scholarly journals A logical critique of the expert position in design research: beyond expert justification of design methods and towards empirical validation

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Vermaas
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Logical Analysis ◽  
Empirical Validation ◽  
Empirical Testing ◽  
Innovative Design ◽  
Design Practices ◽  
Expert Status ◽  
The Way

This paper gives a general and logical analysis of theexpert positionin design research by which methods for innovative design can be derived from expert design practices. It first gives a framework for characterising accounts of design by the way in which they define and relategeneral,descriptiveandprescribedtypes of design practices. Second, it analyses with this framework the expert position’s conservatism of prescribing existing expert design practices to non-expert designers. Third, it argues that the expert status of expert designers does not provide sufficient justification for prescribing expert design practices to non-expert designers; it is shown that this justification needs support by empirical testing. Fourth, it discusses validation of design methods for presenting an approach to this testing. One consequence of the need to empirically test the expert position is that its prescription has to be formulated in more detail. Another consequence is that it undermines the expert position since expert design practices are not anymore certain sources for deriving design methods with. Yet it also opens the expert position to other sources for developing design methods for innovation, such as the practices of contemporary designers and the insights of design researchers.

Do Student Trials Predict What Professionals Value in Sustainable Design Practices?

2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Faludi ◽  
Felix Yiu ◽  
Ola Srour ◽  
Rami Kamareddine ◽  
Omar Ali ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Student Perceptions ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Sustainable Design ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Value Innovation ◽  
Design Practices ◽  
Real Change ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
System Mapping

When teaching sustainable design in industry or academia, we should teach design methods, activities, and mindsets that are most effective at driving real change in a industry. However, most studies of design practices are performed on students, not on professionals. How strongly do student perceptions of value predict those of industry teams designing real products? This study provided workshops on three sustainable design methods (The Natural Step, Whole System Mapping, and Biomimicry) for 172 professionals and 204 students, applying the methods to their actual products being developed. It surveyed both populations about which activities or mindsets within each design method provided sustainability value, innovation value, and overall value. Quantitatively, student results did not strongly predict professional opinions; professionals chose clearer favorites and valued more things. However, qualitatively, student results did predict the reasons why professionals would value the design activities and mindsets. Therefore, care should be taken to choose appropriate participants for the questions being asked in sustainable design research.

Enacting Design for the Workplace

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Seely Brown ◽  
Paul Duguid
Keyword(s):  
Explicit Instruction ◽  
Innovative Design ◽  
Work Systems ◽  
Good Design ◽  
Design Practices ◽  
Conventional Design ◽  
Successful Work ◽  
Successful Design ◽  
Constitutive Components ◽  
The Way

Innovative design for the workplace runs up against inadequate understanding of both work and design practices. Ideas about work practices comprise an odd mixture of folklore and explicit, programmatic descriptions. Thus, paradoxically, a call for union members to “work to rule” can bring a workplace to a complete hall: no set of rules can describe or define what work really is. Conventional ideas about design practices are similarly limited. Indeed, Thackera (1988b) suggests that the whole concept of design is expanding so rapidly that an entirely new term is needed to encompass the range of issues designers now confront. Our purpose in this chapter is to bring some of the implicit character of work and design into the daylight, as a first step towards making design for the workplace more valid. We explore thirteen topics that we believe are central to understanding design for the workplace. We suggest that conventional design approaches often mask powerful but unnoticed resources that, if tapped, can contribute significantly to successful design. For example, a focus on explicit instruction obscures many other ways in which designs actually rely on valuable implicit understanding. Similarly, a focus on individual users conceals the community of users that develops around successful work systems or processes and is crucial to their successful use. To examine the important collateral resources that conventional design overlooks, we pair such concepts as individual-social, narrow-broad, centerperiphery. This is not to establish rigid dichotomies and thus threaten to shift existing imbalances from one inadequate extreme to another, but to expand the region of the “thinkable” in relation to work and design practices. In an insightful discussion of the way such dichotomies may tighten a noose rather than release it, Bourdieu (1989) describes “paired oppositions” as little more than “colluding adversaries” that “tend to delimit the space of the thinkable by excluding the very intention to think beyond the divisions they institute”. But the elements of most of our pairs (though not all, for a few remained stubborn) are presented here as mutually constitutive components of good design.

Evaluation, Validation, and Management in Design

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter E. Vermaas
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Social Design ◽  
Innovative Design ◽  
The Future

This contribution discusses the efficacy of design to realize the aims for which it is employed. Engineering design may be taken as effective in this sense, yet for design thinking as it is emerging in innovative design, social design, nudging, and design for values, this efficacy is not yet established. This contribution surveys the means available for evaluating the designs created by engineering and design thinking methods respectively, and explores how design methods for design thinking can be validated as guarantees for the effectiveness of design. Current work in design research may provide the future means for establishing that design thinking is indeed effective. It is argued that philosophy of technology should be involved in analyzing, understanding, and turning design thinking into a reliable means for realizing its aims. Until then, philosophers should critically monitor whether design thinking realizes the aims for which it is employed.

Design of rural water systems using dynamic models

1999 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 221-231
Author(s):  
A. H. Lobbrecht
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Models ◽  
Water System ◽  
Design Procedure ◽  
Real Data ◽  
Water Systems ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Water Quality Criteria ◽  
Rural Water ◽  
Rural Water Systems ◽  
The Way

The properties of main water ways and infrastructure of rural water systems are often determined by very general design methods. These methods are based on standards that use only little information of the actual water system. Most design methods applied in the Netherlands are based on land use and soil texture. Standards have been developed on the basis of generalized properties of water systems. Details of the actual layout of the water system and the way in which that system is controlled, are usually not incorporated. Present-day dynamic simulation programs and the computer power currently available enable more detailed modeling and incorporation of location-specific data into models. Such models can be used to design the water system and can include real data. A model-based design method is introduced, in which the actual situation of the water system is taken into consideration as well as the way in which the water system is controlled. Stochastics concerning the operation and availability of controlling infrastructure are included in the method. Models can be evaluated by including real data. In this way the actual safety of the water system, for example during floods, can be determined. Water-quantity design criteria can be incorporated as well as water-quality criteria. Application of the method makes it possible to design safe water systems in which excess capacities are avoided and in which all requirements of interest are met. The method, called the ‘dynamic design procedure’, can result in considerable savings for water authorities when new systems have to be designed or existing designs have to be reconsidered.

scholarly journals A Methodology for Architecture Theory and Practices Research: Design Practices Evaluation Studio

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 195
Author(s):  
Fathi Bashier
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Need To Evaluate ◽  
Research Goal ◽  
Architecture Theory ◽  
The Way

This article presents the initial findings of the design research carried out during the last semester by the master of architecture students at Wollega University, Ethiopia. The research goal is the creation of new knowledge to improve the design process. The dissatisfaction with the outcomes of the conventional design approach has led to rising concern and growing awareness of the need to evaluate design outcomes and to learn from the failure. That inadequate understanding of design problems leads frequently to design failure suggests that the evaluation of design outcomes can be made by assessing the way architects develop understanding of design problems, and how they use that understanding for developing knowledge base of the design process. The assumption is that architects’ understanding of design problems can be assessed by examining the way data is used for developing the knowledge base of the design process. The students surveyed the architects’ views in order to produce knowledge, which can be used to develop methods for discovering how inadequate data contributes to miss-informed design decisions; and methods for assessing the architects’ understanding of design problems. In this article the survey findings are analyzed and documented; and, the way the insight drawn from the inquiry can be used in future research for developing design theory, is discussed.Keywords: design outcomes, failure, evaluation, questionnaire, analyze

scholarly journals Making design research relevant for design practice: What is in the way?

2022 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 101063
Author(s):  
Marieke Zielhuis ◽  
Froukje Sleeswijk Visser ◽  
Daan Andriessen ◽  
Pieter Jan Stappers
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
The Way

scholarly journals Supporting designers: moving from method menagerie to method ecosystem

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kilian Gericke ◽  
Claudia Eckert ◽  
Felician Campean ◽  
P. John Clarkson ◽  
Elias Flening ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Alternative Pathways ◽  
Future Design ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Supporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ongoing debate about the ability of design research to transfer its results, which are often provided in form of design methods, into practice. This article takes the position that the transfer of design methods alone is not an appropriate indicator for assessing the impact of design research by discussing alternative pathways for impacting design practice. Impact is created by different means – first of all through the students that are trained based on the research results including design methods and tools and by the systematic way of thinking they acquired that comes along with being involved with research in this area. Despite having a considerable impact on practice, this article takes the position that the transfer of methods can be improved by moving from cultivating method menageries to facilitating the evolution of method ecosystems. It explains what is understood by a method ecosystem and discusses implications for developing future design methods and for improving existing methods. This paper takes the position that efforts on improving and maturing existing design methods should be raised to satisfy the needs of designers and to truly support them.

The Indoor Greening Design Practices

2014 ◽  
Vol 587-589 ◽  
pp. 476-479
Author(s):  
Bing Wang ◽  
Xiao Liu ◽  
Pei Chao Chen
Keyword(s):  
Plant Species ◽  
Indoor Environment ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Green Design ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Green Plants ◽  
Design Practices ◽  
Main Factors

Because green plants benefit people's health, this paper focuses on interior greening design methods as well as the main factors affecting indoor green design. In this paper, we introduce the choices of plant species, the placement of plants in the room and configuration method, as well as the harmony between plant color and indoor environment.

Further Debate about Visual Design Methods for Pile Foundation

2013 ◽  
Vol 477-478 ◽  
pp. 499-502
Author(s):  
Sheng Feng Zou ◽  
Jing Yu Zhang ◽  
Shi Ji Wang ◽  
Yi Han ◽  
Chuan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Bearing Capacity ◽  
Pile Foundation ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Visual Design ◽  
Foundation Design ◽  
End Bearing Capacity ◽  
Capacity Data ◽  
Engineering Practices ◽  
The Way

The computing of end-bearing capacity of pile has vital significances for foundation design while the foundations analysis is usually problematic due to those diverse soils and engineering conditions. Though various CPT-based methods which have already been applied in numerous huge engineering practices are available for the analysis of pile foundation bearing capacity home and abroad, there still seemed lacking legitimate guidance assisting to select these formulations quite effectively. In this paper, five CPT-based design methods are compared in deep, the realization through computer program is also presented, with the capacity data accumulated from pile engineering coming into mind, we are on the way to making designers choose better methods during the designing process.

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