Dear Nicholas and all,
Taking a helicopter view, I think you'll find in essence what Robert Verganti is describing is a design research concept of which the main pulse of early publications occurred in the 80s in architecture and planning. You can see this phase in copies of Design Studies of that era.
A simplified picture is that of solution space analysis.
Form this point of view of design, there exists a solution space of all the possibilities for a design. In practical design terms the bounds of such a solution space are typically easy to define. Within that solution space it is easy and cheap to think of an almost limitless number of designs. In short, ideas for designs are many and ten a penny, with many designs variants and many designs that can be classified in families.
The idea of design solution space analysis was easy to apply to many design fields from 30 to 40 years ago, and more design fields now. It is a powerful tool and the main reason it is not more widely known about or applied more is that designers didn't have the training to use it. There was resistance from design educators who wanted to teach traditional curricula and designers who wanted to design in the traditional manner. The result, I suggest, has been a period of poorer quality designs than we might have had.
We can use computers to simply generate all the possible designs in a solution space. In fact, one of the reasons the benefits of solutions space design methods are not seen so easily is human designers don't have enough mental capacity to be able to conceive of all the possibilities in a solution space (though maths helps).
In this solution space picture of design, the design practice challenge then becomes one of choice: how to identify which are the best areas of solutions. As Verganti states critique and criticism are the primary tools.
The real benefits, however come with being able to computerise and automate critique and criticism, then the computer system can identify areas of best designs.
Although many designers are not necessarily aware of it, this latter is now common, and relatively old both as a design theory concept and (in hidden form) in conventional design practices.
In design practices, you can find it used in a simplified form by Adobe in their design software. It is found in a slightly more sophisticated form in Autodesk and SolidWorks software. New software for Watson does it in spades.
When done well, designers don't notice this use of solution space analysis and automated design choice, and believe that the designs are all their own work.
A benefit of Verganti's paper is he is finding different, and perhaps more designer-friendly ways, to promote the same solution space ideas in which the methods focus more on the homely and conventional folk design psychology methods of design group chats, reflective practices, design thinking, brainstorming styles, etc. His paper can be seen as a powerful step towards making an emotionally and more comfortable bridge to adoption of what is possible through computer automation of solution space analysis
Best wishes,
Terence
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, PMACM, MISI
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
[log in to unmask]
www.loveservices.com.au
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
