[Steps on to Soapbox. ...]

Ken Friedman wrote:

    "As I see it, Starck is not a designer and he does
     not practice design. ..."
     (Freidman 29 .09.2000 22:22:27)

It is a brave person, I think, who publicly declares
Phillipe Starck not to be a designer (rather, a very
talented artist), but I completely agree, and am very
happy to see this. If Starck is counted as a real
designer is completely screws up my understanding
of what designing is.

But he is good at rhetoric too!---the art of using
language so as to persuade others, verbal language,
graphical language and the language of forms, in
his case.

If, as Ken proposes, designing and rhetoric have
a lot to do with each other, perhaps this might
account for why Starck is so widely described
(mistakenly) as a designer.

I see this is as an example of something I think
happens a lot in design research. I call it the
designing is X because it involves X approach to
design research. The example I know best, because
it dominates Artificial Intelligence in Design, the area
I work in, is "design is problem solving." Designing
does indeed involve the solving of problems, but
that's not all in involves, and that it does involve
problem solving does not make it a kind of problem
solving. (Simplifying it down to problem solving is
however very convenient, if not essential, if what you
want to do for design your research is build computer
programs that you can say do design.)

Similarly we have designing is rhetorical or designing
is dialectical, or designing is search, or designing is
crafting, and so on. It's true, designing can involve,
some or all of these things, but that does not make
designing any of them.

Studying or investigating designing in such terms,
as rhetorical, or dialectical, or as search or as a craft
activity, thus does not get us to what (if anything)
designing does have over and above these things,
or a combination of them.

I am not suggesting that trying to understand the
possible relationships and similarities between these
things and designing is not useful, it is! What I am
trying to say is that it would be all the more useful if
we had a theory (or theories) of designing that
allowed us to identify what aspects or when
designing is rhetorical, dialectical, problem solving,
etc.

Given the ubiquity of designing it cannot be anything
special, but if there is nothing about it that is essentially
different from other things we don't have a real
phenomenon to study.

Filling out the true nature and variety of this ubiquity
will surely take concerted and serious interdisciplinary
work. However, I would urge that we also need to try
to give all this interdisciplinary and comparative work a
'centre of gravity'. Something to which we can properly
attach the word designing to, and about which we can
all hang our various contributions, instead of leaving
them scattered all over the place.

[... Steps down from Soapbox.]

Tim Smithers
CEIT, Donostia / San Sebastián

P.S. I realise and I apologies for the fact that reference
to Soapboxes is rather colloquial. If anybody really
does want or need an explanation Email me privately.


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