Fisiología molecular de plantas 5.5.1.1.1 Datos Básicos del Nivel 3

Papanek (1984), defines design practice as the job of form giving and reshaping of the built environment. Furthermore, Papanek describes DP as based on the

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following five myths; The myth of mass-production; The myth of obsolescence;

The myth of peoples “wants”; The myth of designers lack of control; and The myth that quality no longer counts. However, three of these myths are not relevant to today’s design practice. The myth of obsolescence is now viewed as encouraging a throwaway society where products end-up in a landfill instead of being repaired.

Designers now have a lot more control of design practice as a field has grown and better understood; further product quality is one of the determinants of product success on the market. To make new processes work, Hammer (2007) suggests some of the following steps; redefine jobs more broadly, give more responsibility, redirect reward systems to focus on processes as well as outcomes, emphasize teamwork, personal accountability, and the customer’s importance, managers oversee processes instead of activities.

Bush (2003, p26) argues that, “design has an important social role, and that design practice should be anchored in the very reality of its consequences.” The main focus of the NPD process has shifted from being function focused; to how the product is perceived by the user and the environmental impact associated with the product. Moultrie et al. (2006, p190) views NPD process as aiming “to ensure the appropriateness of these solutions to the business.” Moreover, Redstrom (2005, p127) argues, “if design used to be a matter of a physical form, its subject matter being the material object, it now increasingly seems to be about the user and her experiences.” Therefore, more user involvement in the design process may result in better understanding of the user and his/ her experiences. Likewise, Riley (1993) points out that, the modern consumer adds a product’s environmental impact to the perceived cost of consumption and rewards companies that follow this path.

Furthermore, Papanek (1984, p234) suggests designing for “people’s needs rather than their wants, or artificially created needs is the only meaningful direction.”

Technology capabilities and the prevailing individualistic culture can be viewed as the factors reversing the trend. Leong’s (2003) and Sudijc’s (2008) work suggests a move towards individualized consciousness; where products need to be unique to an individual and the willingness to pay a higher price for such a product.

However, DP continues to support and develop products with the primary focus being profit instead of being need based.

31 2.4.1 Design Thinking

“Design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process; done right, it will invariably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead,” Brown (2009, p16). Balke-Schaub et al. (2010, p48), describes “Design thinking as a complex behaviour with a complex context and as such hardly decomposable into independent sub-problems.” Likewise, Steen (2013, p18) sees design thinking as where “problems and possible solutions are explored and developed and evaluated simultaneously in an iterative process.”

Cross (2011, p10), design thinking is described as providing “the means to shift and transfer thought between the required purpose or function of some activity and appropriate forms for an object to satisfy that purpose.”

2.4.2 Implicit/ Tacit knowledge

Balke-Schaub et al. (2010) recommends, better understanding the relationship between the design problem, and the resultant solution (product) may lead to better understanding of the thought process involved in the NPD process. Further, De Jong (2002, p23) suggests, “one should also distinguish between evaluations of an actual design related study and a proposal for such a study to that effect before the design has been made.” Thus the disparity between the actual study and the proposed study can be seen as a measure of product development success. The more similar the actual and the proposed product are the more successful the NPD is and vice-versa. However, understanding this relationship alone, may not lead to a clear picture of the thought process as memory, motivation and knowledge may greatly influence the output (product). Increased global product competition has forced organisations to be more creative in grabbing the consumer’s attention. Also, the current mass-customization era requires organisations to know more about their customer than ever before.

2.4.3 Integrated NPD teams

The designer seldom works in isolation from other disciplines, thus a design is almost always practiced within a multi-disciplinary team. Further, Sato (2009, p30) suggests, “in order to establish the concept of HCD [human-centred design] in the development process, design needs to offer perspectives and methodologies that interconnect rationales from different disciplinary viewpoints.” Design profession still needs credibility for designers working within a multi-disciplinary team to justify

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their design views and solutions. HCD is an approach to systems design and development that aims to make interactive systems more usable by focussing on the use of the system and applying human factors/ ergonomics and usability knowledge and techniques, ISO 9241-210 (2010) and ISO 13407 (1999).

2.4.4 Design as a science: validity

The reliability aspect of the design process is difficult to achieve; there are a great number of possibilities of use and the freedom to choose between them. Also, it is vital to understand that the design field is highly subjective; therefore for validity, what works in one special, ecological, technical, economic, cultural and political context may not work in the same way elsewhere, De Jong (2002). Therefore documentation of the PDP and the dissemination of the academic research are vital to the improvement of design practice as a science. In this study, PDP in this study is a simplified version of the “The Basic Design Cycle” by Roozenburg, it was simplified for easier understanding by participants that were not formally design trained. It also provides a common design process and therefore easier comparison for the researcher.

Visser (2009, p33), describes “science as a design activity, with the artefact aimed here being a theory.” However, De Jong (2002) attributes the lack of science in design to the fact that a lot of design related study is being done by social scientists, organisational experts, historians and technicians, and not by designers themselves. Poggenpohl (2009) suggests extensive research and collaboration are important towards consolidating the use of these borrowed methodologies to come up with a generic design methodology. Furthermore, Poggenpohl (2009) suggests the identification of recurrence within these methods as an important step towards building theories for the design practice. Park (2011), believes that in order to re-use design process in practice, more attention needs to be directed to understanding the design process. Adding validity to design practice begins with documenting what design practitioners are already doing to build a methodology unique to design. However, Veryzer (2000, p68) cautions against over simplification of DP as it may take the joy out of NPD; “But that will not happen!

“Design” is too varied, too dynamic, and too inherently complex to be reduced to a sterile mindless activity.”

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Design is a highly subjective field, thus making it harder to re-use methodologies from past projects as every project has its own unique problems. However, Tomiyama (2009, p49) makes a point that designers can design without explicitly using any so-called design theories and methodologies. Solutions are seldom compared to the method followed.

Leong (2003, p58) “sees potential in cultural research and cognition [inner

‘intangible’ knowledge] for the development of new design theories and models.”

Conversely, Poggenpohl (2009, p4) points out that “design in its craft configuration has limited reach and limited authority among practitioners and marketplace,” thus the need to apply scientific rigor to the design process. The push for design to be recognised as scientific work is an effort to give design methods some degree of reliability and validity.