Michael Speaks, Dean at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is a theorist and educator who advocates for the application of design intelligence in design curriculum and practice. When Fresh MEAT sat down for a conversation with Speaks <!–more–>, he explained how design thinking can redefine problems to produce new opportunities through an iterative process of production and analysis.  In this context, the end game of the design process is the generation of knowledge rather than physical representation of a final idea. In the following excerpts, Speaks explains how the current economy, and the limits it has placed on the field of architecture, has provided an opportunity to rethink its modes of production through design intelligence and innovation.
Though he is less interested in the question of architectural disciplinarity, Speaks suggests that this notion of design as process over product is a way for architecture to reinvent itself as a source of innovation for possible new futures. In discussion with Bob Somol, what becomes clear is the fine distinction that exists between design as a tool for innovation and design as a service or market. What Speaks proposes is an opportunistic embrace of specific tools and methods in order to advance the discipline’s projective aims.

ARCHITECTURE & THE ECONOMY

<<The current economy raises a lot of questions: will you be able to practice architecture and what will that practice look like?  It will surely be a different thing.>>

There’s a backlash, a knee jerk moralism that makes me nervous. I am uncomfortable with the attempt to link the problems generated by toxic loans and the bad economy in general to high-end architecture. We don’t have to get rid of high design to be able to do other things. Not every design can be a Shigeru Ban relief shelter. Don’t get me wrong: that is needed, but there is more to design than that. I am just uncomfortable with the upsurge in moralism in architecture that we see everywhere today.

The critique of obsessive form making to the exclusion of everything else is a legitimate one. It is a critique I’ve been making for a long time—not just for economic, cultural and political reasons, but because the single minded focus on the exquisite, designed object, is not a useful way to understand the importance of design in the world today. There’s a discussion about design thinking that’s been happening in other areas of design for the last four or five years—the focus is on the way designers think by prototyping and testing, by speculating and creating design knowledge. That knowledge then transforms and changes, and it becomes a new kind of product. I would say that today we are in greater need of new design deliverables and products that add value than we are in need of new designs, new designed objects.

DESIGN THINKING & INNOVATION

<<I’m saying, we don’t need less design, we need ten times more design, but it needs to be focused and directed.>>

One answer to this question is that the design deliverable is not only the design object; it is also, literally, the processes and the knowledge that’s generated along the way towards producing the object. And that form of design knowledge is itself becoming as important, if not more important, than the object itself.

So by design thinking I mean this iterative, speculative way in which design knowledge is generated through prototyping and testing. Business schools are interested in this because they believe that designers have found a very clever way to innovate. In fact, I would argue that it is only through this kind of iterative process that you innovate. Innovation is essentially transforming a problem that you bring to me by reforming that problem, adding something to the problem, and then providing a solution that exceeds the problem you initially posed for me to solve. What emerges is a new problem (that I have helped you shape with my knowledge) that leads to a new solution that was not anticipated in your original problem. You can accomplish this, I would argue, only through this iterative process. Many educators in engineering, business and management, even in the military, now see this process as an important engine of innovation. It is interesting that even though architects work like this all the time, most architecture school curricula do not reflect the importance of design thinking. The “what if” that architects use to imagine a project (it would look like this if these were the constraints) is a form of innovative speculation. In that way, architects, and designers more generally, hold the key to innovation. Design is one of the engines of innovation, and in fact, without it, business and all these other means of economic output are not as powerful.

I think we can innovate our way out of a lot of the problems we now face and we have to make the argument that design will be a very important factor in that equation. Rather than diminishing the importance of design—as the new moralism would have us do—we need instead to make stronger economic arguments for design; we need to show how design adds economic value. And it is not a hard argument to make if you can focus on the process of design innovation and not only on the design object. If the discussion is only about whether the object should be orthogonal or blobby, then we are all lost.

For example, at the University of Kentucky we’re partnering with a research group called the Center for Applied Energy Research. They’re looking at ways to mitigate coal use by repurposing or byproducts like fly ash. Already we know that fly ash is mixed with Portland cement to make a more durable, cheaper form of concrete. Our relationship with CAER—who are mostly conducting scientific research of the products themselves—is interesting in that they have no design outlet for these materials; they have no way to think through possible uses, no means of speculating on what could be done with fly ash. Design is very good at that. So we’re partnering with them to generate a series of products including tables, countertops—all kinds of things—that might become useful, commercial products. Only design can engage in that form of speculation.

MODEL PRACTICES

<<Rather than inventing the wheel each time, they use one of these models as a kind of yogurt starter culture, and then that model becomes the way they approach a project.>>

There are architecture offices that are basing their practice on this iterative practice. UNStudio, in an essay in their monograph, Design Models, claim that they sift through all the information that they’ve used to generate the many, many projects they have developed over the last decade or more and that in sifting, which is a kind of pattern recognition, they have discovered seven (or maybe eight) “design models” that they use to generate their work. It is significant that these models do not come from the outside; they are not philosophical concepts that come from outside architecture or even their own practice. Rather, these models are patterns — I would say congealed forms of design knowledge or intelligence — that are produced from the raw materials of the office itself. These models, these congealed formations of design knowledge — and not any style or formal language — form the DNA of the office. These models are not objects but are rather knowledge products that UNStudio uses and reuses within their practice. This, in my view, is a very forward-looking approach to innovation and to looking at other ways that designers might practice. More importantly, it allows UNStudio to take back some of the territory from those — developers and others — who have claimed ever more of what architects once controlled. That is a very powerful thing and it is what, in my view, separates them from so many other contemporary architecture and design practices.

DESIGN THINKING in SCHOOLS

<<It was a fast way to output funky weird shape, and then put some red car paint on it to make it look cool.>>

Here’s an example of how design thinking might begin to shape architecture. When I first went to SCI-Arc, in 1998, to become head of the graduate program, Neil Denari was the director. He wanted to make the school smaller and move the culture of the institute towards digital design. There was initially a great deal of resistance. SCI-Arc, you may know, was known for physical model making and material research—a lot of hands on stuff. That is not what the digital paradigm, at least at the time, was about. So there was a lot of head butting and debate between two cultures: one that was focused on modeling and using traditional materials and the other was focused also on modeling, but in the computer.

What started to change—and transform head butting into productive tensions—was the introduction of CNC machines; what was designed on the screen could then be milled or printed as a physical model. Initially, those means of output—CNC, laser cutters—were just another form of model making. We saw lots of cool shapes dipped in red automotive paint. Nothing had really changed except that the models were no longer hand made and had become shiny objects. But over time the way the models were used began to change; after the first year or so, the models began to be used as prototypes, not as finished product. So that instead of considering the model as something at the end of the line of design production, it became a way of thinking through the design process.

Models used in this way reveal a kind of design thinking; thinking by doing, thinking by using the model to prototype, test and refine design decisions. Design becomes a creative speculation rather than a way to complete in the form of an object a great idea you have.

PETER EISENMAN

<<So, what is architecture? I don’t know. I’m sure it’s something.>>

There has been a discussion and a debate and whole set of essays and problems generated by asking a question about architecture that probably Peter Eisenman has asked more than anybody else. It’s a question that I personally have no interest in whatsoever, and that question is “What is Architecture?” For me there is not a more uninteresting question in the world. That question—what is architecture—is an academic, philosophical, question; it’s a Heideggerean problem. There are other people interested in other things, Koolhaas for example, is interested in what does architecture do, and architecture is an instrument of urban transformation. But saying that is itself already becoming a bit of a cliché and somewhat tiresome.

For Eisenman, great architects are those who call into question the very essence of an existing typology—the villa, for example—and in so doing attempt to offer a new essence of that typology. According to Peter there are only three architects who do that: Palladio, Terragni, and Peter. (Laughter) Convenient. Like the question, what is architecture, what is the villa, is a philosophical, Heidegerrean question. That’s the disciplinary discussion. I think it’s a great thing to know about, but it shouldn’t limit the action that architecture can take in the world.