Part 1. - Design - What is it?
1.1 Defining Design
Design is a difficult thing to define. It is both a noun and a verb and it has been interpreted in many interesting and varied ways by various writers and personalities over time. It is often said that to be a designer is to create something new, to solve a problem, to present a solution that until now was not apparent.
Ask a thousand experts for their definition of design and you’ll get a thousand different answers. But at root it’s a simple concept:
1. To design something is to make a series of decisions that shape an experience for the user—whether that’s flying an airplane, reading a magazine, or navigating a website.
Scott Dadich (Wired Magazine)
2. Design is basically a way of solving a problem. An opportunity to tackle everyday problems with creative ideas. That can involve furniture, but it can also involve processes and social situations. There's a lot more to design than making products.
Mateo Kries Director Vitro Design Museum
3. …design; the process of inventing physical things that display new physical order, organisation, form in response to function.
Christopher Alexander - Notes on the Synthesis of Form.
4. Design is imagining a future and working towards it with intelligence and cleverness. We use design to close the gap between the situation we have and the one we desire.
From the introduction to Frank Chimero's The Shape of Design
5. From Wikipedia: Herbert Simon, in the "Sciences of the Artificial" (MIT Press, 1969) has defined "design" as the "transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones"
Although Design is most often used to describe an object or end result, design in its most effective form is a process, an action, a verb not a noun. A protocol for solving problems and discovering new opportunities.
While all of these definitions ring true in their own context, design is ultimately the process of bringing about a good fit between form and context. Good fit could also be described as finding elegant solutions that reduce cost and complexity, make the aesthetics more appealing and improve the user experience.
The Wright brothers didn’t invent powered flight but they created a plane that people could actually control, with an effective steering system that let pilots manoeuvre the craft in midair and land safely. They brought flight into the practical realm of human experience.
"They designed it."
Design as a foil for Entropy
Human beings try their hardest to make a world and give it substantial form. Nature always and everywhere tries to bring the works of man back to earth.
There is great beauty in the fierce conflict between the forces that try to bring things into existence and the forces that try to nullify them. That is why I do not like works that are too perfect or proclaim themselves too strongly.
Lee Ufan. The Art of Encounter
If the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) is what governs what we can and cannot do with design, and at what cost, then our work in design is to make the most of the way we manipulate entropy in the quest for form or organisation that better serves our needs
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything in the world around us is in a state of state of transformation, decomposition, decay. At the most fundamental level of understanding design is what we do when when we divert the trajectory of entropy in the service of our goals.
1.2 What's the problem
Designing with purpose. Get to the why.
Can we make it simpler, easier, cheaper, more durable, more environmentally friendly, more beautiful? Can we give it more capabilities? Good design is driven by a clear purpose and asking the right questions. The art of design lies in resolving one or more of the design requirements without seriously compromising existing qualities.
And so the real challenge of design is not to simply address one or more of these questions, but to do it in way that the harmony of the whole remains intact as a cohesive resolution to the problem. And so it is paramount that the resolution to the problem be seen in the context of the big picture. The big picture holds an array of sub pictures in an endless string of underlying questions and possible solutions.
In a certain sense what becomes really valuable in a world running under Google's reign, are great questions, and that means that for a long time humans will be better at than machines.
Machines are for answers; humans are for questions. Having a really great question will be where all the value is.
Kevin Kelly
The problem is the seed that sets us on the journey in search of a resolution, and just as a healthy seed has a better chance of producing a robust plant, so too a clear understanding of the problem is more likely to lead to a more successful resolution.
The path may be convoluted, peppered with frustration, diversions and distractions. The problem may change form as unexpected discoveries arise.
A clear description of the problem we are setting out to solve helps us to focus our energy on the task at hand, and equally important to be able to communicate our goals to other participants in the process.
As the ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca once observed, “There is no favourable wind for the sailor who doesn’t know where to go.” His wisdom notably echoes the situation of design teams navigating the design objective without a sense of direction — without a clear vision of the objective. A vision is a shining light that guides teams on the right path, irrespective of the technology, to meeting outcomes relevant to business and customer needs.
1.3 Design as a foil for Entropy
Human beings try their hardest to make a world and give it substantial form. Nature always and everywhere tries to bring the works of man back to earth.
There is great beauty in the fierce conflict between the forces that try to bring things into existence and the forces that try to nullify them. That is why I do not like works that are too perfect or proclaim themselves too strongly.
Lee Ufan. The Art of Encounter
If the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) is what governs what we can and cannot do with design, and at what cost, then our work in design is to make the most of the way we manipulate entropy in the quest for form or organisation that better serves our needs
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything in the world around us is in a state of state of transformation, decomposition, decay. At the most fundamental level of understanding design is what we do when when we divert the trajectory of entropy in the service of our goals.
When we engage with entropy and create new forms, new organisations, new technologies we are effectively manipulating the process of entropy. We are creating new orders/patterns of assembly and organisation, building new technologies that serve us in life.
We can't stop entropy but we can manipulate it to serve our needs. Design is the process of guiding that manipulation.
It may be disheartening to consider that everything we create is itself subject to a process of breakdown. On the other hand it is highly inspirational to consider that if entropy is the only thing that limits our creativity then there is an almost limitless world of possibility open to the designer whether it be a creative chef, a graphic artist or a designer of rocket engines.
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