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