate the proposed model and show that the act of designing involves the evolution of the artifact, social system, language and information embedded in the social and societal context.
Design Philosophy Papers, 2015
Parsons school of Design, The new school, new york 1. 'In the future design will be very important, designers less so' Two hundred years ago a Design Research Society conference was not possible. Indeed, Design, as we know it, as a professional activity, did not exist. One hundred years ago we could have had debates on design-in 1914 there was a famous debate between Gropius and Van der Velde at the German Werkbund (in effect on art versus industry, some things do not change much)-but at that date the idea of design research was all but impossible and indeed the Design profession itself, as we know it was still incipient. The concepts of high-level design education and of design research waited for another half-century. The point I am making here is obvious-almost, but not quite, for to point to the historical emergence of design as profession is to remind us what we continually tend to forget, namely that if design is what we think of today as (in effect) an anthropological capacity-without which we could not be fully human (in the words of the late British design historian John Heskett, 'a unique characteristic of what defines us as human beings on a par with literature and music') it is also specifically, in the form that it takes as capacity, a historical phenomenon. In other words, if design, again to quote Heskett, allows us, or helps us, 'to create a world of artifice to meet our needs and give meaning to our lives, ' and thus (ideally if not always in practice) 'beneficially reshape the world of artifice we have created and inhabit, ' it does so always under particular historical conditions. Design is never outside of history: it occurs; in the context of forces and circumstances; in the play that is set in motion between a relation of forces and the potential (shi) which is implied by that situation, and can be made to play in one's favor. Hegel argued that philosophy is always its own time reflected in thought. Design partakes on something of the same condition. It is always at once beholden to and reflective of, its
Re-Cognizing* Components in A Theory of Design Thinking
The design disciplines have lacked a coherent and comprehensive, conceptual model of designing through which a consistent vocabulary can be built to enable development of information services to support designing, design research, and design education. A new approach to the design of information systems that integrates concepts from facet classification, object oriented programming, cognitive science, problem solving, and designing is introduced. In this approach users establish and partially interpret the subject of interest to them before it is elaborated and processed by components of the system. To determine these components abductive reasoning was applied to correlate outlines using a minimal number of distinct headings to profile their subject. The purpose of this correlation was to identify basic modes of purposeful thought and the kinds of information each mode processes. This involved recognition, interpretation, and sometimes editing, and reordering of previously established, semantically meaningful, objects of thought identified in outlines of different subjects. How this approach was applied to determine headings appropriate to information in different domains, to shared modes for processing the information, and to collaborative roles for its application is indicated through examples of the correlations involved. Uses of the components for critical thinking, content analysis, generation of new content, instrumental applications, and the development of computational systems are also demonstrated. A system that addresses significant problems in information search and retrieval, data mining, and collaborative work is described. Key Words: information, identification, recognition, relevance, part, whole, class, category, order, list, recall, objects of thought, referential thought, data correlation, collaborative frameworks. *Re-cognizing means rethinking what is already known about. * Recognizing means acknowledging something already experienced. *Thanks to Klaus Krippendorff for the hyphen and the insight
Design as Meaning Making: From Making Things to the Design of Thinking
Design Issues, 2003
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