Richard Buchanan

Design Research and the New Learning

Introduction The theme of this conference is how we shape and sustain design research programs in our institutions. It is an important theme, and the conference is timely. Despite a growing body of research and published results, there is uncertainty about the value of design research, the nature of design research, the institutional framework within which such research should be supported and evaluated, and who should conduct it. In short, there is uncertainty about whether there is such a thing as design knowledge that merits serious attention. My goal is to address these questions from a personal perspective, recognizing that my individual views may be less important for the goals of the conference than how my views reflect, in subtle or obvious ways, the North American social, cultural, and intellectual environment within which they have formed. The conference is about design research in the United Kingdom, and my role is to provide a contrasting perspective at the outset that may help us understand some of the issues and options that are taking shape in the United Kingdom. My willingness to play this role comes from a belief that we are in the middle of a revolution in design thinking and that events in the United Kingdom, while strongly influenced by issues of national policy, reflect changes in the field of design in many other parts of the world.

Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice

yet visually clear, symbolization of the real processes at work in a complex machine. The new area of product semantics is closely related to this aspect of persuasion in its attempt to engage the mind of the audience and make the workings of a product more readily accessible.28 Product semantics and similar approaches work within broader design arguments concerning the relationship between users and objects, but there are other approaches that serve quite different

Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of Human-Centered Design

As I walked on the shore of Cape Town to the opening ceremonies of a conference on design in South Africa, I saw through the rain and mist a small sliver of land in the bay. Naively, I asked my host if it was part of the peninsula that extends south of the city or an island. With what, in retrospect, must have been great patience, she quietly explained that it was not “an” island, it was “the” island. I was embarrassed, but I knew immediately what she meant. I spent the rest of the evening thinking about the political prisoners who were held on Robben Island, human rights, and the irony of a conference within sight of Table Bay that seeks to explore the reshaping of South Africa by design. I was helped in these thoughts by the address of the Minister of Education, Dr. Kadir Asmal, who opened the conference by exploring the meaning of design, the need and opportunities for design in South Africa, and, most importantly, the grounding of design in the cultural values and political principles expressed in the new South African Constitution. I have never heard a high government official anywhere in the world speak so insightfully about the new design that is emerging around us as we near the beginning of a new century. Perhaps everyone in the audience was surprised by how quickly and accurately he captured the core of our discipline and turned it back to us for action. Many of his ideas were at the forward edge of our field, and some were further ahead than we are prepared to admit. For example, I believe we all recognized his significant transformation of the old design theme of “form and function” into the new design theme of “form and content.” This is one of the distinguishing marks of new design thinking: not a rejection of function, but a recognition that unless designers grasp the significant content of the products they create, their work will come to little consequence or may even lead to harm in our complex world. I was particularly surprised, however, by Dr. Asmal’s account of the creation—and here he deliberately and significantly used the word “design”—of the South African Constitution. He explained that after deliberation the drafters decided not to model the document on the familiar example of the United States Constitution, with an appended Bill of Rights, but rather to give central importance from the beginning to the concept of human

Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture

In a seminal article on the study of rhetoric in the Middle Ages, Richard McKeon proposed a strategy for inquiry that illuminated the development of the art in a period where traditional histories had found little of intellectual significance.2 He argued that instead of studying rhetoric as a simple verbal discipline with a more or less constant subject matter drawn from style or the interpretation of the works of poets and orators or the law, one could study the changing conceptions of subject matter and purpose by which rhetoricians thought to distinguish and oppose their doctrines. By studying the basic philosophic differences that are implicated in changing conceptions of rhetoric, one could discover intelligible patterns in the development of the art that otherwise may appear whimsical, haphazard, arbitrary, or merely verbal. What followed was the discovery of how the doctrines and devices of rhetoric in the Middle Ages spread with little recognition to subject matters far from those ordinarily ascribed to it. McKeon summarized the patterns in three lines of intellectual development. First was the tradition of rhetoricians themselves; second was the tradition of philosophers and theologians; and third was the tradition of logicians. The article concludes with a discussion of how these lines of development were extended in the Renaissance, with implications for the changing relationship of art and science that continues to unfold in the twentieth century around the development of technology. What would a study of rhetoric in our own period look like if rhetoric were explored by McKeons strategy? Among rhetoricians the record of past meetings of organizations such as the Rhetoric Society of America provides evidence for how the lines of intellectual development revealed by McKeon are extended in contemporary culture. For example, we find continuing attention to the study of rhetoric as a simple verbal discipline

On the Case Study Method of Research and Teaching in Design

Case studies have a rich history for exploring the space between the world of theory and the experience of practice. It is one thing to have an idea and another thing to make that idea concrete and real. Designers, by the nature of what they do, must become skilled at moving between those two places. But recognizing and understanding the transition from the one place to the other, and back again, is difficult. Case studies are a useful tool for research and teaching that focus on the transition between theory and practice. The format has been widely used in other disciplines, and it can be used effectively in design. Law schools first showed the way for the case study approach, beginning in 1870.1 Before that, law was taught by the Dwight Method, which emphasized memorization and recall, and left much of the practical learning to apprenticeships. Christopher Langdell changed that way of teaching when he arrived at Harvard Law School. He believed that, at its root, the art of practicing law involved understanding core principles and being able to apply those principles in different situations. Of course, the legal profession was fortunate in this respect, because there already existed an infrastructure by which cases were written to explain and interpret the principles used to reach legal judgment. When Langdell started teaching, he had his students read the original sources, which were the cases, and develop their own conclusions, guided by conversation and discussion in the classroom. The dialectic of discussion, rather than simply memorizing the grammar of the law, enabled the student to better understand legal principles and their possible application in different situations. Langdell set in motion a teaching approach that initially was met with resistance but, by 1920, became the dominant teaching mode in law schools and continues to this day. Around 1920, the Harvard Business School began exploring the possibility of using the case study approach in their graduate program.2 They, too, realized the need to prepare students for the job of making and implementing decisions in a murky world. The biggest hurdle was the lack of existing case studies, so Wallace P. Donham, the dean of the Harvard Business School, created a group known as the Bureau of Business Research, which developed and wrote case studies from 1920 to 1925. These cases served as a starting place, and the writing of additional case studies became an integral part of a law professor’s duties. 1 David A. Garvin, “Making the Case” Harvard Magazine (September–October 2003): 58–59. 2 Ibid., 60–61.

Introduction: Design and Organizational Change

In June 2004, the Stern School of Business at New York University hosted a small working conference on the theme of “Organization Design.” The National Science Foundation sponsored the conference for the purpose of developing a scientific base for organization design, broadly defined as “explicit efforts to improve organizations.” Like “Managing as Designing,” the groundbreaking conference held at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in 2002, the NYU conference was part of the growing trend in business schools to investigate design—often under the term “innovation”—and its role in management and organizational change.1 For designers who have begun to explore the impact of their work on organizations and organizational life, as well as the impact of organizations on their own work, the trend and the conferences are important. They further elevate the idea that organizations are products, as well as the idea that, like other products, organizations can be designed by intelligent forethought and appropriate action. The idea that organizations are products of design is not entirely new. The rise of management and organization theory in the twentieth century is, in essence, the history of the rise of an important branch of design thinking, based on the broad goal of finding ways to improve organizations and their effectiveness. However, an explicit concept of design emerged only slowly in this area, and in isolation from the development of design in other applications. Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behavior (1945) was the first major work to make design an explicit concept in management.2 It focused on design as an activity of decision-making and advanced ideas about communication and information that revitalized the field of management and organization theory in many ways. Indeed, the ideas developed in this book also were the genesis of The Sciences of the Artificial and the concept of “design science,” as Simon understood it. Subsequently, Jay R. Galbraith’s Organization Design, a book that applied some of Herbert Simon’s ideas about organizational design, offered a concrete method of “structural design” based on information and decision-making that continues to influence management practice. For the most part, however, the study of organizations focused on theory and empirical research. The idea of transferring research results into practical action was, as noted by Roger Dunbar, William Starbuck, and the other organizers 1 Richard J. Boland and Fred Collopy, Managing as Designing (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 2 Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York: The Free Press, 1945).

Thinking about Design: An Historical Perspective

Publisher Summary The philosophical roots of design may be traced to the Renaissance and the work of individuals such as Pico della Mirandola, Francis Bacon, and Galileo Galilei. Design emerged in the twentieth century with two methods of practice. The first was the craft method, based on traditional practices of trial and error in the making of artifacts and the gradual evolution of product forms adapted to particular circumstances. This was an experimental method, first embedded in craftwork as a whole and then gradually separated from machine manufacture because of industrialization. Designing prototypes, with anticipation of their eventual manufacture by machine methods, provided a way of exploring the forms and materials as well as the parts and wholes of products. The second method of design focused on drawing and draftsmanship. In this method, the designer sketches possible product forms that satisfy the needs of manufacturers and the marketplace and then develops detailed scale drawings that can be used as instructions or specifications to guide manufacture and construction.

Strategies of Design Research: Productive Science and Rhetorical Inquiry

The history of design is a history of evolving problems. The earliest problems were those of practice and production, and the solution of those problems led to further problems of practice and production, as well as problems of philosophy and theory that were consequent upon the existence of new products. In the ancient world, there was little need to distinguish design from the making of products, because the craftsperson and the master-builder carried within themselves both the ability to conceive products and the ability to embody their conceptions in tangible form. Technical treatises were written to solve the problem of education, passing on accumulated knowledge of practice and production to individuals who would continue the work of making. Even before such treatises were written, however, there were already theoretical and philosophical speculations on the nature of products and their effects on human life. Those speculations were typically embedded in treatises on other subjects and problems, but they provided the distant foundations for what is now regarded as the field of design and design research. They characterised the subject matter of human-made products or the artificial, developed the fundamental strategies of inquiry into the nature of products and making, and explored possible principles of making and use that would later turn design from a trade practice into a domain of many professions and, subsequently, into a field of research encompassing history, criticism and theory, supported by empirical research and further philosophic speculation. This field did not emerge in recognisable form until the 20th century, when the problems of design and technology became so complex that their resolution required new thinking.

Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Requirements: Methods, Tools, and Techniques [Review Article]

Understanding Your Users is an exception among the many “how to” books that are common in design literature. It is an important book that helps to clarify the practices of user research in design and product development. In addition, however, it also helps to consolidate the new field of interaction design by focusing on the practical meaning of “user-centered design” for the practicing designer. User research has become a common theme of many papers in design conferences around the world, and many design schools are now adjusting their programs to include a significant component of user research methodology. However, the subject of user research remains confusing and disorganized. This is true even in the professional design community, where there are estimates that a significant portion of user research is wasted either because the particular method employed is not appropriate to the question that needs to be answered or because the results of user research are not adequately integrated into design thinking. There are few books or articles that provide a useful framework for understanding the wide range of user research methods that are available to the designer or the product development team, the practical details of specific methods, the situations when one or another method is appropriate, and concrete examples of best practices. Understanding Your Users comes as close to meeting the need as any other book one may find. The book is organized in five parts. The first part is a discussion of many preliminary issues in user research. The issues range from key concepts of usercentered design and user requirements to personas and scenarios to ethical issues to appropriate facilities. The second part discusses the practical issues of preparing for a user research session. The third part presents seven key methods of user research: interviews, surveys, wants and needs analysis, card sorting, group task analysis, focus groups, and field studies (ethnographic methods). The fourth part discusses how to report the results of user research to different stakeholders. And the fifth part offers appendices on many topics relevant to user research. Each part is well considered, clearly written, and entirely helpful, with case studies and many practical suggestions.

Interactionary: a live UI design competition

This experimental panel is an attempt to demonstrate the dynamic and impromptu parts of the interaction design process. Teams of designers, usability engineers and program managers will design solutions to interaction problems live on stage, in front of the audience.