UMEÅ UNIVERSITET

Institutionen för Informatik

Kristo Ivanov — tel 166030 / Fax 166550 den 8 april 1997 (rev 1)

(For "Postmodern-relativism" seminar April 9th 1997)

What is needed to reduce the welter of products, methods, and purposes of design to an intelligible pattern is a new conception of the discipline as a humanistic enterprise, recognizing the inherently rhetorical dimension of all design thinking... (1)

There can be a discipline of design, but it must be different in kind from disciplines which possess determinate subject matters. Design is a discipline where the conception of subject matter, method, and purpose is an integrated part of the activity and of the results. On the level of professional practice, the discipline of design must incorporate competing interests and values, alternative ideas, and different bodies of knoweldge....[T]he subject matter of design is indeterminate — potentially universal in scope, because design may be applied to new and changing situations, limited only the the inventiveness of the designer — then the subject matter of design studies is not products, as such, but the art of conceiving and planning products...(3-4)

[D]esign is inquiry and experimentation in the activity of making, since making is the way that human beings provide for themselves what nature provides only by accidents...(8-9)

[An] architectonic master art that guides all the diverse forms of making which are central to human culture. (14)

A revolutionary vision of rhetoric to match the revolutionary vision of making. This would be rhetoric as a broad intellectual discipline, expanded from an art productive of words and verbal arguments to an art of conceiving and planning all the types of products that human beings are capable of making...integrating design and making with science and practical action. (18)

[D]esign is an instrument of power. It is the art of inventing and shaping two-, three-, and four-dimensional forms that are intended to satisfy needs, wants, and desires, thereby effecting changes in the attitudes, beliefs, and actions of others.(24)

[D]esign, by its very nature, has more enduring effects than the ephemeral products of the media because it can cast ideas about who we are and how we should behave into permanent and tangible form. [Quoted from Adrian Forty] (29)

There are three basic elements that contribute to the development of design in the contemporary world...The first element is the technique or technology of craft production, supported by a gradual accumulation of scientific understanding of the underlying principles of nature that guide construction...The second element is our understanding of the psychological, social, and cultural needs that condition the use of products...The third element is awareness of the aesthetic appeal of forms. (32)

Designers construct objects to satisfy fundamental human needs that are susceptible to some level of scientific or engineering analysis. However, the constructions are inevitably complicated by arbitrary factors of taste and preference which the designer is often able to address only by emotional sensitivity and intuitive understanting. Design is based on science, but it extends its reach in addressing emotional needs through aesthetics. (35)

[T]he designer as an artist in the Platonic sense, an enlightened practitioner seeking unity and harmony among the disparate elements of every product...Products which internally achieve harmony and balance serve the ethical life of human beings, who are actively seeking their own place in a unity of social experience and nature — precisely at a time when culture appears to be disintegrating. [Referring to George Nelson's view in the essay "The design process", in Problems of Design, New York: Whitney, 1957] (37)

All the above in Buchanan, R. (1995). Rhetoric, humanism, and design. In R. Buchanan, & V. Margolin (Eds.), Discovering design: Explorations in design studies . Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press. (Page references to the manuscript, author at <buchanan@andrew.cmu.edu>)

The ultimate purpose or function of design in society is to [make] products which express and, necessarily, reconcile human values concerning what is good, useful, just, and pleasurable. However, these terms no longer possess fixed and generally accepted meanings...
The result of the new discipline of design thinking is typically not agreement on an ideology that may stand behind a new product. Instead, the result is an agreement that this or that is what shall be done today, so that ideological disagreement may be suspended and production move forward with the support of all of those involved in the planning process.
(Richard Buchanan, from "Branzi's dilemma: Design in contemporary culture", The Italian journal Modo, http://www.focusing.org/postmo13.htm)

Design science is the science of design processes (defining the product characteristics such that the product will fulfil all specified properties) and design objects (a product or a machine defined by a list of characteristics).
(From the graduate course on Design Methodology — Konstruksjonsmetodik — spring 1997, at the Trondheim institute of product design, NTNU Norges tekniske og naturvitenskapelige universitet, c/o Jóhannes B. Sigurjónsson, johannes@design.ntnu.no)

Design Theory: Three generations. (1962-1982):

1. Design methods (C. Alexander, C. Jones): analysis-sythesis-evaluation ("systematic"?). Product-context, fit-misfit

2. Wicked problems (Horst Rittel): bearing ideas (visions) & modifying factors (to operative image); vague relation between means and ends, and initially vague ends; design as negotiation, rather than "decisions"; study of thinking-learning; start of empirical studies with interviews of practitioners

3. Restauration: empirical studies, and central concepts: inborn cognitive and perceptual schemata, early obtained structures, a priori for pre-structuring of problems [cf. Jungian "archetypes" and Churchman The Design of Inquiring Systems, chap. 6 on Kantian "representations"]; "codes" linking of artefacts to their use instead of study of procedural questions; importance of first vision and outline-proposal; dialectics between technical rationality and creative reflection-in-action, dialogue between designer and design situation

1. A particular type of thinking (Peirce's abduction, vs. induction-deduction)

2. Design is a way of seeing problems

3. Viewing the problems or acting as though there is some ill-definedness in the goals, initial conditions or allowable transformations

4. The natural sciences are concerned with how things are, design with how they ought to be

5. Design is to focus the attention on an object, its environment and its interplay with environment

6. Design research aims at precising the requirements on an artefact and to advise on how conflicting requirements can be balanced

7. Design is the interplay between form, function, and structure (proportio, symmetria, eurythmia,. (Vitruvius). Cf. E. Panofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1955, p. 68n.

8, Design is determining the space of possible actions (degrees of freedom)

Cf. The Design of Inquiring Systems, pp. 5, 8, 14, 55, 258, 276

9. Design, guided by the designer's preparedness for action (handlingsberedskap) and the "right feeling" (intuition) within his degrees of freedom (handlingsberedskap) is the determination of other's degrees of freedom of choice. (E. Stolterman, The Hidden Rationale of Design Work, pp. 61, 122, 124, 183)

"A dominant influence is exerted by initial design ideas on subsequent problem solving directions...Even when severe problems are encountered, a considerable effort is made to make the initial idea work, rather than to stand back and adopt a fresh point of departure."

vs.:

"The premises that were used in initial concept generation often proved, on subsequent investigation, to be wholly or partly fallacious. Nevertheless, they provided a necessary starting point. The process can be viewed as inherently self-correcting, since later work tends to clarify and correct earlier work."

(From Webster's)

To conceive and plan out in the mind

To create, plan, or calculate for serving a predetermined end

To plan and plot out the shape and disposition of the parts of and the structural constituents of

To plan or produce with special intentional adaptation to a specific end

To conceive a plan for making something

The process of selecting a means and contriving the elements, steps, and procedures for producing what will adequately satisfy some need

Synonyms: see intention, plan (not "method"; cf. Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, 1975, and SvD 18/12-95)