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Draft paper for the conference: -

DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN DESIGN

Title:
THE SCIENCE OF UNCERTAINTY:
THE POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTION OF DESIGN TO
KNOWLEDGE


Clive Dilnot



Preface

Thought essentially as configuration or as disposition, though in ways that will have to be
explored, design is difficult conceptually. As Phillipe Jullien has pointed out with respect
to how we understand some similar concepts in Chinese, the term lies stranded between the
over-powering distinction between things (“their condition, configuration, and structure”)
and forces or effects (the processes that give to things their form and therefore also their
efficacy, their implications). The dichotomy in question is, like all dichotomies, abstract
and inadequate to understanding. Nonetheless, it operates to ensure that, caught between
the realms of forces and consequences on the one side, and that of the facticity of objects
on the other, design is consigned to inconsistency. Its location uncertain, it thus remains
largely unconceptualized—even though we sense that what is at stake here is everything
that really matter (particularly, it must said, in reference to the realm of the artificial, which
is of course the realm of design).i


Introduction
In this paper I would like to address the question of design knowledge, considered in the
light of this conundrum and in relation to the issue we are discussing today, which I take to

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be the question of how there can be Ph.D’s in design at all—meaning by this last point that,
for me, the issue is the double one; of whether there can be a field of knowledge which the
Ph.D. in design contributes to, helps establish, places itself in dialogue with, and, if so,
what that field is, what it consists of, what it’s characteristics are.

The paper will therefore try to define, albeit schematically, the nature or character of
design-knowledge that Ph.D. programmes might explore. It will also try to say something
about the potential contribution that this knowledge might make, at once to design’s
self-understanding (i.e., the self-comprehension of design; the means of how it understands
what it achieves, what its activities are, how it negotiates the world, what it means to
design) and to knowledge in general.

This last point is key. I see no point in trying to shape a design-knowledge that does not
contribute to knowledge in general. The preface already suggests that adequate knowledge
of design must find ways across some of the fundamental dichotomies that divide
knowledge in general today. This immediately seems to indicate one opportunity for design
knowledge. At the same time it is increasingly important to try to overcome the rampant
failures of design knowledge both within and without the professional field of design.
These failures are not insignificant. Though not entirely dependent on the failure by those
within design to “build an intellectual tradition of substance” – since this is also a failure of
other disciplines to recognize the significance of issues centrally concerned with artifice
and its shaping—still the overarching intellectual condition under which we meet is less
celebratory than we would wish, and not only in terms of what is absent from our own
agenda, but also in relation to what Tony Fry has labeled, rightly, as the general “gross
deficiency of knowledge” of the impact (and potential) of human action upon the making
and unmaking of the material, symbolic and natural worlds.(Fry, 1997, 53-54) ii This
failure design participates in. I see one potential role for the design knowledge gained