Designology

Studies on Planning for Action

Wojciech W. Gasparski, Tufan Orel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351522571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The more complex a human action is, the greater the need to formulate a plan of action, devise a method of implementation, and evaluate its execution. Such preparation is called design or planning, and can be defined as a conceptual preparation for action. Design and planning by themselves are so complex and important that they need informed preparation, which calls for systematic designological studies.

This volume brings together original contributions of researchers and practitioners in design theory, design research, and design studies. Its main purpose is to highlight the possibilities of the discipline of designology. Doing and thinking, or thinking and doing, whatever the order, are intertwined. That is why praxiology, the science of action, defines design as a conceptual preparation of action.

Included here are contributions from Jack Brzezinski, Eduardo Corte-Real, Nigel Cross, Michel Faucheux, Joelle Forest, Wojciech W. Gasparski, Ioannes B. Kapelouzos, Thorbjoern Mann, Tom Maver, Tarkko Oksala, Tufan Orel, Sevil Saryldz, and Ladislav Tondl. Designology is the latest volume in Transaction's highly regarded Praxiology series.

Part One
Designological Ideas

Designology: Toward a Unified Science on Design Revisited

Wojciech W. Gasparski
Koźmiński University
Warsaw, Poland

This paper, authored by me and my colleagues from the Design Methodology Unit, Praxiology Department,¹ was originally published as an editorial in the proceedings of the Conference on Design Methods, organized in Radziejowice near Warsaw, Poland, September 11–13, 1977. The proceedings were published in Design Methods and Theories: Journal of the DMG, Vol. 15, Nos. 2–4, Design Methods Group, San Luis Obispo, CA, 1981. The conference intended to present the results of interdisciplinary research on design and was in fact the beginning of the designological approach to design studies.²

* * *

The majority of scientific disciplines mentioned in modern encyclopedias or in lists of university department heads are of a recent date. The causes for the separation and specialization of disciplines are fairly diversified. The history of science and particularly the science of the breakthrough of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries quote many such reasons. Some disciplines, such as psychology, were separated from philosophy; others, such as management science, took shape as the theoretical generalization of practical experience; still others were born in the minds of individual scholars. Thus, praxiology owes its birth to the philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński, while the science of science was also designed by Polish sociologists, namely Maria Ossowska and Stanislaw Ossowski.

The emergent scientific disciplines are given various forms, either initially or in the course of their development. Some of them have the form of unified disciplines that, eventually, further divide into subdisciplines. Others take the shape of federations of subdisciplines having emerged in earlier developed disciplines, federations created in order to hasten the process of attaining maturity. One may quote sociology as an example of disciplines of the first kind. Its rapid development, reflected in the profound specialization of its individual parts, resulted in its division into numerous sub-sociologies. Federated disciplines may be represented by the above-mentioned management science, or science of science.

Another interesting feature of the separation of scientific disciplines in the twentieth century is worth mentioning. This is the separation of disciplines investigating action. It may be action in its total general sense that is the object of research in the already-mentioned praxiology, or of the theory of actions, striving to obtain its independence, or of the more practice-oriented ergonomics. These may be types of actions (e.g., organizing or managing) described by management science, or scientific investigations, included in the research area of the science of science.

The above-mentioned more or less known facts were recalled in order to outline the admittedly short but still almost three-decade old history of systematic research and studies on design. We have used the term “systematic,” for if we took into account every written trace of reflection on design, then the history of studies on design would have to be allotted the lifespan of two millennia. For, it has been that long before now, Vitruvius wrote the first treatise on design in history. Let us note in passing that it is worthwhile having an ancestor in antiquity—this raises our subject to the rank of nobility. But let us return to present times.

From what, then, did these studies on design begin? What kind of design was it all about? Some will say that it began with systems engineering (in 1950 the first attempt to teach systems engineering was made at MIT by G. W. Gilman); others will say that it began with the Cleveland Conference (1960); and still others will claim that it began with the birth of the Design Research Society (1962) or of the Design Methods Group (1966). If we were to put this question to still others, they would point to Grejner’s (1963) or Kesselring’s (1954) books. Many will mention Gregory’s program (1966); someone will probably remind us of Glegg; someone else of Nadler, Rittel, and many other proponents of studies on design, including the praxiologists and their sympathizers. Among the latter, we shall find not only the Poles, starting with Kotarbiński (1929) or Krzeczkowski (1936), interested in design viewed as a methodological distinction of applied sciences, also called practical sciences, but also modern research workers grouped around the Department of Praxiology. We shall find among them, for instance, an Italian professor Tomas Maldonado and an Argentine professor of one of the Canadian universities, Mario Bunge; the former designated the praxiology of design (1970), and the latter designated technopraxiology as one of the divisions of the philosophy of technology (1979).

But what kind of design is meant here? The majority of the quoted proponents of design research or design science had (and still has) in mind architectural, engineering, and organizational design as well as urban planning. This is fully understandable. These types of design are professionally and institutionally separated kinds of activity. But among the above-mentioned proponents of design research, there will be those who will say that, if we want to form a group in order to investigate design and not in order to create a union of professionals, then it is not the similarities or dissimilarities, be they institutional or professional, that should be given precedence. Fundamental importance is ascribed to methodological similarities, and these are of a far broader character than one could surmise, viewing the enumerated kinds of design. This is what the praxiologists, above all others, would say, because, from the very beginning, they treated design as a component of every course of reasonable actions. In a methodological sense, the previously mentioned kinds of design are similar to the design of therapy in medicine, to economic planning, to social planning, and even to the design cultivated by politicians. Support is given to praxiologists by one of the most distinguished representatives of the systems trend and the proponent of one of the versions of design science, Herbert Simon, who wrote:

The second stage in decision making is to devise or discover possible courses of action. This is the activity that in fields like engineering and architecture is called “design”; in military affaires “planning”; in chemistry “synthesis”; in other contexts, “invention,” “composition”; or—that most approving of labels—“creation.” (Simon 1977, 160)

Thus, we may see that design (the fact that, in various languages, its various kinds are given similar or different names may serve as a witness to cultural differences rather than to methodological ones) in its various versions is an object of both practice-oriented and academic research interests. What are these interests? They turn out to be diversified: philosophical, methodological, logical, semiotic, psychological, sociological, cybernetic, systemic, and pertaining to the science of science. In short, if we wanted to represent the current image of the area still given the names “design research” or “design studies” because of its diversity, then we should do it in the form of a matrix, whose column would contain the names of the types of design and the lines of the trends of research and/or studies on design (Table 1).

Table 1
Designological Matrix

The size of white patches on this matrix diminishes. And increasingly often, those actively engaged in erasing these white patches with the results of their research want to exchange ideas, share the results of their studies, undertake collective research, and engage in cross-fertilization.

It is hard to overestimate the role played (in the past and in the present) by Journal of DMG (until recently also of DRS), “Design Methods and Theories,” in the realization of these endeavors. The creation of international “Design Studies” is a clear proof of growing interest,³ as well as the existence of volumes entitled “Designing and Systems,” published once a year in Poland.

There are numerous conferences dedicated to the studies of design. One of them was a research session (Radziejowice near Warsaw, Poland, September 11–13, 1977) organized by the Committee of the Science of Science and the Design Methodology Unit (Department of Praxiology), both of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS). It was at this session that works prepared at the invitation of the organizers were discussed, a selection of which are presented in this issue thanks to the gracious invitation of Professor Donald P. Grant, Chairman of DMG.

It is these conferences, as well as the works and the endeavors of certain research workers in the field of design, striving to keep in constant touch with other research workers in the same field, that give testimony to a new trend within design research, that is, a tendency to the gradual unification of various currents of design studies into a unified discipline—let us call it “designology.” It may well be that it is too soon at present to enclose the field of design research in a designological framework, perhaps some time is still required. But, to quote praxiology, the better outlined the goals, the more efficient the actions. It is, therefore, worthwhile to be conscious of one’s goal in actions, given the name of investigation, research, studies, and so forth, on design and then to work systematically to attain that goal. And this goal is none other than to obtain cognitively based designological knowledge, that is, meeting scientific standards.

* * *

The Polish handbook Projektoznawstwo: Elementy wiedzy o projektowaniu (Design Studies: The Elements of Scientific Knowledge on Design), edited by me and contributed by fourteen authors (W. Gasparski, ed., WNT, Warsaw 1988, 407), was the continuation of the designological idea. Contributions to design science as seen from praxiological perspective were presented to the international audience in a collection of articles published in Design Methods and Theories (Vol. 24, Nos. 2–4, 1990) coedited by Wojciech Gasparski and Andrzej Strzalecki. The designological results were also referred by Gasparski (1993a, 1993b).

Another repository of designological knowledge was the seventeen-volume series Projektowanie i Systemy: Zagadnienia Metodologiczne Nauk Praktycznych (Designing and Systems: The Methodological Issues of Practical Sciences) coedited by Wojciech Gasparski and Danuta Miller in cooperation with Andrzej Strzalecki. The series was published by Ossolineum Publishers under the auspices of the Science Studies Committee, PAS in the period 1978–2003. A collection of the articles published in the earlier volumes of the series were translated into English and published as a volume named Design and Systems: General Application of Methodology, coedited by Collen and Gasparski (1995) as Vol. 3 of The International Annual of Practical Philosophy and Methodology (Transaction Publishers, 1995, 464).

The idea of necessity to discover and collect systematic knowledge on design was acknowledged by Nigel Cross who insisted to differentiate divergent concepts of “design science” from “science of design.” He wrote:

For example, we have praxiology, “the science of effective action,” and in The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon (1969) defined “the science of design” as “… a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process.”

This view is controversial. As Grant (1979), wrote “Most opinion among design methodologists and among designers ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial
• Introduction
• Part One: Designological Ideas
• Part Two: Design as Human Action
• Part Three: Domains of Application
• Notes about the Authors