Cool, thanks for the feedback and suggestions--great stuff! Particularly want to echo what Angela commented about the nature of the ordering and its historical organization. It's not about worse/better fields of design at all, and that inference should not be drawn. It's a common yet inaccurate mis-reading. ALL forms of design practice are valuable and important towards improving human problems, and involve tremendous skills. No one is better/worse or more/less important.
And as Angela says "Great graphic design is just as crucial, even as we move into the spheres of organizations, public policy, and culture. " Absolutely agree. One field does not supplant the other, it's instead an aggregate, cumulative, building on prior fields, and expanding approaches/methods/strategies. Architecture and urban planning are certainly important and frankly run the whole gamut. (Although Buchanan originally placed them in 4th Order I believe) Laid out end to end, these orders (rhetorical "topoi", or lenses really...more on that soon) describe the spectrum of problem spaces from the material to the immaterial, which suggests ideas about the applicability of design thought & action at various points within that spectrum. It%u2019s certainly not about seeing it as %u201Cbetter%u201D or %u201Cmore elite%u201D than other kinds of design. Moving from that, Buchanan's original model's (and what I've what I expanded upon here) real value lies in the usage of the "orders" as "lenses" to re-interpret other orders and suggest innovations of design approaches, methods, etc. To put it simplistically, a graphic design problem of making a poster can be re-conceived as a social interaction problem or process re-engineering problem, etc. This blog post on "Fourth Order Design" has some well-written examples of this "lens-shifting" (aka, "topoi" or placements, from Classical rhetoric): http://designthinkers.blogspot.com/2009/01/fourth-order-design-what-do-you-think.html Kip Lee and Julian Jenkins in particular articulate some rich examples. Finally, for further reading on this "Orders of Design" stuff, as background source material: Dick Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" Tony Golsby-Smith's article "Fourth Order Design: A Practical Perspective" from Design Issues 12, number 1, from 1996 John Body's article "Design in the Australian Taxation Office", Design Issues, Winter 2008, Vol. 24, No. 1: 55%u201367 Thanks again, hope this helps... -uday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=41296 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
