Current State of Design Methods
There is no one way to practice design methods. John Chris Jones recognized this by stating:
- "Methodology should not be a fixed track to a fixed destination, but a conversation about everything that could be made to happen. The language of the conversation must bridge the logical gap between past and future, but in doing so it should not limit the variety of possible futures that are discussed nor should it force the choice of a future that is unfree."
The focus of most post-1962 enhancements to design methods has been on developing a series of relevant, sound, humanistic problem-solving procedures and techniques to reduce avoidable errors and oversights that can adversely affect design solutions. The key benefit is to find a method that suits a particular design situation.
The benefits of their original work has been abstracted many times over; but in today's design environment, several of their main ideas have been integrated into contemporary design methods:
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- Emphasis on the user
- Use of basic research methods to validate convictions with fact
- Use of brainstorming and other related means to break mental patterns and precedent
- Increased collaborative nature of design with other disciplines
A large challenge for design as a discipline, its use of methods and an endeavor to create shared values, is its inherent synthetic nature as an area of study and action. This allows design to be extremely malleable in nature, borrowing ideas and concepts from a wide variety of professions to suit the ends of individual practitioners. It also makes design vulnerable since these very activities make design a discipline unextensible as a shared body of knowledge.
Long before Malcolm Gladwell and his book Blink, there was Donald Schon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1983, he published The Reflective Practitioner. He saw traditional professions with stable knowledge bases, such as law and medicine, becoming unstable due to outdated notions of 'technical-rationality' as the grounding of professional knowledge. Practitioners were able to describe how they 'think on their feet', and how they make use of a standard set of frameworks and techniques. Schon foresaw the increasing instability of traditional knowledge and how to achieve it. This is in line with the original founders of design methods who wanted to break with an unimaginative and static technical society and unify exploration, collaboration and intuition.
Design methods has influenced design practice and design education. It has benefitted the design community by helping to create introductions that would never have happened if traditional professions remained stable, which did not necessarily allow collaboration due to gatekeeping of areas of knowledge and expertise. Design has been by nature an interloper activity, with individuals that have crossed disciplines to question and innovate.
The challenge is to transform individual experiences, frameworks and perspectives into a shared, understandable, and, most importantly, a transmittable area of knowledge. Victor Margolin states three reasons why this will prove difficult:
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- Domain knowledge is a mixture of vocation (discipline) and avocation (interest) creating hybrid definitions that degrade shared knowledge
- Intellectual capital of design and wider scholarly pluralism has diluted focus and shared language which has led to ungovernable laissez-faire values
- Individual explorations of design discourse focuses too much on individual narratives leading to personal point-of-view rather than a critical mass of shared values
In the end, design methods is a term that is widely used. Though conducive to interpretations, it is a shared belief in an exploratory and rigorous method to solve problems through design, an act which is part and parcel of what designers aim to accomplish in today's complex world.
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