David Perkins in his interesting book, Knowledge as Design, proposes a thesis
that there is an operational directive in the structure of design thinking as
design knowledge. Designs are all around us and come in all sorts of formats
and appearances. We design our careers to get to our objectives whatever they
are, we design our family or social lives, we make certain decisions given a
set of knowledge, in order to obtain what we desire. Design is not limited to
engineering disciplines. There is a design in mathematical proofs, the way we
manage our relations, tidy up our bed, or devise a management plan. It takes
thinking. Design as a projection is profound, it cuts through mental models,
templates of world structures and means of verification. After Perkins, I want to
say that knowledge as design also contains its process, that is how knowledge
(making breakfast, develop a software code, or plan a new tax code) also
contains the time backdrop (temporal direction, time axis) of the unfolding of
knowledge, meaning knowledge implies its process. This is a most fascinating connection
that is almost surely left for cybernetic thinkers, it is their assertion and
not mine (Heinz von Foerster, and others).
In this sense, writing, like this posting, is
showing a knowledge based structure while I spend a bit of time to show what it
is, it takes time to make my point!
That ‘taking of time’ is the process of the structure of knowledge in my mind
that shows itself bit by bit. We take these for granted. An editing of a text,
like double checking of a message, or a letter or report to someone, is in a sense the quality
control of the design in the structure of the writing. In this view, writing as
design as structured knowledge, presents a different perspective, this is what
a job seeker tries to do by crafting a strong resume: I can do what I say as I wrote.
A management plan, like a project management
plan, is a structural design directive
for the way the entire body of a project tries to show itself for its fulfillment,
how it will be conceived and realized. Project management is a very young discipline,
and like all young and novel disciplines, they are not recognized, or taken
seriously in the same token as it has taken us time to allow for many of the currently accepted engineering or science
disciplines to find their places. This time taking aspect of a discipline to
find a proper foothold extends even to mathematics. I hear one of the founders of computer science (Stephen Cook) could not get a tenure position at UC Berkeley (1970) because that
discipline did not fit into the established mathematics department of that time! Of course,
it seems easy to look back and assess the narrow thinking of others at that
time. I think knowledge as design and design as process is a powerful thesis
that can help many of our fragmented areas of activities to become better integrated.
Project management is a form of design integration operational thinking. Ali
