Dr Andy Dong
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Title: Name: Position: Location: Phone: Email: |
Associate Professor Andy Dong Associate Professor; Director, BDesComp Program; Head, Design Lab Room 282, 148 City Road, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006 +61 2 9351 3153 |
Associate Professor Andy Dong regards design as one of the most complex problems for the arts and science. Questions surrounding the biological and evolutionary basis of our representational mind and its capacity to invent new symbols - that is, to design - serve as the ‘design muse’ driving his research.
About Associate Professor Andy Dong
His research program is about design competence (i.e., knowledge of design), the universals and ‘first principles’ of knowledge about designing: where do linguistic and design competence intersect, how does language enact design, what are the linguistic properties of language use in design, and what are the sociolinguistic codes of the language of design. His research finds expression both in computational algorithms and in creative works that embody these algorithms. Like Chomsky, whose concept of linguistic competence distinguishes your ability to be able to form a grammatically correct expression against your fluency in a particular language (linguistic performance), the question that drives his research is why humans can even design in the first place.
Originally, his research set out to articulate a theory about language use in design to explain how the semantic and grammatical structures of language relate to design practice. He was the first researcher to achieve a working system that was able to derive probabilistic models of design artifacts based on their natural language descriptions and then to use the probabilistic representation to reason about function (DOI:10.1016/S0954-1810(96)00036-2). This work led to a line of inquiry into the reality producing effects of language through a computationally-derived view of the speech act theory of performativity, a speech act that effects an action by being spoken. Where the orthodox had been that words refer to the work of design, his research showed the surprising result that it is the distributed relations between words that refer to the work of design. The theory and its proof are articulated in the research monograph The Language of Design (DOI:10.1007/978-1-84882-021-0). A review of this monograph in the influential journal Design Studies stated that the book “is likely to be a pioneering reference which will form the basis for much future development.” (DOI:10.1016/j.destud.2009.10.004)
Alongside the biological and evolutionary issues, he is addressing the social and political factors that underpin the expression of design competence. With a team of researchers, he has adapted the normative framework of social justice known as the capability approach to produce a Design Capability Report (DCR). The DCR measures a community’s capability to design to report on barriers and deprivations to a community’s capability to do design. The report has been applied to several major infrastructure projects, including the Sydney/Kurnell desalination project, the San Francisco Octavia Boulevard project, the New Delhi Metro Project, and, is being modified to address Indigenous design capability.
The Australian Research Council, the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation, the US National Science Foundation, and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council have funded research projects led by Associate Professor Andy Dong.
Selected Publications
- Dong, A. 2010, 'Biological first principles for design competence', Artificial Intelligence Engineering Design Analysis and Manufacturing, vol. 24, no. 4.
- Dong, A. 2009, 'The language of design: theory and computation', Springer, London.
- Sarkar, S., Dong, A. & Gero, J.S. 2009, 'Design optimization problem (re)-formulation using singular value decomposition', Journal of Mechanical Design, vol. 131, no. 8, p. 10.
- Dong, A., Kleinsmann, M. & Valkenburg, R. 2009, 'Affect-in-Cognition through the Language of Appraisals', Design Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 138-153.
- Dong, A. 2008, 'The policy of design: a capabilities approach', Design Issues, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 76-87.
- Dong, A. 2005, 'The latent semantic approach to studying design team communication', Design Studies, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 445-461.
- Dong, A. & Agogino, A.M. 1997, 'Text analysis for constructing design representations', Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 65-75.