December 2011 - Issue #14
Science of design builds value
Opinion piece by Professor Ken Friedman
View articles in related topics: Opinion, Design, Film, Multimedia, Commercialisation
Today the word ‘design’ means many things. The common link is service: designers work in a service profession and the results of their work affect every aspect of our daily lives.
Economist and Nobel Laureate Herbert A Simon described design as devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. Simon was an advocate of what he labelled the ‘design science’ approach, recognising that the way things look and feel, while vital to design, is no longer enough.
To drive the creative innovation necessary to solve the problems society faces today, and the anticipated challenges of tomorrow, design requires high-quality research that advances knowledge and practice, just as research serves professional practice in medicine and engineering.
Medicine made the shift to research-based practice in the early 1900s. Engineering made the shift soon after. Design is making that shift in Australia today.
In the same way that research drives advances in science, design research will drive a cycle of knowledge generation and sharing to build the skills and capability that are crucial to value creation and international competitiveness for all major industry sectors.
Design research is already contributing to significant advances, informing improvements in design methods, new materials, computational analysis and user-driven design, and triggering other developments that lead to truly innovative solutions.
Just as basic research – the search and discovery, the development of methods and systems for the advancement of knowledge – is critical for advances in science, it is essential to providing the foundations for future practical applications in the development of innovative design solutions.
An example is the study of how the brain responds to stimuli (neuroaffective design). This work at Swinburne – related to psychology, with streams of enquiry that touch on behavioural economics and human/computer interaction – grew out of a collaboration with the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Cambridge University and the University of Vienna are now also collaborating on this work.
As with medicine and engineering, systems must also be in place to support the timely translation of new knowledge into practice that brings benefits to society.
At Swinburne, we achieve this by drawing on the expertise and knowledge within the university in collaboration with Australian industry and business and our international partners.
* Ken Friedman is University Distinguished Professor and Dean, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology.
