This blog takes an abductive approach, ‘because it is not possible to prove any new thought, concept or idea in advance,’ to cite Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference, which starts with an observation or set of observations then seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation for the observation. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it. According to Peirce, abduction guesses a new or outside idea so as to account in a plausible, instinctive, economical way for a surprising or very complicated phenomenon.
Even though there is no real estate or investment in real estate without development. The development has been totally neglected by academia. In German development is called the ‘Königsdisziplin’ (supreme discipline), since it includes all disciplines, most importantly design. There have been architects working with complexity theory in the past. Buckminster Fuller and Archigram only to mention a few. Today Weinberg and Salat are the most well know representants from within the design community. The blog takes a closer look at important topics concerning developments and findings in complexity science.
The intention is to look at development in a broader sense – not only real estate development but as well business development, since design and technological innovation.
The development of design research has led to the establishment of design as a coherent discipline of study in its own right, based on the view that design has its own things to know and its own ways of understanding them.
Bruce Archer stated, that there is a ‘designerly way of thinking and communicating’ that is, both different from scientific and scholarly ways of thinking and communicating, and as powerful as scientific and scholarly methods of inquiry, when applied to its own kinds of problems.
This view was developed further in series of papers by Nigel Cross, collected in his book ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing’. Donald Schön promoted the new view in his book ‘The Reflective Practitioner,’ in which he challenged the technical rationality of Simon and sought to establish ‘an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes, which design and other practitioners bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict.’ Archer also called design the ‘third area of human knowledge.’ In justifying the existence of this area of knowledge distinct from both the science and humanities: ‘Where science is the collected body of theoretical knowledge based upon observation, measurement, hypothesis and test, and the humanities is the collected interpretative knowledge based upon contemplation, criticism, evaluation, and disclosure, the third area is the collected body of practical knowledge based upon sensibility, invention, validation and implementation’. The issue of the ‘third area’ is not new. It has a distinguished tradition going back through William Morris all the way to Plato. Macmillan shows that there are many ways of value that are created by architects and designers in real estate and development.
Astonishingly there has been (for years) only one research paper, that has tried to examine the value of architecture in real estate: ‘The Eonomics of Architecture and Urban Design: Some Preliminary Findings’, written 1989 by Vandell and Lane. Only recently young researchers like Ahlfeldt examine the value of ‘the hidden dimension of urbanity’. Already Vitruvius proclaimed in ‘De Architectura’ that firmness, commodity, and delight (fimitas, utilitas anc venustas) are inseparable. Unfortunately, architects have lost their important role, they once had once in society and real estate. But design changes reality. Sadly it was not a famous architect, who proved the importance of good design to the world, but a businessman like Steve Jobs, who finally convinced the investment industry that good design can change the course of companies, private equity, and maybe even the world. Design according to the Cambridge Dictionary of American English is the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object, system, or measurable human interaction. Design thinking needs to evaluate different sometimes-contradicting dimensions of an object or a process.
Research in design thinking is still very young. Considering design in real estate development and urban planning as being important, there is no inclusive and holistic approach to the body of knowledge in real estate as of today. As mentioned already developers are mostly neglected in real estate research. Developments and important real estate buildings in cities are almost always assigned to architects – often through competitions – design is never an issue in real estate research as well. The same is true for the inclusion in the general body of knowledge in real estate. None of the researched documents analyzed – besides Vandell and Lane – mention architecture or design. Only Graaskamp admitted: ‘Real estate as a problem solving to of a cash cycle enterprise is to legitimacy as a field of interest appropriate to the School of Business. However, real estate enterprise manufactures the physical terrarium of our society over time, and such enterprise, public or private, is the ultimate client for all physical and environmental designers. Perhaps a contemporary real estate program could have its home base in either a school of physical design or a school of business administration, so long as it was permitted to inductive, multidisciplinary, and problem-solving.’ Harvard University and the National University of Singapore are among the few universities that have placed real estate and real estate development departments in the settings of their design schools.