{"id":33,"date":"2014-05-24T18:29:46","date_gmt":"2014-05-24T18:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.darrenumney.com\/blog\/?p=33"},"modified":"2015-08-19T15:09:09","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T14:09:09","slug":"defining-design-and-the-need-for-a-more-creative-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/?p=33","title":{"rendered":"Defining design and the need for a more creative literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Studying for a PhD in design, as I am, has\u00a0inevitably\u00a0led to quite a lot of reading around the subject of design. This was particularly necessary since I arrived at the subject partly \u00a0from a practitioner’s perspective.\u00a0I knew I had a bit of catching up to do with the frameworks and approaches that inform the discipline.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Like many things, this process reminded me of an incident from my childhood. My sister and I were holding onto the side of the swimming pool at Butlins in Clacton, having been told by my Dad to stay there while he kicked off for a quick swim. Being the adventurous young male as I was then (aged about 7) I decided that I didn’t have time for this and I was also going to kick off for a quick swim. I hadn’t realised at the time that swimming was something you had to learn rather than something you inherited and that water moved through your fingers if you tried to hold onto it. It didn’t end well.<\/p>\n

\"Poolside,<\/a>
Poolside, Butlins Holiday Camp, Clacton-on-Sea. c.1973<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thirty years later I kicked off into the 745.4 classmark unaware of the depth of uncertainty that was waiting there. The most striking feature of this new landscape was that the definition of what\u00a0this thing called\u00a0“design” was seemed to be slipping through everybody’s fingers like water.\u00a0Many of the\u00a0design theses I’ve read kick off with an introductory section concerned with\u00a0“what is Design” and my first year upgrade paper, in the guise of its\u00a0literature review, inevitably followed suit.\u00a0It is necessary, of course, to define some boundaries, to draw a frame around the issues to which you will attend. And this provides a\u00a0back drop\u00a0for later on when you come to check how well you attended to them. Or at least to trace back to where you started out from, even if you did end up somewhere else altogether. That seems to be an\u00a0obvious, useful and intrinsic aspect\u00a0of a thesis.<\/p>\n

But it surely can’t be necessary or practical or possible to rewrite the definition of what design is every time you want to talk about it. And yet here it is in just three examples.<\/p>\n

The foreword of the MIT Press “Design Thinking Design Theory<\/em>” series takes us back 2.5m\u00a0years to when human beings started to manufacture\u00a0tools in order to provide historical contextual.<\/p>\n

Several members of the PhD design discussion list invariably seem to end up pursue what\u00a0may be the\u00a0noble\u00a0aim of attaining academic rigour but which usually for me has a\u00a0more ignoble effect of making me wonder why I would want to be involved.<\/p>\n

Closer to home, colleagues who sometimes congregate around\u00a0what would be the departmental water cooler (if there was a water cooler and if there was a department) are not averse to\u00a0rehearsing\u00a0something similar as they attempt to locate their practice on the\u00a0shifting sands of\u00a0academia.\u00a0When you’re thirsty and you have no water cooler it’s sensible\u00a0to talk about\u00a0how you plan to fill your glass. Similarly when you have no departmental identity its essential to regroup around\u00a0a cohesive identity\u00a0that shares ideas,\u00a0works together, explores proposals and maps out a credible territory for itself to operate within.<\/p>\n

For my literature review to be credible I need to get something more progressive in place than a\u00a0trite set piece history of design studies. Something that locates the research within a broad creative framework and sets the tone for what should come next. And\u00a0something that avoids the kind of internecine debates which seem to have\u00a0taken the design out of the department and the joy out of the conversation. Something that reflects the spirit of the adventurous seven year old but without the naivety that led him to follow blindly in his parent’s wake.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Studying for a PhD in design, as I am, has\u00a0inevitably\u00a0led to quite a lot of reading around the subject of design. This was particularly necessary since I arrived at the subject partly \u00a0from a practitioner’s perspective.\u00a0I knew I had a bit of catching up to do with the frameworks and approaches that inform the discipline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}