Erik Stolterman: Design Theory and Philosophy

If someone asks me who is Eric Stolterman, I would say that Eric Stolterman is perhaps the foremost philosopher of design today, particularly an interaction design. First of all, would you agree that that is an accurate label for what your work is about and then who else would you consider to be your peers and pioneers at the frontier of the particular kind of design research that we do? Well, thank you very much for those very nice words. First of all, I wouldn't say I'm the premier design philosopher. I do consider myself to be doing design philosophy or philosophy about design to be more precise. But I'm not the only. There are a whole bunch of people out there that I admire and have had huge impact on me and my thinking. First of all, my colleague Harold Nelson, of course, I've been doing a lot of work with him over the years. And then people like Donald Stern, Nigel Cross, Crippendorf, there are a whole number of people that in the last maybe 30, 40 years have really been able to approach design not just as a from a very practical level, but also as a broader tradition of human activity. And you can say theorizing or philosophizing around that. I usually see myself as one in that group. This kind of, I guess you could call it the career choice being a theorizer or philosopher. It's not very obvious to many people. I'm curious about many aspects of this for many reasons, partially because I'm interested in the same activity and I like writing through theoretical papers and covering theoretical subjects myself. But also because it's just it's a very curious thing to do. Would you tell the story of how you got there and like what have been some stepping stones in your career? What has been your relationship to design practice, for example? Have you worked as a designer or worked with designers at some point in your career? I always been interested in theory and philosophy. That's since I was young, that was always part of me. I was always fascinated by kind of the deeper or more hidden aspects of the world and how to understand it. So that's maybe more a personality thing. Then why I started to actually study design and especially study design practice in a more theoretical or philosophical way was I was as a young PhD teaching some courses that was what they were called systems design or something like that. And we were using some textbooks on how to do systems design and my students always complained that it was okay, everything weren't worked fine with the assignments but the problem was to make it look like they actually used the methods in the book. And to me that was very strange. I mean these books were supposed to be helpful. They were supposed to guide you through the design process and to the students they seem to be in the way. And since then I always my approach and my research and thinking has always been to try to understand what is it that designers actually do? How designers actually think, not trying to come up with a solution on how you should actually do it. Here is the prescription. I'm much more just curious and interested in how they actually do it. When you take that approach you almost inevitably end up in let's say more of a philosophical approach because you have to understand the broader picture and understand why people do things in certain ways. And that's my take on the research and that's still what I do. Of course I'm not trained as a designer more than I was trained as a systems designer but maybe not in the classical tradition of a design. But at the same time of course I always design things. I've designed books, I've designed courses, I've designed programs, I've designed workshop, I designed things all the time. So in a sense that type of design. But what I always have argued when people ask me if you're a designer, I say no I'm not. I am someone who studied design and that's not the same thing. To study design doesn't necessarily mean that you are yourself an excellent practitioner in that field. In the same way as if you're an excellent practitioner doesn't necessarily mean that you can actually say something interesting about your practice. I think any field needs both excellent practitioners who know what they're doing and they also need people who study what they do and try to formulate that in a way that that can make sense to people. I have probably worked with designers in hundreds or maybe even thousand different companies. And of course you do get a different perspective when you when you see the breath across a field like that because I don't just work with designers in a particular field. I have worked with designers that span everything from architecture, landscape design, organizational design, healthcare design, interaction design. I mean every and I look at that whole thing as the field of design. And to most practitioners they focus on one of those and maybe just a part of one of those. So the benefit from studying a field like this is that you get a different perspective than people who are professionals. That also means that you still have to be extremely respectful to every practitioner in every field because they are doing things because they have to be done in a certain way in their field. And that's when you start to get a deeper understanding of design when you look at it in that way. Is there a particular research method for example that you that you particularly enjoy or you particularly believe in? Well I really really like doing interview studies that is probably what my favorite thing and it usually have to be combined with other things because people are very good at answering questions in the way they believe I want to hear. And everybody wants to sound rational and knowledgeable. When you ask them about their professional practice they want to sound like they know what they're doing and all that. So you cannot rely on interviews. But interviews I think if you are careful and doing it well, combine that with observation and other forms of investigative methods. Then that is really becomes a strong approach. But you can't rely on one thing because it doesn't matter what method or tool or approach you use to study practice. If you just use one you will get a very strange view of that practice. You have to combine it with a different perspectives. And if you take someone like maybe the most famous design thinker Don O'Shaan and you look at his research. What he did he is very kind of famous for it because his research was not really what people today would call research. And this is only still just 20, 30 years ago. But what he did was he used to sit next to designers. So he was watching them when they were doing whatever they were doing. At the same time I was asking them questions about what they did and why do you do that and why didn't you do this. And that's basically the only research he did. And he was able based on those very short meetings. Actually he almost didn't, it was very few he did during his life. Still get a very deep understanding of what people do who are involved in design activities. So sometimes it's not the choice of method or tool or technique, it's also how you actually can do it. If you can do it well. To know what you're doing and know what you're looking for and know how to think about it and how to ask questions that reveal things. To me that's more of a that is in itself a practice that needs to be trained and reflected upon and done over and over. I know it takes years to be good at it. It's not necessarily the case that you can find a good book that do this and then you do it now you are successful. It's not really like that. As far as I know every medical professional which would be be dark. and nurses and technicians, for example, they all have certain common knowledge in medicine and this would be basic anatomy and first aid and maybe some chemistry and so on. Since I went through the education for being an engineer, I know that every engineer is taught calculus and statistics and certain other mathematical modeling tools. In your opinion, what would be the basic knowledge that every design related professional must have? Well, that's a good question and I've gotten that question before and a lot of people are struggling with that question because as you know, there are a lot of design education around the world. When we talk about design today, it's very difficult to say what are the fundamental say skills and knowledge that you need to be a practicing designer. There are some and I would say in my book or our book, the design way, we do go through some of those. So to some extent, I would say that chapters in those but for instance, we have a chapter called service, being in service. As a designer, you need to understand that that you are working on behalf of someone. Someone is your client and someone is paying you and you're working for them and you're designing something that someone else probably is going to use. So you have users and you have other groups of people that will be affected by your design. To understand how that works, what your role is in that situation, that is very similar across all design fields. Another thing that is also nowadays, getting more and more is that as a designer, you need to be able to think in systems. So you need to be able to understand systems because every design today is part of some kind of very complex reality. So some kind of systemic thinking is part of being a designer. And then you have all the traditional things. You have to be, you have to have a mind that can imagine things that don't exist. That is also across the board. I mean, designers design things that don't exist. Otherwise, if you design something that already exists, people will not even see it as design. It's a copy of something out there. So the power of imagination is part of being a designer. And that is across the board. So there are some things that you can think about. Not necessarily things that you have, let's say, a course on each of these. It's more like themes that go across every, say, more specific area in every specific practice. So there are some. And I know, for instance, my colleague and friend Harold Nelson had developed some, some of these models that lay out what are the core, what are the core themes in design education. But you have to be very careful when you're talking about these things because this is also, it's so easy to get focused here based on your own experience and your own understanding of the field. And there are so many aspects of different design areas that are unique to that particular area. So you also have to be very generous and open to the idea that, well, maybe it's not always the case that you need to understand what it means to be in service. Maybe there are designers who don't necessarily do that or work in those kind of environments. So one thing that I always talk about, and this is what my students always think is funny because whenever they ask me about what is the right way of doing something, what is the, I always say it depends. Because this in design, it depends. So what are the core themes or core aspects in a design education? Well, my answer would, at the end be, well, it depends. It depends on who are you, who are you going to be educating? Why? Where is it? For what purpose? It's a design like every other design. Every design is an ultimate particular and it's a unique thing and it hasn't existed before and it has to be created. I discovered this one I was sort of, I led a second life as a musician for a brief period of time in my younger years, I guess, was that you do need to be able to have the theoretical knowledge of music and to be able to read and write and know the chord symbols and the harmony and so on if you're going to play with other people. If you're going to go in a room with three other people and you want to communicate very fast about how the song is going to go, you need to use that language of the names of the notes and the harmonic structures and the chords and so on. In your work, for example, this is where I find a lot of value. For example, we were writing proposals for research funding where we sort of ask for resources to do particular research activities. We use your papers and books as these foundational references to explain certain concepts and make the argument, I guess, that our research is worthwhile and when we use the language that you presented or that others have presented in their papers and books, since there's common knowledge, common ground, a source, a reference that we can go to to understand what these ideas mean in a more sort of expansive fashion. It becomes easy to communicate with the reviewers or the readers of these papers and these proposals. So in the end, with these proposals, for example, we did receive the funding that we were looking for because we were able to explain things in the language that is expected and the language on which there is consensus. So the usefulness of theory for me is obvious in this particular way, but when I speak to a lot of practicing designers who work on products or brand identity and so on, I talk to them and I noticed that most of them are entirely unaware of this world of academic scholarship and these research activities and these theoretical and philosophical discussions that you and I are part of and yet they seem to be doing just fine. In fact, some of them are doing much better than fine. Some of them are producing amazing creative outputs and having commercial success. What is the value proposition from the kind of theory and philosophy that we produce for professionals who practice these works? And I know this is a vast subject. I know you teach a course on this. I know you've written books and papers about this, but I still like to hear from you. What is your, I guess, elevator pitch for design professionals? I usually make a distinction between what I do which I kind of call philosophy of design or theory of design and someone's design philosophy. So these practitioners that you talk about who are very successful without really knowing academic work, I always argue strongly that they have a very elaborate and well-developed design philosophy, a personal design philosophy that they have developed over the years and they have developed it based on their practice. So they have been able to find what are the valuable principles and fundamental ideas that they have to base their practice on to be successful and it's usually because they are reflective practitioners in the sense of Donald Schruin. So they do continuously improve their own design philosophy. My experience as a design researcher or someone who researches this, when I meet these people, there is never any problem of talking about this. It's easy for me to understand what they are talking about. If I can talk about ideas from say academia or theory in a way that makes sense to them, they have no problem in understanding. Usually there is a huge overlap between those. However, there are many practitioners who don't necessarily do this, who do not become successful and some of the reasons for that is because they do not really take this on as a project, as a reflective practitioner. They do not develop their personal design philosophy. So they just jump from place to place and do whatever they are told and it doesn't lead to this broader, more deeper understanding of their own profession. If you go to successful and famous designers, they always, if you ask them about these things, what does design mean to you? What are your design principles? They will talk forever. They can talk forever. And I've done this many, many times. I know this is true because they have a whole world of theory and philosophy in their head about their own practice. What academic design research can do as a value proposition to practitioners then becomes a question of who they are. To these successful designers who have a well-developed design philosophy, the value proposition is not very strong. I mean, it's not that if you read our work, if you understand design theory, you will become a better designer. No, that's probably not the case. You may want to do it because it might be fun and interesting to you. So it might be stimulating, but that's basically it. However, if you go to young inexperienced designers or designers who have not really been able to develop their own thinking, then ideas from academic design research or design philosophy can really help them. If it is presented in the right way, it should not be presented as anything close to prescriptive theories or here is what you should do or here is how you should think. It should only be provided to them as here are some opportunities to see other ways of understanding the world, other ways of thinking about design. And based on those ideas, maybe can help you to develop your own thinking. This is exactly how I teach my course on design theory. I even tell the students, does it help you to think about your own design thinking, about your own design philosophy? Can it help you to develop your personal design philosophy? If it can, great. If it doesn't, move on to the next thing. You touched on another topic that I find myself thinking about a lot, which is the transmission of these ideas that are developed in academia to their intended audiences. In this case, younger designers who we should not expect maybe to like go and read academic papers and academic books and so on. Other than attending a university and taking these courses, do you have any examples that you might give where this kind of transmission is happening? Where can a young designer go to nourish their thinking from these ideas? Almost every city has a club or an organization where these people meet and they come from all kinds of different companies and organizations. They meet maybe once a month and they have invited speakers or they have the internal workshops and they share information, they share knowledge, they discuss. This has been developed as a way of constantly improving yourself. You know you have to be part of these things. You have to go to these professional conferences, not academic conferences, but professional conferences. You have to discuss, you have to be part of what's going on right now. So to be on the forefront of what's going on and learning from other people, be curious, curious, curious about new technology, curious about new ideas, curious what your colleagues are doing in other companies. That's what pushes this forward, that's what helps people. Much more than reading academic papers. But there is a long term change that goes on and people usually think, okay, so since practitioners don't read academic papers, academic research doesn't mean anything and that is completely wrong too. Because academic research builds on existing practice. So it's studies existing practice and the forefront of the practice takes it back, uses that in the education of the next generation of designers, this next generation come out in the real world. And now they have these new ideas, new knowledge and they start to change practice. If we didn't have academic research that really pushed, let's say one thing, let's use the center design. If academia did not pick up that early and started to educate new designers on that way of thinking, it would probably never happen. But that's what also changed the practice in the industry. Because they came out, they have all these new ideas on how to do things. And it's completely changed the field. It's interesting you brought up systems because I wanted to talk to you about the academic system or the academic ecosystem even since I'm expecting that a good proportion of our audience for this particular episode will be academic. So I'd like to move a little bit from the practice of design to the practice of academic scholarship. Especially since you're a high-racking professor. I imagine you contribute in different ways to hiring decisions and reviewing papers and grants obviously. Maybe we can talk about the first one first. So if you think back about the hiring decisions that you contributed to or that you made, so we can talk about hiring PhD students or junior faculty you can choose based on wherever you have the more interesting stories I guess. But I'm curious when you're evaluating candidates for this kind of career track. Have you noticed any qualities that you find very impressive in people consistently and that sort of lead to hiring decisions and conversely are there any skills that candidates tend to overlook that maybe cost them opportunities? So I think one of the things that in almost every research field is overlooked is by people who are younger is that they often focus on doing things in the right way. So they want to be, they want to do research in the right way. So they want to do it as the method says or as and they want the right papers that look like every other paper because they want to be sure that they can do it which is fine that that's and you have to do that. And I think what is overlooked many times is what I would say I would almost call it courage and with courage I mean the courage to actually be led by your own curiosity and your own ideas and take that on as something that is worth exploring. That is what I like probably the most often. I meet people who are extremely good in a kind of a student way good. I mean they can do a lot of things and they do things right and everything is in the right place and you know but it's not interesting. When I read something that is interesting and surprising I care less about how polished it is I care less about did they follow the methods correctly. You know I care less about the details because here is something really interesting going on. There is only one topic that you can be successful with and that is the topic that excites you. When I talk to students maybe they are supposed to pick their final project or something for a program and they don't really know and they are coming up with all kinds of ideas and I say yeah doesn't sound like you are so interested in this and well I don't know I don't know. So then I always try to say so what are you interested in? Are you into sports or music or what is it that you do that really and then they usually light up oh yeah well I am into music or I am into gardening or I am into whatever and then I say there you go that is the energy there you have the energy. Okay now whatever your ideas were can you connect those to your energy. So why not doing something around gardening? You know you had some ideas about whatever solution and can you tie that into gardening can you come up with something and then they say well yeah I don't know but that sounds strange no one is doing that or there you go good for you that is why you should do it. The thing is the students who get to that level are trained to not do that. I mean they are trained to solve problems that someone else give them. They are trained to search for the correct solution. I mean that's how the whole school system is. They are not trained to think the other way which is to draw from themself. If you go to maybe art schools or education it is much more of that it is all about that is maybe too much of that. Then it becomes just about you and yourself and who cares about the rest of the world. As a designer you have to find the middle ground here. You have to find that internal energy that is you and then you have to be able to connect that with your client and your users and you have to work in service of them to see what you can do. with all that when you bring it together. There is a question that I like to ask all of my guests. And this is because I really love books. I read a lot of them. I have a lot of them all over my apartment. And you have also written or co-written a few of these yourself. So I'm imagining you also read a lot of books. Your most recent book together with Lars Erich Janleert, I'm saying it right, that was things that keep us busy, the elements of interaction. And that's unfortunately not one that I have with me, but I have the design way, which you wrote with Harold Nelson. And it was very interesting. It opened my eyes to a lot of different concepts and different ways of talking about concepts in design. You have thoughtful interaction design with Jonas Lovgren. And I'm also a fan of Jonas Lovgren's other work too. But that's a whole other subject. Other than the books obviously that you've written, what books do you find yourself recommending the most to people around you? That's a good question. I actually have a small part of my bookshelf here where I have my favorite books that I go back to. They're not necessarily design books. They are mixed bag of things. Some are more in philosophy, some are a little bit different. But what my way of reading is, I don't read a lot. I look at a lot. I look at a lot of books. And I think it's important to distinguish between different ways of reading. There is one way of reading that you do as a researcher just because you need to know. So you just need to know what is this about? Okay. And that, if you put 20 minutes into a book, you're fine. You know what they're trying to say, you know what the main idea is, you know, kind of the arguments. And you will remember it. So if you get into that kind of area later, you can reference it or go back. But then you, now and then you find a book that really tracks your, your interest. And then you should read it carefully. And to read it carefully means you read it, you make notes in it, you underline, you read it again a year later, you read it again three years later. Because what happens when you do that, now you're internalizing these ideas. And they, on a very deep level, start to change the way you think about things. And you start to apply that thinking, you start to apply those theories without, you believe it's your own thinking. And it's, it's not this, okay, this idea from this guy, here's the reference. No, you, you can write about it, you can talk about it as if it's your ideas. And that's where you want to go. You want to have certain types of sources that on a deep level influences your thinking and helps your thinking and pushes you to be a better thinker. That's what it's all about. But you have to, that takes a little bit of work. That means you can't do it with every book or every paper or anything. You, you, only a few. I mean, you can maybe have in my younger years, maybe I had one of those per year. Now I have maybe one of those pretend years. It's not more than that. So that's why I have those books that I know how know on some kind of fundamental level have changed the way I think about things. And I always go back to them. They kind of my, my friends, you know, what are some of those books. I don't have so many of them here. I have them at work. But. Okay. Oh, that's a snack. This is a few of them. You don't need to, this is just to give you sense of what it. So this is a book from when I was almost a student. I think it's the idea of history by a philosopher calling wood. Wonderful. This book. This book is something I come back to now and then actually it's by the American philosopher Robert Nosek. His book exam in life, the exam in life, really. His worth. What? The exam in life is worth living. Is they say. Yeah. From Aristotle. This is a. See what's churchman. Who is the big, my big guru when it comes to systems thinking the systems approach. This is from when I was a student. Here's a book from a guy who is in education, a philosophy, the occasion back to the rough ground. This is just a wonderful book. If you have a little bit of philosophical interest and in design, this is all about design. This is a wonderful book that I. From David pie is also an old book. The nature and aesthetics of design. He was a furniture designer in England. So that's just an example and these books I go back to all the time. So, just matter what I write about as long as it's about design. I use. Most of their ideas are though internalized. So I probably. When I say it's my idea, it's probably comes from. One of these books. There is a. As you said, a lot of ideas and a lot of good ideas and a lot of good advice in the kinds of things that you teach. I'm wondering what you think might be some bad advice that you hear coming from others in your profession. The idea of design thinking design thinking is fine. But the idea that you can learn design thinking in an afternoon or. By taking your workshop or maybe in one online course and now you're a designer. That's so far from reality is. Unfortunately, it's very common nowadays because design is so. Popular and also so there are so many people who believe design is is an approach that is useful, which it is. So they are right in that sense. And they feel they miss it. And now they're looking for how can I get that myself or how can we change people in our company. And it doesn't work like that. You can't you don't become a designer in a in a day or. One. Course or something like that. You know, it's it's like any profession to be a designer is a highly disciplined way of working. It's a highly disciplined way of working and it doesn't look disciplined. So it compared to what an engineer think is a discipline way of working or what an accountant think is a discipline way of working. But design is a highly disciplined way of working and it takes years. To understand it and to learn what are those discipline principles. And how do you apply them and how to and and until you have an ability to make judgments. So you apply those principles in a in a good way in a particular design situation. So that is something that I see as a big problem today that a lot of people are talking about it as, OK, here come take this course or you start tool and now you're designer. And maybe the biggest problem I see today. The other problem is maybe more in. In design schools traditional design schools are still see a problem with being traditional skills oriented and not enough thinking oriented with design educations in non traditional settings. I think you have almost the opposite problem. A lot of people think you can teach design by reading about it. But not doing it enough. Yeah, the idea of how much thinking you do and how much while doing you do to constitute design that was a topic that I recently covered actually in the previous episode. And I had made the same observation that that that's it's really interesting to hear you corroborate that and it's also really interesting that you spoke about design thinking. Because it's something that I am intending to cover in an upcoming episodes. What are some ideas or directions that you're excited about right now? What is next for Eric Stolterman? There is a new next I think it's a continuation. I just keep doing what I'm still very curious about the things I'm I still I'm still investigating the things I started to investigate when I was the young researcher. It's not resolved. It will never end, it just keeps going. As I said, especially books, 10 years is nothing. If you work on a book, unless it's a textbook, I mean for teaching or something like that, then fine, I've done a couple of those. And that is a different type of writing. Then you can strategize and plan it and divide it up. But if you want to write more idea books, then it takes time. Yeah. I spoke to the owner of a design studio recently in a previous episode. He was saying how time is important for all kinds of creative work, not just writing, but like graphic design or music. There are workings in the brain that operate over long term. There are particular kinds of ideas, particular results that you just cannot achieve. Even if you end up putting the exact same amount of hours, if you do it without any discontinuation, then you will not get those results. There are some background thinking needs to happen. That's very true. That's very true. One last thing that I'm curious about, and this is your life outside of work. If you look back at your schedule, let's say in the past year or so, other than your work, what was the second thing that you spent most of your time on? I don't know. I'm an outside work. I'm a very practical person. I spend a lot of time on the home, my house. I like building, I like renovation, I like working in the yard. I like things like that. All kinds of hands-on, very practical things. That's probably what I do outside work. I don't really use my brain for anything. I want to do things with my hands. That's really what it is. Yeah, that's fascinating to me. I grew up in a very big city. I grew up in Istanbul, where the population is, I think, close to 20 million now. So it's a lot of people, not a lot of yards happening in the city, not a lot of space for hand work and sawdust and things like that. I've always wanted to have that in my life. It's fascinating now that I live in Sweden. I see so many people working with wood and building things in their houses. Is that a habit that you carried over from Sweden to the city? Yeah, I think so. From my family and it's part of the tradition, they were farmers and, you know, so I have my workshop out here in the backyard and so I'm happy to do all kinds of hands-on work. Before we conclude, how can we find and reach you and your work on the internet? I have a website, the blog, I don't really know the address, of course, like just like that, but transforming grounds. Transforming grounds. So this is transground, T-R-A-N-S-G-R-O-U-N-D, dot blogspot.com. Yeah, that's me. It's not a very active blog right now or doing a lot of other things. I post there sometimes and it also has the listing of all my publications. Professor Alex Stolterman, this has been an absolute pleasure. I am honored to have sat with you. I hope our paths cross again in the future. Until then, I am certain that I will discover countless insights and concepts in your work that will lead to other breakthroughs in mind. It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much. Very good questions and a good conversation. Thank you.