CEPHAD 2010 // The borderland between philosophy and design research // Copenhagen //
January 26th – 29th, 2010 // Regular table session
Prof. Mogens Myrup Andreasen // Professor Emeritus, MSc MechEng, PhD, Dr-Ing Eh //
Section Engineering Design and Product Development // Department of Management Engineering // Technical University of Denmark // mmya(a)man.dtu.dk
Background
The Design Society [1], an international society for “people who share a common interest in design”, was established in 2000 based upon the informal WDK-organisation (Workshop Design Konstruktion), the network established around the ICED-conferences (International Conference on Engineering Design), and many international workshop initiatives, mainly operating in Europe. The author was co-founder of WDK in 1981, together with Vladimir Hubka and Umberto Pighini, co-manager of the ICED conferences and co-founder of the Design Society (DS). He is now member of the advisory board of DS.
Design Society has as one of its goals to “actively support and improve design research, practice, management and education”. This positioning paper is about DS’s concern about poor quality and chaotic structure of the engineering design research domain, and DS’s attempts to create consolidation. The paper sketches the symptoms and a diagnosis; tell about the dialogue on the problem in DS and ideas launched. In the conclusions the paper asks for help from CEPHAD, for its advice regarding consolidation, which we have the hope of making concrete in the form of a positioning paper for the ICED11 conference, which will be held in Copenhagen, August 2011.
The dialogue in Design Society
Analysis of conference papers and the reviewing process by ICED leads to diagnoses such as: “It is no simple matter to define the context, the research approach and the community behind research in engineering design” (Cantamessa [2]) and “It is not easy to see the trends of evolution, to identify landmarks of development, to judge the scientific significance of the various approaches or to decide on the target fields of investments” (Horváth [3]).
The reviewing process of the ICED papers has sparse and often primitive feedback to the authors. At one of the conferences 1049 different keywords were used to identify 390 papers (McMahon [4]), and it is evident, that the number of seemingly different topics grows very rapidly over time (Birkhofer [5]). From our summer school on engineering design research, Blessing reports [6] that the large number of concepts paralyses the PhD students. The situation is concluded as being: “Fragmented, lack of rigour, no integrating efforts, limited impact on industry” [6].
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Copenhagen Working Papers on Design // 2010 // No. 1 // Myrup Andreasen DS’s management sees these problems as being the greatest challenge for the research area’s identity and reputation. But the action to be taken is not quite clear. Blessing [6]
proposes issues we should care about:
- Terminology and common understanding
- Common model or a set of (partly shared) models, as a precursor to a theory/theories - Classification of research area and research findings.
Samuel [7] asks for common goals, respectable tools and experiences, recommendable terminology and appropriate “transliterations”. At a DS board meeting about 20 delegates tried to identify core publications on designing. A list of approximately 90 books was proposed, but most of the delegates had not heard about more than 20 from the list and most were unread. So we are far from a situation where we agree on what is fundamental – and where we respect the fundamentals.
Understanding designing and research
Designers perform “work practices” and they are part of a “community of practice”. This is our research object; we study the practice in order to note down its patterns and to create scientific understanding, both with the purpose of developing methods and models for enhancing the practice. However, the industrial practice is very composed and we have no clear picture of the phenomena, which we actually study and theorise. My proposal [8, 9] for a clarifying Weltanschaung is shown below. I propose that we divide design science into four domains as shown and especially that we try to crystallise and separate the basic design phenomena from the large amount of activities performed in industry.
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Copenhagen Working Papers on Design // 2010 // No. 1 // Myrup Andreasen My simplistic model shall be seen as a mindset provoking researchers to distinguish
between what they note from practice and what shall be seen as new empirical and theoretical contributions.
Ways forward?
I have my ‘heroes’, inspiring me in the search for consolidation. A couple of examples:
Horváth [3] has created a very interesting structured view upon theories and contributions, identifying nine contextual categories of design research, composed by 39 topics and 127 subtopics. Horváth has brought 328 basic research contributions into his structure as a kind of evidence. Horváth’s idea and mapping should be thoroughly discussed and applied.
Henderson [10] in her book “The use of models and drawings in practice” shows an exemplary treatment of the practice topics CAD, configuration, distributed design, etc. by studying the basic research issues of codification, conventions, boundary objects, coordination and communication.
I believe that dialogue about basic issues can bring us further to consolidation. Many good textbooks have been created where the author presents an “arranged practice” as his or her perception of practice, theories, ideas and pedagogics, i.e. a “school”. But these books only implicitly bring research fundamentals to the audience.
A proposal
I am sure that Centre for Philosophy and Design can help Design Society in establishing a framework and reference of understanding of what it takes to create consolidation. I propose that a positioning paper and speech be prepared for the ICED11 conference in Copenhagen [11], showing the profile and endeavours of CEPHAD and this group’s reflections on configuration of design research.
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References
[1] See: www.designsociety.org
[2] Cantamessa, Design research in perspective – a meta-research on ICED97 and ICED99, In Culley et. Al. (ed.): Proceedings of ICED01, Glasgow 2001.
[3] Horváth, I.: A treatise on order in engineering research. Research in Engineering Design 2004,15: 155-181
[4] McMahon, C.: Design Research Challenges for the 21st Century – or my life as mistakes.
DS’s Rigi meeting at Crete 2006. Unpublished.
[5] Birkhofer, H.: The Need for Consolidation. Workshop Engineering Design Science – Consolidation and Perspectives. DESIGN 2006 Dubrovnik.
[6] Blessing, L.: Consolidation of Design research: The issue of design theory. Workshop Engineering Design Science – Consolidation and Perspectives. DESIGN 2006 Dubrovnik.
[7] Samuel, A.: Slides on consolidation, Rigi 2002, unpublished.
[8] Andreasen, M.Myrup: Consolidation of Design Research: Symptoms, Diagnosis, Cures,Actions? DS’s Rigi meeting at Eltville 1008. Unpublished.
[9] Andreasen, M.Myrup: Complexity of industrial practice and design research contributions –We need consolidation. In Meerkamm, H. (ed.): Proceedings of 20. Symposium
“Design for X”, Neukirchen 2009.
[10] Henderson, k.: On Line and Paper – Visual Representations, Visual Culture and ComputerGraphics in Design Engineering. The MIT Press 1999.
[11] See: www.iced11.org
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