Transforming Grounds

If you go to Youtube and look for "design thinking" you will find a large number of videos with TED talks and other talks all explaining what design thinking is, how important it is, how to do it, etc. Some are good. They present an understanding of designing that is ok, but in many cases they are quite simplistic, and surprisingly quite often based on the speakers personal experience of realizing the "power" of design as a new creative process to solve problems. The speaker have "seen the light", and the light is design thinking. Again, this is all well, we do need as many as possible to be introduced to a designerly way of thinking. The world needs design thinking. But, it is not enough. Any approach used by humans to engage with the world in an intentional way, for producing knowledge (as the scientific process) or for producing art (as the artistic process) or for producing change (as the design process) has to be supported. The scientific process ha...

I was today made aware about an interesting text about complexity (thanks Abiel Tomás Parra Hernández for the pointer). The article has the title " Why this will be the Century of Complexity... " written by Kieran D. Kelly. The article is mostly aimed at the world of physics and how that discipline has and is changing in relation to the growing understanding of complex phenomena. To what extent the article correctly describes physics and its development is not something I can determine, but, the article makes some interesting observations that can be relevant to the philosophy and theory of designing. In the article Kelly argues that complexity and chaos is something natural and something that we have to live with and that can't be reduced to traditional thinking based on some fundamental ideas of stability. Anyway, if this is interesting from a scientific perspective I don't know and for the purpose of my post, I don't care. Instead, what is interesting to me a...

I am at the moment, together with my PhD student Jordan Beck, working on a new course preliminary called " The World of Interfaces ". I would like to teach a course that captures the breadth and diversity in the way interfaces are manifested today. It would include a lot of capturing, collecting and curating. It would lead to categorizations, clusterings, and types. I imagine it as a quite exciting course for undergraduate students primarily with the purpose to challenge their perceived ideas about what interfaces are, can be and should be. I also imagine a graduate course on the same topic but with more theoretical ambitions (related to my new book "Things that keep us busy -- elements of interaction". If you have ideas about a course like this, maybe already teach one or took one, or know good readings, I would love to hear from you. My email is estolter@indiana.edu

One of my intellectual hero's is Donald Schön. I have sine the mid 1980s been impressed and inspired by his writings on design. His theoretical framework is broad in scope, deep in detail and ambitious and by most today overlooked. Of course, Schön is one of the most cited design thinkers but his ideas has been reduced and are usually referred to only be about "reflection". Schön's work is much more than that. Anyway, to those to engage in trying to produce new methods and tools that can support design practice, there is a wonderful quote from Schön that is worth 'reflecting' upon. (You have to exchange 'policy academics' with 'design academics' in this quote.) "If policy academics want to build a better understanding of policy practice in a way useful to practitioners as well as appropriately rigorous, then they must not bypass the research in which practitioners are already engaged. If they disregard what practitioners already know...