Design & Research

Had a meeting with some art and design educators recently. Got quite surprised on how they were so cautious about "research", when on one hand they were attracted by the financial resources research can tap for them, one the other they were reluctant to articulate in layman terms on what they are "researching", since all the resources spent will need to be accountable to the resource providers...

Thoughts and quotes on design and research
Brought up as a designer, my training almost taught me that "innate creativity and intuition tend to be glorified. Although becoming a designer involves the acquisition of certain technical skills, true excellence in this field tends to be measured more by the creative brilliance of the objects or services a designer has developed, the way these items blend esthetic beauty with an elegant functionality and ease of use. Although designers recognize that their inspirations are shaped by their engagement with various external sources, ranging from market surveys to observations of consumers, they nonetheless highlight their internal processes as being the essential locus of new ideas." (Wasson, 2002) Although what I believed has changed in recent years when design became more linked with other disciplines so as to generate a proper design solutions for the real world, many of my fellow colleagues, and more seriously our clients (although they had never received any training in what is art or design), still hold this as their belief. They see design "as an autonomous, inward-looking relationship between designer and product", an intuitive ability that almost belong to a God-given talent, despite the fact that many of the knowledge actually evolved from the training of skills they received and the experience they earned in all these years when they practiced the profession. Creativity seems to be something divine, "the foundation of their work, is the faith that motivates all designers" (Heskett, 1980:7––8).

However, the meaning of design is actually changing. We cannot view it as the way we viewed it. We need to understand where it is heading for, and how does this imply the changes brought to the role and the job descriptions of a designer. Ken Friedman has commented that the very definition of design, the domains of knowledge and skills that comprise it, and the balance between art and science are changing. He noted that "[s]tudents who wish to become designers in the postmodern knowledge economy will enter an inherently multidisciplinary profession. This profession involves a wide variety of professionals, including scientists (physical, biological, and social), engineers (industrial, civil, biological, genetic, electrical, and software), and managers, as well as many kinds of artists and artisans now called designers.... Everybody engaged in the process of defining, planning, and configuring artifacts and systems will be considered 'designers.' "(Friedman, 2002) Designer nowadays seems need to incorporate knowledge of every kind to solve problems he came across in his projects. But perhaps it is also that this embracing of such a diverse spectrum of knowledge discipline that makes the meaning of design itself so hard to define, especially in a simple and easy-to-understand way. There is a trend that design educators are infinitely expanding the meaning of design to such an extent that it almost covers every knowledge discipline.
Friedman commented that the nature of design "as an integrative discipline places it at the intersection of several large fields. In one dimension, design is a field of thinking and pure research. In another, it is a field of practice and applied research. When applications are used to solve specific problems in a specific setting, it is a field of clinical research. I propose a generic model of design as a field of theory, practice, and application composed of six domains. Three theory domains (natural sciences, humanities and liberal arts, and social and behavioral sciences) are interrelated with three domains of practice and application (human professions and services, creative and applied arts, and technology and engineering). Design may involve
any or all of these domains, in different aspects and proportion, depending on the nature of the project at hand or the problem to be solved.... Although these are necessary domains of design knowledge, no one design professional can be expected to master all these areas of knowledge and skill."
"[D]esign has begun to take new form in the knowledge economy. The need for designers to consider their work as an integrated process flowing through and embedded in the entire process of conceptualizing, planning, and realizing products and services means that design is now both a philosophy and a technology.... The philosophy appropriate to design may also be a new kind of philosophy that blurs prior distinction. The knowledge economy is blurring the boundaries between product and service, material and immaterial, hardware and software. In this context, nearly every design practice has immaterial dimensions along with the material. Design as defined here is an act of conceptualization linked to the managerial concept of governance and the industrial concept of control."
Friedman correctly observed the emergence of design as a science "when skills-based professions move from traditional rules of thumb or trial-and-error methods to the use of theory and scientific method.... The growth of a design science is implicit in the ongoing transition from an arts-and-crafts approach to a theory-based design. The design science challenge is to shape an effective process of design that yields effective outcomes. This must be an inquiry-based process, a problem-solving process linked to effective methods for design development. This... requires the use of systematic thinking, a scientific approach." Design today is at the point of moving from a skill-based profession engaged in rules of thumb based on trial and error to instructions based on scientific methods, which has to be built on basic research, applied research, and clinical research.
Without a proper inquiry-based process backuped by research, Friedman argued that good design artifacts may still "evolve" naturally or randomly by intuitive "selection, justified afterward by clever language." The author of that piece of artifact has not yet learned to walk upright as a designer since what he did was "no more and no less a product of evolution than the tools evolved by Homo habilis in 2,500,000 B.C." although what has been added to it might be a snappy look, a fancy package, or a trademark name. In a globalized world migrating to a knowledge economy, designers are facing the challenge of transitioning from crafting things to understanding things.

What research can contribute to the design process is to eliminate the high price in failed developments and extinct lines due to efforts, resources and man-hours wasted on generating intuitively ideas and let them evolve but finally concluded that they do not work. Designers who reject research but insist on tackling design solution with intuitive means will be unable to move beyond craft skill and vocational knowledge to professional knowledge.
Just as Friedman noted, "[t]he design process must integrate field-specific knowledge with a larger understanding of the human beings for whom design is made, the social circumstances in which the act of design takes place, and the human context in which designed artifacts are used. This requires knowledge across domains, linked to a general knowledge of industries and businesses within which design operates."
He argued that although design artifacts do speak for themselves and for their makers through sensory quality, "artifacts do not articulate or clarify the design process. This is where the problem lies. The key difference between design and craft is not in the crafting or the beauty or the esthetic quality of the artifact.... It is a question of process. The design process begins above all with inquiry. Jens Bernsen (1986:10) describes design as "translating a purpose into a physical form or tool." "
If a designer is to create artifacts with a disruptive impact, he inevitably has to pay an ever-increasing amount of attention to the context of the people for whom they create objects -- how the physical and social features and processes will affect the individual behaviour, perceptions and preferences. Design educators are trying to borrow and employ knowledge and techniques from other disciplines, like cultural analysis and criticism, ethographic research from social science to help extracting the principles that underlie cultural trends and to draw out the implications of the insights and offer practicable guidelines for future ideas, plans, policies, organizations, activities, products, services, and images. All these "exotic" knowledge and techniques of course in one hand help the designer to find the best solutions to solve the design problems, but at the same time diffuse the uniqueness of the design knowledge discipline (if there is still any).

What is design? What are the core competencies of designers? How designers should be trained? How should design be treated professionally? Not until the design circle to come up with their own sets of knowledge and skills which othe knowlege discipline need to borrow from, the term "design" will remain ambiguous and only go more ambiguous rather than more precise, and it is not a good trend.

-----
Bernsen, J. (1986). Design: The problem comes first. Copenhagen: Danish Design Council.
Friedman, K., "Conclusion: Toward an integrative design discipline" in Squires, S. & Byrne, B. (eds.) (2002) Creating breakthrough ideas: The collaboration of anthropologists and designers in the product development industry. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Heskett, John. (1980). Industrial Design. London: Thames & Hudson.
Wasson, C., "Collaborative work: Integrating the roles of ethnographers and designers" in Squires, S. & Byrne, B. (eds.) (2002) Creating breakthrough ideas: The collaboration of anthropologists and designers in the product development industry, p.71–90. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.