Education guide 'Eindhoven designs' - Technische Universiteit ...

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Fallman (2003) distinguishes three
approaches: a conservative, a romantic and
a pragmatic approach. The conservative
approach has its philosophical base in
rationalism and has similarities with Simon’s
process. Design is seen as a scientific or
engineering endeavour. The design process
is supposed to advance gradually through a
series of structured steps from the abstract
(requirements) to the concrete (resulting
design) (Löwgren, 1995). The romantic
approach gives prominence to the role of
the designer who is seen as an imaginative
mastermind, a ‘creative genius’, an artist
equipped with almost magical abilities of
creation. The process is seen as a ‘black box’,
because the designer is not interested or able
to explain how the final design came about.
The process itself is guided by the designer’s
values and taste with respect to quality and
aesthetics (Stolterman, 1994). The pragmatic
approach gives importance to the position of
the design project. Instead of being related to
science or art, this approach sees design as a
form of hermeneutic process of interpretation
and creating meaning. It is closely related
to Schön and sees designing as a reflective
conversation with the materials of the design
process.
There are many more design processes, coming
from a business perspective, for example,
or from informatics and mathematics. For
example, the new product development
(NPD) process that focuses on the complete
process of bringing a new product or service
to market. This process focuses predominantly
on the different stages from idea generation
and screening, to concept development and
testing, to business analysis and testing (beta
and market) down to technical implementation
and commercialisation. The design of
intelligent systems, products and services
has strong implications for this process. One
important consequence of the development
of strongly innovative products is a growing
market uncertainty regarding ‘if ’, ‘how’, and
‘when’ users can and will adopt such products.
Often, it is not even clear to what extent these
products are understood and interacted with
in the intended manner. The perception of
the user and the designer may be completely
different. As indicated in chapter two, the
technical mediation of a device or system and
the transformation of a person’s behaviour and
experience is a context-and person-dependent
process, which requires a specific role for users
in the design process (Koca et al., 2008).
What all these processes reveal is that they
are a representation of reality, and they
amplify as well as reduce certain aspects of
the process, either the focus on reflection, or
the user, or the business aspects, and so on.
The educational foundation of ID requires, in
our opinion, a process model that amplifies
and reduces the elements clarified in this
book; a process that can be used for the
design process as well as for the process
of becoming a designer. With our reflective
transformative process we do not aim at
negating the existence and value of other
used design and developmental processes.
In many cases other processes can even be
incorporated in the RT process, due to the open
character. Nevertheless, we want to offer our