Hi Richard and all

You could as equally argue that the core aspect of design as an activity is
the ability and skill of a designer to

'predict the failure point of assets' 

(I'd suggest this is probably much more important than aesthetic sensibility
as aesthetic sensibility depends on it.)

There are many other characteristics of design as an activity that are at
least as valuable as aesthetic sensibility as design skills. 

==

Incidentally, if I'm not mistaken, the original role of the Greek term
aesthetic is adjectival and served to differentiate a class of things.

To say something is aesthetic in its original Greek meaning is to classify
that thing in the set of things that can be perceived by the senses or the
mind.  The critical term being 'perceived'. It is independent of affect  and
hence completely independent of 'beauty'.

This meaning differentiates aesthetic things  from those things that cannot
be perceived by the senses or the mind (e.g. truth, justice and the
parallelism of lines (please don't even start on this latter!)). To repeat,
the original meaning of aesthetic has nothing to do with beauty.

The corruption of the meaning of aesthetic to its positive affect sense of
a means of qualifying (or quantifying)  'beauty'  is a relatively recent
phenomenon with its  'misuse' first occurring in the world of art valuation
in the mid-1700s as a means of giving art valuation some credence of
science.

Regards,
Terry

==
Dr Terence Love 
PMACM, MISI, MAISA, FDRS, AMIMechE
Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
[log in to unmask] 
www.designoutcrime.org 
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566


-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Richard Herriott
Sent: Tuesday, 27 June 2017 2:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Design and aesthetics: response to Joao DeSouza Leite

What motivates me is the wish to retain for that thing we call design the
thing that makes it different from science (which is about finding out what
is) and general planning (which is about deciding what will be and which
includes politics).  Starting with the empirical observation that designers
are interested in the subjective effect of objects´forms, design is rooted
in aesthetics. It has developed as the tasks it deals with has grown in
complexity. That´s how we get to Buchanan´s fourth order design (if I
understand it correctly). The issue here with this debate is to find a way
to constrain design research. Do we really want to get into politics because
the political scientists are already there with 2000 years of thought. And
once the management consultants have worked out how to do focus groups and
use Post-It notes, they´ll take over design methods. The one things
designers do that others can´t is conceive of (useful) shapes and assess
their impact. We still want to be concerned with planning how to conceive
useful shapes; we need to be aware of the politics of design too. But at all
times, it seems useful to me anyway to keep one foot anchored in form.




Maybe you both are expressing something very usual to design discipline, if
there ever is one — the plurality of concepts that, together, makes the very
complex field of design.
As a matter of fact, there is no problem in this kind of coexistence inside
the field, except when there is a struggle for power, any kind of power.
There will be ever designers with a deep knowledge on a special sector of
acting, moved by a certain kind of craftsmanship, and there will always be
those who understand design, even when they are not design professionals, as
the main road to recollect the multiple aspects of any kind of problem in
order to change a special situation, as well. By those, I really do not mean
a simple adhesion to Herbert Simon's positivist way of thinking. It can also
be appropriate to address the problems of men living in community.
The problem is how should us, design researchers, deal with such
indeterminacy of design concept and, on the other hand, work inside the what
we would call the boundaries of design.


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