Work with no products ... yet

I spent a leisurely (scholarly??) morning chatting with Steve Brown about our individual and mutual research projects. The work-session started with a tour of his "new" old home (rebuilt following a fire almost exactly a year ago (Jan 28) that completely destroyed his previous home.) I was most impressed by how "settled" they are -- Kathy said that was due to Christmas, everything HAD to be ready. On the specifics of work, we talked about the details of the "where to make the charitable donations" article that we dropped after our EAM presentation, made preliminary plans for an EGOS 2011 paper and came up with an idea for a new diagnostic tool during the ride back to Fairfield. Nothing tangible for 3 hours of "work" except a few handwritten notes - but that's the academic life!

My design thinking schema is emerging as a wheel - inspired perhaps by a wine-aroma wheel. I want to get away from the Burrell and Morgan paradigms in a 2x2 matrix that Ulla and I have used up till now to explore the epistemology of design-management connections. After we presented a paper based on this matrix to PhD students in Design and Management from all over Sweden at the seminar last October, several of them told me afterwards it made them feel "uncomfortable" - they didn't know why, but it just wasn't the sort of structure a designer would work with. So, I'm thinking of creating a wheel with the different segments of the design thinking discourse, and see what I can do with that. It's a starting point, a prototype for a new framework.