Dear Prof. Winograd

Dear Prof. Winograd,

We are extremely excited that you are interested in the panel. It is enlightening as young researchers to have you review our abstract and criticize it. Much of your critique is well received and will be very valuable to us in the revision of our abstract. We also appreciate you sharing your article for Ambidextrous Magazine.

As an update we would like to inform you that Meg Armstrong, of Parsons, The New School for Design has confirmed her attendance. In light of your discussion with David Kelley, we have asked Bill Lucas and Jon Kolko, design chairs to invite Bill Moggridge for the panel. It is unfortunate that Prof. Kelley cannot attend; at the same time it is also exciting to have Mr. Moggridge participate (if he does). Scott is in communication with Thom Mayne at Morphosis, from whom a response is expected in the coming week.

Now to the main point of this email…while we agree on most of your criticism, there are certain points which require clarification and/or discussion. The rest of this write-up will focus on these points and your questions. I hope you will understand that our response to your critique may border on impudence, without an actual intention to do so. It is only meant as a discussion to present our own views on this subject. So kindly bear with us through this rebuttal...

How it all began: Both Scott and I are relatively recent participants in the CHI community and have attended the past 2 CHI Conferences. It was at CHI 2005 that we met other young ‘designers’ and started to discuss the notion of design and its interpretation at CHI. Trained as architects, we’d been taught that design is the purview of an ‘elite core’, however this perspective never sat quite right with either of our opinions of what design could be, indeed what design is. At CHI (as you mention) we saw very many people designing in a plethora of ways. And then there were the many people who ‘claimed’ to be designing, but who failed to address primary issues that we’d been taught were tenets of design. We thought (collaboratively and independently); “why is it that so many people claim ‘design’ as a methodology or procedural component and yet have such drastically differing points of view?” This is where it started. During CHI 2006, in a discussion with Bill Lucas, we presented the idea of a panel – a group of experts who could discuss (and in our mind – argue) the contemporary notion of design, its implications within the CHI community, and the implications of CHI for disciplines outside of CHI.

Scott and I have had many more discussions on this topic, since CHI ‘05. Both Scott and I have very different positions on design and its implications. However we both agreed on one thing… the notion of design belonging to an elite core is an archaic notion – one that must be (and has been) challenged. Today’s information world hands over power to the viewer, the user, the individual. Within this context perhaps there is room for, a new breed of designer – one borne of a complex coalescence of traditional design ideas with contemporary design thinking and technical skills. A breed of designers who understand that design is moving from specific design skill disciplines to an interdisciplinary approach. It seems at least likely, if not inevitable, that these are the kinds of designers who will be more active and successful in the coming decades. Therefore we believe that this is a critical time to address this issue from a definitional standpoint … a time where the boundaries between path finders, problem solvers, implementers, managers, and users are blurring at an ever increasing rate.

Therefore, this topic and theoretical engagement may also be seen as a bridge building opportunity… and an opportunity to find out what “bridges may be too far” (a notion that John T. Bruer interestingly points out in his critique of the relationship between neuroscience and education, and the rift between practice and theory in their context). Similar to Bruer, this issue of Design within a community like CHI raises an interesting theoretical and practical conflict for us, as the organizers of this session, and for many others in our mutual communities (plural assuming that we are all parts of multiple communities).

This leads to the panel and its intentions:

Who killed Design? This strikes me as one of those titles that is intended to be provocative without really meaning anything. A kind of bait and switch. Design has not been killed, but is doing just fine. The word "design" as a term has not been killed. What's with the violence?

It is true. When we first wrote the abstract, the title was intended to be a provocateur without any real intention or meaning. A bait, as you say. However since the submission of the abstract, Scott and I have revisited the title many times. We played with other ways of presenting it; not losing the provocative nature but not just as an empty container. Each visit brought about different results until recently Scott brought up the idea of a whodunit mystery… To explain this idea, think of the Robert Altman movie – Gosford Park. It’s a whodunit mystery set in early 20th century England. Within what, at first, seems to be a straightforward murder mystery are intertwining threads – threads that have nothing to do with the murder but offer us (the viewers) an understanding of social order, of sexual mores, the declining power of English nobility. The movie is a kaleidoscope of the lives of English nobility wherein the murder itself becomes secondary to the lives of the people living in and visiting the manor. This is how we envision the panel to be – a complex whodunit. Within this, the title ‘Who killed Design?’ may even be a misnomer; it is possible that Design is doing just fine…but as we unravel that, we will have to come to terms with several undertones that establish ‘design’ today. The complexities and the biases associated both with the word and the people who are designers will (hopefully) manifest itself through interaction with the panel. Because we see this panel as an interactive session, the audience will be critical in the discussion of some of these subtleties.

[Also important is to note capital D in the word Design. I will argue (later, in detail) that there is a difference between design and Design.]

So we keep the title. However we are preparing a sub description that is detailed and meaningful enough that people will come to hear about the ‘death’ of Design but leave with the understanding of where it stands today.

Theoretical biases are always there implicitly (why the “become”). It isn’t clear that this has “driven a wedge”. Quite the opposite. The modern attempt to see these disparate disciplines as part of some more generic activity of “design” is pulling them together.

True. Yet we feel that to only acknowledge this is not enough. At least for pedagogical purposes, we think that it is important to address them in discourse with others. If disciplines are coming together, then there must be a strong impetus for growth that comes from the merger. The truth however is that there is not a clear sign that things are merging in cohesive or effective manners. We don’t think that it is enough to say that interdisciplinary interactions lead to ‘good design’ by default. This is where we think terminology has a critical academic value and potentially professional value as well.

We want to believe that Design has always existed primarily outside of the ivory tower. But we don’t believe that is the truth. The evolution of design may have existed primarily outside the ivory tower but until very recently, those who design have always lived in a kind of isolated environment… thus the “ivory tower” quandary that we tried to raise in our abstract. Please do not misunderstand us…we are not saying that tower should exist, nor are we claiming that there should be one work-all solution for design… or Design. It is possible that there never were any ivory towers, nor disciplinary barriers to productive design solutions and theories. We are merely positing that they do exist and asking for participant reactions. For us, at least, the question remains interesting and one potential angle to our discussion.

All the more reason why we believe this discussion should happen in a panel, and not a position paper. A panel by its virtue of difference will present multiple view points and arguments. The inclusion of the audience into the discussion will further enrich the positions. The larger goal of the panel is then to identify what design is to a community like CHI and who a ‘designer’ in CHI is. In the end, if no solutions are provided, at least there is material for thought. y Today, when an individual designs something they must consider the impact of their work on the environment, culture, society, legal system and any other system with which the product of a design process might interact, either intentionally or unintentionally. This is an important point…It is tied to the interdisciplinary issue. The design process as a whole encompasses this scope of concerns and therefore cannot lie within any one discipline. The act of designing includes prototyping, testing etc. It is not a first stage in a waterfall (which is what I assume you mean by “designating”), but a way of talking about the entire innovation/production process.

Here we agree. I believe, that Design with a capital ‘D’ is different from design with little ‘d’. Let me explain – the design of an artifact is merely a subset of Design that identifies, and then solves a problem (in entirety). We often confuse the two terms and believe that the former is all that is required. Design is iterative. In Design, interdisciplinary interaction is important, and often welcomed. However design (with the little ‘d’) is still a proprietary activity…one where the decisions are made solely by a single protagonist, working to develop the artifact, not a solution. In your critique and your article, you talk about Design – in a holistic manner. Yet much of CHI (in our short exposure) does the opposite. In HCI and many disciplines outside of HCI, design methods have become so stringently concentrated on user studies and heuristic evaluations that the initial problem identification/solving is simply a phase that must be gotten over with (quickly).

To bring in this point of view, we (after submission) suggested the addition of Meg Armstrong, the Chair of the Design and Management program at Parsons The New School for Design as a panelist. It is our hope that her inclusion in the panel will bring the broader point of view of business, management, and design. In other words: Big ‘D’ Design.

The prevailing Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) model of design tends to be a computational model that promotes efficiency over experience It is a caricature of the past of CHI, but there is a significant voice within the community that has been taking a broader view of design.

It may be true that there is a significant voice within CHI that has taken a broader view of design. We have seen it. However a large majority of HCI research is still rational and efficient. The artifact, its design, testing and prototyping takes precedence over socio-political implications of HCI, theory and criticism. Little ‘d’ over Big ‘D’. What’s more, the broader view does not necessarily mean unification in understanding. All the more reason to investigate the term don’t you think?

The power is vested in the people who are doing design, not the “wielders of the word. Often, the best state is to have multiple perspectives which are not consistent but can interact. I don’t think we want to try to have some universal agreement on what “design” means.

Here I disagree. Power is not vested in the people who design…power is vested in the “designers”. u Everyone writes. This does not mean that everyone can write. Everyone sings. This does not mean that everyone can sing. Both communication and music are disciplines that have strong theoretical bases. Both writers and musicians require years of rigorous training. If we accept that not everything that is written is good writing; how can we accept that everything that is designed is good design? If writers, musicians, artists all require training before they can produce work, then why should ‘Design’ be left without definition? Design prescribes self evaluation. If that is accepted, then shouldn’t we as designers self evaluate ourselves, our definition of design, our design intentions, and our design processes? We think that this discussion should be a recurring theme in any field that attracts many different kinds of works and points of view (the CHI community seems to be a great example of this).

In short, is it not then appropriate (at least from a pedagogical perspective) that the ‘right stuff’ at CHI be categorized, theorized, and eventually criticized? The group which feels that design activities, results, and practices should be better represented, not that we should spend more time discussing the abstract idea of design.

The idea of ‘design’ has to be discussed so that we all know what we are talking about. The discussion doesn’t necessarily require a singular definition but as disciplines come together it is all the more important that we speak the same language, have the same nuances, attribute similar meanings… or at least attempt to address the issues that allow us to find commonality. Of course, the results of interdisciplinary work will reveal many differences between two individuals from different fields. Furthermore, there is a chance, that differences will not be acknowledged at all. One wonders how often project “post-mortems” identify interdisciplinary misunderstanding, or how often a project is re-designed because of two significantly different goals (the most common and general is perhaps the technical vs. aesthetic but there are likely to be many others).

At this point, it is important to assert that neither Scott nor I intend this panel to be biased or one sided. In fact, it is exactly your keen criticism and those of the other panelists that we think will make this panel a success. We’d like the panel to address bias directly…to at least accept that everyone has biases and that engaging these biases in discourse can be pedagogically and even professionally advantageous. We wrote up the abstract with the assumption that there would be criticism of our point of view, but that readers would also see this as a starting point rather than a summary statement. Reviewer comments and your criticism have shown us that perhaps we need to be a little less subtle about this and address the goals more clearly. We are working on revised abstract in this regard.

Moreover, we envision that in a time when everyone is able to ‘design’, everyone must have a voice to claim what they see as ‘design’. We want to make this panel truly interactive… We plan to start a wiki as soon as the panelists are on board - where people interested in the panel can start discussing immediately. Also in pipeline is a Flickr group where people can upload images and discussions; an on-site wiki for people to question and or comment. We are constantly discussing on novel ideas of how to involve the entire CHI community in this discussion.

In the end, we want to stress that your participation in this panel is considerably important to us. To both Scott and I, your views on design and the bridging of disciplines have been influential both in the conception of this panel and the vision of what will form a core of the discussion. Each of the panelists will have a different perspective and the actual nuances of what is discussed will be governed by these perspectives.

Looking forward to your response to this write up…

Thank you,

Anijo Mathew w/ Scott Pobiner 01.09.07