Dear Kari-Hans,

I can't match Keith's elegant response, which I think usefully
blows away many of the cobwebs that vail your "what is a
design" question.

Still, perhaps you won't mind if I offer some contra-thoughts
to yours.  First, on "what is a design?," then on designing.

[A] Design is a relation, not, as I think you presume it to
be, a thing, of some kind or other, or some set of properties
and/or qualities of things.

A thing, T, stands in the Design relation to an agent, A, when
agent A chooses to consider, in some way, T to be a
representation of a set of related actual or imaginable
instances of things.

(Or, given what I've just replied to Keith, some stuff, S,
stands in the Design relation to an agent, A, when, A chooses
to consider S to be a representation of a set of related
actual or imaginable instances.)

So, if we have no agents able and wanting to put things in a
design role, there are no designs.  And, of course, if we have
no things or stuff, no agent has anything to place in a design
relation.

In summary, some stuff or a thing is placed in the design
relation when an agent adopts a Design Stance towards that
stuff or thing.  (Following Dennett's "Intentional Stance,"
[1].)

From this, all to easily, unfortunately, and confusingly, we
can slip in to talking about the things placed by some (often
not identified) agent in a design relation, as designs.  This
seemingly harmless linguistic move does serious damage to a
proper understanding of "what is a design," in my view.

And so to designing, and Papanek's "All men [sic] are
designers," Cross's "Designing is something all people do;
something that distinguishes us from other animals, ...," and
your Klauss Krippendorff quote referring to Simon's
"definition" of design, which says, to pull the full
statement:

  "Engineers are not the only professional designers.
   Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at
   changing existing situations into preferred ones.  The
   intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is
   no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes
   remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new
   sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a
   state.  Design, so construed, is the core of all
   professional training; it is the principal mark that
   distinguishes the professions from the sciences.  Schools
   of engineering, as well as schools of architecture,
   business, education, law, and medicine, are all centrally
   concerned with the process of design." [2]

Papanek's claim is, I think, essentially empty of any
usefulness, both for understanding what [a] design is, and for
understanding what designing is about.  The best you can say
is that all people can make things or stuff that can be placed
in a design relation by the same person or other agents,
people.  But this does not exclude other animals, as Cross
wants to do.  Many other animals make things that can and are
placed in design roles by humans, and can and are themselves
put in to a design role, when we seek to copy or somehow
borrow from their forms and functions etc.

Back to Simon.  Is he, in the quote above--so often squashed
down to just "Everyone designs who devises courses of action
aimed at changing existing situations into preferred
ones."--speaking of all people, or all animals, of just of
professional practitioners?  The answer to this questions is,
I think, crucial.

If you take the squashed version of the above quote, Simon can
easily be made to appear to be saying, all people are
designers.  And a great many people is (so called) design
research do precisely this.  But, if you take the full quote,
I think you can't easily do this.  To me, it's clear Simon is
talking about professional practitioners, and, I would claim,
only professional practitioners, thus not just all people, and
not other animals.  (I was at a workshop in CMU at which Simon
spoke, and was asked about this.  He replied saying it only
made sense to talk of professional practitioners in this way.)

This linguistic slight of hand--of just and only taking the
second sentence from this Simon quote--also does serious
damage to our attempts to better understand what designing is
about and how and why it can and does happen.

If you look more carefully at even just this second sentence,
you can, I think, see that Simon did not mean to talk of all
people: as a short sentence it packs in a lot.

First, the devising of a course of action, for Simon, and, I
would say, in real designing, is most often a difficult,
laborious, expertise needing activity.  It's not just think up
some action or few actions that'll get some job done to fix
something, or change things for the better.  Typically whole
loads of legislation, regulations, external constraints, and
requirements for efficiency, safety, robustness, reliability,
etc must all be satisfied well enough, and shown to have been
satisfied well enough.  Any devising of courses of action that
involve little or none of this, is not part of what I would
want to label designing.

Second, changing existing situations into preferred ones, is
not some simple matter of making something better.  Better for
who?  Better how?  Judged by what criteria?  How judged?  By
who?  And so on.  Real designing needs to sort all of these
things out.  Devising courses of action that change a
situation for the better for you, is not, I would say
designing.  It does not necessarily need any of what
professional practice does necessarily need.

So, if I may be so bold, I'd like to suggest we stay well
clear of easy but empty claims and assertions about how
pervasive designing is in our animal world, no matter who
makes these claims.  And, more importantly, let's not try to
turn things people have said into yet more versions of these
empty claims.  If what we want to call designing is really so
pervasive in human behaviour, and perhaps in other animal
behaviour too, we have nothing to investigate, nothing to do
research on.  Research--to build shared reliable new knowledge
and understanding of something--is only worth doing if the
thing we investigate is somehow important and of identifiable
value.  Real designing--what professional practitioners
do--is, I think, important and of value.

So, let's do research on this; designing as professional
practice.  It still leaves tons to do!

Best regards,

Tim


References

[1] Daniel C. Dennett (1996), The Intentional Stance (6th
    printing), Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, (First
    published 1987)
    See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance>

[2] Hebert A Simon (1996), The sciences of the artificial,
    (3rd edn), Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, pp
    111, (first published 1969)

====================================================

On Apr 3, 2013, at 23:18 , Kommonen Kari-Hans wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> There have been numerous discussion of what design is on this list, and most of the time, it seems to me, these discussions tend to focus on defining design as an activity, or on the verb (to design) as opposed to the noun (a design). However, I  have been for some time wondering about what is "a design" - e.g. the noun "design" we use when we say "what is the design of x" or "how should the design of x be changed" or "how does the current design of x influence this situation" where x is some kind of an object, artifact, or system, or circumstance, or whatever else might meaningfully fit that slot.
> 
> I also find that the design literature that I have found otherwise very enlightening about doing design, about the phenomenon of design or the field of design, about the qualities of good designers,  about design processes, and about various methods and tools for designing and so on, does not offer many concise definitions or even less formal characterizations of what "a design" is, except one that says that "a design" is a specification of an artifact for an industrial mass production process (e.g. Baldwin & Clark 2000) - which is sensible and real for many uses, but in many ways not universally applicable in all interesting areas and circumstances of design.
> 
> 
> Do you have some favourite definition or characterization? I have not yet found one that would be able to explain what "a design" is in a way that would be universal enough. So the real issue is probably: is there such a universal idea, or is "a design" some kind of a fuzzy, context dependent idea that often, at the fringes, needs a custom explanation?
> 
> 
> To feed your inspiration: 
> 
> when Victor Papanek says that
> "All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child." (Papanek 1971)
> 
> or Klaus Krippendorff says that 
> ”It already has been suggested that design is an everyday activity. Planning a meal, planting a garden, decorating one’s home, writing poetry, and even voting for a political candidate fit Simon’s (1969/2001) definition of design as an effort to change existing conditions to preferred ones. But why do people not recognize these ordinary activities as design? The reason is historical. As elaborated above, design – industrial design, design as profession – emerged in response to industry’s need to expand its markets.
> ...
> Artifacts designed to offer choices were unthinkable during the industrial period. Information technology not only values everyday design, it depends on it. To be fair, historically, systems of components that users could use variously have been known for some time. For example, musical instruments enable infinitely many compositions to be played, constrained only by what artists can do and connoisseurs are willing to listen to. Furniture is such a system as well, leaving ordinary users plenty of room for self-expression. Not all such systems are literally designed; language, for example, largely evolved and continues to evolve in use, and so does music. What these systems have in common is their designability. They exist not so much on account of professional designers, but on their ability to amplify design in everyday life.” (Krippendorff 2006)
> 
> or Nigel Cross says that
> ”Designing is something all people do; something that distinguishes us from other animals, and (so far) from machines. The ability to design is a part of human intelligence, and that ability is natural and widespread amongst the human population. We human beings have a long history of design ability, as evidenced in the artefacts of previous civilisations and in the continuing traditions of vernacular design and traditional craftwork. The evidence from different cultures around the world, and from designs created by children as well as by adults, suggests that everyone is capable of designing.” (Cross 1999)
> 
> 
> What kinds of designs are created e.g. in these kinds of design activities? What makes the difference between a design and something that does not qualify as such? If we consider the idea that fire was designed (Nelson and Stolterman 2012:11) or that discourses can be designed, or that desirable futures can be designed (Krippendorff 2006:23-31) - is there some way how we can capture and explain the nature of those resulting "designs" with a fairly universally applicable, somewhat concise definition? What characteristics or features must "a design" have, or what does it typically have? 
> 
> Cheers, Kari-Hans
> 
> 
> Baldwin, Carliss Y., and Kim B. Clark. Design Rules. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000.
> Cross, N. 'Natural Intelligence in Design', Design Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 25-39, 1999.
> Krippendorff, Klaus. The Semantic Turn: a New Foundation for Design. Boca Raton: CRC/Taylor & Francis, 2006.
> Nelson, Harold G, and Erik Stolterman. The design way: intentional change in an unpredictable world. Cambridge, Massachusestts; London, England: The MIT Press, 2012.
> Papanek, Victor J. Design for the real world: human ecology and social change. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
> 
> 
> ------------------
> Kari-Hans Kommonen
> Director, Arki research group
> 
> Media Lab, Dept of Media
> Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture
> mail: PO Box 31000, FI-00076 AALTO
> visit: Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 HELSINKI, Finland
> email: [log in to unmask]
> mobile: +358 405010729
> in Japan: +81 80-2396-2896


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