Designing Psi: An Introduction to the Psi Framework

Design Issues, 2004

This Design Issues symposium is a continuation of efforts to enrich design studies by selectively reaching out to scholarship in related fields. The contributors to this issue are from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). They include an anthropologist, a political scientist, and an interdisciplinary set of STS graduate students and recent Ph.D.s with backgrounds in engineering and design, as well as in the humanities and social sciences. This volume emerges from a project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to develop "An STS Focus on Design," funded by the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Studies program. Project participants seek to foster a dialogue with the design studies community on design as a public activity engaging professional designers with many other social actors and institutions. In this introduction, we provide an overview of how some STS scholars think about the challenges of design, and we briefly summarize the articles in this symposium. However, we begin by discussing the conceptual foundation for the work, distinguishing between what we call "proximate designers" and "design by society." 2 Professional designers most immediately shape design by their decisions at the drawing board, of course, but they work within contexts and incentive structures shaped largely by others. In proposing that design studies pay increased attention to design by society, we are attempting to join with Victor Papanek, Nigel Whiteley, Joan Rothschild, Richard Buchanan, Victor Margolin, William McDonough, and others who think systematically about how design can help shape a commendable civilization. 3 Proximate Designers and Design by Society Our starting point is the fact that design involves both professional designers as well as what might be termed "design by society." We refer to the persons often studied in this journal as proximate designers, including product, industrial, graphics, and urban designers and architects who exercise direct control over the details of design. 4 Proximate designers work under constraints and incentives established via complex social arrangements involving persons often far removed from the drawing board. This happens partly because 1 This symposium is based on papers originally written for the Design Seminar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, funded by the National Science Foundation under grant B10332 for "An STS Focus on Design." We thank John Schumacher (in memoriam), Linnda Caporael, Judith Gregory, Langdon Winner, and our fellow participants in the Design Seminar for their contributions to this collaboration. 2 Design by society is intended as a corollary to Nigel Whiteley's Design For Society (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), recalling as well the democratic theme, "Of, by, and for the people." 3 Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd ed.

Design Philosophy Papers, 2013

A range of alternative formulations of design, such as ‘social’, ‘activist’, ‘critical’, ‘relational’, ‘humanitarian’ design, are amassing.[1] Instead of focusing on form and function, such formulations typically focus on what design produces. At stake in the social turn within design is reconsideration of what design is about – not in terms of its objects but, and perhaps even more fundamentally, its subjects. Further, contemporary design oriented toward the public realm in multiple contexts involves a diversity of possible subjects and political subjectivities. ‘Participation’ has been an approach to addressing social questions in design. Participation has been linked, for example, to “a mindset and attitude about people” [2] and a kind of ‘design humanism’ aimed at reducing domination,[3] which meets the human ideal of mutual support for altruism, a ‘collective instinct of humanity’.[4] In a range of associated projects and practices in recent years, methodologies have been applied to involve more or different people directly in product development processes. Indeed, participation may itself be seen as the objective of design processes.[5] Concern, however, often tends towards methods for improving design objects, with certain questions about its subjects left under-examined or posed in overly general and loaded terms that might be further interrogated. In this paper, we query participation in design in order to discuss some of the problematics of relating to ‘others’ in practices of design and design research. We argue, as do other design thinkers, for practices involving “micro-political participation in the production of space”,[6] in which design frames and stages the (re)production of social as well as spatial relations. We argue for increased reflexivity about how others participate in design and the political implications. Here, ‘the political’ refers to the issue of who is identified and represented as a subject in studies and practices of design. Concerned with the social organization of everyday life, the design role is always engaged with “confrontation of power relations and influence by the identification of new terms and themes for contestation and new trajectories for action”.[7]

The issue of defining design is open in many quarters. Definitions abound, yet convergence, especially between different design disciplines, remains elusive. In this speculative paper, the authors consider what designing is like, rather than what it is. In particular, we consider some other activities that have been likened to designing (problem-solving, creativity, planning, synthesis, specification, and a natural human ability), and study the boundaries between designing and these other activities. These boundaries are not crisp, but may be analogous to boundary layers -grey areas in which certain, otherwise steady, characteristics change. While no clear answers result, we do believe we have shed some light on the nature of designing with respect to these other activities. In the end, we see designing as a confluence of other activities, each with their own existence, but combining uniquely to form the activity we call designing.

1996

In Time for Change: Building a Design Discipline, design educator Sharon Poggenpohl argues “that design practice and education are changing, particularly in relation to…research and collaboration. If design is to develop as a discipline, it must necessarily develop further based on these themes.”(1) At the center of this development, Poggenpohl continues, is the transformation of the tacit knowledge that designers traditionally employ, to explicit knowledge that is a core asset to cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration. “This is the shortcoming that makes design appear elusive, special, inarticulate, and even unknowable. As long as designers consider themselves to be first and foremost aesthetic finishers of ideas that are well advanced in the development process, they will be trapped by the tacit and unable to provide a clear explanation.”(5) Since Poggenpohl’s call, design discourse has been increasingly focused on this building of explicit, critical knowledge. Designers are no longer comfortable or willing to be the “aesthetic finishers” that Poggenpohl aptly names. But as Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin have argued, much of the evaluation of design has been dictated by those outside of design practice—and in doing so, the focus has leaned to the artifacts that are a result of design practice, rather than the practice itself. In The Idea of Design, Margolin and Buchanan call for an integration of the liberal arts into the evaluation of design — to both broaden the discussion of design evaluation to include that which is focused on the human experience, but also to connect design philosophy and practice (x). This call is in part a response to designs focus on “wicked” problems, and a necessary shift in motivation from what we (as designers) can do, to what we should do. As architectural practice dips into urbanism and visual communication; and as graphic design expands into strategies that involve spaces, places and environments, the ability for students to see across disciplines to find patterns and commonalities as well as differences is increasingly critical. This paper will look at how a cross-disciplinary design studies course for sophomore students at NC State University evaluates design artifacts, environments, experiences and impacts through a series of common, contemporary and critical themes that sit above any specific discipline. By looking at design through its technology, usability, morality, economy, sustainability, and cultural context and impacts, students focus on how design shapes, and is shaped by, the human experience. As a course for non-studio majors, the work in this course can provide insight for studio instructors into how the language and evaluation of design might evolve to include more cross-disciplinary, systems-based perspectives, to help young designers see the work that they do as part of a larger design theory and practice.

"Usability: Turning Technologies Into Tools" , 1992

Successful design relies on much more than the designed artifact itself. Focus on the artifact alone ignores or conceals many important “peripheral” factors that make an essential contribution to the success of good design. Such a narrow focus also conceals the way good design helps people learn, work, and innovate. In this paper, we suggest that these generally unrecognized aspects of design can be successfully exploited if, on the one hand, the focus of design is broadened to include the environment in which a designed product is situated and the community in which it is used; and if, on the other hand, notions of the design process are expanded to include its often unseen role in supporting learning and initiating “enacting” innovation. We try to extend the understanding of design, both as a process and as a product, by examining a series of paired concepts— such as “individual” and “social,” “opacity” and “transparency,” or “center” and “periphery”—relating to design. We claim that too often designers regard these pairs as mutually exclusive alternatives. We suggest that in general the reconciliation of such pairs may lead to a richer understanding and use of design.

A contemporary vision of design needs to be encompassed in the actual mutation of the productive and cultural contexts facing different systems of change. Conceived as a collective work, this introductory paper looks at these changes in the design field by identifying six possible perspectives that, albeit laying on parallel dimensions, present many interrelated aspects: productive, professional, creative, cultural, sustainable, prospective. The conclusive paragraph brings forwards an in depth analisys that offers an engineering vision of design cultures.

Systems & Design: Beyond Processes and Thinking. 6th International Forum of Design as a process, 2016

Historically the imaginary and the hegemonic thinking, in the Western globe north, has been marked by the epistemology and capitalists archetypes. Notwithstanding the design seem as a practice and discipline shielded on a simplistic discourse of functional / communicative efficiency, wandering through by multiple aestheticism apparently neutral in relation to the symbolic, but in fact they never are, because what really hapens is that the aesthetic appearance of the generated forms will always be a review of the powers ruling. We start from the understanding that the act of creating an aesthetic artifact, will also be a movement of inscription in a discursive platform (that precedes it), is in itself an narrative act and that fact represent a certain take place in relation to certain symbolic reality. On reflection shown if it sees design as a discipline and / or an instrument of action, whose operational relevance tends to question and simultaneously rehearsing a response, in which more than why interests answer to why.

Design Issues, 2020

To resolve the problem of design marginalization in organizations, we introduce the concept of institution and an Aristotelian framework for human activity to identify an action-based approach for design in complex systems. When design is positioned solely as an activity of production—despite the success of human-centered products—it misses an opportunity to influence institutions, or the human-side of organizations. When repositioned as a practice of shaping action, design engages in the ordering, modifying and reordering of social structures, environments and culture. In short, a theory of institution provides a human-centered approach to systems design and organizational transformation.

Convergence Of Research In Art And Design: A Source Book, Malaysia: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia., 2023

Evolving from the dawn of the design industry during the first Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century to the Industrial Revolution 4.0, the concept of design research has extended from the humble beginning of studying how to improve the quality of design artefacts and design process to a bigger perspective of solving design problems. However, the so-called design problem may not be the problem that can be effortlessly solved with the creation of design artefacts or ideas; it may involve wicked problems that require researchers to look into the matter comprehensively and holistically. It requires systems thinking, socio-technical systems approach, and the new DesignX concept posited by Donald A. Norman and other design scholars. This article explores this new extended horizon of design research and discusses possible research ideas and future spectrums. It provides insight to prospective postgraduate students who are interested in conducting research in the area.