Lubomir et al,
I agree that there's different tasks that get done, which you call
pre-design and design, but I think the boundary is artificial.  The initial
state, before even the 'pre-design' is the recognition of a need to produce
energy.  The end result may be a nuclear reactor; or it may be something
else.
(Indeed, one could step even further back and ask why the energy is needed &
is there a way of changing things such that the energy is really not needed,
but not the point here.)
I think that there *is* a role for designerly thinking even at this early
stage.

And again, I am very confident that to expect any one or any
group/profession to fully comprehend the possibilities is intractable
because it doesn't mean *just* predicting the future, but predicting all
possible futures.

The best tools we have to predict things are scientific in nature, but the
situations that need to be predicted here go far beyond what's possible.

I'm confident that someday we'll have the tools and methods to predict such
systems.  But in the meantime, we need to ALSO focus on how to deal with the
way things are today.

Cheers.
Fil

On 17 March 2011 12:04, Lubomir Savov Popov <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Dear Cleve,
>
> There are several schools of thought about design, its nature, and scope.
>
> I still believe that in the case we discuss, the problem comes not from
> pure design, but from the pre-design process. The decisions about safety and
> security have to be made during the pre-design research and decision making.
> After that, there is no way to see the big picture and to balance reasonably
> well all factors.
>
> It is not necessary that we blame designers for everything. Most important,
> it is not necessary that designers take the blame for everything. We don't
> need to expand the design process. We need to think about the project
> delivery process. There are some major differences between these two
> concepts. The project delivery concept allows us to organize the process in
> several different phases from inception to bidding. We can specialize and
> professionalize in each phase. The nature of decision making requires that
> every professional has to be an expert in the adjacent phases as well.
> However, there is a need for specialization. Everyone would agree that needs
> assessment is not design, but when we come closer to design, at programming,
> the opinions start to differ.
>
> When it comes to facilities design, and in particular the design of large,
> complex, and/or unique facilities, I would prefer that the project delivery
> process is differentiated at least in two major phases: pre-design and
> design.
>
> From this perspective, design is about problem solving.
> The problems have to be formulated during the
> pre-design/programming/planning phases.
>
> Many architects object this position because they feel disempowered, out of
> control. It is very interesting that the architects love to engage in social
> design and to redesign the social organization that they are accommodating.
>
> The major problem is that there is a substantial difference between social
> design and core architectural design. We are talking about different
> content, different ways of thinking, different procedures.
>
> You talk about "... the impossibility of the individual engineer thinking
> through every possibility..." I agree. That is why there should be another
> profession to engage more deeply into such inquiry. I am talking about
> major, strategic considerations rather than the internal considerations in
> the very design act or cognitive operation.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Lubomir
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
> research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Clive
> Dilnot
> Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 8:24 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Status of "design" re Japanese nuclear crisis? Reply to Norman
>
> In regards to the unfolding double tragedies in Japan, Donald Norman’s
> “leap-to” diatribe in defense of engineers completely misses the
> point. In fact, it is part of the problem (in that, as the subsequent
> replies showed, it diverts the real question in all the wrong
> directions—no Virginia, building a 100-metre sea wall is not the
> answer).
>
> My original post asked two questions. The first was open—what does the
> word “design” mean when it is used in connection with the design of  (or
> what I would call the configuration) of the Japanese nuclear plants?
> What is “design” here? What is that in the nuclear plant or as a quality
> of the plant, that causes commentators to talk of its ‘design”?
>
> The second question, which asked "to what extent does the failure of the
> Fukushima plant throw up the generic failure of purely technological
> models of design with respect to the construction, operation and
> implication(s) of complex systems?" was both a provocation and a deeply
> serious question. This was not aimed at individual engineers, for whom I
> have enormous sympathy, but at certain view of “how to design.” So the
> intent of the second question was not to skewer some poor bastard for
> not anticipating a 10-metre Tsunami (though let us say this is a nuclear
> plant in a zone prone to earthquakes, one that has experienced no less
> than 308 separate quakes within 200 miles in the last 11 days alone).
> Above all, it was not to suggest that the ‘design profession could have
> done it better.’ They would not.
>
> But we are, in all likelihood, facing a nuclear crisis. To be sure, in
> comparison to the much larger humanitarian disaster of the
> earthquake/Tsunami (which is also, we will see, a “design”
> problem—though not a design professional problem) this is (as yet)
> the smaller crisis. Indeed, its arguable that the nuclear crisis is
> diversion from the real problem, which is revealed to be the fact that
> an advanced and nominally extremely organized State cannot cope with
> even a relatively small humanitarian crisis; that it cannot organize
> basic supplies of food, water and shelter for less than 1% of its
> population (Today’s figures suggest just less than ½ million persons in
> need of food and shelter; 1.4 million without power). The real crisis
> then is the political one.
>
> But in relation to Fukushima we also have a technical crisis—a failure
> of technical back-up systems and of management and organization that has
> put on the table the prospect of a nuclear meltdown.
>
> It is irrelevant that, even in worse case scenarios, “only” the local
> population may be affected. Such scientific common-sense is useful to
> put the situation in context; it allays the apocalyptic—at least for the
> moment. But it also misses the point: the “meaning” of Fukushima is not
> in the number of eventual casualties but in the sense that here is a
> crisis that should not be occurring; and it should not be occurring (the
> public in this case intelligently perceives) because if you are dealing
> with technologies which have potential for disaster on the scale of the
> nuclear then you had damn well better make sure that you think through
> the consequences and implications of deploying this technology.
>
> In the case of Fukushima, disaster is the making not because of an
> “unexpected event” (earthquakes and thus Tsunami in this part of
> Japan are no more “unexpected” than icebergs were in the North Atlantic
> in April 1912) but because of a lack of resilience in the total system
> of which Fukushima is only one small part.
>
> The objective engineering response to this situation is not to lament
> the impossibility of the individual engineer thinking through every
> possibility—nor to advocate bigger walls. It is to ask a question about
> the system that, in effect, short-changed (doubtless on economic
> grounds) the conceptual procedure of thinking through the resilience of
> the system. (And which on another level short-changed also the capacity
> of local management to respond well to theshort-changing that lead them to
> concoct ad-hoc solutions (hoses of
> seawater as coolant) rather than, from the first moment, focusing also
> on re-connecting power, the loss of which is the real or at least the
> immediate “culprit” in this scenario. It is this failure that has seen
> today pathetic (and failing attempts) to drop water by helicopter over
> the plant, 90% of which cannot possibly reach its intended target, and
> which (as I write) is about to see attempts by water cannon to spray
> water on the reactors! Such ad-hoc responses are perhaps courageous, in
> a Heath-Robinson kind of way, but they are also evidence of severe
> systemic failure.
>
> So the issue is not the “poor bloody infantry” of the front-line
> engineers, doubtless also busy obeying company dictat as to cost and
> economy, the question is how do we think adequately—which means think
> socially, politically, economically as well as technologically, about
> the complex trade-offs involved in the “design” of such systems? This
> comes back to my original questions, first, about the “design” of the
> plant (what does it mean exactly to “design” a nuclear plant?) and
> second about whether the complex levels of failure at Fukushima throw
> light on the ‘generic failure of purely technological models of design
> with respect to the construction, operation and implication(s) of
> complex systems?’ Notice the qualifier here. This is not the nonsense
> question of the design professions “doing better” than the engineers, it
> is a question about the adequacy of the ways in which conceptually and
> operationally we think of the conception, operation (and ownership) of
> complex technological systems which contain within them the
> possibilities for disaster.
>
> One issues here is political. Should private companies be allowed to run
> such plants—when as we’ve seen spectacularly this year with the BP
> case—the companies instinct is both to cut costs to the bone and to
> abandon as rapidly as possible the site of its disasters? The point here
> is that such questions today demand to be brought into the total “design”
> process. Yet part of what we are talking about here is that while we are
> certainly talking in some ways here about “design” (this word referring
> to a configurational choice amongst alternatives) “design” is itself a
> completely inadequate term (with all the wrong associations) for the
> kind of process which needs to be undertaken. So we come back again to
> the question: what does it mean to “design” such plants? And what does
> the answer to that question tell us about the responsibilities and work
> of “design” as a whole?
>
> Clive
>
>
> Clive Dilnot
> Professor of Design Studies
> School of Art Design History and Theory
> Parsons School of Design,
> New School University.
> Room #731
> 2 E 16th St
> New York NY 10011
> e [log in to unmask]
>



-- 
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON
M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/