Richard Buchanan is Professor of Design in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. His research addresses issues of interaction design, verbal and visual communication, communication planning and design, and product development. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1973, and has been at Carnegie Mellon for 12 years. |
Chapter 12, selection: Design, Making, and
a New Culture of Inquiry When I was a student at the University of Chicago in
the early 1970s, the eminent philosopher Richard McKeon came to class
one day with a news clipping. This had never happened before in all the
time that I had studied with him, so I listened carefully to understand
what had attracted his attention. What he read was a story about the creation
of a new university, formed from the union of the Carnegie Institute of
Technology and the Mellon Institute of Science. The new institution would
be called Carnegie Mellon University, and it would explore new problems
in areas such as technology, cognitive psychology, decision making, and
information processing. It would build on existing strengths in engineering,
the natural sciences, cognitive psychology, economics and industrial administration,
and the visual and performing arts. Thus, it would have some of the traditional
disciplines found in other universities. However, it would also emphasize
interdisciplinary collaboration and encourage the creation and development
of new disciplines that would likely emerge from such collaborations in
areas such as computer science, information and decision sciences, and
design. In essence, Carnegie Mellon would cultivate the new sciences of
the artificial, the domain that was articulated by Herbert A. Simon in
the Compton Lectures, delivered at MIT in 1968 and soon afterward published
as The Sciences of the Artificial. At the time, I had little understanding of what the "sciences
of the artificial" meant, except as a possible, if somewhat unusual,
translation of "poetics" in the Greek tradition established
by Aristotle. For Aristotle, "poetics" meant the productive
sciences or the science of human-made things; he used the word as the
title of his famous treatise on tragedy, which provides the primary example
of his method of productive science. The leap of imagination from a study
of the literary and dramatic form of tragedy to a study of technology,
decision making, and human behavior was suggestive and, at the same time,
puzzling. I did not know that the sciences of the artificial, whatever
they are today or will become in the evolving intellectual environment
of Carnegie Mellon, initially represented Simon's theory of design. Even
more puzzling was the idea that "poetics" or the "sciences
of the artificial" could form the basis for a new kind of university
that would explore interdisciplinary connections among established disciplines
of human learning and a variety of newly emerging disciplines focused
on new problems of inquiry. |
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Last updated 01 November 2004.