Accidental Vagrant

As a scholar practitioner advising people in businesses, governmental agencies and even universities, it is too often the case that the refrain: “this is too abstract”, “this is too academic”, “this is too complicated”, “this is too hard”…is heard when the reality of what is required to actually change complex systems by design begins to sink in. The implied judgment is that 'thinking' gets in the way of practical 'doing' and doing should be simple and easy—i.e. ‘keep it simple stupid’. People want to claim the competencies of change agents but they hope to gain that competence through ‘edutainment’ or by learning the ‘tricks of the trade” or some other minimally demanding means. The famous pragmatic nature of Americans has led to the rise and nurture of prideful anti-intellectualism, which has reinforced the historic split between thinking and doing inherited from centuries of Western tradition. However the best designers have learned how to reintegrat...

The design process is a learning process. Learning is the result of inquiry and experience. There are many designs of inquiry created for different purposes with different expected outcomes. Among them, design inquiry is a composite form of inquiry that includes scientific inquiry which, is necessary but not sufficient for adequate design inquiry. Scientific inquiry—research—is designed to determine what can be accepted as true and real. However, even the determination of what is true and real is more involved than objective forms of inquiry, such as the scientific method, would imply. Describing and explaining things as true and real is much more complex and challenging than many design academics and professionals appreciate. That is a problem in todays complex world. Designers need to know what is real and what is true about the real-world design situations they are thrown into. Inquiry into the nature of things and events has been approached in two diff...