Design Issues 

About: Design Issues is an academic journal published by The MIT Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Design education & Computer science. It has an ISSN identifier of 0747-9360. Over the lifetime, 883 publications have been published receiving 31274 citations.

Wicked Problems in Design Thinking

Abstract: Introduction Despite efforts to discover the foundations of design thinking in the fine arts, the natural sciences, or most recently, the social sciences, design eludes reduction and remains a surprisingly flexible activity. No single definition of design, or branches of professionalized practice such as industrial or graphic design, adequately covers the diversity of ideas and methods gathered together under the label. Indeed, the variety of research reported in conference papers, journal articles, and books suggests that design continues to expand in its meanings and connections, revealing unexpected dimensions in practice as well as understanding. This follows the trend of design thinking in the twentieth century, for we have seen design grow from a trade activity to a segmentedprofession to afield for technical research and to what now should be recognized as a new liberal art of technological culture. It may seem unusual to talk about design as a liberal art, particularly when many people are accustomed to identifying the liberal arts with the traditional "arts and sciences" that are institutionalized in colleges and universities. But the liberal arts are undergoing a revolutionary transformation in twentieth-century culture, and design is one of the areas in which this transformation is strikingly evident. To understand the change that is now underway, it is important to recognize that what are commonly regarded as the liberal arts today are not outside of history. They originated in the Renaissance and underwent prolonged development that culminated in the nineteenth century as a vision of an encyclopedic education of beaux arts, belles lettres, history, various natural sciences and mathematics, philosophy, and the fledgling social sciences. This circle of learning was divided into particular subject matters, each with a proper method or set of methods suitable to its exploration. At their peak as liberal arts, these subject matters provided an integrated understanding of human experience and the array of available knowledge. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, existing subjects were explored with progressively more refined methods, and new subjects were added to accord with advances in knowledge. As a This essay is based on a paper presented at 'Colloque Recherches sur le Design: Incitations, Implications, Interactions," the first French university symposium on design research held October 1990 at l'Universit6 de Technologie de Compiegne, Compiegne, France.

Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline Versus Design Science

Abstract: Design and Science I would like to begin this paper with a brief review of some of the historical concerns that have emerged with respect to the relationship between design and science. These concerns emerged strongly at two important periods in the modern history of design: in the 1920s, with a search for scientific design products, and in the 1960s, with a concern for scientific design process. The 40-year cycle in these concerns appears to be coming around again, and we might expect to see the reemergence of design-science concerns in the 2000s. A desire to “scientise” design can be traced back to ideas in the twentieth century modern movement of design. For example, in the early 1920s, the De Stijl protagonist, Theo van Doesburg, expressed his perception of a new spirit in art and design: “Our epoch is hostile to every subjective speculation in art, science, technology, etc. The new spirit, which already governs almost all modern life, is opposed to animal spontaneity, to nature’s domination, to artistic flummery. In order to construct a new object we need a method, that is to say, an objective system.” 1

City of bits: space, place, and the infobahn

Abstract: Pulling glass electronic agoras cyborg citizens recombinant architecture soft cities bit biz getting to the good bits notes surf sites.

Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs. Technology and Meaning Change

Abstract: Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs Technology and Meaning Change Donald A Norman, Roberto Verganti Donald A Norman and Stephen W Draper, Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human–Computer Inter- action (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986); Donald A Norman, “Human-Centered Product Development,” Chapter 10 in The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), Background Our work began independently Norman was one of the originators of the class of design exploration now commonly known as user- centered or human-centered design (HCD) 1 These methods have a common framework: an iterative cycle of investigation—usually characterized by observations, an ideation phase, and rapid proto- type and testing Each iteration builds on the lessons learned from the previous cycle, and the process terminates either when the results are appropriate or when the allotted time has run out Norman realized that this continual process of checking with the intended users would indeed lead to incremental enhancements of the product; he also realized that it actually was a form of hill climbing—a well-known mathematical procedure for finding local optimization In hill climbing’s application to design, consider a multi-dimensional hill where position on one dimen- sion—height along the vertical axis—represents product quality; and where position along the other dimensions, represents choices among various design parameters This image is usually illus- trated with just two axes: product quality along the vertical axis and design parameters along the horizontal, as shown in Figure 1 Hill-climbing is used in situations, such as design, where the shape of the hill cannot be known in advance Therefore, one makes tiny movements along all the design dimensions and selects the one that yields an increase in height, repeating until satisfied This movement is precisely what the repeated rapid prototyping and testing is doing in HCD Think of a blindfolded person trying to reach the top of a hill by feeling the ground in all directions around the current position and then moving to the highest posi- tion, repeating until the “ground” in all directions is lower than the current one: This position would be the top of the hill Although the hill-climbing procedure guarantees continual improvement, with eventual termination at the peak of the hill, it has a well-known limit: “Climbers” have no way of knowing whether even higher hills might be scaled in some other part of the design space Hill-climbing methods get trapped in local maxima © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology DesignIssues: Volume 30, Number 1 Winter 2014 doi:101162/DESI_a_00250