One of the biggest  issues in defining design is whether to restrict the
idea to ‘ things that only humans can do’.

 

Until around 2001, I’d believed it made good sense to define design  in that
way (along with  other concepts such as ‘creativity’, ‘intuition’,
‘emotion’,  and ‘intelligence’).

 

From this point of view, things like computer software  and design methods
were ‘aids’ to human design activity to help make it easier, faster, more
effective etc.

 

For the next few years, I explored the human aspects of design activity such
as emotion, creativity and intuition. In particular, it was interesting  how
theories about how they integrated with research findings and theories from
more established fields. This is important because it provides the theory
validity for design theories.

 

Over the next few years, it became clear there was no epistemologically or
ontologically intrinsic reason why emotion, creativity and intuition should
be regarded as only the province of humans.

 

Evidence for this comes from research giving better understanding of the
ways our bodies ‘do’ emotions, intuition, and creativity and create designs.
It also comes from seeing how non-human animals and other beings do
emotions, intuition, creativity and similar processes, including using
tools. And a design can be seen as a tool – in fact, a ‘time and place
shifting’ tool, that enables use to do the thinking at one time and the
making at another time and place. Other evidence included the way that
similar processes might, in theory at least 10 years ago, be capable of
being undertaken using chemical processes echoing the chemical processes
used in ‘alive’ beings. At the same time, there has emerged  an increasing
understanding of human activity as ‘socio-technical’.  It always involves
some form of ‘technology’ (as in the use of the other as a tool) including
the use and involvement of other people: the social dimension, that can also
be regarded in abstract as technological (I feel a wince too!).

 

In parallel with all this was the increasing empirical evidence that human
behaviours (including thinking, emoting, empathy, creativity and intuition)
were relatively naïve and often inappropriate, incorrect and faulty and our
judgment was plagued by situation in which we felt that we had understood
things perfectly  but were clearly deluded – especially when we designed or
remembered complex situations.  

 

Increasingly it has become obvious computers can do better on many of the
things that we regard as ‘essentially’ human than humans.

 

Here’s an example.  How do you feel the flavour of a city? What makes Paris
feel like Paris rather than (say) New York or Berlin? How can you tell this
from a handful of everyday photos? This is clearly a job for designers and
other visual arts specialists.  Apparently, when the art directors working
for Pixar wanted to capture the look and feel of Paris for the film
Ratattouille, it took them spending a week photographing there. An
essentially human intuitive and creative task. Or not? 

 

Visual datamining  software from CMU researchers identified the visual
characteristics that visually define Paris as different  from London , New
York, Barcelona and eight other cities and it did so overnight  – without
going there, using Google street view images.  (If you really want to know,
the differences were in the doors, balconies, windows with railings, shape
and colour of street signs, and lampposts). The full article is at
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/august/aug7_citystyles.html. 

 

There are now a lot of similar examples of computerised systems that address
the same issues as human designers (including setting goals and the problems
before solving them) and often address them better.

 

This makes it increasingly hard to justify using definitions that define
designing, the activity of creating designs, as a purely human activity.

 

At heart, choices about  such theories may be a religious issue?  Christian
and similar traditions  might tend towards an emphasis in design on the role
of the human as the one with the relation to the creator: an anthropocentric
view. Other traditions such as Daoism, might emphasise ‘Idama’, the ‘isness’
of everything and the role of everything and anything in who we are and the
creating of what surrounds us.  This may lead to a non-anthropometric view
of design – similar to that intrinsically implied by design theories such as
Activity Theory and ANT in which computers are capable of design activity
and other forms of tool use alongside humans, other primates, elephants,
bears, dingoes, dolphins, octopi, wrass (fish), ants, and birds, especially
of the  Corvus family (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals
).

 

Best wishes,

Terry

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Dr Terence Love

Love Design and Research

PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks

Western Australia 6030

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+61 (0)4 3497 5848

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