TIME FOR CHANGE: BUILDING A DESIGN DISCIPLINE

Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl

Design is reaching a transitional moment that requires a critical look at its current and future states. The look that will unfold in these pages is not from the standpoint of design as an object, but from the standpoint of design as process or action — a look from the inside of design by international teachers and practitioners who support a change from craft to discipline. Design's craft origins cannot support the evolving context of design action needed now. This is not a new or unique call to action (Krippendorff, 1995; Owen, 1998; Buchanan, 2001); nevertheless, it is timely. Transformations from a status quo do not happen suddenly, and do not evolve because one or a few people believe it is necessary, but because the idea of change resonates with many individuals and institutions worldwide, especially those who practice a new version of design and who teach the next generation of designers to build on the past rather than replicate it. Such transformations also respond to cultural change in the broadest sense. In this case, it also depends on design faculty that understands academic structure from a broader perspective and use institutional supports like research offices, peer-reviewed journals, interdisciplinary opportunities, and conferences to their advantage. What unfolds in this book is a fairly specific argument: that design practice and education are changing, particularly in relation to the two themes this book addresses, research and collaboration. If design is to develop as a discipline, it must necessarily develop further based on these themes.

The first and last chapters of this book frame the focus on design integration; the first chapter argues for a necessary change in design education and practice, while the last chapter looks to the future of design. Between these chapters are two sections, research and collaboration, each of which starts with an examination of its theme and ends by introducing the next chapters in its section. Let's now explore the argument for change.

Craft or Discipline?

Both crafts and disciplines have methods to support their work, but how these methods are learned and applied is different. Crafts often have traditional, stable methods learned by observation and trial and error during an apprenticeship. Disciplines have an array of methods as well as ongoing inquiry into new or improved ones, introduced with theoretical perspectives and used in practical situations on a variety of problems. Craft methods are often not transferable to situations beyond the craft's immediate domain, while disciplinary methods are frequently empty of content or context and are transferable or adaptable to other situations. Another way to look at the difference between craft and discipline is to examine their outcomes. Crafts lead to trade organizations and disciplines lead to professions. Research is intimately tied to disciplinary evolution in its development of grounding knowledge for professional work.

Disciplines do not have to be invented; scaffolding for their growth exists organizationally within the university. Other disciplinary histories and evolutions can inform an immature domain like design. Lee Shulman, former president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, observed in The Wisdom of Practice (2004b, 456), "... we recognize that the communities that matter most are strongly identified with the disciplines of our scholarship. 'Discipline' is in fact a powerful pun because it not only denotes a domain but also suggests a process: a community that disciplines is one that exercises quality, control, judgment, evaluation, and paradigmatic definition." Others (Weingart and Stehr, 2000, 51) have suggested that disciplines are like cartels — they organize the marketplace for the employment of their students to the exclusion of those lacking such credentials. Arguably, design in its craft configuration lacks the processes just mentioned as its singularity or idiosyncrasy has limited reach and authority among practitioners and marketplace.

What is Tacit or Explicit?

Among others, Jürgen Habermas (1998, 33) has drawn a useful distinction between "know-how" and "know-that." Know-how is the understanding of a competent practitioner to understand how to produce or accomplish something — a craftsperson or one with habituated skills. Know-that is the explicit knowledge of how one is able to know-how; for example, a teacher who abstracts principles for or from application exhibits know-that. To illustrate the difference even more specifically, compare adesign practitioner who can intuitively select, size, and position type for legibility to an educator who knows why the type is better perceptually and how the typographic variables interact with page or screen space, reading ease, and comprehension.

Another way to draw this distinction is to discuss what is tacit and what is explicit. Tacit knowledge, according to Michael Polanyi (1983, 166), is what we know that we cannot tell. He offers the example of how we can identify a particular human face, yet be unable to describe exactly how we recognize it in a crowd. He compares this to the police system that facilitates the selection of facial elements (eyes, noses, mouths, etc.) to form a composite face from an array of possibilities. We can use this method by matching the features to our remembrance, yet we are unable to tell exactly how we do this. Our remembrance and its realization through building a composite face are tacit; the method for building the facial representation is explicit.

Much of the forming activity of design is tacit, developed through interaction with representations or prototypes that we manipulate, observe differences in, react to and change until a desired (imagined, discovered, appropriate) form is achieved. It is difficult to talk about the action of making something a little smaller (how small?) or shifting something to a more remote place (how remote?) — we sense the need and perform the action much before we can articulate the reason why. In a fluid...