Preface

This book has been very long in the making. My work on linkography was initiated in 1988 while I was at MIT, on leave from the Technion—the Israel Institute of Technology. After further development of the concept, a first paper on linkography was presented at the Tenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna in 1990. Much to my surprise, the paper was received very well and was honored as one of the two best papers presented at the conference. This was encouraging, of course, and in the next few years two more papers about linkography and its use as a research method were written. One of these was honored as the best paper published in the journal Design Studies in 1995.

For more than a decade now, colleagues have been encouraging me to write a more comprehensive text. Some years ago, I wrote a few dozen pages. That beginning was not followed through, however, because I felt that something was still missing; that more work would have to be done before a book could be undertaken. Only quite recently have I been able to convince myself that I am as ready as I will ever be to finally write the book, though clearly more work still remains to be done on many aspects of linkography.

Portions of the studies featured in this book have been published as journal papers, by me and by others, but the book is in no way a compendium of papers. Rather, existing publications served as inputs to the book. The original empirical research that informed the studies described in the book (excluding chapter 7) is briefly reported in the appendix.

Although I cannot point to a specific influence that led to this book, there are certainly people and institutions that contributed indirectly by shaping my thinking and serving as intellectual stimulation. First and foremost among them was my teacher, and later colleague and dear friend, the late Abraham Wachman, whose morphology classes were exciting and thought provoking, and who set me on a path of scholarly pursuit. He challenged me more than once with his demands for precision and clarity, which were lessons for life. Donald Schön was a valuable source of inspiration, and during my time at MIT he was helpful in serving as a model for inquiry and providing critical feedback, which was invaluable to me while I was struggling to turn from a practitioner to a researcher. A two-year stay at MIT in this crucial phase of my life was a wonderful opportunity to be exposed to academic pursuit at its best. I consider myself very fortunate for having had the opportunity to gain inspiration and insights from countless formal and informal encounters with great thinkers whom I met at MIT. I would like to single out John Habraken, William Porter, and Larry Bucciarelli, who remain close colleagues to this very day. I am grateful to MIT for instilling in me values and passions that have guided my academic pursuits.

Another institution to which I am grateful is the Delft University of Technology, in particular the Department of Product Innovation Management in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. I have been associated with this school for two decades, and I spent a sabbatical year there in 2005–06. The friendship I encountered there, the encouragement, and the openness to new ideas made for an ideal work environment. In particular, Petra Badke-Schaub was a wonderful hostess, fully supportive of the linkography enterprise. Thanks to the faculty members and students who were so kind and supportive, Delft has become another home away from home, as MIT had been.

Howard Gruber, Tamar Globerson, and Bernard Kaplan, and later Sidney Strauss, helped me come to grips with questions related to developmental psychology and creativity. Danny Gopher provided an introduction to experimental cognitive psychology, and the seminar on Human Factors Research he headed at the Technion, which I attended for years, was both instructive and a model of exacting research standards.

Sincere thanks are extended to the many participants in the empirical studies reported in this book. They volunteered their time and were patient with occasional mishaps that prolonged the experimental sessions. Where names of participants are mentioned, they are fictitious.

I also want to thank the many students who took part in my graduate seminar Cognitive Aspects of the Design Process, wherein linkography was introduced as a possible addition to “classical” protocol analysis. Their challenging questions and comments forced me to think of new ways to develop the theory and application of linkography. Some of the students went on to write brilliant term papers, and in some cases master’s theses, using linkography. They taught me that there is no limit to inventiveness and creativity, and what they did with linkography was always a refreshing and pleasant surprise.

I am grateful to Eilam Tycher for his kind, careful, and patient work in upgrading many of the figures. I would like to extend my heartiest thanks to the individuals who wrote the code that made digital production of linkographs possible. The first version, meant for Macintosh computers, was called MacLinkograph. It was written by Shahar Dumai, then a teenager, who also wrote a manual for it. Later a new version was written on a Java platform. The budget allowed for only a very limited amount of development, but we still use this application, called Linkographer, which was written by Konstantin Zertsekel, Robert Sayegh, and Hanna Mousa. Hanna Mousa has been a talented and kind savior angel ever since, solving sticky problems that came up occasionally. Many thanks also to Doug Sery, my editor at the MIT Press.

I am also indebted to the National Endowment for the Arts for research grant 87-4251-0169 at the outset of this endeavor, which allowed for an incubation period that was crucial to the formation of the initial concepts of linkography.