As a design professional, I have worked primarily in the emerging world of digital design and have sought to give aesthetic, semantic and functional order to a medium that was more imagined, than real. Unique to beginning my digital (web) design career in the mid 1990s was that it afforded me the opportunity to participate in a practice in its infancy. It was a new medium, a new discipline, and in both senses without established conventions or expectations. It was an exciting time, rich with inventiveness, and paradigm changing ideas. However, in time, this bubble of rapid innovation settled into predicable grooves, and several well-defined practices like information architecture, and interaction design were established as professions.<\/p>\n
I settled into a role as the website architect for a university, and it was my sponsor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s aim for me to create the digital facade of its identity, functions, and presence to act as interface between itself and the world at large. My design of this artifice was in large part an imitation of the real entity (the university itself) which I discovered was more devised than I had been previously aware. As I set to work \u00e2\u20ac\u0153virtually\u00e2\u20ac\u009d replicating the design inherent in the university\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s material presence, I followed a typical design method for interdisciplinary work: exploring possibilities and constraints, (re)defining specifications, and prototyping solutions (Jones, 1992). As I struggled to resolve increasingly messy, circular and complicated problems, this method lead me to asking deeper and more far reaching questions. Soon, it became apparent that to achieve my sponsors desired results for the website, the design of the organization itself would need to be changed.<\/p>\n
With this insight in hand, I realized that my conceptual design competency was useful in other abstract realms, such as systems, services and strategies. And to this end I pursued further studies in Leadership (organizational behavior and learning) to refine my capacity to architect change. I discovered the ideas of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1976), Peter Senge (1990), Jamshid Gharajedaghi (2005) and others, and embraced systems thinking as a way to cope with my complicated design challenges. The Iceberg Model, a metaphor used to explain systems thinking as layers [events (what happened?), patterns (what has been happening?) and structure (what would explain theses trends?)], was of particular value in helping me make sense of the complicated problems I was addressing. System thinking also added to my increased awareness of the interconnectedness of everything and the layers of design activity within these various systems, sub-systems, and so forth.<\/p>\n
While there is more to say on this topic, the point that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m leading up to is that my experience as a developing professional in various emergent design spaces has given me a very broad perspective of design and its theoretic implications. A radical, or root, sensibility and awareness of this intellectual activity that we commonly call design. Consequently, I find the broad notion of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153design thinking\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or design as a distinctive intellectual activity is intriguing, and I wonder if this might in fact be the case? Of course, I do realize that this often more a buzz phrase these days, but I also wonder if there might not be something more significant to this idea? Perhaps not a distinct psychological faculty of the mind, or even a generalized thinking method (i.e. scientific method). Still, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an intriguing idea on an emotional level, speaking as an design educator, who is concerned with teaching people to think in a design way that is able to co-create inter-disciplinarily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a design professional, I have worked primarily in the emerging world of digital design and have sought to give aesthetic, semantic and functional order to a medium that was more imagined, than real. Unique to beginning my digital (web) design career in the mid 1990s was that it afforded me the opportunity to participate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hubwise.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}