50 Years of Design Research
The Design Methods Movement: From Optimism to Darwinism
John Z Langrish
Salford University
jlangrish@aol.com
Keywords: design methods, evolutionary design, memetics, history
Abstract
The past, of course, is a foreign country with different values and practices. When the Design Research Society (DRS) was born in 1966, things were very different from now. It grew out of the Design Methods Movement (DMM), itself a product of post war optimism and belief in science-based progress. This paper is in four parts, describing: 1. The post-war optimism of the 1950s; 2. The DMM and its role in the formation of the DRS; 3. The end of optimism and the replacement of belief in scientific progress by a suspicion of science and a search for alternatives; 4. An alternative approach in which biology is shown to be a better model than physics when attempting to make design ‘scientific’. This involves a generalised Darwinism with different kinds of memes as imperfect replicators.
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Cite this paper: Langrish, J.Z. (2016). The Design Methods Movement: From Optimism to Darwinism. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme