Friedman Creating design knowledge: from research into practice Ken Friedman Department of Knowledge Management, Norwegian School of Management Abstract This paper considers how we create design knowledge. It examines the ways that research contributes to design knowledge in theory and in practice. The paper will ask seven important questions: What is the nature of design? How does the nature of design involve knowledge of certain kinds? What are the sources of knowledge? How does research function as a source of knowledge? How does research relate to other sources of knowledge? How do we create design knowledge through research? How does new knowledge move from research into practice? The paper will outline answers to these questions. It will also provide information and resources for those who want to explore further. 1 Introduction further. The main paper is followed by two Design knowledge involves many questions. endnotes that contain condensed literature What is the nature of design? How does the reviews. The first covers the subject of nature of design involve knowledge of certain knowledge. The second deals with innovation. kinds? What are the sources of knowledge? Now, let’s start with a few basic definitions. Knowledge has many sources. Research is one of them. Research also involves questions. 2 A prehistoric prelude on design and How does research function as a source of evolution knowledge? How does research relate to other As professions go, design is relatively young. sources of knowledge? How do we create The practice of design as a thing that people design knowledge through research? Finally, do predates professions. In fact, the practice how does new knowledge move from research of design – making things with a useful goal into practice? in mind – actually predates the human race. Making things is one of the attributes that In this presentation, I will consider all these made us human in the first place. questions. I promise not to answer them, though! Answering these question is far more It’s fair to say that design began over two and than an hour’s work. My promise is both a a half million years ago when homo habilis reality check and guarantee that we will be manufactured the first tools. Human beings done on schedule. were designing well before we began to walk upright or attend conferences. Four hundred Along with this guarantee, however, I do thousand years ago, we began the promise to unfold a range of rich ideas. I’ll manufacture of spears. By forty thousand years outline issues and answers, I’ll offer a few ago, we had moved up to specialized tools. conceptual maps, and I’ll present some valuable sources for those who want to go Urban design and architecture came along ten IDATER 2000 Loughborough University 5 Friedman thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. Interior change to the genetic structure, through other architecture and furniture design probably forms of mutation or through some form of emerged with them. It was another five biological breakdown to a prior genetic thousand years before graphic design and structure. In the infinitely vast majority of typography got their start in Sumeria with the cases, these mutations were not successful, development of cuneiform. Since then, things and the creatures went extinct. Over the have picked up speed. billions of years of life on the planet, most life forms have died out. Today, many of us have replaced cuneiform with ASCII characters. Instead of chipping In some few, rare case, mutations conferred rock, we download it with Napster or Gnutella. advantage on a specific life form in a specific While we haven’t yet replaced our spears with environment. These advantages were pruning hooks or our swords with preserved and passed on. ploughshares, we do provide a far wider range of goods and services than the world has The environment forms the context within known before. which initially random adaptations create successful species. Success, in the sense of All these goods and services are designed. The evolutionary development, is not purposeful. urge to design, to take a situation, imagine a It simply means that a species is selected for better situation, and act to create that situation survival by the environment based on its goes back to those first, pre-human ancestors. physical and behavioural characteristics. When a mutation proved well suited to the Design, in short, helped to make us human. environment, the species survived. The It did so in several ways. Among the frequent descendants of creatures whose misunderstandings of evolution theory is the characteristics were defined by beneficial notion that evolution somehow programmed mutations inherited what had once been new us to become something or to behave in a genetic matter. The human species and its certain way. This is not quite so, and the subtle predecessor species emerged in and adapted distinctions are significant to how we can to a specific physical world. The physical world develop further. to which we adapted defined us. The initial stimuli of evolution were random. Complexity theory (Aida et al 1985; Casti 1995; Biological life on our planet has existed for Waldrop 1992) offers a rich series of billions of years. The many forms of life over explanations of how adaptation takes place. those years shaped a rich enough One of the salient paradigms of complexity environment to permit hundreds billions of theory is the notion of the way that complex different events, manifestations, behaviours, adaptive systems shape their behaviour within evolutionary streams. Some of those what is known as a “fitness landscape.” As manifestations gave the creatures manifesting complex adaptive systems fit themselves to the them competitive advantage in local landscape, the context itself takes on different environments. These creatures survived to shapes and meanings. Complex adaptive pass their genes on. When those genes systems include all biological creatures: plants, possessed the same traits, they sometimes animals, individual humans. They also include survived to pass the genes further. When a the communities or societies that these large enough population pool existed to creatures create. Their evolutionary paths permit the gene-carrying population to move through time and history. Some vanish, spread, these traits sometimes spread further others appear. Either way, there is no going still into larger environments. back. In earlier forms of biological evolution, all At some point, life forms became sufficiently stimuli were random. Genetic endowment advanced to capture behavioural adaptation changed through chance. Chance arose as well as genetic adaptation. Those creatures through mutation caused by radioactive that adapted their behaviour in a way that 6 IDATER 2000 Loughborough University Friedman conferred evolutionary advantage did better bone or antler. Even in this primitive form, than other creatures. The interaction between information tools began to “reshape the way behaviour and biology, nature and nurture is we think” (Burke and Ornstein 1997: 29-31). complex. A creature survives better because This was “the first deliberate use of a device it possesses a larger brain with a richer brain which would serve to extend the memory, structure. The continually improving brain because with it, knowledge could be held in enables the creature’s offspring to do better recorded form outside the brain or the still. New behaviours make survival more sequence of a ritual.” The relationship secure. Secure survival preserves the gene between these tools and the human mind is pool. And so on. significant, in that “the cognitive facilities needed to make the batons required a brain This is how tool making helped us to become capable of a complex series of visual and what we are. Tool-making probably preceded temporal concepts, demanding both recall language behaviour. Tool making therefore and recognition. These are exactly the same preceded conscious imagination, the ability to mental abilities which are involved in modern imagine and to plan. Animals other than reading and writing.” humans make tools. At the start, our ancestors – homo habilis – weren’t humans. They were At this point, and many points like it, the among the advanced animals that made tools. random workings of natural selection were taken over by the complex human phenotype In evolutionary terms, we developed the – the properties that are caused by the modern brain in the relatively recent past. The interaction of genotype and environment. physical potential of this brain gave rise to our current habits of mind, the habits that support In our case, this environment includes the our mental world. The forces that give rise to development of culture and all that it entails. the modern mind go back over two and a half Tool making relates to the many qualities that million years to the unknown moment when make us human, and they all relate to tool homo habilis manufactured the first tools making. These issues involve a large range of (Friedman 1997: 54-55; Ochoa and Corey conceptual tools and symbols. 1995: 1-8). This may seem like going the long way round Our tools and our tool-making behaviour to get to a definition of design, but there is a helped to make us human. As tool-making and reason for it, and this reason has to do with tool use became the conscious subject of the nature of the design profession. willed imagination, our tools and tool-making behaviour helped us to survive and prosper If, on the one hand, design helped to make us as humans. There is no way to know when or human, on the other, the act of designing has exactly how we began to create conscious in some way been so closely linked to human mental symbols, and there is no way to know culture that we haven’t always given it the exactly when symbols became our preeminent thought it deserves.