Dear Richard,
You wrote, “However, from within design we should be alert to what design is and is not. Simon’s famous definition is way too broad. If we add the visual and aesthetic to it we arrive at a reasonably defensible definition.”
This leaves me with two questions. The first question involves the visual. Many of things that we now design are invisible. They constitute processes, services, or hidden structures that enable other things to work. Other things that we design involve visible parts — but we do not measure the success of the visible parts based on visual qualities.
Last month, I spent ten days in the hospital, with a week in an isolation. I found myself thinking often of how many of the processes that I required were purposefully and carefully designed, often quite well, despite the fact that I only saw a tiny part of the process where it specifically affected me. I only learned about some aspects of the systems inadvertently when physicians explained to me how they arrived at one decision or another.
Other things were quite important and entirely visible, but the qualities they represented had little to do with how they looked. For example, for blood tests, many systems now permit medical specialists to use only one needle and a special device rather than multiple needles: the device is such that the person taking blood uses a series of different devices resembling test tubes with a rubber seal on one end, placing one after the next within the single device and its one needle. When you are being tested for blood four or five times a day, you don’t care how the thing looks: if it works so you are only pierced once each time, you are grateful for the change from earlier systems.
Is it necessary that designers engage with the visual to design invisible processes or system that work well?
The second question involves the word “aesthetic.” This word makes sense in one way, but it remains quite vague. What do you mean by the aesthetic dimension? Depending on the definitions you use, a tax system may have aesthetic dimensions — or it may not. The same applies to many of the kinds of things that meet Simon’s admittedly broad definition.
Much of the problem in these recurring debates involves attempting to demarcate boundaries that may not exist in the real world. If we want to argue that people are not designers who design systems, artifacts, and processes without visual or aesthetic dimensions, then we’re excluding from the practice of design many people who we might otherwise think of as designers.
People really do design breeze block walls. Some of those people are engineers, some are architects, some are construction managers. These artifacts are definitely different from a Baroque church exterior. I’ve never met anyone who designs a blunt functional wall who would say that this wall is the same to them as a Baroque church exterior. People recognize the differences between different kinds of designed things. People who design functional things all day may appreciate the beauty of something designed for prayer and glorification just as much as you or I might do.
Again, I recommend Richard Buchanan’s article, "Design Research and the New Learning.” The four orders of design offers a useful way to think about design.
https://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/hcs/ixs/material/DesResMeth09/Theory/01-buchanan.pdf
It seems to me odd to say that one may fulfill Simon’s definition yet not be a designer — perhaps I am wrong, but then it would help to have better and more clear definitions of design and designers. Without that, there would have to be some mysterious quality that designers possess, a quality that others do not possess, that renders them “designers” as contrasted with people who would otherwise be designers.
This may be the case. If it is, defining and explaining it clearly is the purpose of research on these issues.
I’d be interested in a clear answer to my two questions.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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